The US has sent the first group of migrants to Guantanamo Bay since President Donald Trump announced plans to expand migrant detention at the base, officials say.
A brief statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the detainees were part of the Tren de Aragua – a gang that originated in Venezuela’s prisons.
Ten detainees were flown from the Fort Bliss Army base near the Texas border to the US Navy base in Cuba on Tuesday afternoon, the BBC’s US partner CBS News reported, citing multiple US officials.
Last week, Trump ordered that an existing migrant detention facility at the base be expanded to hold some 30,000 people.
He said that would double the US capacity to hold undocumented migrants.
The move is part of Trump’s effort to crack down on undocumented migrants in the US after his return to office. He has promised arrests and mass deportations.
In Tuesday’s brief statement, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said: “President Donald Trump has been very clear: Guantanamo Bay will hold the worst of the worst. That starts today.”
The department published several photographs of the detainees being taken on board the plane. Two officials told CBS that the group was considered “high-threat”.
Trump ordered that the Tren de Aragua be designated as a foreign terrorist organisation last month, as part of a directive targeting gangs and cartels.
The existing facility – Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC) – has been used by both Republican and Democrat administrations to house migrants for decades. It has principally held migrants picked up at sea.
The expanded facility would be run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan said last week.
Announcing his plan last week that the facility be expanded, Trump said: “Some of them (the migrants) are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back.
“So we’re going to send them to Guantanamo… it’s a tough place to get out.”
US military personnel travelled to Guantanamo Bay at the weekend to assemble tents to house migrants sent to the base, the New York Times and CNN reported.
Last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) accused the US government of secretly holding migrants at the base in “inhumane” conditions indefinitely.
The administration of Joe Biden, who was then president, responded that the location was “not a detention facility and none of the migrants there are detained”.
The GMOC is separate to the military prison on Guantanamo which has, for years, held detainees taken into US custody after the 9/11 attacks.
The Cuban government quickly condemned news of the immigration facility’s expansion last week, with President Miguel Díaz-Canel calling it “an act of brutality”.
It has long considered Guantanamo Bay to be “occupied” and has denounced the existence of a US naval base on the island ever since Fidel Castro swept to power in 1959.
