After 14 months imprisoned without charge in Eswatini, Phone Chomsavanh finally secured his release, only to spend nearly 60 hours trapped inside an international airport terminal because of paperwork problems. His attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said the 45 year old has now reached Laos after four days in transit.

“He was very broken and frustrated and disappointed when I talked to him” during the ordeal, Nguyen said. After two days of uncertainty, Chomsavanh told his attorney, “I’m through with this, just send me back to Eswatini.”

Nguyen said he believed the ordeal triggered a trauma response because of what Chomsavanh had endured. Before his airport trouble began, Chomsavanh said in a statement released Sunday, “I just want to live. I just want to be free.”

Chomsavanh was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Laotian parents. He arrived in Tennessee with his family at age seven, but his refugee status was taken away following a 1998 felony conviction committed while he was a teenager.

Laos refused to issue him a travel document, so he was never deported. The source described that refusal as a longstanding practice among several Southeast Asian countries that left thousands of former child refugees with convictions in limbo in the United States.

Chomsavanh was living with his girlfriend in Florida when immigration agents captured him at their home in June 2025. Three weeks later, officials shackled him and placed him aboard an ICE flight operated by Journey Aviation, based in Boca Raton.

He initially believed he would be sent to Laos. “When they told me I was going on a deportation flight, I was actually excited,” he said, adding that he thought he “was going to the country where my parents were born. I could learn about my history.”

Instead, Chomsavanh and four other men were flown to a U.S. military base in Djibouti, then transferred to a military cargo plane. Chomsavanh and Orville Etoria, another man aboard the flight, said they were not told their destination until shortly before landing in Eswatini.

Both men also said immigration officials tried to get the group to sign documents consenting to removal to Eswatini. Everyone aboard refused, but the men were nevertheless sent to a maximum security prison, where they were held in solitary confinement and denied unmonitored phone calls for months.

“Phone’s removal order named one country, and it was Laos. He told ICE he wanted to go,” Nguyen said. “He had already served his time. Instead they put him on a plane without telling him where it was headed and left him in a prison in a country he had never heard of, where nobody ever accused him of anything. No notice, no hearing, no chance to object. That is not due process by any definition.”

After Roberto Mosquera del Paral staged a hunger strike, the prisoners gradually received more freedoms, though they remained incarcerated. ICE later expelled 27 additional men to the Eswatini prison on four more removal flights, and Chomsavanh became only the seventh person freed.

The Eswatini government received $5.1 million from the Trump administration to accept up to 160 third country nationals, according to a report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. More than 25,000 immigrants have been forcibly expelled to countries where they have no ties during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to Third Country Deportation Watch.

Nguyen said he navigated a complicated and opaque diplomatic process without assistance from the U.S. government before securing Chomsavanh’s release early Sunday. Chomsavanh flew to Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport, but airline officials questioned his emergency travel document and denied him boarding after a “risk assessment.”

Nguyen purchased a ticket on another airline for Monday night, but officials again pulled Chomsavanh aside during boarding. The second airline said its assessment would not be completed until the following day, and he was finally permitted to board a flight to Asia on Tuesday night.

Because his emergency travel document could be used only once to leave an international transit zone, Chomsavanh remained inside the Johannesburg terminal. Nguyen paid for access to a priority lounge, where Chomsavanh slept during the two nights he was stranded.

Chomsavanh is now in Laos and will stay with an uncle he has never met while adjusting to a country he has never visited. Nguyen, meanwhile, remains focused on those still incarcerated in Eswatini: “There are still men in that prison tonight,” he said. “and we are not going to stop talking about them until they are home, too.”