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The military planes departed from Texas in quick succession, eight flights in as many days. Each one carried more than a dozen immigrants that the U.S. alleged are the “worst of the worst” kinds of criminals, including members of a violent Venezuelan street gang.
Since Feb. 4, the Trump administration has flown about 100 immigrant detainees to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a facility better known for having held those suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Officials have widely touted the flights as a demonstration of President Donald Trump’s commitment to one of the central promises of his campaign, and they’ve distributed photos of some of the immigrants at both takeoff and landing. But they have not released the names of those they’re holding or provided details about their alleged crimes.
In recent days, however, information about the flights and the people on them has emerged that calls the government’s narrative into question. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have identified nearly a dozen Venezuelan immigrants who have been transferred to Guantanamo. The New York Times published a larger list with some, but not all, of the same names.
For three of the Guantanamo detainees who had been held at an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, ProPublica and the Tribune obtained records about their criminal histories and spoke to their families. The three men are all Venezuelan. Each had been detained by immigration authorities soon after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and was being held in custody, awaiting deportation. In some cases, they had been languishing for months because Venezuela, until recently, was largely not accepting deportees. According to U.S. federal court records, two of them had no crimes on their records except for illegal entry. The third had picked up an additional charge while in detention, for kicking an officer while being restrained during a riot.
Relatives of the three men said in interviews on Tuesday that they have been left entirely in the dark about their loved ones. They all said that their relatives were not criminals, and two provided records from the Venezuelan Interior Ministry and other documents to support their statements. They said the U.S. government has given them neither information about the detainees’ whereabouts nor the ability to speak with them.
Attorneys say they have also been denied access. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, arguing that the U.S. Constitution gives the detainees rights to legal representation that shouldn’t be stripped away just because they have been moved to Guantanamo.
“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantanamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case. “It is difficult to think of anything so flagrantly at odds with the fundamental principles on which our country was built.”
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Yesika Palma sobbed as she spoke about her brother Jose Daniel Simancas, a 30-year-old construction worker, and how it felt to think of him being treated like a terrorist when all he’d done was attempt to come to the United States in pursuit of a decent job. Angela Sequera was distraught about not being able to speak to her son, Yoiker Sequera, who’d worked as a barber in Venezuela.
Michel Duran expressed the same dismay about his son, Mayfreed Duran, who also worked as a barber. “To me it’s the desperation, the frustration that I know nothing of him,” he said in a phone interview in Spanish from his home in Venezuela. “It’s a terrible anguish. I don’t sleep.”
In response to questions about the Guantanamo detentions, officials at the Department of Homeland Security insisted, without pointing to any evidence, that some — but not all — of the immigrants they have transferred to Guantanamo are violent gang members and others are “high-threat” criminals. “All these individuals committed a crime by entering the United States illegally,” an agency official said in a statement. Some detainees are being held in Guantanamo’s maximum-security prison while others are in the Migrant Operations Center that in the past has been used to house those intercepted at sea.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, responding to the ACLU lawsuit, said in an email that there was a phone system that detainees could use to reach attorneys. Writing in all caps for emphasis, she added, “If the AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union cares more about highly dangerous criminal aliens including murders & vicious gang members than they do about American citizens — they should change their name.”
In the past, the U.S. government has withheld information about cases that it says involve a threat to national security. In those cases, the authorities say, information they’re using to make custody determinations is confidential. The government said some of the people sent to Guantanamo are tied to the Tren de Aragua criminal organization, which Trump designated a terrorist group when he took office. Among the things law enforcement has used to identify members of the group have been certain tattoos, including stars, roses and crowns, though there’s disagreement on whether the practice is reliable. Lawyers have expressed concern that the government sometimes uses national security concerns as a pretext to avoid scrutiny.
The Guantanamo detentions may be among the highest-profile moves the Trump administration has made as part of its mass deportation campaign, but federal agents have also fanned out across the country over the last several weeks to conduct raids in neighborhoods and workplaces. Data obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune shows that from Jan. 20 through the first days of February, there have been at least 14,000 immigration arrests. Around 44% of them were of people with criminal convictions, and of those, close to half were convicted of misdemeanors. Still, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has said that he’s not satisfied with the pace of enforcement.
Government data obtained by the news organizations shows that the Trump administration has averaged about 500 deportations per day, well short of the more than 2,100 per day during the 2024 fiscal year under former President Joe Biden. However, the difference could be attributed to lower numbers of border crossings, which have been dropping since last year.
Trump directed the departments of Defense and Homeland Security last month to prepare 30,000 beds at Guantanamo and later said the site was for “criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
Relatives of three of those currently detained in Guantanamo said the immigrants all had tattoos. And one of them, Simancas, was from Aragua, the state where Tren de Aragua was born. The detainees’ relatives dispute that their loved ones have anything to do with the group. “This doesn’t make sense. He’s a family man,” Palma said in Spanish of her brother. “Having tattoos is not a sin.”
Palma, who is currently living in Ecuador, said her brother left Venezuela years ago, first living for a time in Ecuador and then in Costa Rica. He decided to try his luck in the United States last year, crossing with a group that included his wife and cousin, who were soon released into the U.S. to pursue asylum claims, they both said in interviews. All three women said Simancas was proud of his work on construction sites and shared TikTok videos he made showing the progress of some of his projects, set to music. Simancas called his cousin on Feb. 7 saying he was being taken to Guantanamo. “It is truly distressing,” his sister said. “I have to have faith because if I break down I can’t help him.”
Duran’s father only learned of his son’s potential whereabouts after recognizing his face in a TikTok video with some of the images released by the U.S. government of men in gray sweats and shackles being led into military planes in El Paso.
Duran had left Venezuela hoping to one day open his own barbershop in Chicago, where he had relatives. He described his son, who has a toddler, as a jokester and a dedicated worker. Duran was detained in July 2023 on his third attempt crossing the border, his father said. He remained in detention following a conviction for assaulting a federal officer during a riot at the immigration center in El Paso in August, about a month after his arrival. He’d called his father on Feb. 6, asking him to gather documentation that could prove he had no criminal record in Venezuela because officials were trying to tie him to Tren de Aragua. That was the last his father heard of him.
Angela Sequera was used to talking to her son every day on the phone while he was detained in El Paso, but then she abruptly stopped hearing from him. On Sunday she got a call from a detainee inside the El Paso center telling her that her son Yoiker had been transferred, but she wasn’t able to speak to him; when she looked him up online, it still showed him as being at the border.
She’d last heard from him a day earlier. “Estoy cansado,” I’m exhausted, she said he told her in Spanish. “It’s unfair that I’m still detained.” He’d been held inside the detention center in El Paso since September, after turning himself in to the Border Patrol in Presidio, nearly four hours south of El Paso.
Yoiker Sequera, who was first identified by the online publication Migrant Insider, is among the three Venezuelans named in the lawsuit filed by the ACLU. The 25-year-old had wanted to be a barber ever since he was a boy, his mother said, just like his uncle. That’s how he made a living wherever he went, in Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia. He continued to cut hair along the migrant route, as he was trying last year to make his way to his family in California, and inside the detention center.
Angela Sequera said her son had planned on crossing the border and trying to seek asylum in the United States. “Now they want to tie him to criminal gangs. Everything that’s happening is so unfair.”
We are still reporting. Do you have information about the U.S. immigration system you want to share? You can reach our tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can.
Pratheek Rebala contributed reporting.
