The saying goes that if the US sneezes, South Africa gets the flu. Well, in this case it appears to be the reality, Washington is sending a massive viral load of deported criminals from the US to Eswatini and no doubt South Africa will also suffer as a result.
Under a new “third-country” removal scheme backed by a June Supreme Court ruling the US has begun deporting non-citizen criminals to countries that agreed to take them, even when they aren’t nationals. It’s Donald Trump’s strategic criminal dumping plan in action in real time. Now they’re also being sent to eSwatini in hopes they’ll stay put and stay out of trouble. With the chances being likely that these criminals will struggle to get back to the States, the chances are good that their next destination will likely be South Africa.
Five convicted violent offenders including murderers, a child rapist, and a violent gang member were recently flown to eSwatini after their countries refused to repatriate them. But eSwatini, as we all know, is no defensive fortress. It’s a loose patchwork of rural hills, scattered border posts, and informal crossing points – effectively a staging ground for a regional spillover.
Eswatini’s 430 km border with South Africa is among the most porous in the region. In many parts, a goat could wander across unnoticed. Countless footpaths crisscross the various mountain ranges in Eswatini, unmarked trails locals and smugglers have used for generations largely ignoring the 11 border posts.
Magistrate courts in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu‑Natal often show that a large share of criminal cases involve undocumented foreigners. South African borders are therefore certainly no Helm’s Deep.
The impact of porous borders is most visible not in Pretoria or Sandton, but in small towns like Piet Retief, Pongola, or Malelane. Here law enforcement officers will tell you that cross-border crime networks rely on the laxity of enforcement. Drugs, guns, stolen vehicles, and now, potentially, high-risk deportees move with little to no resistance through these zones.
What happens to these men now remains unclear. Eswatini has offered no public details about their status, whether they’re being detained, monitored, or simply released into the country unchecked. The US government has only said they’ve been removed from American soil, not what conditions await them on the other end. Given Eswatini’s limited prison infrastructure and opaque legal system, there’s a real chance these individuals aren’t being held in any meaningful way or if they are long term detention is unlikely.
The logical conclusion for South Africa is once the US has offloaded its dangerous individuals into eSwatini they will likely themselves rechart their course to our very own backyards.
Are our borders any safer?
However, under Minister Leon Schreiber, Home Affairs has made strides. Since July 2022, the Border Management Authority (BMA) has deployed drones, body cameras, digital ID scanners, and dozens of new officers in an effort to curb our porous borders. And the result at least according to government data is that drone patrols alone disrupted illegal crossings by 215 percent during festive operations.
The Border Management Authority (BMA) stopped 6,253 attempted illegal crossings into South Africa in 2025, a 63% increase over the 3,841 intercepted during the same period in 2024.
That’s welcome progress. It suggests South Africa is no longer a soft target. But welcome progress is not fortress status against seasoned criminals. Hundreds of unsupervised kilometres remain and eSwatini remains an enormous backdoor we haven’t secured.
A dubious burden on eSwatini
Eswatini itself lacks the infrastructure and resources to manage violent offenders. A 2023 Organized Crime Index described its border controls as opaque, underfunded, and vulnerable to corruption. The report states “Smugglers typically use commodity containers, commercial vehicles, or passenger vehicles to transport the drug, taking advantage of the country’s porous borders and low-risk airport controls.” The US is therefore not just pushing criminals onto Eswatini’s soil but indirectly to South Africa’s as well.
Sooner or later, those individuals will vanish into remote villages or walk across dirt roads into KwaZulu-Natal or Mpumalanga and infiltrate our communities. Our police, already under pressure, understaffed and underresourced, will be the ones tasked with addressing this.
As if the scandal-plagued SAPS did not have enough to deal with already. Entire communities, who already bear the brunt of foreign influxes, will have to absorb the damage.
This isn’t about pointing fingers at the US but it is about recognising that in a region as interconnected with porous borders as Southern Africa sending violent criminals to one country has an effect on all its neighbouring countries.
If Pretoria lets helpless eSwatini, and by extension its own borderlands, shoulder this burden we’ll absolutely pay the price.
Strained relations
Donald Trump might not realise that Eswatini is next door to South Africa, not that he’ll be too concerned. Relations between Washington and Pretoria have been strained for years, and not just the Trump administration.
From South Africa’s defiant stance on the Ukraine war to joint naval drills with Russia, the unresolved Lady R arms shipment, and the ICJ case against Israel trust has eroded.
Add to that the ANC’s ongoing flirtation with expropriation without compensation, inflammatory rhetoric like “Kill the Boer” defended in court, and the broader BRICS push to challenge Western influence, and it’s no surprise that South Africa no longer commands the diplomatic regard overseas it ought to have.
In this climate, sending violent offenders to our doorstep isn’t too much of a worry to the world’s superpower, but it should be a grave concern for the South-African government drawing attention to a much larger issue – our fragile border situation.
Five criminals may not seem earthshattering in a country already numbed by staggering levels of violence and crime. But if this becomes a pattern the effects could be harder to ignore and harder to kick to the curb. South Africa may be used to chaos, but it doesn’t mean we can keep absorbing it without consequence.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay