I’ll admit it: until a few days ago, I don’t believe I knew there was a country called Eswatini. I was aware that Swaziland was a country in southern Africa, but I did not know that its king, Mswati III, had changed the name to Eswatini. It is a tiny, poor, landlocked country of about 1.1 million people with an extraordinarily high HIV infection rate (28 percent) and one of the world’s lowest life-expectancy rates (60.7 years, according to the CIA World Fact Book, and just 58.7 for men).

It is also the latest “third country” to accept the deportation of criminal aliens by the Trump administration. The New York Times reports that five “migrants” from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen, and Cuba have just been relocated to Eswatini. A spokeswoman from the Department of Homeland Security described the aliens as “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” and said they had collectively been convicted of murder, assault, and robbery.

I have not seen any reporting on what compensation our government is paying Eswatini to take criminal aliens. As I’ve detailed (see here, here, and here), federal law permits the government to deport removable aliens to third countries — i.e., countries to which they have no prior ties of citizenship, nationality, residence, or travel — if their native countries, or countries to which they have ties, refuse to take them back. If Congress objects to this practice, it can amend the laws it enacted that allow it. It is not within the judiciary’s power to stop it or to second-guess the executive branch’s determination that a deported person will not be tortured or otherwise persecuted in the receiving country. That is why, two weeks ago, the Supreme Court removed roadblocks that a Biden-appointed judge had tried to erect.

Obviously, the administration’s objective here — as it was with the recent deportations to South Sudan — is not merely to transfer a handful of criminal aliens who came to our country illegally and have no legal entitlement to remain here. It is to convey the message that, if one enters the United States illegally, one could end up in a place even worse than whatever country one came here from.

The Trump administration continues to set record lows for the number of aliens entering the United States illegally.