Trump administration abruptly clears out migrants it sent to Guantanamo

The Trump administration on Thursday transferred all of the Venezuelan migrants it had brought to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, suddenly emptying a detention operation that it had just as abruptly started this month.

Two passenger planes operated by Global X, a charter aircraft company, flew to the naval base Thursday morning and shuttled most of the migrants to an airfield in Honduras. They were to then be put aboard a Venezuelan plane for repatriation.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, said 177 migrants had been transferred to Venezuelan custody, and one had been brought back to an immigration facility in the United States. In a declaration filed in court earlier Thursday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had said 178 Venezuelans were at the base.

It was unclear whether the administration intended to send additional migrants to the base.

But an ICE official, Juan E. Agudelo, said in a court filing Thursday that the immigration agency intended to use Guantánamo "as a temporary staging facility for aliens being repatriated" and said they would be held there for "the time necessary to effect the removal orders."

The transfers cleared out the migrants at a time when the operation has raised numerous questions about whether the government had legitimate legal authority to take people from ICE facilities in the United States to the base in Cuba for continued detention. Immigrant rights' lawyers have gone to court seeking access to the migrants, and rights groups have been expected to file a broader challenge to the Trump administration's policy.

"It's a way to avoid litigation from getting traction," said Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale Law School professor who worked as a lawyer in the State Department during the Obama administration and has long been involved in litigation over detainees at Guantánamo. He added: "Possession is nine-tenths of the law."

The turnover took place at the Soto Cano air base, where the US military's Southern Command has maintained a presence for decades, a statement from Honduras said.

The Honduran government said it was facilitating the transfer for what it described as humanitarian reasons.

On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump directed the US military and the Homeland Security Department to prepare to expand a migrant operations center at Guantánamo Bay, saying it would "provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States."

The military began transporting migrants to the base on near daily flights from an immigration site in El Paso, Texas, starting Feb. 4. In announcing the first transfer flight, the Pentagon cast the operation as a "temporary measure" to secure the migrants "until they can be transported to their country of origin or other appropriate destination."

All of the migrants taken to Guantánamo to date have been citizens of Venezuela. It has been difficult to deport people to the country because of the breakdown in relations between its authoritarian government and the United States.

But a Trump adviser, Richard Grenell, visited Venezuela in late January and appeared to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough, which included an agreement that Venezuela would resume accepting deportees. On Feb. 10, Venezuela sent two planes to El Paso to pick up about 190 of its citizens, whom the Homeland Security Department described as under final deportation orders.

Speaking on television Thursday, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela described the return of "177 men who we have rescued" as a victory for his government and the result of a "direct petition" his government had made to the United States.

Maduro said that his interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, widely viewed in Venezuela as a major orchestrator and symbol of state repression, would meet returnees at the airport. "In Venezuela, we give them a welcome as a productive force, with a loving hug," Maduro said.

As the flights to Venezuela have resumed, it has not been clear why some Venezuelans were taken to Guantánamo.

Trump administration officials had initially portrayed the migrants taken to Guantánamo as members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which the State Department included on a list of transnational cartels and gangs the administration designated as foreign terrorist organizations Thursday.

But it is not clear whether that is true for any of the migrants: Congressional staff members were told in a briefing that the only criteria to be sent to the base were being Venezuelan with a final removal order.

As of Wednesday, McLaughlin, the homeland security spokesperson, had said simply that ICE was using Guantánamo "to house detainees subject to final orders of removal." She also referred to them as "final order aliens."

Luis Castillo, 29, was among the Venezuelans held at Guantánamo. According to his family, he left Venezuela years ago for economic reasons, tried to make a living in Colombia -- he worked for a time washing cars -- and eventually left for the United States in hopes of making more money to support his family, including a young son.

His sister Yajaira Castillo said he presented himself at the U.S. border on Jan. 19 in an attempt to claim asylum, and he was detained and then sent to Guantánamo.

When she heard he was being sent back to Venezuela, she said, she had mixed emotions. She was glad he would be released. But she was saddened by "this cruelty that they inflicted on us Venezuelans" by keeping her brother and others at Guantánamo. She and other family members of detainees have connected on a WhatsApp group, where they have consoled one another. "They made us suffer so much," she said.

McLaughlin has said Castillo is part of Tren de Aragua, but she has presented no evidence. Castillo's family maintains that he is not a criminal and was portrayed as a gang member because of a Michael Jordan tattoo on his neck.

In a lawsuit seeking legal access to the migrants in which Castillo is named, the government told a court that it had allowed three men named in the suit to call lawyers Monday and that "preliminary access procedures have been developed for others at the facility."

But the Justice Department also urged a judge not to require broader access, arguing that the migrants had only "limited rights" as "immigration detainees with final orders of removal, who are staged for final transfer and in the midst of a removal operation."

The Trump administration has raised the possibility of eventually housing tens of thousands of migrants at the base. With the future of the policy unclear, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, the lead lawyer for the immigrant rights' groups seeking access to migrants at Guantánamo, said the fight was far from over.

"The government saying we can now have access to the detainees only after they have moved them is perplexing, at best," he said. If the government was trying to make the lawsuit moot, he added, "they will not succeed."