The Trump administration transferred all the Venezuelans on Thursday migrants he had brought to the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cubasuddenly emptying a detention operation which he had just as suddenly started This month.
Two passenger planes operated by Global X, an aircraft company Charter, flew to the naval base on Thursday morning and returned most of the migrants to an aerodrome in Honduras. They then had to be on board a Venezuelan plane for repatriation.
Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson for the Department of Internal Security, said that 177 migrants had been transferred to the Venezuelan guard and that one had been brought back to an immigration establishment in the United States. In a statement Placed in court on Thursday, an official of immigration and customs application said that 178 Venezuelans were at the base.
It was not clear if 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 temporal staging facility for aliens being reatad” and said they would be held there for “the time necessary to effect the withdrawal orders. “”
Transfers eliminated migrants at a time when the operation has raised many questions On the question of whether the government had a legitimate legal authority to take people from ice facilities in the United States to the basis of Cuba for continuous detention. Immigrant rights lawyers went to court to request access to migrantsAnd rights defending groups were to file a broader challenge in the Trump administration policy.
“It is a way to prevent disputes from being traction,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of the Yale law faculty who worked as a lawyer in the State Department during the Obama administration, a For a long time involved in litigation on the prisoners of Guantánamo. He added: “The possession is nine tenths of the law”.
The turnover took place at Soto Cano air base, where the southern US army command maintained a presence For decades, said a declaration from Honduras.
THE The Honduran government said He facilitated transfer for what he described as humanitarian reasons.
On January 29, Trump ordered the US military and the Department of Internal Security to prepare to extend a migrant operations center in Guantánamo Bay, saying that he would provide additional detention spaces to criminal foreigners of high priority illegally present in the United States. “”
The soldiers began to transport migrants at the base on daily flights close to an immigration site in El Paso, from February 4. By announcing the first transfer flight, The Pentagon threw the operation as a “temporary measure” to secure migrants “until they can be transported to their country of origin or another appropriate destination”.
All the migrants led to Guantánamo to date have been citizens of Venezuela. It was difficult to deport people to the country due to the rupture of relations between his authoritarian government and the United States.
But a Trump advisor, Richard Grenell, Visited Venezuela at the end of January and seemed to make a diplomatic breakthrough, which included an agreement that Venezuela would resume the accepting deportees. On February 10, Venezuela Sent two planes In El Paso to collect about 190 of its citizens, which the Department of Internal Security described as in the context of final expulsion orders.
Speaking Thursday on television, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela described the return of “177 men that we saved” as a victory for his government and the result of a “direct petition” that his government had made to the States -Unis.
Maduro said his Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello, which is widely considered in Venezuela as a major orchestrator and a symbol of state repression, would meet returnees to the airport. “In Venezuela, we give them a welcome as a productive force, with a loving hug,” said Maduro.
As flights to Venezuela have resumed, it was not clear why some Venezuelans were taken to Guantánamo.
Trump administration officials initially portrayed migrants led to Guantánamo as members of the Gang Tren in Aragua, which the State Department included on a list of transnational cartels and gangs that the administration has appointed as than foreign terrorist organizations Thursday.
But it is not clear if this is true for any of the migrants: the members of the Congress staff were informed in a briefing that the only criteria to be sent to the base were Venezuelan with a final dismissal order.
On Wednesday, McLaughlin, the spokesperson for internal security, simply said that Ice used Guantánamo “to house prisoners subject to final dismissal orders”. She also called them “final aliens.
Luis Castillo, 29, was Among the Venezuelans held in Guantánamo. According to his family, he left Venezuela years ago for economic reasons, tried to earn a living in Colombia – he worked for a while to wash the cars – and finally left for the United States in The hope of earning more money to support his family, including a young son.
His sister Yajaira Castillo said he had presented himself on the American border on January 19 to try to claim asylum, then he was detained and then sent to Guantánamo.
When she heard that she was sent back to Venezuela, she said she had mixed emotions. She was happy that he was released. But she was saddened by “this cruelty that they inflicted on American Venezuelans” keeping her brother and others in Guantánamo. She and other members of the prisoners’ family connected to a WhatsApp group, where they consoled themselves. “They made us suffer so much,” she said.
Ms. McLaughlin said that Mr. Castillo was part of Tren of Aragua, but that she had presented no evidence. Mr. Castillo’s family argues that he is not a criminal and has been described as a member of a gang because of a tattoo of Michael Jordan on the neck.
In legal action that seeks legal access to migrants in which Mr. Castillo is appointed, the government said to a court that it had allowed three men appointed in the pursuit to call lawyers on Monday and that “the preliminary access procedures were developed for others in the establishment”.
But the Ministry of Justice also urged a judge not to require broader access, arguing that migrants had only “limited rights” as “immigration detainees with final dismissal orders, which are organized for the final transfer and in the midst of a withdrawal operation ”.
The Trump administration has increased the possibility of possibly accommodating tens of thousands of migrants at the base. With the future of unclear politics, Lee Genernt of the American American Liberties Union, the principal lawyer for immigrant rights groups looking for access to migrants in Guantánamo, said the fight was far from over.
“The government saying that we can now have access to prisoners until they moved them are perplexed, at best,” he said. If the government was trying to make the trial without object, it added: “They will not succeed.”
Eric Schmitt contributed Washington’s reports, and Albert Sun from New York.
