It's Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025 from Peachfish Productions.

It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca.

Lawyers for one of the five men who've been deported to Eswatini say their client has spent

seven weeks in a maximum security prison and has not been able to contact them.

This client is a Jamaican whose home country offered to take him back.

Why is he? Why are all the others in Eswatini?

I have a theory.

And it goes back to Trump's, well, it wasn't the State of the Union.

It's what we call the first speech a president gives in his term an address to the joint houses of Congress.

In it, Donald Trump said this.

Nobody knows what that is.

$8 million to promote LGBTQI plus in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.

Lesotho is an Eswatini, of course.

You could tell by the names, one's Lesotho, one's Eswatini, though Eswatini was once Swaziland.

But I think Trump was very excited to send some prisoners to a landlocked country entirely surrounded

by South Africa.

Or maybe it was less specific than that.

To take Trump at his word, a questionable undertaking, he had literally never heard of

Lesotho, and maybe someone told him, oh, that's a small country surrounded by South Africa. And then later, someone else said, Mr. President, the Eswetitians are willing to take our prisoners. And he said, what's an Eswatian and was told, oh, Eswetini is a small landlocked country inside South Africa. And he said, great, I talked about that in the State of the Union. And no one even thought to say, well, actually, the first time it's not the State of the Union.

They just said, great, let's go with it.

Anyway, I'm willing to admit my theory could be wrong.

What's also wrong is the legal procedures these deportees seem to be experiencing.

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