Transcript of He Was Deported to a Country He’d Never Heard Of

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In its effort to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible, the Trump administration has relied more and more on a highly controversial strategy: deporting people to countries they have no connection to. The practice has drawn outrage from civil rights groups and immigrant advocates. And last week, a federal court ruled that it was illegal. because it violated people's rights to due process. The administration has challenged that ruling, and now it's in front of the Supreme Court. And so today, my colleague Nicholas Casey explains what it actually looks like to be sent to a country you do not know. It's Monday, September 28th. Nick Casey, welcome back to The Daily.

Thanks, Rachel.

So, Nick, late last week, we got word that the Supreme Court was basically poised to decide whether to block the Trump administration's ability to deport people to countries they are not from. This is known as third-country deportations. It's also a practice that you've been following extensively. So tell us how this works.

So a third-country deportation is when the US deport someone not to the country that they're from, but to just another country. It can even seem to be like a random country. Often the person has no connection to the place that they're being sent to.

Mm-hmm.

And this is a strategy which has become a hallmark now of the Trump administration. Trump came to office obviously promising to really ramp up deportations, and this is very much part of it. But this goes beyond really anything that's been done by previous administrations, largely because many of the countries that people are being sent to now have really spotty human rights records. And the fact that the U.S. has been sending people to these countries just kind of raises fundamental questions about America itself. Like, what is our relationship to these places that have got bad human rights records. What's our relationship to people that we are deporting? What human rights do we grant these people? And so this week, the Supreme Court's going to decide essentially, can this practice continue?

And what do we know about the people who are being deported this way?

Yeah, I mean, according to the administration, this is a tool that it's been using to go after people with criminal records. They've even called them depraved monsters. They've said that they are the worst of the worst. This is why it's doing it. And it is true that in the case of people that have committed crimes in the US and have served jail time, it's pretty common that their countries of origin may say no when America is asking to send them back. But I've been looking into these deportations and I've seen like this practice is sweeping up people with all kinds of different backgrounds, not just people with criminal backgrounds. It is true, there are a number of people that had committed crimes that are getting deported this way, but there's also another class of people that's also quite large that are being deported this way, who are people that immigration judges had banned from being deported to their countries of origin, because if they were, they faced a credible threat, usually of torture. And these are the reasons why the Trump administration has had trouble deporting these people. And for the last few months, I've been talking to one man in particular who's been swept up in this.

And his name is Roberto Mosquera.

So tell us about Roberto. Who is he?

Hey, Roberto. How are you doing?

I'm doing okay, man.

Okay, good. Well, Roberto Mosquera is 59. And he's been in the US almost all of his life.

I was born in Cuba, but I was raised in America.

He came in 1980 from Cuba in a boatlift.

I came here with my mother and my sister. We ran away from the communists, you know, in Cuba.

And Roberto was only 12 when he came. So this is the only country he's really known as home. He remembers a little bit about Cuba, but he doesn't remember that much. And they settled into Miami.

I didn't have no father, and my mother, she tried the best, but, uh, that was very difficult to us, you know.

And it wasn't long after they moved that Roberto began to get into trouble.

I wish I could have changed things, you know, and do better with my life, you know.

He became a rebellious teenager and he joined a gang.

But I was just like get the freedom that I needed on the streets, you know, with other kids, like, hanging around and fighting.

There were a lot of car thefts, shootings, you know, attacking rival gang members in the street. And eventually, he ended up going to trial for a shooting that took place.

Somebody got shot. A lot of my friends got killed.

Roberto says he actually wasn't part of the shooting. He admitted to all kinds of crimes which he committed over the years, but he said this was one that he actually hadn't done.

Yes, would I do anything?

And he took a plea deal even though he said he hadn't committed the crime. He said that his lawyer had said, if you don't take this deal, you're gonna be sent to jail for many more years. So he served 9 years in jail. And after being released after those 9 years, we're talking about The 1990s now. Usually you would get deported at that point.

Mm-hmm.

But in Roberto's case, that's not what happened. Roberto was from Cuba, and Cuba wasn't cooperating with deportations of people from America at that time.

Right. Roberto is one of these people who the United States government may have wanted to deport at one point, but effectively could not.

Yeah. I mean, the US government was kind of in a bind here. On one end, they couldn't just send Roberto home, But they also couldn't keep him in jail indefinitely because to do that to someone, you've gotta charge them with something. And they didn't have charges to keep Roberto, like, in jail.

Mm-hmm.

So for years, administrations, Republican and Democrat, both determined the only option was to let people out, to let them stay. And that's what happened with Roberto.

So what were the terms under which he was allowed to stay? Like, how did that actually work?

The idea was that if Roberto tried to stay out of trouble and made check-ins with immigration authorities, usually every year, he'd be able to get a work permit, get a driver's license, basically have a normal life in the United States.

Man, my life has changed, man. I changed my way, man. I try to do better, you know?

And like a lot of people in his situation, he took them up on that offer. Mm-hmm.

I didn't know how to do anything when I got out of prison. But then this man, okay, who runs this plumbing company, he said, man, listen, I'm gonna give you a break. It's on you if you want to take it. Learn everything you can here and I will help you out. And he did.

This was the early 2000s. He started working as a plumber.

I work hard. I learn how to do plumbing. I become a foreman.

He started as a temp, then he became an apprentice, and then he became a foreman. And he started a family.

Man, I worked so hard for my daughters, man.

He ended up having 4 daughters here, all American citizens.

I was trying to be the best father the best way I could, you know?

So he really established a life here. How long did things continue like that?

It was for decades. He was, in his head, an American, even if he didn't have papers saying he was an American. He'd been here since he was 12. But all of that changed last June.

And what happened last June?

That morning I got up before I go to work. I have Cuban coffee, which I'm missing a lot. I go to the gas station, put gas, and I went to the ICE detention center like every year.

Roberto went in for his regular check-in with ICE.

They took the paper. And then they called me, and they took me inside.

But this time it clearly was different.

And I see this group of immigration officers talking to each other. They were looking to us.

The agent who was there told him—

Your time is up, he says.

Your time in the US is over. And that was it. He was detained for a number of weeks. And then he's told he's gonna be deported.

And does he know at this point where he's getting deported to? What are they telling him?

No. No one would tell him anything about where he was going. He thought he was going back to Cuba. He didn't know how that exactly was going to work. And they took him and 4 other people onto a plane. And then when the flight took off, after a few hours, it was clear they weren't going to Cuba because it doesn't take that long to get there.

Sure. This is where my mind got started running everywhere.

You don't know where this plane is going, taking you?

No. I said, what the hell are they doing? You know, where are we going? You know? And we just start flying around like hours and hours. You couldn't see outside. Every time we're going to land the plane down to fill up with gas, okay, they close the window. They don't want us to see where we at.

And many hours later—

7 hours. One of the officers, he came up and he goes, well, you in Africa. I said, what the hell am I doing in Africa, bro? I don't want to go to Africa.

They landed in Africa. So he was now getting off of this plane. And at that point, the plane was circled, he said, by military vehicles, local military vehicles.

Guns everywhere. They surround the whole, like a military.

These men got out of the plane and were loaded into what looked like a military truck that had what he described as sort of a cage fitted onto it.

And then I see this big wall, and I told this guy, man, I think that looks like a prison, bro.

And then that truck drove into a maximum security prison.

And that's when this iron door opened and we went inside.

And when he finally found out where he was—

Eswatini.

He was told he was in a country called Eswatini, a country he had never heard of before.

This is a bad dream, you know?

We'll be right back. Nick, I want to talk about what happened to Roberto once he arrived at this prison. But first, just for people who might be as unfamiliar as he was, tell us a little bit about Eswatini.

Yeah. Eswatini is a small country landlocked in South Africa and Mozambique. It used to be called Swaziland until its king, who's an absolute ruler, an absolute monarch, changed the name 6 or 7 years ago. There's no freedom of speech. There are no political parties that are allowed. In fact, they're banned. And this is about kind of the opposite of what you would imagine a place that you might send someone to from the United States, at least when it comes to human rights.

And just to get back to Roberto's story, what happened when he got to this prison?

Well, I mean, they treated him like you would any other prisoner.

I came out in here like, like a murderer and like the worst of the worst.

They had him stripped down. They put him in a prison uniform.

And they pulled me against the wall and, um, give me a prison number.

He spends every day in a small cell with his cellmate from Yemen.

The warden here who run the prison, man, I asked him so many times, hey man, we got a lawyer, uh, that we're going to see some courtroom.

And he wasn't able to talk to a lawyer.

No, no, no, no, no, no, you good. No, don't worry about it. And this is all they used to say, right?

But eventually, a friendly prison guard started to let Roberto use his phone every once in a while.

My first call, I talked to my sister, and she said, listen, it's a lawyer. I got her number. She want to speak to you. And, um, the next week, I called her.

And Roberto made a call to a human rights lawyer in the United States. Now, this isn't a lawyer that's able to get him out because the US court system, once you're out of American jurisdiction, it can't tell an Eswatini prison to release you. But at least it was a lawyer who could tell him what his rights should be. And legally in Eswatini, he has the right to have a local lawyer.

But they don't give me no answers. They don't let me see no lawyer. They don't let me— it's just bad, man.

But he wasn't able to do that.

Bro, I was so depressed, man.

And what Roberto comes to recognize is that he be stuck here indefinitely. He's being held without charges. He's not serving a sentence with a discrete end date. He's just here. And there's no prospect that he can see that this is gonna change.

It's not easy to pass day by day in this place. And without knowing if I ever go back, or if I know if I ever go see my daughters You know, my people, my family, my life.

Yeah.

So there was a point where he was getting so desperate.

I have to go on a hunger strike.

That Roberto decided that he was going to stop eating.

And that's it. One day, the officer, the captain came. I said, listen, man, I'm going on a hunger strike. And then I start losing weight. I start losing, like, just getting weak every single day, you know.

I prayed to And during that time, he was writing. Do you have the diary that you sent me?

Yeah. Yeah.

He showed me his diary, and a lot of it is about how much he was missing his life in the United States and how much he was specifically, you know, missing his life that he had with his family before he got deported. He wrote a lot about his daughter Faith, who was 10 years old Well, tell me about— tell me about Faith. Tell me about your youngest daughter, because you're really close to her.

Faith, my God, man. That's, that's my little one, you know. That's, that's my last one, you know. And I haven't finished my, my job as a father, you know. And that's what hurt me more.

And Roberto wrote in his diary, every day I think about my daughter Faith. I've never cried so much as I do missing my beautiful girl, my Faith. So sorry, my little girl. How much it hurts me. He wrote, I felt like the happiest father in the world seeing you happy. At another point, he writes, all for Faith, as if the whole hunger strike is about getting her back in some way.

Yeah, she was everything to me, you know. She was everything to me, man.

And 30 days passed this way.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

It was weeks with no eating, and my eyes, I started losing my vision, you know.

And he had a call with his attorney who was in the US.

She told me, she said, wait, Listen, I need you to get strong. I need you to get, you know, I need you alive, not dead.

His lawyer told him, you know, look, you've got to stop. Like, that you're not going to get what you need this way. We've got to find another way to try to fight this. The only thing that's going to happen is that you could starve to death.

And then I say, okay, I'll stop.

And so Roberto decided to call off his hunger strike. But it wasn't all for nothing.

After I stopped, he come back and give me the phone.

After the hunger strike, he was allowed to purchase a phone. And that phone became his window into the outside world. That's how I was able to learn about the situation that he and others in Eswatini were in. It was because of that phone.

I mean, once you learned about the situation that Roberto was in, What did you understand about how it had all happened? Like, how did the Trump administration come to adopt this practice? And prior to Trump, were third-country deportations something the US had ever done?

Yeah, but in a really limited way. There was a practice where if someone's home country wouldn't take them back, you could deport them to what the US had deemed to be a safe third country. I'm talking about a place like Canada. This might be a person that, um, you know, the US wanted to deport, couldn't deport back to their own country, but maybe they had some relatives who were in Canada, and Canada, okay, sending them there. So that was one way to do it.

Mm-hmm.

But this kind of solution doesn't really scale. Most countries are not going to take back hundreds of deportees that have no connection to their country. But one way you could potentially get a country to agree to something like this is if you offered them money.

Mm-hmm.

And you saw the Trump administration begin to go down that route last spring when it deported about 250 mostly Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador called CICAT.

Right. I remember this. We covered it on the show. The Trump administration accused all of these men of being gang members and criminals, and many of them turned out not to be. And yet they were still stuck in this prison for months. It was a huge story.

Yeah, this was when a lot of Americans first learned what third-country deportations were. It was with Nayib Bukele, who is an autocrat very close to Trump, and also with someone who received $6 million for this deal.

Sure.

And you saw the government go on now to cut other deals with about 35 countries, including Eswatini, which we know from the record Got $5.1 million to take deportees from the US.

Do we have any sense of how many Robertos are out there? Like, how many people have been deported to third countries and have been caught up in this kind of limbo where it's not clear when or even if they'll be released?

So fortunately, there are people who are tracking this. Uh, there's an organization called Third Country Deportation Watch, and the big number is an estimate of 25,000 people who have been sent through third countries to be deported.

Wow.

Now, the 25,000 figure aren't all people in Roberto's situation, and a large number of those people, most of them, were sent to Mexico largely immediately after they came over, and usually not to prisons. But there's a subset of the cases, and I'd estimate this is probably about 5,000 people who were being sent to many different places, often maximum security prisons, sometimes hotels for weeks, sometimes months at a time. These people were sent all over the world.

Mm-hmm.

And we talked about there being a precedent for sending people to places like Canada. Well, now the US is sending people to countries with active conflicts, middle of wars in some cases.

And just recently, The Times reported that detainees who were sent to Equatorial Guinea, which is another country notorious for human rights violations, they were being beaten in a hotel by guards I can imagine a lot of legal objections to what you just described, but just to pivot back to the case before the Supreme Court right now, what is the question that the justices will be deciding?

Well, it's actually a pretty narrow one. So the lower court ruled that these third-country deportations are a violation of people's due process rights. Essentially, they said these deportees aren't getting an opportunity to appear before a judge to say, hey, don't send me to a third country because, for example, I have a mental illness. example, you know, I might get tortured there. That lower court's ruling had an immediate consequence for the federal government, which all of a sudden had to stop these deportations. And so the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court to ask for an emergency stay. Basically, they want to allow these deportations to continue as this case continues moving through the courts.

Okay, so this is one of those temporary Supreme Court decisions that is less about the merits of the case and more just about Like, does everybody need to stop what they're doing until we get a chance to actually consider the merits of the case in months or years or whatever? But for now, do we know whether or not the court might agree to this, to grant this temporary stay?

We actually have a fairly good idea just because this question has reached the Supreme Court before. Basically, the lower court, you know, paused third-country deportations. And then when that happened the last time, the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court and asked the same question: can we continue to do this anyway? And the justices said, okay.

Did they explain their reasoning, Nick, when they granted the stay before?

No, not, not really. In these cases, when they're acting on an emergency basis, they, they don't issue a written opinion. But what we can say is that the Supreme Court has been very deferential to the Trump administration when it comes to immigration in the past. They see the president as having very wide latitude here.

Okay, so it sounds like there's every reason to think that the court would do the same thing this time and let these deportations continue.

That's right. And by the way, even if the court does decide to pause these deportations, the thing is, is it's not quite clear how this would affect Roberto. This case most immediately affects people who are about to be deported. And Roberto, of course, has been deported, and he's still in Eswatini.

Right. He's already stuck in this legal limbo. What do you think is gonna happen to him, Nick?

He asked me the same question the first time that I talked to him on the phone. And I said I didn't know.

Hmm.

And I mean, when I was a teenager, it was when America started sending people to Guantanamo Bay. And it was another situation Where after the War on Terror had begun, there was a haste to move people out of the American justice system to put them in another corner of the world where there weren't human rights. These people in this case, in Eswatini, aren't terrorist suspects, but they share what's going on with Guantanamo Bay in the fact that they are out of US jurisdiction. And so, so is Roberto. We We don't know what's going to happen to him. He could be there for a few more months, but he could be there for a few more years. And if these cases are completely forgotten about, it could be very much like the situation in Guantanamo, where you still have people, prisoners, who have been there now for many, many years and don't have any way of getting out because no country seems to be interested in taking them.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that there is a deep fear that Roberto has that he is just going to get forgotten in, in this prison. Are you hopeful that you're going to get back to the United States? Do you think that's going to happen?

My God, I don't want to lose that hope, Nick. I dream for that, okay? I don't know if it's gonna happen, I don't know, but I'll be fighting for that for a long time, you know, for 13 months. Okay. But, you know, there ain't nothing I can do now. I'm in God's hands.

Nick Casey, thank you so much.

Thanks, Rachael.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The British police arrested 5 men on Sunday on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism after receiving a call that 3 suspicious vehicles were headed toward an Air Force base used by the US military. The base, RAF Fairford, is primarily used by the US Air Force to deploy some of its largest bombers, and American bombers have launched from Fairford on missions to Iran since the war began in February. It is not yet clear whether Sunday's incident is connected to the conflict in the Middle East, but investigators are looking into whether there's any link to Russia or Iran. Today's episode was produced by Clare Tennisketter and Lexi Diao, with help from Rachelle Bonjo. It was edited by Minoff and Devin Taylor. Contains music by Leah Shaw Demeron and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachael Abrams. See you tomorrow.