U.S. officials have deported 18 migrants who were being held at the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, leaving the temporary holding site vacant once again.
Charter aircraft transported the men to Guatemala and El Salvador on Thursday and Friday, according to officials, who were not authorized to discuss the operations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The identities and nationalities of the detainees were not immediately known.
The operation cleared the base of migrants six days before a federal court hearing in Washington. Civil liberties lawyers are challenging the legality of holding migrants at the base from previous detention on U.S. soil.
It also came as administration officials are deciding what to do with two survivors of a U.S. military strike on a vessel from Venezuela suspected of smuggling drugs. They were being held aboard a U.S. Navy ship somewhere in the Caribbean.
The migrants who were moved out of Guantánamo had arrived there on Monday from a Homeland Security Department hub in Alexandria, La. Some of them were categorized as “low threat illegal aliens” and were held in a dormitory-style lockup near the base’s airstrip.
Others considered more dangerous were held at a prison, called Camp 6, that was built for Qaeda suspects. No breakdown was available.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents working with the U.S. military have held about 710 migrants at the base since the operation began in February, a much more modest operation than President Trump envisioned in December when he ordered his administration to prepare to hold thousands of “criminal aliens” there.
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.
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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