FIVE people deported by the US to the small southern African nation of Eswatini under the Trump administration’s third-country programme are in prison, where they will be held in solitary confinement for an undetermined period of time.

Spokesperson for the Eswatini government Thabile Mdluli declined to identify the facilities where the five men are being held, citing security concerns. She said Eswatini planned to ultimately repatriate all to their home countries with the help of a UN agency.

The men, who the US says were convicted of serious crimes and had entered the country irregularly, are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen and Laos.

Their convictions included murder and child rape, the US Department of Homeland Security said, describing them as “uniquely barbaric.”

Their deportations were announced by the department on Tuesday and mark the continuation of President Donald Trump’s plan, stalled by a legal challenge, to send deportees to third countries with which they have no ties.

Eswatini, a country of 1.2 million people bordering South Africa, is the latest nation to accept third-country deportees from the US. The Trump administration has exiled hundreds of Venezuelans and others to Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama, and deported eight men earlier this month to South Sudan, also an African country.

The deportees to South Sudan are citizens of Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan. They were held for weeks in a converted shipping container at a US military base in the nearby country of Djibouti until a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for them to be finally sent to South Sudan.