The Trump administration has begun flying detained illegal migrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday.
The move comes just days after President Donald Trump announced that he would instruct the Pentagon to prepare the facility to hold around 30,000 “criminal illegal aliens” at the U.S. military base.
“I can also confirm that today the first flights from the United States to Guantanamo Bay with illegal migrants are underway,” Leavitt said.
The Trump administration has begun flying detained illegal migrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday. Right: Footage from the Defense Department shows Marines boarding a plane bound for Guantanamo Bay from an air base in North Carolina on Sunday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, left; DOD via AP, right)
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“And so President Trump, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are already delivering on this promise to utilize that capacity at Gitmo for illegal criminals who have broken our nation’s immigration laws and then have further committed heinous crimes against lawful American citizens here at home.”
Leavitt said that El Salvador has agreed to the repatriation of its own citizens as well as also “illegal criminals from other nations” who will then be sent to their prisons.
“Venezuela as well has agreed to repatriation flights and Colombia also agreed to cooperate with the repatriation of illegal Colombian nationals that we have found in the interior of our country.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that one flight from Fort Bliss to Guantanamo has roughly a dozen migrants on board, the publication reports, citing people familiar with the matter. An additional flight left the U.S. on Monday, the publication reports, citing one of those people.
As of today, the facility is understood to have enough beds to cater to around 120 migrants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News’ Will Cain on the “Will Cain Show” last week that Guantanamo Bay is already being used to house illegal immigrants, particularly the worst of the worst.
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Noem said her department will make sure resources are placed there to ensure there is enough space to get criminal illegal aliens out of the U.S.
Trump last week signed a presidential memorandum last week to begin the process of making 30,000 beds available at Guantanamo to house migrants who pose a threat to the American public, adding that putting them there will ensure they do not come back.
“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump said. “We’re going to send them to Guantanamo.”
He added, “It’s a tough place to get out of.”
The president said the move will bring the U.S. one step closer to “eradicating the scourge” of migrant crime in communities, once and for all.
The migrant facility at the base is separate from the high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects – which has been used occasionally for decades, including to hold Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.
The Trump administration has not said how much it would cost to expand Guantanamo, which was established in 2002 to detain foreign militants in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Illegal immigrants boarding a plane to Guatemala last month. (White House)
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He also called on Congress to provide full funding for the complete and total restoration of U.S. borders and financial support to remove record numbers of illegal aliens.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel last week called Trump’s move to send 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo an “act of brutality.”
“In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory [of Cuba], of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” he said in a translated post on X.
Reuters contributed to this report.