Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was traveling to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on Tuesday to inspect the administration’s migrant operations there, as well as the detention operation for the war on terrorism.
Mr. Hegseth, who served as an Army lieutenant at Guantánamo in 2004-05, also visited the base in 2016, when as a correspondent for Fox News he joined a news media tour of the remote prison and reported about life there.
He has spoken fondly of his deployment to the base, where he served as a platoon leader for an infantry unit of the New Jersey National Guard. The unit conducted security operations for what was then a massive operation of nearly 2,600 U.S. forces and more than 600 detainees, spread out across a sprawling prison zone on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean.
As of Tuesday, he was visiting a much-reduced operation. The Defense Department now holds 15 foreign men there from the war on terrorism at a facility called Camp 5, including six men who are charged in death-penalty cases for Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and on the U.S.S. Cole on Oct. 12, 2000.
Next door, in a prison building called Camp 6, the Homeland Security and Defense Departments on Tuesday were housing 17 men, aged 23 to 62, who the Trump administration has said are designated for deportation. They included seven men from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by The New York Times.
Eight of the men were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after President Trump took office.
Mr. Hegseth has been enthusiastic about the migrant detention operation, which began holding prisoners removed from the United States for ICE on Feb. 4. So far it has held 178 other men, all Venezuelans, in two facilities on the base.
In 2021, in an appearance on Fox, Mr. Hegseth lamented that the Guantánamo detention operation had become “a prison without a mission.”
“It got mucked up very, very early when left-wing lawyers and other protections came in,” he said, adding: “It could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and, you know, execute, because we are in a war.”
Mr. Hegseth’s visit comes as civil liberties lawyers have been pressing for access to the immigration agency detainees.
