Who are these people and why did they decide to send specifically them to these gulags? Were they just random immigrants or were they dissidents?

Trafficking victims, shipped to a nation none of them have ever been to.

The African nation of what now?

Eswatini, formally the Kingdom of Eswatini, also known by its former official names Swaziland and the Kingdom of Swaziland, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. It is bordered by South Africa on all sides except the northeast, where it shares a border with Mozambique.

huh. TIL. If a country wasn’t named in Yakko’s Nations of the World, I dun wan it.