The Trump administration has flown to all the migrants he had in the Guantanamo Bay out of the facilities there, NBC News has learned from three sources familiar with the operation and flight data.
In response to a lawsuit, the Trump administration said there were 178 immigrants, all from Venezuela, housed in Guantanamo Bay from early Thursday.
A senior official of the National Security Department told NBC News that 177 of the 178 migrants in Guantanamo Bay were deported on Thursday. The other person was sent to a detention center in the United States, said the official.
Also on Thursday, the Honduras Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the country had accepted a flight with what said 174 Venezuelan immigrants from the United States on board, which would immediately be far from Honduras to Venezuela.
The official also said that the variable numbers between the administration and Honduras could be a discrepancy.
An image of the plane in which immigrants were transferred to Honduras were tweeted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Honduras. The tail number on the plane in the image corresponds to a flight that was from Guantanamo to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Thursday, according to Flightradar24.com.
The Trump administration had made a sample of mute migrants to Guantanamo, saying that it would send the “worst of the worst.”
The senior DHS official told NBC News that he plans to send more immigrants to Guantanamo, and that the base is seen as an “staging area” to bring migrants to other countries. But two sources familiar with the matter said that DHS has asked the Defense Department to look for alternative locations, and that the DOD is considering other places such as Fort Bliss in Texas.
The elimination raises new questions about the rights that immigrants have once in custody in Guantanamo Bay. The lawyers of the immigrants’ rights groups sued the Trump administration to have access to the detainees and 72 hours of warning before the planes that lead to migrants AO outside Guantanamo took off.
In response, the lawyers of the Department of Justice representing the Trump administration that the administration could celebrate immigrants in Guantanamo. Bay of more than six months. The previous judicial orders have declared that migrants cannot remain in ice arrest of more than six months and that the detention standards should not be punitive.
Lee Gelernt, the main lawyer of the ACLU who challenges the Trump administration in the demand, told NBC News: “We will have to verify what type of access can be given by phone and make sure it is significant. We will also look for access in person when necessary. “
“It is ironic to say the least that they tell us now they have telephone access, but it seems that our customers have been eliminated,” said Gelernt.
In his response to the demand in which he said he had 178 Guantanamo immigrants, the Trump administration also detailed in which part of the base they were being retained. One hundred twenty -seven were housed in camp VI, the high security detention center is typically used to stop people accused of terrorism by the United States, according to administration. Another 51 were housed in the center of the migrants operation, an existing structure previously reserved for migrants interspersed in the sea.
Didi Martínez and Gabe Gutiérrez contributed.
