No migrants were being held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Thursday, a day after homeland security officials cleared out the last 18 men who were there awaiting deportation.
It was a rare exception since the Trump administration began temporarily putting migrants there whom it intended to remove from the United States.
The men were removed from the base on a charter flight to the United States on Wednesday. Their final destinations were not known, but immigration authorities have in the past moved migrants back to the United States to consolidate deportation flights.
More than 600 U.S. government workers, most of them military members but also 120 civilians working for the Homeland Security Department, are on temporary assignment to the base’s migration operations, which was set up in February.
Since then, fewer than 700 foreign citizens have been held there awaiting deportation in an operation that was initially established with a vision of holding tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants in tent cities.
The operation never reached that capacity. The largest number of migrants held there on a single day was 178 on Feb. 19 — all of them Venezuelans — before they were all removed, all but one to repatriations. Since then, the deportee population has ranged from a single migrant to dozens.
The military recently began adding a second bunk to some cells at a site where the migrants have been held, called Camp 6, to increase capacity to about 200.
Until this year, Camp 6 housed prisoners in the war against terrorism on a remote portion of the base. When it was built for $39 million in 2006, Camp 6 had bunks in some cells and a capacity of up to 200 detainees. But the bunks were removed in the early years under a security doctrine of confining only one prisoner to a cell.
Some migrants had been held in a lower-security site called the Migrant Operations Center on a different part of the base. But a water outage in that area last month forced its evacuation.
A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to a question of why the base was cleared of migrants.
At the end of July, 61 people were being held at Guantánamo in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, according to military officials. Since then, 16 ICE flights have picked up deportees, to either return them to the United States or add to flights already loaded with other migrants and continue on to other countries.
Their destinations included Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, England, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Laos, Nigeria, Romania, St. Kitt, Sierra Leone and Vietnam, according to Thomas Cartwright, who tracks deportations with the immigrant rights group Witness at the Border.
This group was the longest-held of the detainees taken there since Feb. 4. On average before this summer, Guantánamo served as a way station for migrants being deported within days or weeks.
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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