The Trump administration is using the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain dozens of foreigners from 26 countries and six different continents, including detainees with serious criminal convictions, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday.
CBS News reported last week that, as part of an expansion of the Trump administration’s effort to turn Guantanamo Bay into an immigration detention center, officials had transferred detainees from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Europe to the naval base. Initially, the base housed mainly Spanish-speaking Latin American migrants awaiting deportation.
DHS officials on Tuesday confirmed CBS News’ reporting, sharing the full list of the nationalities of those detained at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the names and criminal histories of more than two dozen detainees. They are being held separately from the remaining prisoners held there as a result of the U.S. war on terror.
The list shows Guantanamo Bay is housing detainees from all continents other than Antarctica.
The detainees, DHS said, hail from Brazil, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Russia, Somalia, St. Kitts-Nevis, the United Kingdom, Venezuela and Vietnam.
The criminal records of the detainees whose names were shared by DHS officials include convictions for homicide; sexual offenses, including against children; child pornography; assault with a weapon; kidnapping; drug smuggling; and robbery. DHS officials said they all have final deportation orders.
Those with criminal records are classified as “high-risk” detainees and held at Camp IV, the post-9/11 prison complex at Guantanamo Bay that also holds around a dozen war on terror-era detainees, though in a distinct part of the facility. Those without serious criminal records or any at all — deemed to be “low-risk” detainees — are housed at a barrack-like facility known as the Migrant Operations Center.
As of this week, there were 72 immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay, 58 of them classified as high-risk and 14 in the low-risk category, two U.S. officials told CBS News, requesting anonymity to discuss internal data.
The administration began using the base to hold immigration detainees in early February.
The Trump administration has sought to use controversial detention centers and prisons to warn those in the U.S. illegally — particularly those convicted of serious crimes — that they will be found, detained and deported if they don’t turn themselves in or self-deport.
In a statement, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said the detention of foreigners with criminal records at Guantanamo Bay shows that President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are using “every tool available to get criminal illegal aliens off our streets and out of our country.”
“Whether it is CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, Guantanamo Bay or another detention facility, these dangerous criminals will not be allowed to terrorize U.S. citizens,” McLaughlin said, referencing the Salvadoran prison where the U.S. sent more 200 Venezuelan deportees and the facility set up by Florida officials in the Everglades.
The use of Guantanamo Bay for immigration detention — which is supposed to be civil, and not punitive, in nature — has alarmed some Democrats and civil rights advocates. The base has been at the center of controversy for the past two decades due to indefinite detention of war on terror detainees, some of whom were found to have faced abuse and torture.
Democratic lawmakers have also denounced the costs involved in turning Guantanamo Bay into an immigration detention center. The Department of Defense told Congress in May that as of April 8 it had spent $21 million transporting detainees to Guantanamo Bay.
The government staff supporting the immigration detention efforts at Guantanamo Bay include more than 520 Department of Defense service members and roughly 130 DHS personnel, according to a Defense official. The base has held 663 immigration detainees so far, the official said, far below the 30,000 number referenced by Mr. Trump when he ordered his administration to start detaining immigrants awaiting deportation there.
Civil rights advocates have called the detention of immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay punitive and unlawful, arguing in an active lawsuit that federal law does not allow the government to hold those awaiting deportation outside of U.S. territory. The base sits on Cuban land that the U.S. has stipulated for decades is being leased, though the current Cuban government has long rejected U.S. payments and demanded the base’s return.
Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer seeking to block the transfers to Guantanamo Bay, said the Trump administration’s effort is “more about theatrics than following the law and pursuing sound policies.”
“Every prior administration has understood that Congress did not authorize the detention of immigrants in foreign countries,” he said. “That is true whether or not the immigrant has a criminal conviction.”
