American military forces have taken down some of the tents they hurriedly set up on an empty corner of the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, three months after President Trump ordered preparations to house up to 30,000 migrants at the base.
No migrants were ever held in the tents, and no migrant surge has ever occurred. On Monday, the operation was housing just 32 migrants, in buildings that were established years ago.
A total of 497 migrants have been held there for just days or weeks, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses the base as a way station to hold small numbers of detainees designated for deportation.
Instead, the Homeland Security and Defense Departments have reached an agreement to house dozens, not thousands, of ICE detainees at the base on any given day. Full costs of the operation have not been disclosed.
The military says it can pivot and expand migrant operations at Guantánamo, depending on need. But the decision to dismantle at least some of the tents demonstrates that the Defense and Homeland Security Departments do not currently plan to house tens of thousands of migrants on the base, as the president envisioned.
The tents and cots that served as a backdrop of the high-profile Feb. 7 visit by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, have been inventoried and stashed for future possible use, according to a Defense Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the president’s migrant mission is considered politically sensitive.
Over the weekend, the task force in charge of migrant detention at Guantánamo Bay was holding 32 migrants awaiting deportation and had about 725 staff members, mostly uniformed Army and Marine forces, with 100 employed by ICE as security officers or contractors.
That is more than 22 uniformed military and ICE workers for each migrant.
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited in February, the Pentagon said the task force numbered 1,000 military and ICE employees. Since then, the Defense Department has estimated that it spent about $40 million on the first month of the detention operation, including $3 million on the tents that were never used.
Democrats in Congress and other critics of the operation have called it a waste of taxpayer funds and military resources because housing migrants in U.S. facilities is considerably less expensive.
In a letter on Friday, Senators Gary Peters of Michigan and Alex Padilla of California asked Mr. Trump to order a review of the operation by the Department of Government Efficiency for fraud, waste or misconduct.
“While no one disagrees that violent criminals should be deported, this mission is operating under questionable legal authority, undermines due process and is unsustainably expensive — wasting millions of dollars of taxpayer money,” the senators wrote.
The senators said that, during a visit to Guantánamo in March, they were told that the tents did not meet detention standards and that there were no plans to use them to hold any migrants.
A senior military leader testified recently that to hold 30,000 migrants there in tents, the Pentagon would have to mobilize more than 9,000 U.S. forces there. The costs would include feeding and housing the troops, and transporting them there.
That ratio of one service member for every three or four migrants was intended to handle migrants like those housed at Guantánamo in the 1990s: Haitian and Cuban citizens intercepted at sea as they tried to reach the United States.
The 1990s model treated the tent camps as a humanitarian rescue mission, not a law enforcement deportation operation, and defense officials have said it could be used again for similar reasons.
But the March 7 memorandum of understanding reached between representatives of the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department to carry out Mr. Trump’s order defines the migrants who can be held there as entirely different from the families sheltered there in the 1990s.
The current agreement defines those eligible for detention at Guantánamo as “illegal aliens with a nexus to a transnational criminal organization or criminal drug activity.” The Trump administration considers them violent, although that description is based on ICE profiling, not criminal convictions.
The two sides agreed that the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for all transfers, releases and removals. The document was first released by CBS News.
Of the 497 men who have been held there since Feb. 4, 178 were Venezuelans who were airlifted to the Soto Cano air base in Honduras and transferred to Venezuelan aircraft.
On April 23, a chartered deportation flight from Texas stopped at Guantánamo and picked up one Venezuelan citizen before delivering 174 male and female deportees to Soto Cano. On that day, 42 other migrants of unknown nationalities were being held at Guantánamo, according to people familiar with the transfer who were not authorized by ICE to discuss it.
Another 93 were Nicaraguans who were repatriated by U.S. charter flights on April 3, 16 and 30.
Separately, a federal court is reviewing two military flights on March 31 and April 13 that may have delivered Venezuelans held at Guantánamo to El Salvador in defiance of a court order barring the Department of Homeland Security from deporting migrants to third countries without giving the migrants or their lawyers adequate notice.
The order also requires that the would-be deportees be given an opportunity to argue that they would be endangered by deportation to that third country, said Trina Realmuto, the executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and a lawyer on the case. The issue has been highlighted by an agreement between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments to imprison Venezuelan deportees in El Salvador for a fee, but essentially as a favor to Mr. Trump.
The Justice Department is arguing that the March 31 flight was a military operation carried out by the Pentagon, not by the Homeland Security Department, and so it is beyond the scope of the judge’s order.
The judge, Brian E. Murphy of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, has ordered the government to disclose certain information about the flights to lawyers advocating legal protections for immigrants.
