This would be the first shipment of Cuban citizens to that facility since January.
MIAMI, United States. – The US resumed the transfer of Cuban migrants to the Guantánamo Naval Base, in a detention operation linked to deportations that had been detained for two months, as revealed The New York Times.
A first group of 22 men arrived last Sunday, December 14, on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter flight from Louisiana. According to US media reports, this would be the first shipment of Cuban citizens to that facility since January.
According to The New York Timesfive of the migrants were classified as “high-risk illegal aliens” and would be held in a prison in the complex used in the past for suspects captured in the “war on terrorism,” while the rest would be housed in a “dormitory-type” facility used for years for Caribbean asylum seekers.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not clarify whether these Cubans would be handed over to the island’s authorities or how an eventual repatriation would be processed. According to the text, the DHS “refused to indicate whether the men would be returned to the custody of the Cuban Government or what the procedure would be like.”
In a statement released Tuesday night, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said that among those detained at the base were people “with criminal records for homicide, kidnapping, assault, battery, obstruction of law enforcement and cruelty to a minor.” The report added that the government did not identify the men, so those claims “could not be independently verified through a criminal records search.”
According to The New York Timesthe weekend transfer was the first since “a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Trump Administration exceeded its authority by holding migrants designated for deportation at the base.” In this context, Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said that he had not been notified of the movement and warned: “Guantánamo operates largely as a black box.”
The ACLU and other organizations They had sued the federal government last June to stop the use of Guantánamo as an immigration detention center, alleging that people were sent there for civil immigration violations and were isolated, without in-person access to lawyers and under punitive conditions. Along the same lines, the Associated Press (AP) agency reported this month that Federal Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan (Washington, DC) denied the Government’s request to dismiss the lawsuit and scheduled a hearing to discuss the next steps in the case.
According to the report, “the detention complex had been empty since mid-October,” following the transfer of 18 men to El Salvador and Guatemala. The note adds that, “at the end of that month,” the base evacuated non-essential residents — including ICE agents and contractors — “before Hurricane Melissa,” and that they returned “last month, after cleanup efforts.”
Last January, Donald Trump ordered to expand the capacity of the so-called “Migrant Operations Center” in Guantánamo. In a presidential memorandum dated January 29 of this yearthe White House instructed the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to “expand” the center “to provide additional detention space” to “high-priority criminal aliens” in an irregular immigration situation, within the framework of its immigration toughening agenda.
According to the Reuters agencyICE has detained “about 730 men” at the Guantanamo Naval Base so far in 2025.
