Nearly 200 Venezuelan migrants are flown home from Guantanamo Bay, with a layover in Honduras

Nearly 200 Venezuelan immigrants to the U.S. were returned to their home country after being detained at Guantanamo Bay, in a flurry of flights that forged an unprecedented pathway for U.S. deportations.

U.S. and Venezuelan authorities confirmed the deportations that relied on a stopover in Honduras, where 177 Venezuelans exited a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement flight and boarded a Venezuelan plane bound for Caracas.

The government of President Nicolás Maduro said it had “requested the repatriation of a group” of Venezuelans “who were unjustly taken” to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. With the request accepted, an aircraft with the state-owned airline Conviasa picked up the migrants from Honduras. ICE confirmed the transfer of 177 “Venezuelan illegal aliens.”

The administration of President Donald Trump has placed a high priority on deporting people who have exhausted all legal appeals to stay in the U.S. Nearly 1.5 million had final removal orders as of Nov. 24, according to ICE figures, including more than 22,000 Venezuelans.

In a court filing Thursday, federal immigration and military authorities said that “Venezuela has historically resisted accepting repatriation of its citizens but has recently begun accepting removals following high-level political discussions and an investment of significant resources.”

Last week, two Venezuelan flights carried 190 immigrants directly from the U.S. to Venezuela in a rare moment of coordination between the two countries that may be giving way to regular exchanges.

Thursday’s court filing by U.S. Justice Department attorneys provides the most thorough official accounting to date about who is being held at the isolated Guantanamo Bay military complex and why — noting that detainees as of Wednesday were Venezuelans with final orders of deportation.

Two U.S. government aircraft flew from Texas and Louisiana to Guantanamo Bay on Thursday, according to flight data analyzed by Tom Cartwright of the advocacy group Witness at the Border, but it was unclear how many people were aboard, including any immigrant passengers. The aircraft later flew from Guantanamo Bay to Honduras, where Venezuelan authorities took custody of passengers to be returned to Caracas.

Trump in January said he wanted to expand immigrant detention facilities at Guantanamo to hold as many as 30,000 people, although the current capacity at Guantanamo’s low-security migrant operations center is roughly 2,500.

The naval base is best known for housing suspects taken in after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but it also has been used for holding people caught trying to illegally reach the U.S. by boat and to coordinate the resettlement of immigrants in the U.S.

Authorities initiated on Feb. 4 near-daily flights from a U.S. Army base in West Texas to Guantanamo. By Wednesday, 51 of the newly arrived immigrants were being held in low-security tent facilities, while 127 more were confined to a high-security area. The tally in detention after Thursday’s transfer flights.

The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are defending their ability to move immigrants in and out of Guantanamo Bay with little or no notice to the public and legal representatives.

They argued in Thursday’s court filing that the recent detainees at Guantanamo do not have a right to legal counsel because they all are subject to final orders of removal to Venezuela, affording them “very limited due process rights.”

Relatives of the new Guantanamo detainees and advocacy groups have accused the U.S. government of holding immigrants without access to counsel or any means of vindicating their rights, amid unsubstantiated or disputed accusations of criminal ties. They say immigrants with final removal orders should still be able to challenge conditions of confinement and possible mistreatment in detention and seek release in the U.S. if efforts to deport them drag on too long.

U.S. authorities have not publicly confirmed the individual identities of immigrants recently held at Guantanamo Bay.

A lawsuit on behalf of three immigrants detained at Guantanamo seeks a court order for authorities to provide unmonitored telephone and in-person access to legal counsel for people held at Guantanamo, as well as advance notice before immigrants are transferred to Guantanamo or removed to other countries.

A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has directed authorities to provide phone access to legal counsel, and authorities at Guantanamo said in Thursday’s court filing that they have complied, while pushing back against other demands including communication between detainees and relatives.

The Departments of Homeland Security and Defense “are not presently offering the opportunity for in-person visits to immigration detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay but will continue to evaluate whether to extend this option in light of significant logistical challenges, the availability of alternative means of counsel communication, and the anticipated short duration of immigration detainee stays.”

Attorney Lee Gelernt of the ACLU — among the plaintiffs challenging detention practices at Guantanamo — said Thursday’s deportations were conducted with a troubling lack of transparency.

Trump earlier, in January, signaled that some migrants could be held indefinitely at Guantanamo.

“Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send ’em out to Guantanamo,” Trump said.

The U.S. government has alleged that Venezuelan immigrants transferred to the naval base are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which originated in a prison in the South American country and accompanied an exodus of Venezuelans as far as Chile and the U.S. Trump and his allies have turned the gang into the face of the alleged threat posed by immigrants living in the country illegally and formally designated it a “foreign terrorist organization” this week.

Maduro’s government said Thursday that the country “will always fight terrorism and criminal organizations of any kind, while denouncing the manipulation of these elements for political ends and rejecting any attempt to criminalize the nation and its citizens.”

Authorities in several countries have reported arrests of Tren de Aragua members, even as the Maduro government claims to have eliminated that organization.

Relatives of immigrants recently taken to Guantanamo Bay and civil rights advocates say they have been left guessing about exactly who has been transferred there, as they stitch together reports by immigrants in detention about people being led away from holding cells at an ICE processing center in El Paso, Texas. An online detainee locator is of limited use, they say.

___

This story was first published on Feb. 20, 2025. It was updated on Feb. 23, 2025 to make clear that while flight data analyzed by Tom Cartwright of the advocacy group Witness at the Border showed two aircraft arrived at Guantanamo Bay, it was unclear how many people were aboard, including whether there were any immigrant passengers.