Flights carrying undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo have begun, White House says

Nora Gámez Torres and Syra Ortiz Blanes, Miami Herald on Feb 4, 2025

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The Trump administration started sending migrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, on Tuesday as part of a crackdown on undocumented immigration, the White House said.

“I can confirm the first flights from the United States to Guantanamo Bay with illegal migrants are under way,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Tuesday morning. “Trump is not messing around, and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world.”

The flights to Guantanamo Bay come as the federal government seeks to ramp up its mass deportation plans. Since President Donald Trump took office, the White House has announced agreements to resume direct deportation flights to Venezuela and to send undocumented immigrants from any country — and perhaps Americans with criminal convictions — to El Salvador, which operates the largest maximum-security prison on the hemisphere.

Guantanamo already houses a migrant processing facility where Cubans, Haitians and others apprehended at sea await the outcome of their asylum cases or to be resettled in a third country. The State Department has been in charge of running the center, with assistance from the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.

The State Department and the U.S. Southern Command, which is based in Doral, referred questions about the flights to the Department of Homeland Security. The agency did not reply to a request for comment.

CNN reported there were around 10 migrants with criminal records in one military flight that departed to Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported authorities used a C-17 military jet that costs $28,500 an hour to fly instead of the much cheaper charter flights used by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On Tuesday afternoon, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shared photos on X of handcuffed migrants arriving at the base and one image of four military planes with the text: “President @realdonaldtrump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst. That starts today.”

Last week, Trump signed a memorandum ordering the Homeland Security and Defense departments to increase the capacity of Guantanamo’s migrant facility so it can process and detain 30,000 people. Experts note that such a gargantuan operational expansion will present logistical and personnel challenges. The facility has only held a handful of immigrants in recent years.

White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN earlier that ICE would oversee the management of a Guantanamo Bay detention facility for migrants.

“We’re just going to expand upon existing migrant centers,” he said, adding the facility would be overseen by “our migrant center run out of Miami.”

During the weekend through Monday, the Pentagon deployed troops to the base to support “illegal alien holding operations” at Trump’s request, the U.S. Southern Command, which is based in Doral, said. With the arrival of the first troops, the Southern Command said there were approximately 300 service members involved in such operations.

Around 50,000 migrants were housed in the base during parallel migration waves of Cubans and Haitians in the mid-1990s. And the U.S. Southern Command regularly carries out exercises to prepare for a surge of migrants intercepted at sea. But flying migrants out of the U.S. to the station in Cuba sets up a different scenario.

The migrant processing facility in Guantanamo has come under fire in recent years on claims of civil- and human-rights violations. The International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal aid and advocacy group based in New York City, said in a report last fall that the Guantanamo facility for migrants had inadequate health care and that people were kept there in prison-like conditions. Over a hundred organizations asked the federal government to stop detaining asylum seekers found at sea at the center in October. The State Department under the Biden administration vehemently denied the report’s findings to the Miami Herald and other media outlets.

“These flights set the stage for egregious rights violations, indefinite detention, and crushing family separations,” said Hannah Flamm, acting director of policy at The International Refugee Assistance Project. “The United States has a deplorable history of detaining different groups of people unlawfully at Guantanamo to avoid oversight and the public eye, and this latest chapter is no exception.”

The Cuban government, which argues the U.S. base is illegal, has blasted the plan to send migrants to Guantanamo in a statement, calling it “a demonstration of the brutality… and hostility towards countries of origin.”