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A third-country national recently freed from the African prison he was expelled to by the Trump administration got stuck in an international airport terminal for nearly 60 hours this week due to problems with his paperwork, his attorney told the Prospect. The 45-year-old man, who came to the United States as a child refugee, has just arrived at his new home in Laos after four days in transit from the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini.
“He was very broken and frustrated and disappointed when I talked to him” during the ordeal, said his U.S.-based attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen. “He had high hopes for going home smoothly, he’s been waiting for 14 months for this, and having to wait for two days with all this uncertainty, he was like, ‘I’m through with this, just send me back to Eswatini.’ I think it triggered a trauma response, because of everything he’s been through.”
Phone Chomsavanh was imprisoned without charge for 14 months in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, where he was sent in the early days of the Trump administration’s third-country removal scheme. More than 25,000 immigrants have been forcibly expelled to countries where they have no ties in President Donald Trump’s second term, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.
“I just want to live. I just want to be free,” Chomsavanh said in a statement released on Sunday, before his airport ordeal began.
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Laotian parents, Chomsavanh resettled in Tennessee with his family when he was seven years old. His refugee status was taken away after a 1998 felony conviction when he was still a teenager.
He was never deported because Laos refused to issue a travel document for him—a long-standing practice in several Southeast Asian countries, resulting in thousands of former child refugees with convictions remaining in limbo in the U.S., where many started families and built productive, law-abiding lives, for decades. But after the Trump administration began expelling these former refugees, including Chomsavanh, to so-called third countries, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are now issuing those travel documents in earnest.
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Chomsavanh was living with his girlfriend in Florida when he was captured at their home by immigration agents in June 2025. Three weeks later, he was shackled and put onto an ICE flight operated by Boca Raton–based Journey Aviation.
“When they told me I was going on a deportation flight, I was actually excited,” he said in the press statement. He thought he “was going to the country where my parents were born. I could learn about my history.”
Instead, he and four other men were flown to a U.S. military base in Djibouti, where they were transferred to a military cargo plane. According to Chomsavanh and one of the other men—Jamaica-born Orville Etoria, who spoke to The New Yorker last year—none of them were told where they were going until shortly before the plane landed at King Mswati III International Airport in Eswatini. Both men said immigration officials tried to get them to sign documents consenting to their removal there; everyone on the plane refused.
“Phone’s removal order named one country, and it was Laos. He told ICE he wanted to go,” Nguyen said. “He had already served his time. Instead they put him on a plane without telling him where it was headed and left him in a prison in a country he had never heard of, where nobody ever accused him of anything. No notice, no hearing, no chance to object. That is not due process by any definition.”
Sent to a maximum-security prison, the immigrants were held in solitary confinement and denied unmonitored phone calls for months. After one of the men, Cuba-born Roberto Mosquera del Paral, staged a hunger strike, they were gradually allowed more freedoms, though they remained imprisoned.
ICE has since expelled 27 more men to the Eswatini prison on four additional removal flights. Chomsavanh is only the seventh to be freed. Another of Nguyen’s clients, Pheap Rom, was freed and repatriated to Cambodia in April.
The Eswatini government, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, received a $5.1 million payment from the Trump administration to take up to 160 third-country nationals, according to a report from Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
After navigating a complicated and opaque diplomatic process without any help from the U.S. government, Nguyen said he had finally made all the necessary arrangements to secure his client’s release early Sunday. Chomsavanh’s first flight from Eswatini to Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport that morning went smoothly. But when he tried to board a flight to Asia the same evening, airline officials seemed suspicious of his emergency travel document—a single sheet of paper with his photo, biographical details, and signatures of Laotian officials—and pulled him aside for a “risk assessment.” He was later told he would not be allowed to fly on the airline.
Nguyen bought his client a ticket on a second airline for a Monday night flight, but Chomsavanh was again pulled aside during boarding for a “risk assessment,” which the second airline said would not be completed until the next day. On Tuesday night, Chomsavanh was finally allowed to board a flight to Asia, Nguyen said.
Because the emergency travel document could only be used once to leave an international transit zone, Chomsavanh was stuck in the terminal the entire time he was in Johannesburg. Nguyen said that other than his client’s trip to the U.S. when he was a child, which he does not remember, he had never been through an international airport before, and after a year in isolation, felt overwhelmed and scared. So he paid for Chomsavanh to have access to a priority lounge, where his client slept during the two nights he was stuck.
Now safely in Laos, Chomsavanh will be staying with an uncle he’s never met as he settles in the “home” country he’s never been to. Nguyen remains focused on Eswatini.
“There are still men in that prison tonight,” he said. “and we are not going to stop talking about them until they are home, too.”
