Federal agents have moved about 20 migrants to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a Defense Department official said on Tuesday, repopulating the holding site for detainees designated for deportation for the first time in nearly two weeks.
The identities or nationalities of the detainees where not immediately known. All were believed to be men.
Trackers spotted the flight after it left a Homeland Security Department hub in Alexandria, La., on Monday afternoon. But the first confirmation came on Tuesday, after the federal holiday, from a defense official who was not authorized to be identified by name.
The operation raised to about 710 the number of migrants who had been temporarily held at the base since the Trump administration’s deportation operations began in early February.
On Oct. 1, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents transferred 18 detainees held at the base back to U.S. holding facilities, leaving the site empty. The arrivals on Monday were the first since then.
A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department did not respond to questions of why the base was cleared of migrants, or why more were sent there.
The site had generally served as a way station for deportees bound for Latin America, primarily Venezuela and El Salvador. More recently, the department used it to house several dozen men from countries farther from the United States, including Egypt, Iran, India, Romania and Vietnam.
Civil liberties lawyers are seeking a court order to shut the operation down. A hearing before a federal judge is scheduled in Washington later this month.
“Never before this administration has the federal government moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to Guantánamo, or to any other facility outside the United States, for the purpose of civil immigration detention,” their filing claims. “Nor is there any legitimate reason to do so. The government has ample detention capacity inside the United States.”
President Trump initially authorized his administration to hold up to 30,000 people on the base in tent cities. But that proved impractical, and the military dismantled rows of tents erected for the mission and returned them to storage for use in the event of a humanitarian crisis in the Caribbean.
The largest number of migrants held at Guantánamo on a single day was 178 on Feb. 19 — all of them Venezuelans — before they were all removed, and all but one repatriated. Since then, the deportee population has ranged from zero to dozens.
The military recently added a second bunk to some cells at a site where the migrants have been held, called Camp 6, to increase ICE detainee capacity to about 200. A second site has been closed because of a water break.
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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