Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on Tuesday to observe the Trump administration’s migrant detention operations there, and get a briefing on the base’s prison housing detainees in the war against terrorism.
Mr. Hegseth arrived at the base with a former colleague from Fox News, Laura Ingraham, about an hour before a military flight from El Paso, Texas landed there, carrying nine migrants who the Homeland Security Department has decided will be housed at Guantánamo pending deportation.
The Pentagon provided few details on the trip. But Ms. Ingraham posted a photograph of herself and Mr. Hegseth standing on the roof of a building at the airstrip as they were being briefed by the two-star Army general in charge of the operation. The cargo plane from Texas could be seen in the background.
Mr. Hegseth served as an Army lieutenant at Guantánamo in 2004-5, then also visited the base in 2016, when as a correspondent for Fox News he joined a news media tour of the remote prison and reported about life there.
He has spoken fondly of his deployment to the base, where he served as a platoon leader for an infantry unit of the New Jersey National Guard. The unit conducted security operations for what was then a massive operation of nearly 2,600 U.S. forces and more than 600 detainees, spread out across a sprawling prison zone on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean.
As of Tuesday, he was visiting a much-reduced operation. The Defense Department now holds 15 foreign men there from the war on terrorism at a facility called Camp 5, including six men who are charged in death-penalty cases for Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and on the U.S.S. Cole on Oct. 12, 2000.
Next door, in a prison building called Camp 6, the Homeland Security and Defense Departments on Tuesday were housing 26 men who the Trump administration has said are designated for deportation. They included seven men from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, aged 23 to 62, according to a document seen by The New York Times.
Nine of the migrants arrived on Tuesday’s flight from El Paso, according to two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be identified.
Mr. Hegseth has been enthusiastic about the migrant detention operation, which began holding ice prisoners removed from the United States on Feb. 4. So far it has held 178 other men, all Venezuelans, in two facilities on the base.
On Tuesday, he posted a photo of himself having lunch with members of the joint ICE-military task force that is staffing the operation, a combination of civilians and uniformed service members. “These warriors are directly supporting the apprehension and deportation of dangerous illegal aliens,” he wrote on social media. “We cannot thank them or their families enough.”
In 2021, in an appearance on Fox, Mr. Hegseth lamented that the Guantánamo detention operation had become “a prison without a mission.”
“It got mucked up very, very early when left-wing lawyers and other protections came in,” he said, adding: “It could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and, you know, execute, because we are in a war.”
Mr. Hegseth’s visit comes as civil liberties lawyers have been pressing for access to the immigration agency detainees.