This week, the Department of Homeland Security sent its “first flight of criminal aliens” to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem revealed in a Tuesday statement.
“The worst of the worst criminals will be held at the military facility,” said Noem. She also said that the individuals sent there were part of the Tren De Aragua criminal organization.
Last Wednesday, President Donald Trump issued a directive to expand migrant operations at the Naval Station. In the order, the president called for the operations to be expanded to “to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present,” in the U.S. and to address immigration enforcement.
Trump campaigned on promises to be tough on immigration, and he has already started efforts to crack down on border crossings. According to CBS News, Trump has instructed his administration to detain as many as 30,000 “high-priority” unauthorized immigrants with criminal records at Guantanamo.
This base is located on land along Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and has been seen as a strategic asset by maritime powers since at least the 15th century, according to the U.S. Navy. The U.S. has had control of the land since the 1900s.
CBS noted that in the 1990s, former President Bill Clinton’s administration held thousands of Haitian migrants there, “including in a notorious camp for those diagnosed with HIV, who were banned from entering the U.S. at the time.” In 2001, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, former President George W. Bush issued a military order directed the detention of certain non-citizens suspected of involvement in international terrorism at the base.
As of today, Guantanamo is the longest-standing war prison in U.S. history, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Per the Council on Foreign Relations in 2022, some view the detention center as “a haunting monument to human rights violations perpetrated by the United States in the name of national security.”
Former President Barack Obama issued executive orders aimed at closing the detention center. Just before former President Joe Biden left office, he announced the release of 11 prisoners from Guantanamo. Still, there are more than a dozen men still held there, and Amnesty International said last month that at least six of them had never been charged with a crime.
“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,” said CBS. This center is separate from Guantanamo’s post-Sept. 11 detention center, though small numbers are housed in barrack-like facilities while they undergo interviews with asylum officers. They are typically settled in other countries such as Australia and Canada due to the U.S.’s longstanding policy to deter maritime migration.
Following Trump’s directive last week, CBS said U.S. officials have been setting up tent facilities to hold migrants in Guantanamo Bay outside of the Migrant Operations Center. It also said that a plane sent there from Fort Bliss Army base near the Texas border to Guantanamo Tuesday was carrying 10 migrants.
“One of the officials said they were Venezuelan men with affiliations to Tren De Aragua, a gang that originated in Venezuela’s prisons,” the outlet reported. Specific names were not reported.
Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration have identified Tren De Aragua as a dangerous criminal organization. In July, the Treasury Department under Biden issued sanctions against the group.
At that time, the treasury said Tren De Aragua was “expanding throughout the Western Hemisphere and engaging in diverse criminal activities, such as human smuggling and trafficking, gender-based violence, money laundering, and illicit drug trafficking.”
“Tren De Aragua leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage,” it added. “When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren De Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.”
Last Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Luis Gualdron-Gualdron, a citizen and national of Venezuela and suspected Tren De Aragua gang member who allegedly entered the U.S. without inspection. Authorities said Gualdron has a criminal record in Pennsylvania, including arrests for indecent assault of a person less than 16 years of age and harassment.
“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,” CBS News reported.
It said that ICE has averaged 800 to 1,000 arrests daily over the past week. That’s up from an average of 312 during Biden’s final year in office.
“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,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said this week, per CBS.