Press secretary says at least two deportation flights to Cuban base of undocumented immigrants ‘under way’

The Trump administration has begun flying undocumented immigrants from the US to a military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday.

Leavitt told Fox Business Network that at least two deportation flights were “under way”, but gave no further details.

Her comments, however, appeared to confirm reporting by the Wall Street Journal, citing an anonymous official with knowledge of the operation, that about a dozen immigrants were onboard one flight from Fort Bliss, Texas. The newspaper said an additional flight had departed on Monday.

CNN later reported one of the flights had “about nine or 10” people onboard who were detained in the US without valid immigration documents.

  • IndustryStandard@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    218·
    18 hours ago

    Yes Trump is expanding on the human rights violations Obama and Biden put in place.

    Take Trump’s order to construct a migrant detention centre in Guantánamo Bay – a space that has for years operated outside international law despite outcries and appeals for closure. Hundreds of prisoners were kept there under military law, often following rendition, disappearance and torture at CIA black sites. Trump’s proposal to detain tens of thousands of migrants there is an outrageous move, but it is not an aberration. He is building, literally, on what came before him.

    “Like many of Trump’s authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in US history,” Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told CNN. “Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its ‘war on terror’, the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights under international law.” The prison, in fact, currently houses detained migrants in a facility called the Migrant Operations Center. Last year, the Biden administration awarded a private contractor over $160m (£130m) to run the facility.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/03/donald-trump-american-exceptionalism-guantanamo-bay-imperialism-billionaires