Cambodian Man Deported to Eswatini Released After Five Months, Headed Home

Pheap Rom boarded a commercial flight to Johannesburg on Wednesday, beginning the long journey back to Cambodia after five months inside Matsapha Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Eswatini where he was held without a single criminal charge filed against him in that country.

Rom's release came the same day his U.S.-based attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, went public with a pointed indictment of the deportation program that put him there. "Rom's release proves what we have argued from the beginning. These third-country deportations are unnecessary and unlawful," Nguyen said.

The case traces back to October, when Rom and nine other shackled deportees landed in Eswatini on Oct. 6 aboard a private jet. They were met on the tarmac by roughly 20 to 30 military personnel wearing masks and carrying machine guns. None of the deportees knew where they were going before they arrived.

Rom had completed a 15-year U.S. prison sentence for attempted murder, released from U.S. custody in late 2024. Within months, he was transferred to Eswatini under the Trump administration's third-country deportation program, which removes individuals to nations they have no documented ties to. Nguyen argued that holding Rom at Matsapha, described in reports as a facility with impoverished conditions, was illegal precisely because Eswatini never charged him with anything.

Rom is the second deportee from that group to be repatriated, following a Jamaican man who was flown home in September. The U.S. has sent 19 migrants to Eswatini in three separate batches since July, part of a broader initiative that has relocated around 300 migrants to third countries under the program. The State Department and Department of Homeland Security have defended the policy as an efficient mechanism to remove people in the country illegally, noting that many deportees sent to Eswatini had completed serious criminal sentences in the U.S.

With the Johannesburg leg of his trip now underway, Rom's case has become the clearest test yet of whether the legal challenges mounted against third-country deportations carry real consequence — and his attorney's framing leaves little ambiguity about how that argument will proceed.