Sasha Pfeiffer
Appearances
Up First from NPR
Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
The U.S. has not released an official figure, but it appears to be a small number, possibly just one flight with about a dozen migrants on board. The Department of Homeland Security says they're all members of a Venezuelan organized crime group called Tren de Aragua.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
And overnight, it released photos of handcuffed men in gray sweatpants outfits, some with neck tattoos, being led onto military planes. And several hundred U.S. service members were deployed to Guantanamo in the past few days to prepare for these arrivals.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
The U.S. says they will not be housed alongside the accused foreign terrorists held at the military prison there. Instead, a Guantanamo's U.S. naval base has had a detention facility used for migrants intercepted at sea, usually Haitians and Cubans. It's had that for years. But it's been mostly empty for a long time. It's not ready for large numbers of people.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
So the military has also circulated photos of service members putting up green army tents to help with what it's calling a migrant operations center expansion. And the defense secretary says migrants will be held at Guantanamo only temporarily until the U.S. finds other countries to take them.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
I've gotten conflicting answers from lawyers. Some say yes, some say no. One who thinks it is not legal is a lawyer at UCLA named Ahilan Arulanatham. He says U.S. immigration law dictates where these migrants can be sent. And if Cuba has presumably not agreed to take them, he says it's an illegal deportation. But Steve Vladek at Georgetown Law School thinks it's legal.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
He argues a deportation is not official until the U.S. has relinquished custody of the migrants And that won't happen until they're moved to another country after being at Guantanamo. But you know that they disagree, suggest we're in murky legal territory. Vladek also thinks the Trump administration is sending migrants there as a kind of macho performance art. Here's Steve Vladek.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
You know, he points out it'd be cheaper and easier to hold them somewhere in some big open space elsewhere in the U.S. But by shipping them to Guantanamo, you send a certain message. Here's how the editor of the website Lawfare, Ben Wittes, put it.
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Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave
And by the way, all those people I interviewed are skeptical that 30,000 migrants will ever end up at Gitmo, given the legal questions plus financial, political, practical barriers. But even sending a handful is getting a ton of public attention, which is part of the point.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
Who are these 11 people? All of them are men. All are from Yemen. All were captured after the 9-11 attacks. And all are former al-Qaeda, according to the Pentagon. All had also been held for more than two decades without charge or trial. Now, eventually they were approved for transfer after national security officials said they weren't dangerous enough to keep holding.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
And they had been approved for transfer for at least two years, sometimes much longer, once since 2010. But they had stayed behind bars due to diplomatic and political challenges like resistance to releasing them. And the really difficult, slow process of finding countries to take them. The problem is they could not go back to their home country of Yemen because it's unstable. So the U.S.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
had to negotiate with another country to take them. Finally, Oman agreed to do that. It says it will give them jobs, housing, other supports. Some of them will be monitored for security reasons and also face travel restrictions. And for Guantanamo, the end result is just 15 prisoners are held there now.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
And it really has been a flurry. You know, in recent weeks, four other Guantanamo prisoners were released. We know of at least one more transfer in the works. This is partly Biden racing to fulfill his goal of closing Guantanamo. A less charitable view is that it would have taken more political courage to do this when he was not a lame duck.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
But now that he's on his way out, it's easier to do hard and controversial things. I do want to note that yesterday's 11 prisoner transfer almost happened in October 2023, but it was called off after the October 7th Hamas attack because some members of Congress were worried about Mideast stability. So finally, in these final weeks, that plan got resurrected. It's also motivated by Trump returning.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
Trump has said he wants to keep Guantanamo open. So the assumption is that once Trump is back in the White House, there may be no more Guantanamo transfers under him. And Michelle, at some level, it's also Biden acknowledging that Guantanamo has been a failed legal system. As you know, there's still been no 9-11 trial more than two decades after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
There's worldwide criticism of Guantanamo as a human rights embarrassment because of the unlawful detention happening there. It's also really expensive, $15 million per year per prisoner. That is way more than a federal supermax. It's as Biden saying, it's time to shut the place down.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
So what's been the reaction to this? It tends to be predictable along party lines. Republicans claim this is like releasing terrorists. Democrats say this should have happened a long time ago. It's a moral stain on America, they say. This is complicated by the new fresh upheaval in the Middle East because there's some concern these men could end up back on a battlefield somewhere.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
But remember, national security officials has made the decision these men no longer pose a significant threat. I got a more hybrid or nuanced view from Scott Rehm of the Center for Victims of Torture. He's glad the men were released, but he says it could and should have happened sooner.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
And he says because it didn't happen sooner, time is now running out on transferring others before Trump comes into office.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
The prison and the military court were set up to prosecute suspected foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first prisoners arrived in January 2002. Over the years, a little under 800 people have passed through there. Most were never charged, yet held for years. The majority were eventually repatriated to their home countries or resettled in other countries.
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Trudeau Resigns, Guantanamo Prisoner Release, Minneapolis Police Reform
There are now 15 left, all of them racing the clock as Trump is about to get into office. And the commonality among the 15 left is that if you're not out by January 20th, you're expected probably not to get out. That is NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer. Sasha, thank you.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
We are not. The Trump administration is saying that migrants would not be in that U.S. military prison detention facility where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is held. They would instead be on the naval base portion of Guantanamo, which is a separate area. And for decades, the naval base has had a detention facility that houses migrants intercepted at sea. They're usually Haitian or Cuban or Dominican.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
It's been mostly empty for years. So Trump is saying he wants to expand that migrant detention facility to make room for deported migrants. So once there, how long would migrants be held there? This came up on Fox News, where the Trump administration basically broke this news yesterday.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
Fox had on Pete Hegseth, the new defense secretary, and Hegseth said the plan is not to hold these migrants indefinitely. Indefinite detention is what is happening at the military prison. Some people there have been held for two decades, more than two decades, without being charged.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
But Hegseth says when it comes to deported migrants, Guantanamo would be a way station, as he called it, until the administration finds other countries to take them. Here he is on Fox.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
But, Michelle, details are very thin so far, and the Trump administration has not said how it would define what Hegseth called temporary transit. Does the existing migrant holding facility at Guantanamo actually have 30,000 beds? Unclear. When Trump first announced this, he said it did, but he later said he plans to expand the facility to full capacity.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
I spoke about this with the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vince Warren, and he said this about the current status of Guantanamo's migrant detention operation.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
He told me he knows that through reports from migrants who've been there. Defense Secretary Hegseth also said a golf course on the naval base would have room for 6,000 deported migrants. So the administration seems to be trying to identify different spaces at Guantanamo that could have room for tens of thousands of people.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
The administration did not give a dollar figure, but you're right. The plan would require construction, food, lodging for people held there, guards or staff to oversee it, money to transport migrants there. because Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said the migrants would be flown there directly.
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D.C. Plane Crash, Migrant Housing At Guantanamo, January 6th Criminal Records
So on cost, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said only that money would be appropriated by Congress for that. She also said ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would run the facility. As for when migrants might start being flown there, they didn't say. There'll certainly be a lot of litigation about this. That is NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer. Sasha, thank you. You're welcome.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
What does the suit say? It says that ever since the migrants were shipped to Guantanamo, they've been held, quote, incommunicado without access to attorneys, family, or the outside world.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
And the lawsuit alleges this isolation is not a coincidence, that the point of flying these migrants to a remote Caribbean island is to make it especially difficult for them to communicate with lawyers, lawyers who could explain their legal rights and possibly challenge their detention. Here's something that the lead attorney in the lawsuit, League Alert of the ACLU, said to me.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
Correct. Those images were released by the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. And the ACLU says some of the migrants' family members learned their relatives had been sent to Guantanamo because they saw them in those photos. Wow. They recognized a brother or a son. And now several of those family members are plaintiffs in this legal case.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
It wants lawyers to be able to go to Guantanamo and meet with the migrants, but the suit acknowledges that traveling there will be arduous, will be hard to get to. So it asks that at a minimum, attorneys be allowed to communicate with the migrants by phone or video conference or email.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
The ACLU lawyer, Galert, points out that the suspected foreign terrorists who've been held for up to two decades at Guantanamo do have access to lawyers.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
What's the U.S. government saying in response to this? So, Leila, our colleague Jimena Bustillo, who covers immigration for NPR, got a statement from Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin that says there is a, quote, system for phone utilization to reach lawyers, but no additional detail was provided.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
And several of the migrants' relatives say they've repeatedly called ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to get information about their family members, but no success. And by the way, the DHS statement also said this.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
If the American, all caps, Civil Liberties Union cares more about highly dangerous criminal aliens, including murderers and vicious gang members, than they do about American citizens, they should change their name. In reply to that, Gelernt of the ACLU said to me, we were hoping to get a serious professional response from the U.S. government. This was not a serious response.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
Has the government said what happens to these people next? It says they'll be held at Guantanamo only temporarily until it can find other countries to take them. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledges that could take a long time.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
And we know from having sent suspected terrorists to Gitmo after 9-11 that some of those prisoners have never been allowed to leave, even ones who've been cleared for release. But DHS told us it will be ramping up the tempo further. of plane loads of migrants arriving at Guantanamo soon.
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Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
You're welcome.