The Trump administration plans to begin flying migrants in military planes from El Paso to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay on Tuesday, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the plans.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed the move, saying on Fox Business that “the first flights from the United States to Guantánamo Bay with illegal migrants are underway.”
The decision is a change in how the United States handles people it deports. The U.S. government has long held migrants it picked up at sea in a facility at Guantánamo Bay, but it has not flown migrants from within the United States to the base.
It also serves as a significant symbol of President Trump’s attempts to cut off legal and illegal immigration, a key pillar of his campaign for the presidency and part of his promise for his administration. Last week, Mr. Trump ordered the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare to expand Guantánamo Bay for the detention of migrants.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” he said. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”
Mr. Trump said it was also a “tough place to get out of.”
About 300 service members have already arrived at Guantánamo Bay to provide security and begin setting up at a new tent city for the migrants. U.S. forces have put up 50 Army green tents inside a chain-link-fence enclosure, adjacent to a barracks-style building called the Migrant Operations Center.
On Sunday, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said the facility would be an asset for the agency.
“We’re just building out some capacity,” she said on “Meet the Press.” “So we appreciate the partnership of the D.O.D. in getting that up to the level that it needs to get to in order to facilitate this repatriation of people back to their countries. So remember that Guantánamo Bay clearly, by this president, has said that it will hold the worst of the worst, that we are going after those bad actors.”
In recent weeks, about 40,000 immigrants have been held in private detention centers and local jails around the country as funding constraints have limited the number of detention sites.
The U.S. government has long held migrants at Guantánamo Bay. Those migrants, however, have been caught at sea and were forced to pass screenings on their asylum claims. Most of them have been from Cuba and Haiti and were then resettled in third countries.
In recent years, the United States has overseen a small group of migrants held at the Migrant Operations Center there. From 2020 to 2023, about three dozen migrants who were waiting for resettlement were held there.
United States Defense and Military Forces,Military Bases and Installations,Illegal Immigration,Deportation,Trump, Donald J,Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba),El Paso (Tex)
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