Washington — U.S. government officials are moving rapidly to fulfill President Trump’s orders to turn the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay into a massive immigration detention complex, making plans to send daily flights there with migrant detainees, two U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations told CBS News Thursday.
So far, two U.S. military flights have been sent to Guantanamo Bay this week with fewer than two dozen migrant detainees who officials said have alleged ties to the notorious Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua, which is expected to be labeled a foreign terrorist group at Mr. Trump’s direction.
But the administration’s objective is to send groups of unauthorized migrants from the U.S. mainland to Guantanamo each day, using military aircraft to airlift and relocate the detainees, the U.S. officials said, requesting anonymity to discuss internal plans that have not been formally announced.
More migrant detainee flights to Guantanamo are planned for Friday and the weekend, one of the officials said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is planning to visit Guantanamo on Friday to assess officials’ efforts to set up and prepare enough detention space to hold as many as 30,000 migrants, as the president called for in an executive order last week, sources familiar with the plans said.
Military service members at the Naval Base have been setting up tents to act as holding sites with the goal of building enough for 2,000 migrants as part of an initial phase, though the alleged Venezuelan gang members transported to Guantanamo this week have been classified as “high-threat” detainees and held in cells inside the base’s high-security prison. A separate part of the prison, created after the 9/11 attacks, also houses more than a dozen terrorism suspects.
The plans illustrate how quickly and aggressively the administration is moving to transform Guantanamo Bay, a 45-square-mile stretch of Cuban land the U.S has leased for over a century, into a focal point of Mr. Trump’s plans to oversee the largest deportation operation in American history.
Representatives for DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Being able to house thousands — and potentially, tens of thousands — of migrants in Guantanamo Bay would be a significant breakthrough for the Trump administration’s mass deportation goals. While deportation officers have increased immigration arrests operations across the country in Mr. Trump’s first weeks in office, the government is running out of space to house them.
This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities reached 109% capacity, forcing the agency to release some migrant detainees after fitting them with ankle monitors.
ICE has been scrambling to find additional detention space, making plans to set up as many as 18 new facilities within its own network of county jails and for-profit prisons, which currently have about 38,000 beds. On Tuesday morning, ICE had 42,000 detainees in custody.
The agency is also asking other federal agencies and local law enforcement officials, like county sheriffs, to provide detention space. ICE has been permitted to use a Denver-area Space Force base to house its detainees, and other military sites are being considered for migrant detention. The agency is also considering using Border Patrol facilities, currently well under capacity due to a sharp drop in illegal border crossings, to hold those arrested in the U.S. interior.
Still, the effort to convert the naval base in Guantanamo into a large-scale migrant holding site is already facing legal and operational challenges.
Finding and mobilizing sufficient security guards to supervise the migrant detainees has been an issue limiting transfers to the base, the two U.S. officials said.
For days, officials across federal agencies argued over who would have legal custody of the migrant detainees and what their legal rights would be, officials said. Ultimately, it was decided that ICE would continue to have legal custody over the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, pending their deportation.
But it’s unclear how long migrants will be detained in Guantanamo. The U.S. has not carried out deportations to Venezuela for a while due to frosty relations with the regime in Caracas. Mr. Trump recently announced a deportation deal with Venezuela’s government, but it has not been implemented yet.
The Trump administration and the government of President Nayib Bukele are forging an agreement that would allow the U.S. to deport non-Salvadoran migrants to El Salvador, including suspected Venezuelan gang members. But that arrangement also has not been finalized yet.
For decades, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, the U.S. has housed some migrants in the Guantanamo base. But that policy, until now, only applied to migrants intercepted at sea who were undergoing interviews to be resettled in third countries like Canada and Australia. Those migrants have been housed in a barrack-like facility that is separate from the newly-erected tents.
