The US government has flown 177 deportees from Guantánamo Bay to Honduras, from where they are set to be transferred on to Venezuela, apparently emptying the military facility of migrant detainees.
The move on Thursday came days after human rights lawyers filed a lawsuit seeking access to dozens of people who had been held at the US naval base.
The Honduran government had earlier said that about 170 Venezuelans were set to arrive in the Central American nation from the United States, before being transported “immediately” back to Venezuela.
Lawyers representing several of the deportees said that they learned about the deportations on Thursday afternoon.
A US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed that 177 migrants had been deported from the Guantánamo Bay detention site on Thursday. The deportees included 126 people with criminal charges or convictions, the spokesperson said, 80 of whom were allegedly affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang. The spokesperson said 51 had no criminal record.
The move comes after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit last week seeking access to dozens of immigrants flown to a US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying they were being denied the right to an attorney.
The Trump administration began shipping detained immigrants to Guantánamo on 4 February, describing them as the “worst of the worst” and saying that they included “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters”.
Human rights lawyers argued that the US government had not provided proof that any of the detainees had committed serious crimes, while relatives of some of the men denied that they had been involved in wrongdoing.
The website Migrant Insider reported that relatives identified one detainee as Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera. The 23-year-old Venezuelan was detained when seeking asylum on the southern border on 19 January, one day before Trump took power vowing to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came”.
“He’s innocent,” Castillo’s sister, Yajaira Castillo, told the Spanish news agency EFE, denying her brother was part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
Thursday’s flight comes two days after Honduran president Xiomara Castro announced that a deal had been reached with the Trump administration to salvage an extradition treaty that was set to expire on 28 February.
The treaty has mostly been used to bring drug traffickers to justice in the United States, but was denounced by Castro in August, at about the same time that a video emerged of her brother-in-law negotiating illicit campaign contributions with traffickers.
The Honduran foreign minister, Eduardo Reina, said on Tuesday that the deal to save the treaty included safeguards against the use of extradition to interfere with the country’s electoral cycle in 2025. Critics denounced the move as an effort to protect the president’s family from the same fate as her predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández, who last year was convicted of drug-trafficking conspiracy charges in New York. Castro has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Reina had also said that the deal involved the issue of migration. Honduras is one of the few countries in the region that recognized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s disputed victory in last year’s election and also has cordial, albeit complicated, relations with Washington.
