Trump Administration Sends a New Group of Migrants to Guantánamo Bay

The Trump administration sent a new group of migrants to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Thursday to await deportation, claiming that they may have ties to a Venezuelan gang, according to officials with knowledge of the operation.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flight from El Paso transported about 20 people, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.

The transfer put migrants on the base for the first time since March 11, when the administration brought 40 men it had temporarily held there back to the United States. That transfer occurred a few days before a court hearing in a pair of lawsuits challenging the legality of President Trump’s policy of holding immigration detainees there.

At the hearing, Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declined to issue an order barring further transfers to the base and expressed doubt that the plaintiffs would succeed in the cases because at the time no migrants remained at Guantánamo.

The administration also emptied the base of migrant detainees on Feb. 20, when it flew 177 Venezuelans it had brought there to Honduras and handed them off to the Venezuelan government.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Administration officials have generally portrayed the migrants sent to Guantánamo as dangerous, accusing some of being members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. They have not offered evidence to support those suspicions, and most of the migrants whose identities have become public did not have criminal records in the United States.

The administration has sent scores of men, a majority of them Venezuelans, to two detention sites on the base since Jan. 29 as part of Mr. Trump’s broader crackdown on illegal immigration.

One of the sites, known as Camp 6, is a military prison that was built two decades ago to house suspected members of Al Qaeda. The other is a medium-security dormitory building that is part of a migrant operations center.

The Trump administration has deployed about 1,000 U.S. government workers to the migrant operation. Nine hundred of them are members of the U.S. military, and 100 are civilian employees, including 70 contractors from the Department of Homeland Security.

On March 15, the Trump administration also flew 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador and handed them off to the Salvadoran government, which has placed them in a high-security prison.

The administration has portrayed all of those men as members of Tren de Aragua. Many of them were transferred without individual immigration hearings after Mr. Trump claimed he had the power to do so under a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

A judge has temporarily ordered the administration not to deport migrants under that law, and the Trump administration is appealing that order.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.