Security forces lead a man in gray sweatsuit away from a a military cargo plane that transported deportees from El Paso, Texas, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Feb. 7, 2025. The Homeland Security Department on Thursday, June 12, was holding 43 immigration detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, which has become a way station for foreign citizens designated for deportation. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
- The United States repatriated 170 Cuban citizens on Monday, including dozens of men who had been held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
- The deportees were flown from Louisiana and Florida to Havana after months in U.S. detention, including time in a former Guantánamo prison once used for terrorism suspects.
- Rights groups said the flight marked the first U.S. deportation to Cuba since mid-December, as officials declined to provide details about those held.
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The long, circuitous journey of dozens of Cuban men who were designated for deportation from the United States last year but instead taken to a prison at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay ended Monday when they were repatriated to Cuba.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flew 170 Cuban citizens on a charter flight that picked up deportees from airfields in Louisiana and Florida and delivered them to the international airport in Havana.
More than 50 of them were men who were transferred from a huge ICE holding facility in Natchez, Mississippi, their last stop in an odyssey that, starting in December, took them to the American base in Cuba. They were kept there, in a prison that previously held people suspected of being al-Qaida members, until their transfer to Mississippi last week.
Human Rights First, which tracks removal flights as ICE Flight Monitor, said the Global X charter was the first deportation flight to Cuba since Dec. 18.
ICE and Department of Homeland Security officials did not respond to questions about the men, or their return.
But they were all included on the repatriation flight, according to the relatives of the men, who shared information in an online support group of sisters, wives and mothers who had connected their families between Cuba and the United States.
The chat group showed that the men were from towns and cities across the island, and one by one had checked in with relatives in the United States after they arrived in Cuba.
Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has challenged the use of Guantánamo as a holding site for ICE detainees, said lawyers representing the men believed all 55 had been returned on Monday’s flight.
Homeland Security officials repeatedly declined to identify any of the men held at Guantánamo but said the first 22 Cubans sent there just before Christmas included “illegal aliens” with histories of homicide, kidnapping, assault, battery and other violent crimes. The officials did not provide details.
The 170 people flown to Havana on Monday included 153 men and 17 women, according to Cuba’s Interior Ministry.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
c.2026 The New York Times Company
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