The Homeland Security Department on Thursday was holding 43 immigration detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, which has become a way station for foreign citizens designated for deportation.
Facilities for migrants at the base currently can hold fewer than 200 detainees, and there are no immediate plans to expand that capacity, according to two Defense Department officials. Like others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Trump administration considers the mission sensitive.
On Wednesday, a flight chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped at the base and picked up two Venezuelan men, according to two people with knowledge of the operation. They were among 152 men and women who were shuttled to a connecting flight at an airport in Honduras, which has in recent months been one route for Venezuelan repatriations.
Also, a military C-17 cargo plane arrived from an airport in South Florida with 12 ICE detainees. Their citizenship was not known.
As of this week, about 540 Defense Department employees, mostly soldiers and Marines, were staffing the operation, along with 130 Homeland Security Department employees, many of them ICE contractors. They were spread between two holding sites on opposite sides of the base, one near the base landing strip and the other requiring a ferry ride across Guantánamo Bay.
Those staff members are part of migrant operations that began in early February after President Trump ordered Guantánamo prepared to house up to 30,000 migrants for his administration’s crackdown on immigration. But the operation has so far remained small, with fewer than 600 deportees held there overall, including the 43 there on Wednesday, a Defense Department official said.
The ICE operation has 192 beds in two facilities.
Migrants who are profiled by homeland security officials as high-threat individuals have been housed in a prison called Camp 6, which until earlier this year was used to house military detainees who were captured in the war against terrorism. People who are believed to pose a lower threat were being held in a dormitory-style detention site with bunk beds.
A plan to house tens of thousands of migrants in tents at the base hit a snag earlier this year when security officials deemed large-scale communal confinement as too dangerous. Dozens of tents that were set up in an empty field in February were taken down and stored before the hurricane season in the Caribbean began this month.
Critics of the operation have called it a waste of taxpayer resources because of the costs of shipping migrants and supplies to the base, which is behind a Cuban minefield.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
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