JOHANNESBURG: Roberto Mosquera’s family had no trace of him for a month after he was arrested by US immigration agents, until a government social media post revealed he had been deported to Africa’s last absolute monarchy.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had picked up the 58-year-old Cuban at a routine check-in with immigration officials on June 13 in Miramar, Florida, said Ada, a close family friend, who spoke to AFP under a pseudonym for fear of US government retaliation.
They told his family they had sent him back to Cuba, she said, a country he had left more than four decades earlier as a 13-year-old.
But on July 16, Ada recognized her lifelong friend in a photograph posted on X by US Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who announced that Mosquera and four other detainees had been flown to tiny Eswatini.
It was a country Ada had never heard of, and 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away, wedged between South Africa and Mozambique.
