Washington — The U.S. government is moving quickly to implement President Trump’s order to turn facilities at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base into a large-scale immigration detention center, sending the first group of migrant detainees there on Tuesday.
Last week, Mr. Trump instructed his administration to dramatically expand detention space inside the naval base to detain as many as 30,000 “high-priority” unauthorized immigrants with criminal records. Since then, officials from across the government, including the Departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security, have scrambled to implement the president’s directive.
On Tuesday afternoon, a plane carrying 10 migrant detainees departed the Fort Bliss Army base near the Texas border for Guantanamo Bay, multiple U.S. officials told CBS News. Two officials said the migrants were classified as “high-threat” detainees who would be held in cells inside the naval base. One of the officials said they were Venezuelan men with affiliations to Tren De Aragua, a gang that originated in Venezuela’s prisons.
A U.S. official said those likely to be sent to the naval base in the future would be unauthorized immigrants arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency at the center of the president’s vow to oversee the largest deportation effort in American history. The agency has ramped up immigration operations across the country under Mr. Trump, averaging between 800 and 1,000 daily arrests in the past week — up from the 312 average in former President Joe Biden’s final year in office.
Over the past several days, there has been an internal debate about whether the Pentagon or DHS would have legal and physical custody over the migrant detainees, and what sort of legal rights they would have.
For decades, the Guantanamo base has included a facility, known as the Migrant Operations Center, where U.S. immigration officials have screened some asylum-seekers intercepted at sea. That area is separate from Guantanamo Bay’s detention center, the post-9/11 military prison where the U.S. still holds more than a dozen terrorism suspects.
A relatively small number of migrants are housed in barrack-like facilities while they undergo interviews with asylum officers. Asylum-seekers who passed those initial interviews have been referred for resettlement in third countries like Australia and Canada. The U.S. has long had a policy of not allowing those caught at sea to seek asylum in the U.S. in order to deter maritime migration.
After Mr. Trump’s recent directive, U.S. officials have been setting up tent facilities to hold migrants in Guantanamo Bay outside of the Migrant Operations Center, as the new detainees are not expected to be held in that facility.
In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration held thousands of Haitian migrants inside the Guantanamo base, including in a notorious camp for those diagnosed with HIV, who were banned from entering the U.S. at the time.
While visiting the southwest border on Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Guantanamo Bay “the perfect place” to hold “hardened criminals.”
“Where are you going to put Tren De Aragua before you send them all the way back? How about a maximum security prison at Guantanamo Bay, where we have the space,” Hegseth said.
