Campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the deportation of migrants from the US to third-party African countries is against the law and exploits suffering to deter migration.

“Many, if not most” of the deportees have no practical option but to return to their home countries regardless of the harm they face there, HRW says in a report.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, more than 500 people have been sent to African countries where they are not citizens, the group says, citing US data.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said “third country removals are an essential public safety tool that remove the most dangerous criminal illegal aliens from our streets”.

Tackling immigration was one of Trump’s key pledges during the 2024 election.

Eswatini, which welcomed 32 deportees from the US, says three people – from Yemen, Belize and Laos – “voluntarily departed” to their home countries recently.

According to HRW, some of the countries accepting the deportees have “arbitrarily detained” or sent them to their home countries, where they face “the risk of persecution or torture”.

The group said that people sent to Eswatini, Ghana and South Sudan, had been arbitrarily detained and faced ill-treatment while in detention.

In Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Ghana, the deportees had been sent to their countries of origin despite the risk of “violating the principle of nonrefoulement [that people should not be sent to a country where they face torture, cruel treatment, or threats to their life and freedom]”, it said.

The group cited an unnamed US official as having told a Senate hearing that the point for the administration was that it could “threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere”.

“The point is to scare people,” HRW said.

“Deporting people to countries where they have never set foot is part of a US policy designed to cause human suffering as a means to deter migration,” said Michael Garcia Bochenek, the group’s interim US programme director.

In a statement from to the BBC, DHS said: “ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is given diplomatic assurances from destination countries that the illegal aliens being removed there will be safe. When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told the BBC that those being sent to third countries were those whose home nations refused to take them or who had court orders preventing them being sent home.

“Any illegal alien who wants to go home, we will arrange a free flight for them and give them a $3,000 check,” she said.

None of the African countries named has commented on the report.