The Helsinki Notebooks

In early 2025, the Trump administration moved to bypass further process and deport five men — from Vietnam, Laos, Jamaica, Cuba, and Yemen respectively — residing in the US illegally, who had been had arrested, convicted, imprisoned, and issued final removal orders under prior administrations. This time, the Department of Homeland Security designated them “uniquely barbaric” and racialised them as contaminants too dangerous for US soil.¹ Their own governments categorically refused to take them back. This pushed the US to shop for a country willing to take them in quickly. Africa’s last absolute monarch, King Mswati III, of desperately poor Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, needed hard currency and jumped forward to rent out his kingdom’s prison space. 

In May, Donald Trump and King Mswati shook hands over the matter. The US would pay Eswatini $5.1 million or 88 million lilangeni (with more to come) for “border and migration management”. Eswatini would open its maximum-security cells to men no one else on earth was willing to accept. In August, the first five men were successfully sent to solitary confinement at Matsapha Correctional Complex. Ten more followed in October. None of them had ever set foot in Eswatini. 

The deal elicited outrage across the globe — much less about King Mswati’s excitement over prison space for foreign cash than it was about the Trump administration. Media outlets, human rights advocates, and commentators framed it as a moral low point, with critics highlighting its racial undertones, speaking directly to a grotesque escalation of far-right ideology in the US: The Intercept wrote it down as the “expansion of a global gulag in Africa”;² The Guardian labelled it “human trafficking disguised as deportation.”³ 

Many see Trump himself as embodying this ideology, and with his deal with King Mswati, his “America First” rhetoric seems to bare fascist teeth. This would align with his 2016 claim that illegal Mexican migrants were rapists and drug traffickers,⁴ his assertion that illegal migrants in general are “poisoning the blood of our country”,⁵ his dismissal of African nations and Haiti as “shithole nations”,⁶ and more recently, his certitude about “the rotten country of Somalia.”⁷ 

But few want to speak about how Trump did not invent cruelty: he inherited an entire system, only, he removed the polite mask off it. 

Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, which retroactively criminalised decades-old misdemeanours as deportable felonies. This law created expedited removal (a fast-track deportation without due process),⁸ resulting in the deportation of millions of people across Clinton’s two terms and turning immigration enforcement into a war on “criminal aliens.”⁹ 

George W. Bush initiated workplace raids through the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — armed with assault rifles, helicopters, and military tactics —, including the 2008 incident in Postville, Iowa, which resulted in the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Guatemalan and Mexican meatpackers working under supposedly stolen Social Security numbers, contributing to 2 million deportations during his two terms.¹⁰

Bush also started the Secure Communities database in 2008, which deported “non-citizens” arrested for crimes.¹¹ Barack Obama expanded this database to every county jail in the US and focused on removing non-citizens convicted of felonies while pursuing criminal persecutions for illegal re-entry. His policy, which earned him the nickname of “Deporter in Chief,” resulted in the deportation of 3 million “non-citizens.”¹² Congressional funding for immigration reached $18 billion under him, to be used to build detention centres, hire thousands of new agents, and prosecute tens of thousands of people a year for the new felony of illegal re-entry. 

There is no doubt that these former presidents created or operated within the powerful, centralised machine that Donald Trump is using today: the moment a non-citizen is fingerprinted for a traffic stop or a bar fight, the system lights up and begins the deportation clock; the Congress that gave Obama $18 billion a year is the same Congress that quietly approved Trump’s 2025 “third-country removal” funding;¹³ and the for-profit prisons that locked up Latin American mothers and children under Obama’s “family residential centres” are the same contractors who were paid in 2025 to send the five “uniquely barbaric” men to Matsapha. 

Trump’s deal with King Mswati is not an outlier in US foreign policy. Just as importantly, it is not an outlier in Western foreign policy in general. In fact, the West outsourcing migration control to third countries through cash-backed deals that treat vulnerable nations as “dumping grounds” for unwanted people is more common practice than some might think.¹⁴ 

This practice is rooted in colonial legacies, which left post-colonial states like Eswatini perpetually positioned as sites for “dumping” by the West. European colonisation established toxic economic dependency by exploiting Africa as a source of cheap raw materials and later using it as a market to dump surplus manufactured goods from the Industrial Revolution. Today, that “surplus” extends to human beings, unwanted people, people who are not seen as such and are thus treated by Western nations as interchangeable for political expediency and are offloaded to poorer, vulnerable nations that can be paid to absorb them. 

For instance, in November 2025, Israel, continuing its long history of colonisation and ethnic cleansing, arranged the deportation of 153 Palestinians from Gaza to South Africa. This was done via a shadowy NGO called Al-Majd Europe, linked to Israel’s Voluntary Emigration Bureau under the Ministry of Defence.¹⁵ Like the men sent to Eswatini prisons, these Palestinians had no ties to South Africa, and the relocation was framed as “voluntary” and bypassed consultation with local government, in pure third country dumping style. Similarly, France pays Tunisia and Algeria millions in aid to take in migrants from other countries instead of letting those migrants continue into France.¹⁶ The UK, too, deports “unqualified” Channel crossers back to France, paying transport costs and accepting an equal number of “qualified” asylum seekers from France in exchange, within the framework of a “one-in, one-out” swap.¹⁷

This entitlement by Western countries to define, displace, and discard people stems from imperial racism. The West has long treated Africa and its leaders as irrational, depraved, childlike, and alien, while casting itself as rational, virtuous, mature, and normal.¹⁸ Edward Said’s Orientalism dissects this: Europe, and by extension, the West, created an image of the East through which we can think of the rest of the world as exotic, stagnant, and inferior, aiding in the justification for Western domination.¹⁹ The name “Africa” itself was imposed by Roman cartographers, refined through centuries of outsider mapping and weaponised alongside the transatlantic slave trade. This fuelled the Western view that Africa was not a continent of sovereign peoples but a reservoir of inferior bodies. 

The logic of deportation in the 21^st century relies on this deliberate “othering”, recycling eugenicist myths. We call it fascism when Trump or Israel dump racialised bodies on vulnerable nations, and “border management” when Clinton, Bush, Obama, France, or the UK do the same. It is not very clear why this is the case. But more importantly, this is the last colonial illusion: that the cruelty we see in the case of the five men deported from the US to Eswatini is exceptional rather than structural; that the dumping ground was invented by Trump in 2025. It was not. The truth is that the Eswatini case is not Trump’s doing alone; it is the continuity of colonialism in 2025 dollars. On gunboat or chartered plane, the cargo is still human, and the sender is still the West. 

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1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/16/us-deports-immigrants-to-african-country-of-eswatini-amid-rights-concerns. ↩︎
2. https://theintercept.com/2025/07/16/trump-third-country-deportation-eswatini-africa/ ↩︎
3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/06/us-deportees-eswatini-lawyers-ngos ↩︎
4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016-donald-trump-defends-calling-mexican-immigrants-rapists/ ↩︎
5. https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2024/donald-trump-on-illegal-immigrants-poisoning-the-blood-of-our-country/5098439 ↩︎
6. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946 ↩︎
7. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/12/03/we-don-t-want-them-trump-says-of-somali-immigrants_6748091_4.html ↩︎
8. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/may/12/social-media/Immigrants-due-process-rights-Bill-Clinton-1996/ ↩︎
9. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/may/12/social-media/Immigrants-due-process-rights-Bill-Clinton-1996/ ↩︎
10. https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/05/12/postville-raid-brought-devastation-15-years-later-its-a-sign-of-resilience/ ↩︎
11. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/secure-communities-fact-sheet/; https://www.niskanencenter.org/federal-immigration-policies-that-spurred-sanctuary-jurisdictions/; and https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/immigration/ ↩︎
12. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not; https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/07/obama-immigration-enforcement/1815667/ ↩︎
13. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/obama-family-deportation-raids-217329 and https://theconversation.com/deportation-tactics-from-4-us-presidents-have-done-little-to-reduce-the-undocumented-immigrant-population-261640 ↩︎
14. Michael Westcott and Carolyn Hamilton, In the Tracks of the Swazi Past: A Historical Tour of the Ngwane and Ndwandwe Kingdoms, comp. for the Swaziland Oral History Project, 1992 ↩︎
15. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/16/whats-the-shadowy-organisation-taking-gaza-palestinians-to-south-africa and https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/south-africa-activists-allege-israel-used-group-transfer-palestinians-from-gaza ↩︎
16. https://www.reuters.com/world/france-threatens-review-algeria-migration-pact-row-over-deportations-2025-02-26/ and https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-000289_EN.html ↩︎
17. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/18/first-person-removed-france-one-in-one-out-asylum-deal-home-office and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/10/whats-in-the-one-in-one-out-migrant-deal-between-the-uk-and-france ↩︎
18. Mustapha A. Kangiwa, “The Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism on Politics and Governance in Post-Colonial Africa: Legacies and Consequences,” IRE Journals 9, no. 3 (September 2025). Available at https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1710831.pdf ↩︎
19. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 ↩︎

To cite this article:

Ncebakazi Makwetu, ‘Africa, the Dumping Ground of the West: Colonial Legacies, Fascism and the Racialised Logic of Deportation,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 8 (2 February 2026).

Africa, the Dumping Ground of the West: Colonial Legacies, Fascism and the Racialised Logic of Deportation © 2026 by Ncebakazi Makwetu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Featured image: Deportation Flight to unknown “country of origin” from the United States by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on January 23, 2025 Photo by Robert Cano. By CBP Photography – https://www.flickr.com/photos/54593278@N03/54297884097/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158869949