Migrants Sent to Gitmo, India — and Potentially Venezuela

Immigration was a main — if not the main — reason Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and now that he is back in the White House, aliens are being sent to two exotic locales: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo), and the Punjab province of India. You can’t have a mass deportation program without deportations, and it looks like flights will soon be headed to yet another sunny destination, Venezuela.

Gitmo

As I recently reported, President Trump sent a memorandum to the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security on January 29 captioned “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity”.

In that memo, Trump told the secretaries that he wants to expand the migrant detention facilities at Gitmo to hold up to 30,000 of the “worst criminal aliens”.

Alien detentions at Gitmo date back at least six administrations, but in the past, they generally involved just two very specific groups of individuals — seaborne migrants interdicted on their way to the United States (mainly Cubans and Haitians), and terrorists.

You can now add members of the vicious Venezuelan organized-crime organization, Tren de Aragua (TdA), to that select list, because on February 4 a planeload of them landed at the Gitmo U.S. naval base for detention.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “roughly” a dozen migrants were flown from Fort Bliss in Texas to the island facility on Tuesday, a fact referenced by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Fox Business on February 4:

I can also confirm that today, the first flights from the United States to Guantanamo Bay with illegal migrants are underway. So, President Trump, [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth, and [DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem are already delivering on this promise to utilize that capacity at Gitmo for illegal criminals who have broken our nation’s immigration laws and then have further committed heinous crimes against lawful American citizens here at home.

Expect more flights, given that the Department of Defense (DoD) is expected to deploy 300 Marines to the base to bolster the current cadre of 200 who are currently stationed there standing up detention resources.

The administration is already receiving pushback on its Gitmo detention scheme.

The Journal quoted Hannah Flamm, interim senior director of policy for the International Refugee Assistance Project, who told the Journal:

These flights set the stage for egregious rights violations, indefinite detention, and crushing family separations. … The United States has a deplorable history of detaining different groups of people unlawfully at Guantanamo to avoid oversight and the public eye, and this latest chapter is no exception.

Respectfully, it’s questionable whether any TdA members have had the time or inclination to settle down to a life of domestic tranquility and start the sorts of families in the United States that a sojourn to Gitmo would “separate” them from.

Moreover, anybody who has handled immigration issues on Capitol Hill knows that DoD is more than willing to allow members and staff to come to the island base whenever they want to check things out, undermining any claim that Gitmo would be used “to avoid oversight” of migrant detentions.

India

In any event, Mexican Foreign Minister Juan Ramon de la Fuente has stated that his country objects to its nationals being sent to Gitmo, preferring that they be returned home instead.

It’s doubtful any Mexicans will be sent to the base, because their country generally accepts the return of its nationals in short order.

The same cannot be said for other governments of countries deemed “recalcitrant” because they either slow walk or outright refuse to grant U.S. government requests to take their nationals back.

India has long been on the recalcitrant country list, but just over two weeks into the second Trump administration, government officials there are actively trying to get off it.

Speaking after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington on January 23, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar signaled that New Delhi is now willing to take its nationals back.

As Jaishankar told reporters: “We have always taken the view that if there are any of our citizens who are not here legally, if we are sure that they are our citizens, we have always been, you know, open to their legitimate return to India”.

That’s good to hear, given that there are around 18,000 Indian nationals here who have been identified for return, and the Indian government started making good on Jaishankar’s promises on February 5.

As the Times of India reported that day:

In the first such operation of its kind involving India since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the US dispatched a C17 military aircraft carrying an unspecified number of illegal Indian immigrants to India. Anonymous US officials were quoted as saying dozens had been deported, and unconfirmed reports put the number of deportees north of 200.

Apparently that flight originated in San Antonio, Texas, landing in Amritsar, the second-largest city in India’s Punjab state — a major region for illegal Indian immigration to the United States.

Interestingly, the Times of London suggests that the deportees are unlikely to receive a warm welcome back home: “On social media, Indians have shown little sympathy for the plight of their compatriots, with some venting their contempt for those who left ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) in the first place.”

That article continues:

The desperation not to return stems not only from an unfulfilled dream but also because many will have sold land or taken out loans to pay “agents” up to $100,000 to help them enter America illegally.

Returning will fill them with shame. Ahluwalia said: “The whole village will know they left. They will dread being judged as failures, the ones who came back as losers, empty-handed.”

Good luck getting the money back, but the Trump deportations will plainly upset the economic calculus Indian migrants — and their smugglers — have been relying on in recent years to decide whether to make the illegal and dangerous trek to the United States.

That said, expect “social outcast” to be added to Indian asylum claims in the months to come.

Venezuela

Speaking of recalcitrant countries, yet another one is apparently attempting to mend its ways in an effort to get into the new president’s good graces.

On February 1, the Journal reported that Trump special envoy Richard Grenell (a former acting director of national intelligence under Trump I) had negotiated a deal with Venezuelan “President” Nicolas Maduro, under which the country would accept its deported nationals back home.

As the paper noted:

Accepting deportees reverses Maduro’s policy, in place since early in 2024, of refusing to accept deportation planes from the U.S. More than 600,000 Venezuelans had migrated in recent years to the U.S., where they have received special protected status allowing them to reside and work temporarily.

My colleague Elizabeth Jacobs recently reported that this “special protected status” for Venezuelans in the United States will likely soon be ending, meaning Maduro’s policy reversal on immigrant returns is especially salient now.

The State Department refuses to recognize Maduro, arguing that he “fraudulently declared himself the victor” of the July 2024 presidential election in Venezuela (it’s also offering a bounty of $25 million for his arrest in connection with narco-terrorism), but the department’s special envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver Carone, told reporters that Caracas’s assent was not part of a deal under which the United States would switch its position on the Maduro government:

This is not a negotiation. … The Venezuelan criminals of Tren de Aragua and other groups have to be deported and Venezuela has to accept them. It is their responsibility … it is not negotiable. … And if they don’t comply with these requirements, obviously, as President Trump himself has said, there will be major consequences.

If President Trump gets his way, the days of countries blithely ignoring their international obligations to accept the return of their deported criminal nationals will soon be in the past. Until then, the U.S. Marine Corps is busy setting up accommodations for them in Cuba.