The migrants—citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen, and Laos—had served prison sentences in the U.S. for serious crimes, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the five men as "individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back."

The United States sent five migrants it describes as “barbaric” criminals to the African nation of Eswatini in an expansion of the Trump administration's largely secretive third-country deportation program,