The first flight carrying migrants to Guantanamo Bay arrived Tuesday evening, part of the Trump administrations crackdown on illegal immigration.
The C-17 plane took off from El Paso, Texas, and is expected to bring a small number of migrants to be held at the high-security prison facility that has been used to hold al Qaeda detainees, according to a U.S. official.
The 10 people on the flight are suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, according to a U.S. official.
The migrants, however, will not be co-located with existing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have the primary guard of them.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 29 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 said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “So we’re going to use it.
“The migrants are rough, but we have some bad ones, too,” he added. “I’d like to get them out. It would be all subject to the laws of our land, and we’re looking at that to see if we can.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the flights carrying migrants to Guantanamo Bay were underway Tuesday morning, saying on Fox News, “Trump, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are already delivering on this promise to utilize that capacity at Gitmo for illegal criminals who have broken our nation’s immigration laws and then have further committed heinous crimes against lawful American citizens here at home.”
While Trump has said the United States will work to prepare the base to hold 30,000 migrants awaiting processing to return 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 called the base “the perfect place to provide for migrants who are traveling out of our country,” including for “hardened criminals.”
“President @realdonaldtrump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst. That starts today,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on Tuesday. It is unclear what charges the migrants on the plane face.
As of Monday, there were about 300 service members supporting the immigrant holding operations at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, according to U.S. Southern Command. U.S. officials told ABC News that as many as 200 more Marines are expected to arrive in waves.
The Defense Department posted that the troops are at Guantanamo Bay “to prepare to expand the Migrant Operations Center” to house up to the 30,000 migrants temporarily, separate from the maximum-security prison.
“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 said on Jan. 31. “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 ABC News’ Phil Lipof on Jan. 29 that a “big challenge” of holding migrants at Guantanamo Bay is the large number Trump has suggested.
“I don’t know that they have the capacity for that,” said Greenberg, who noted that “in the old days and the ’90s, I think they held 21,000 at the most.”
She added that the base has repeatedly held refugees and migrants, including in the Biden administration, though in much smaller numbers.
However, Greenberg noted that the reports from those 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 said.
ABC News’ Luke Barr contributed to this report.
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