After U.S. Deportation, a Cuban Immigrant Finds Himself Imprisoned in an African Nation

Roberto Mosquera had called the United States home

Roberto Mosquera had called the United States home for more than four decades. He arrived as a Cuban immigrant in 1980, built a life, and served time for a crime, completing his sentence back in 1996. But last year, immigration agents came for him again. This time, he wasn't taken to a detention center in the U.S. Instead, he was flown to a prison in Eswatini, a small kingdom in southern Africa he had never even heard of.

Mosquera's ordeal began with a routine arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which he says gave no clear explanation for why he was being removed after all these years. Within weeks, he found himself in a foreign cell, thousands of miles from anyone he knew, with no legal representation and no clear path forward. The conditions there, he recounts, are harsh, and the isolation is total.

In desperation, Mosquera launched a hunger strike to draw attention to his situation. The protest worked, at least in part: he was eventually given access to a phone. With that lifeline, he reached out to Nicholas Casey of The New York Times Magazine, describing a world of bureaucratic limbo, overcrowded cells, and a sense of abandonment by the country he considered his own.

His story highlights a growing and often overlooked

His story highlights a growing and often overlooked practice: the U.S. deporting individuals to third countries, sometimes with little regard for their ties to those nations or the conditions they will face there. For Mosquera, what began as an immigration enforcement action has turned into a fight for basic human dignity in a place he never imagined he'd be.

Now, as he waits in that African prison, Mosquera's main hope is that someone will hear his voice and question why a man with decades of residency and a completed criminal sentence should be left to wither away in a foreign land. His phone calls, brief and monitored, are his only window to the outside world—and his only chance at freedom.