GEOGRAPHY QUIZ: Can You Find 'Third' Countries Trump Bribing To Take Deportees On A Map?

Hey, who ELSE made a habit of deporting people to random third countries?

Geography pop quiz! Find on the map: Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Rwanda, and El Salvador. Answers below!

Before the Thanksgiving holiday, Tobi Raji and Sammy Westfall at the Washington Post scooped a filthy turd that got zero attention: details of the quid pro quos the Trump administration has made with Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Rwanda, and El Salvador for accepting deportees who have no connection with said country, as part of its Cruelty Is The Point and Who’s Gonna Stop Us initiative (CITPAWGSU).

What did we learn about what those first five countries getting, and, um, where are they? Hint, all of them except El Salvador are in Africa! And what they are getting is money, with no oversight at all. RIP USAID.

Eswatini

It’s tiny, it’s teeny, it’s Eswatini, so obscure that Substack insists it’s a spelling error. Landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique, it’s the last absolute monarchy in Africa, ruled by King Mswati III since 1986. Remember when the US used to like to spread democracy? Who’s she?

In May, Eswatini agreed to take up to 160 deportees in exchange for $5.1 million. Eswatini says that it intends to then remove the deportees to their countries of origin. As it has already done with Orville Etoria, a 62-year-old Jamaican man who had lived in New York for almost 50 years, following a two-month stay for him in the maximum-security Matsapha Correctional Center. And it’s also accepted at least 14 others, including “three Vietnamese, one Filipino, one Cambodian” and 58-year-old Cuban national Roberto Mosquera del Peral, who claims he never committed a crime, and went on a month-long hunger strike to protest his detention. It would be cheaper and easier to negotiate repatriation to their actual home countries, but won’t somebody think about Stephen Miller’s boner?

Trump’s own regime has raised alarm over Eswatini’s “eroding human rights situation, noting arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; and restrictions on freedom of expression,” but again, cruelty = point, stop them = who?

Eesh, from blowing up boats of innocent fishermen in the Caribbean to this, the US sure has become a rogue nation in very short order. Somali pirates have more decorum, and we’re skidding towards Wacky Qaddafi world now. He probably would have made all of his lady bodyguards get Mar-a-Lago faces, if it had been a thing at the time.

What other country in the world even does this, sends people off to third countries? Only one immediately comes to mind, back in the 1930s and 40s. Your reminder that when MAGA talks about Western Culture, there’s only one Western European culture they mean!

Equatorial Guinea

Not to be confused with Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Western Guinea, or Western New Guinea, Equatorial Guinea is another tiny African country. It’s been led by Teodoro Obiang Nguema and his family since 1979, and is ranked 173rd out of 180 on corruption on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Marco Rubio’s own state department noted in 2025 that senior governmental officials were complicit in human trafficking. It has a Spanish Colonial prison from the 1940s that is considered the most brutal on the continent.

And New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen says it got $7.5 million to accept deportees, though it’s unknown if any have actually been sent there yet.

Rwanda

In June, Rwanda agreed to accept up to 250 deportees in exchange for $7.5 million in cash, up front, and seemingly the US helping to negotiate peace with the neighbor it has a long-running conflict with, the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Congo has accused Rwanda of sending a rebel paramilitary group to terrorize Hutu communities and loot the country’s mineral reserves.) And in April, the United States made a one-time payment of $100,000 to the government to take an Iraqi deportee.

Ghana

Ghana agreed to accept, detain and deport at least 42 West African migrants sent by the United States, in exchange for relaxed sanctions, tariffs and immigration restrictions, according to a lawsuit filed in October by Democracy Hub. President John Mahama says he’s doing it as a gesture of Pan-African support:

“We were approached by the US to accept third-party nationals who were being removed from the US, and we agreed with them that West African nationals were acceptable. West Africa has a protocol of free movement. Any West African is welcome in Ghana.”

El Salvador

In March White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the United States paid “approximately $6 million” to El Salvador to take 300 deportees. And September filing in a lawsuit showed a $4,760,000 contract for a new prison.

It’s corrupt, it’s wasteful, it’s inhumane, and also, if these deportees are truly the hardened criminals that Donald J. Trump claims they are, it is not justice to send them somewhere that will happily pocket the cash and then lose all track of them. Notably, even Trump supporter Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was allegedly raped and murdered by a fugitive illegal immigrant from El Salvador, is not calling for her daughter’s alleged killer to be deported back to El Salvador before he has a trial. Presumably because she wants to know with some certainty that he is the correct guy, and that he’s not going to be released back on the streets of San Salvador and sneak right back in over the border, like he did at least twice before.

Panama, Honduras, South Sudan, Uzbekistan and Mexico have also reportedly stepped up to take third-country migrants, in exchange for who-knows-what.

A moment of silence for how the moral majority corrupted the Supreme Court to the point it has ended America’s moral standing, and now, here we are. Deep breath!

And how did you do?

[Washington Post gift link / Guardian]

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