The long, circuitous journey of dozens of Cuban men who were designated for deportation from the United States last year but instead taken to a prison at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay ended on Monday when they were repatriated to Cuba.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flew 170 Cuban citizens on a charter flight that picked up deportees from airfields in Louisiana and Florida and delivered them to the international airport in Havana.
More than 50 of them were men who were transferred from a huge ICE holding facility in Natchez, Miss., their last stop in an odyssey that, starting in December, took them to the American base in Cuba. They were kept there, in a prison that previously held people suspected of being Al Qaeda members, until their transfer to Mississippi last week.
Human Rights First, which tracks removal flights as ICE Flight Monitor, said the Global X charter was the first deportation flight to Cuba since Dec. 18.
ICE and Department of Homeland Security officials did not respond to questions about the men, or their return.
But they were all included on the repatriation flight, according to the relatives of the men, who shared information in an online support group of sisters, wives and mothers who had connected their families between Cuba and the United States.
The chat group showed that the men were from towns and cities across the island, and one by one had checked in with relatives in the United States after they arrived in Cuba.
Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has challenged the use of Guantánamo as a holding site for ICE detainees, said lawyers representing the men believed all 55 had been returned on Monday’s flight.
Homeland Security officials repeatedly declined to identify any of the men held at Guantánamo but said the first 22 Cubans sent there just before Christmas included “illegal aliens” with histories of homicide, kidnapping, assault, battery and other violent crimes. The officials did not provide details.
The 170 people flown to Havana on Monday included 153 men and 17 women, according to Cuba’s Interior Ministry.
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.
The post Cubans Sent to U.S. Prison at Guantánamo Are Returned to Cuba appeared first on New York Times.
