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A transfer operation on Thursday repatriated 177 Venezuelans via a handoff in Honduras, while one migrant was brought back to U.S. soil.
A tent encampment being set up for the migrant operation at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this month. Credit… Doug Mills/The New York Times Published Feb. 20, 2025 Updated Feb. 21, 2025, 7:40 a.m. ET The Trump administration on Thursday transferred all of the Venezuelan migrants it had brought to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, suddenly emptying a detention operation that it had just as abruptly started this month.
Two passenger planes operated by Global X, a charter aircraft company, flew to the naval base on Thursday morning and shuttled most of the migrants to an airfield in Honduras. They were to then be put aboard a Venezuelan plane for repatriation.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said 177 migrants had been transferred to Venezuelan custody, and one had been brought back to an immigration facility in the United States. In a declaration filed in court earlier on Thursday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had said 178 Venezuelans were at the base.
It was unclear whether 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 temporary staging facility for aliens being repatriated” and said they would be held there for “the time necessary to effect the removal orders.”
The transfers cleared out the migrants at a time when the operation has raised numerous questions about whether the government had legitimate legal authority to take people from ICE facilities in the United States to the base in Cuba for continued detention. Immigrant rights’ lawyers have gone to court seeking access to the migrants, and rights groups have been expected to file a broader challenge to the Trump administration’s policy.
“It’s a way to avoid litigation from getting traction,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale Law School professor who worked as a lawyer in the State Department during the Obama administration, has long been involved in litigation over detainees at Guantánamo. He added, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
Deportations to Venezuela ICE has sent 367 people to Venezuela, some after a stop in Guantánamo Bay.
By Albert Sun
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