Trump’s administration on Thursday switched all Venezuelan Migrants that brought to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay in CubaSuddenly the emptiness of the detention surgery that he started equally abruptly This month.
Two passenger aircraft operated by Global X, a charter aircraft company, flew to a naval base on Thursday morning and took most of the migrants at the Honduras airport. Then they were supposed to put a venecuelan plane for repatriation.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said 177 migrants were transferred to Venezuelan custody and one was returned to an immigration plant in the United States. In a declaration Submitted in court earlier on Thursday, the immigration officer and Customs said that 178 were Venezuelanians in the base.
It was unclear whether the administration intended to send additional migrants to the base.
But ICE Officer Juan E. Agudelo, he said in court on Thursday that the immigration agency intended to use Guantánamo “as a temporary wastewater facility for removal commands.”
Transfers cleaned migrants at a time when surgery Asked numerous questions Whether the government had legitimate legal authority to take people from ice facilities in the United States to the base on Cuba for a continuous detention. Lawyers of the Immigrant Right went to court looking for access to migrantsAnd it is expected that groups of rights will bear a broader challenge for the policies of Trump’s administration.
“This is a way to avoid litigation to gain attraction,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor at the Yale Law School, who worked as a lawyer in the State Department during Obama’s administration, has long been involved in litigation around Prisoners in Guantánam. He added: “Possession is nine dozen laws.”
Traffic occurred at Soto Cano Air Base, where the Southern Command of the US Army held presence For decades, he has been a statement from Honduras.
AND The Honduran government said This facilitated the transfer because of what he described as humanitarian reasons.
On January 29, Mr. Trump ordered the US military and the Homeland Security Department to prepare for the extension of the Migrant Operations Center in the Guantánamo Bay, saying that he would “provide additional detention for crimes of high priorities that are illegally present in the United States. ”
The army began transporting migrants to a base on near daily flights from the place of immigration in El Pas, starting on February 4th. Pentagon threw out surgery As a “temporary measure” for migrant insurance “until they cannot be translated into their country of origin or other appropriate destination.”
All the migrants who have been taken to Guantánamo have been the citizens of Venezuela to date. It was difficult to deport people to the ground due to the breakup in relations between his authoritarian government and the United States.
But Trump’s Advisor, Richard Grenell, visited Venezuela in late January and seemed to have reached a diplomatic breakthrough, which included an agreement that Venezuela would continue to accept the deported. February 10 Venezuela sent two aircraft El Pasu to pick up about 190 of its citizens, described by the Homeland Security Department as a final deportation command.
Speaking on television on Thursday, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela described the return of “177 men we saved” as a victory for his government and the result of the “direct petition” his government gave to the United States.
Mr. Maduro said his interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, would be widely observed in Venezuela as the main orchestra and a symbol of state repression, to meet the returnees at the airport. “We are welcome in Venezuela as a productive force, with a love embrace,” Maduro said.
As Venezuel’s flights continued, it was not clear why some Venezuelan were taken to Guantánamo.
Trump administration officials initially portrayed migrants who took over as members of the gang in Venezuel as a gang of de Aragua, which State Department included on the list of transnational cartels and gangs, which was labeled as foreign terrorist organizations on Thursday.
But it is not clear whether this is true for any of the migrants: members of the congress staff said in Brifing that they are the only criteria to be sent to the Venezuelan base with a final removal order.
Since Wednesday, Mrs. McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security, has simply said that Ice uses Guantánamo “to accommodate the detainees subject to the final elimination commands.” She also called them a “final alien command.”
Luis Castillo, 29, was Among the Venezuelans held in Guantánamo. According to his family, for economic reasons, he left Venezuela for economic reasons, tried to make a living in Colombia – he did a car wash for a while – and eventually went to the United States in the hope of making more money to support his family, including and the young son.
His sister Yajaira Castillo said he presented himself on the US border on January 19 in an attempt to request asylum, and he was detained and then sent to Guantánamo.
When she heard that they sent him back to Venezuela, she said, she had mixed emotions. She was glad she would be released. But she was sad because of “this cruelty they had inflicted on us Venezuelans” holding their brother and others in Guantánam. She and other family members connected to the WhatsApp group, where they comforted each other. “They made us suffer so much,” she said.
Mrs. McLaughlin said that Mr. Castillo was part of a moment de Aragua, but she did not bring out any evidence. Mr. Castill’s family claims that he is not a criminal and is portrayed as a member of the gang for a tattoo Michael Jordan on his neck.
In a lawsuit seeking a legal approach to migrants in which Mr. Castillo was appointed, the government The court said that three men were appointed in a lawsuit to invite lawyers on Monday and that “preliminary approaches were developed for others in the facility.”
However, the Ministry of Justice also called on the judge not to require a wider approach, claiming that migrants had only “limited rights” as “immigration detainees with the final removal orders, which were set for the final transfer of the removal operation.”
Trump’s administration has raised the possibility of tens of thousands of migrants in the base at the end. Since the future of politics is unclear, Lee Gelertn from the US Union for Civic Freedom, the Chief Lawyer Group of Rights of Immigrants seeking access to migrants in Guantánamo, said the fight is far from the end.
“The government says that we can now have access to detainees only after being moved, at best it confuses,” he said. If the government tried to make the lawsuit trained, he added, “They will not succeed.”
Eric Schmitt contributing to Washington reporting and Albert Sun from New York.
