The first flight bringing migrants to Guantánamo Bay landed on Tuesday evening, as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
According to a US official, the C-17 jet took off from El Paso, Texas, carrying a limited number of migrants bound for the high-security prison facility that has previously housed al Qaeda inmates.
The deportation flight landed about 7:20 p.m. ET, according to the United States Transportation Command.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the ten persons on the flight were suspected members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
However, the migrants would not be housed with current inmates at Guantanamo Bay, and they will be primarily guarded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On January 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the secretaries of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to “expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity” to house migrants without legal status living in the United States.
“There’s a lot of space to accommodate a lot of people,” Trump stated in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “So we’ll utilize it.
“The migrants are rough, but we have some bad ones, too,” he noted. “I want to get them out. It would all be subject to the regulations of our country, and we’re looking into it to see whether we can.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Tuesday morning that flights carrying migrants to Guantanamo Bay were underway, telling Fox News, “Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem are already delivering on this promise to use that capacity at Gitmo for illegal criminals who have broken our nation’s immigration laws and then committed heinous crimes against lawful American citizens here at home.”
While Trump has stated that the US will work to prepare the base to house 30,000 migrants awaiting processing before returning to their home countries, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Guantanamo Bay’s high-security prison facility could house “the worst of the worst” criminals being deported.
“Where are you going to put Tren de Aragua before you send them all the way back?” Hegseth asked. “How about a maximum-security prison at Guantanamo Bay, where we have the space?”
He described the base as “the perfect place to provide for migrants who are traveling out of our country,” including “hardened criminals.”
“President @realdonaldtrump has been unequivocal: Guantanamo Bay will house the worst of the worst. “That begins today,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on Tuesday. It is not known what accusations the migrants aboard the plane face.
According to U.S. Southern Command, there were around 300 military men assisting immigration detention operations at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay on Monday. US insiders tell HeadlinesForever that up to 200 additional Marines are anticipated to arrive in waves.
The Defense Department stated that the troops are in Guantanamo Bay “to prepare to expand the Migrant Operations Center” to temporarily hold up to 30,000 migrants away from the maximum-security jail.
“As we identify criminal illegals in our country, the military is leaning forward to help with moving them out to their home countries or someone else in the interim,” Hegseth told reporters on Jan. 31, 2018. “Now if … they can’t go somewhere right away, they can go to Guantanamo Bay.”
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, told HeadlinesForever’s Phil Lipof on Jan. 29 that keeping migrants at Guantanamo Bay is a “big challenge” because to the massive number Trump has recommended.
“I don’t know if they have the capacity for that,” Greenberg remarked, adding that “in the old days and the ’90s, I think they held 21,000 at most.”
She said that the facility had previously housed refugees and migrants, notably under the Biden administration, but in considerably lesser numbers.
However, Greenberg stated that reports from people who have spent time at Guantanamo Bay are “not good.”
“There was a report released in September by the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sort of detailed the conditions that migrants are held in currently at Guantanamo, which included unsanitary conditions, mistreatment, not to mention this sort of fuzzy legal status,” she told me.