Nearly 200 Venezuelan illegal immigrants detained at Guantánamo Bay are flown back home

Nearly 200 Venezuelan illegal immigrants detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were shipped back home this week in multiple flights after the South American nation expressed its willingness to accept its citizens. 

The 177 Venezuelans were aboard a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement flight that had a stopover in Honduras before landing in Caracas.

Images show a group of men wearing gray sweatsuit outfits lined up on a tarmac waiting to board a plane. 

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Last week, two Venezuelan flights carried 190 illegal immigrants from the United States to Venezuela.

In January, President Donald Trump said he wanted to expand immigrant detention centers at Guantánamo to hold as many as 30,000 people. The military base is best known for detaining terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 

“Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send ‘em out to Guantánamo,” Trump said at the time. 

The acceptance by Venezuela could signal the country’s willingness to regularly take back its citizens who enter the U.S. illegally.

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“Venezuela had historically resisted accepting repatriation of its citizens but has recently begun accepting removals following high-level political discussions and an investment of significant resources,” federal immigration and military officials wrote in a court document filed Thursday. 

The U.S. government has alleged that Venezuelan immigrants transferred to the naval base are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Trump has turned the gang into the face of the alleged threat posed by immigrants living in the country illegally.

He formally designated the gang a “foreign terrorist organization” this week.

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On Thursday, the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said the country “will always fight terrorism and criminal organizations of any kind, while denouncing the manipulation of these elements for political ends and rejecting any attempt to criminalize the nation and its citizens.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.