The New York Times Magazine published a feature today on one of the most troubling developments in U.S. immigration enforcement: the deportation of immigrants to countries they have no connection to, where some remain imprisoned indefinitely without charges.
The story follows Roberto Mosquera, who arrived in the United States from Cuba as a child during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and was deported last year to Eswatini, a small monarchy in southern Africa he had never heard of. He has spent more than a year in a maximum-security prison there. He faces no criminal charges in Eswatini and has no apparent path to release.
Novo Legal Group Of Counsel Alma David represents Mr. Mosquera and several of the other men detained in Eswatini, and the Times credits her as a source for the reporting. As she told the Times, “People are disappearing into this no man’s land.”
Together with the Global Strategic Litigation Council and Cornell Law School’s Transnational Disputes Clinic, the firm also brought the Eswatini detentions before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which agreed in March to hear the case, and in April the Supreme Court of Eswatini ruled that the detained men are entitled to meet with counsel.
These removals raise serious due process questions that are the subject of ongoing federal litigation. People are being sent, sometimes without a hearing, to countries where they have no legal status, no counsel, and no way home.
The full article is available at The New York Times.
