The United States has transferred 22 Cuban migrants to its Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, people familiar with the matter said, repopulating its detention site with men it intends to deport for the first time in two months.
The men, who arrived at the base this week, are believed to be the first Cuban citizens sent here since January, when the Trump administration set up a holding center for migrants designated for removal from the United States.
In total, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held about 730 men at the base, most from Latin American countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela.
On Monday, ICE referred questions about the latest detainees and their possible fates to the larger Homeland Security Department, which did not provide details, including whether or how the men would be returned to the custody of the Cuban government.
On rare occasions the United States has repatriated Cuban citizens through a gate at the fence line that separates the two sides, and is guarded by a Cuban military force and minefield.
All the previous immigration detainees held this year were moved in and out on either U.S. chartered aircraft or military cargo planes.
The 22 men arrived on an ICE air charter from Louisiana on Sunday.
The latest arrivals included five men who had been deemed “high-threat illegal aliens,” according to a Defense Department official who gave details on the operation on the condition of anonymity as only ICE and homeland security officials are authorized to discuss it. Detainees who have been determined to be high risk are typically held at a prison that formerly housed suspected Al Qaeda members who had been captured overseas in the war against terrorism.
The remaining Cuban men were to be held at a dormitory-style holding site that has been used for years to shelter migrants seeking asylum from Caribbean nations.
The detention complex had been empty since mid-October, when the United States sent 18 men to El Salvador and Guatemala. Later that month, the base evacuated all nonessential residents, including ICE agents and contractors, back to the mainland ahead of Hurricane Melissa. They returned last month, after cleanup.
The weekend transfer was also the first since a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Trump administration exceeded its authority in holding migrants designated for deportation at the base.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokeswoman, indicated that the agency planned to appeal. “We look forward to a higher court’s vindication of our use of this facility to keep criminals off American streets,” she told The Associated Press this month.
In the 1990s, the U.S. military held tens of thousands of Cubans at Guantánamo in sprawling tent camps that overwhelmed the base. Those Cubans had never reached the United States. They were instead intercepted at sea and housed at the base in what the military cast as a humanitarian relief operation that eventually permitted many of them entry into the United States.
In recent years, Cubans interdicted at sea have mostly been held on U.S. Coast Guard cutters and repatriated in cooperation with the Cuban government.
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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