The Trump administration has moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants.
About a dozen of the men were brought in from El Paso, Texas, on Friday, as Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, arrived at Guantánamo. She is the first senior member of the Trump administration to visit the migrant mission on the base in southeastern Cuba.
Ms. Noem was taken to the rooftop of the base’s aircraft hangar and observed as U.S. security forces led the deportees down the ramp of a C-130 military cargo plane to an awaiting minibus. Maj. Gen. Philip J. Ryan, the army commander overseeing the migrant mission, stood beside her in combat uniform, and a Chinook transport chopper could be seen in the distance.
“Vicious gang members will no longer have safe haven in our country,” Ms. Noem said on social media, calling the men “criminal aliens.”
The White House has characterized this week’s arrivals as members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the United States has designated a “transnational criminal organization” for human trafficking and other crimes. A fourth group was inbound Saturday evening in what has become an emerging U.S. military air bridge from an immigration site in El Paso.
But the Trump administration has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost.
For Friday’s arrival, some security forces wore combat uniforms and had scarves over their faces, apparently to shield their identity. The migrants were all dressed in gray sweatpants and sweatshirts, similar to the 13 men who had been brought in a much larger C-17 cargo plane on Thursday. At least two of the men were wearing lace-less sneakers, one pair yellow and green, the other black and white, and both with the distinctive Nike logo.
One image showed two guards leading a man to a minibus. He was shackled at the ankles and at the wrists, and was clutching a plastic water bottle.
That man was not blindfolded or wearing a noise-inhibiting device on his head, unlike the way the military processed what it called “the worst of the worst” of the detainees who were transported to Guantánamo from Afghanistan in January 2002, amid the war on terrorism.
The bus windows were blackened for the journey from the airfield to the military prison where the Pentagon said this week’s arrivals were being housed. Rather than take them to available space in the nearby tent city, their buses were driven onto a ferry to cross the bay to the opposite side of the base, which has 4,200 residents.
The Pentagon has described the arrangement as “a temporary measure.”
The military has said agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, have been holding the first detainees.
A mixture of forces appeared to be handling the new arrivals. Some of them appeared to be military policemen from the Army. One was wearing civilian attire, including a blue jacket marked “Police ICE,” and no mask. Some of the civilian and military forces wore ball caps, something that is generally forbidden at the Guantánamo airstrip for fear of their flying into the engine of a plane.
Ms. Noem visited the nascent tent camp, where the administration has suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of migrants who pose lesser threats could be housed. She watched Marines rehearse how to move migrants to the future tent city, and she was shown a tent with cots and a display of basic items to be provided each new arrival — T-shirt, shorts, underwear and a towel — and then got an aerial view of the mission from a Chinook helicopter.
The helicopter then carried Ms. Noem and her entourage, Army and homeland security officials, across Guantánamo Bay to the two-decade-old complex housing prisoners from the war on terrorism, where the first migrant arrivals were being held. It was not known whether she saw the recent arrivals in their cells.
The U.S. military’s Southern Command has sent Marines from North Carolina and soldiers from Texas to support the effort by an undisclosed number of homeland security staff members.
By Friday, crew from the Coast Guard cutter Resolute out of St. Petersburg, Fla., had also joined the forces building the tent city.
A contingent of Navy engineers, called Seabees, and some medical corps personnel also arrived Friday on the Navy’s weekly charter from Jacksonville, Fla., along with a delegation of professional football cheerleaders to entertain residents on Super Bowl weekend — an annual tradition.
Ms. Noem’s visit came 20 years after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth served at the base as a young officer with the New Jersey National Guard, his first deployment.
In a newsletter for the detention operation staff, Mr. Hegseth, then a second lieutenant, predicted that the New England Patriots would triumph at the Super Bowl. “Tom Brady knows how to win,” he was quoted saying in a feature. “He’s the next Joe Montana.”
New England defeated Philadelphia, 24 to 21.
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