The Trump administration has begun flying undocumented migrants 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 migrants were onboard one flight from Fort Bliss, Texas. The newspaper said an additional flight had taken place 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.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) referred a request for comment from the Guardian to the homeland security department, which did not immediately respond.
“President Trump is not messing around, and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world,” Leavitt told Fox.
“Today, the first flights from the United States to Guantánamo Bay with illegal migrants are under way.”
Donald Trump last week signed an executive order to prepare a huge detention camp at the navy base at Guantánamo that he said could house up to 30,000 people deported from the US.
“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” he said. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”
The news of the first flights, containing deportees of unknown nationality, comes a day after El Salvador offered to accept undocumented migrants from any country – and even incarcerated US citizens. The announcement by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, followed a visit by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
Leavitt told Fox that Trump was determined to complete what he has previously called “the largest deportation effort in American history”, of 15 million to 20 million people, for which he has said he would engage the military to help achieve it.
“El Salvador has not disagreed to the repatriation of [only] their own citizens but also illegal criminals from other nations who will then be sent to their prisons,” she said.
“Venezuela as well has agreed to repatriation flights, and Colombia also agreed to cooperate with the repatriation of illegal Colombian nationals that we have found in the interior of our country.”
Rubio praised El Salvador’s willingness to accept deportees. “No country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this. [It is] the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” he said.
Immigration advocates, meanwhile, have expressed concern over the legality of deporting those in the US illegally to countries they are not from.
“Obviously, we’ll have to study it on our end; there are obviously legalities involved. We have a constitution, we have all sorts of things,” Rubio said on Monday.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the US naval base at Guantánamo is equipped to hold about 120 migrants.
Known to critics as “America’s gulag”, the facility has housed several people accused of plotting the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, as well as others deemed to be “enemy combatants”. Some have been detained for years without trial.
Trump’s plan to use it to detain civilians deported from the US further demonizes immigrants, advocates have said.
“This is political theater and part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to paint immigrants as threats in the United States … and fan anti-immigrant sentiment,” Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First, told the Guardian.
