The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Tuesday that foreign detainees from 26 countries are being held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, including many with criminal convictions.
The department shared the full list of nationalities of people being held at the base, as well as the identities and criminal histories of more than two dozen people, confirming reporting from CBS News last week that officials had sent detainees from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean to the base, the network reported Tuesday.
The Guantanamo Bay base initially had been used to house mainly Spanish-speaking, Latin American migrants as they waited to be deported.
The current detainees are from Brazil, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Russia, Somalia, St. Kitts-Nevis, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, and Vietnam, the DHS list confirms.
Meanwhile, the records of those being deported for criminal offenses include convictions for robbery, homicide, child pornography, kidnapping, assault with a weapon, drug smuggling, and sexual offenses, including those involving children.
The DHS said those detainees are facing final deportation orders and are considered to be "high risk." They are being detained at Camp IV, the post-9/11 complex that also holds a dozen war-on-terror detainees, but are in a separate part of the facility.
The other detainees without serious criminal records, or any record at all, are deemed "low risk" and are at the Migrant Operations Center, a barracks-like facility.
Out of the 72 immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay, 58 are classified as high-risk and 14 fall in the low-risk category, two U.S. officials told CBS News, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The administration started holding immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay in February.
Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said the detentions of people with criminal records at the Cuban base show that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are "using every tool available to get criminal illegal aliens off our streets and out of our country."
"Whether it is CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, Guantanamo Bay or another detention facility, these dangerous criminals will not be allowed to terrorize U.S. citizens," she said.
Using Guantanamo Bay to detain immigrants has been criticized by some Democrats and civil rights advocates, particularly after the controversy over holding detainees from the war on terror indefinitely.
Democrats in Congress have also said they are concerned about the cost of using the Cuban base to detain immigrants, after the Department of Defense reported that as of April 8, it had spent $21 million to transport detainees there.
A DOD official said that more than 520 service members and about 130 DHS personnel make up the government staff supporting the detention efforts at Guantanamo Bay.
So far, the base has held 663 immigration detainees, far fewer than the 30,000 Trump referenced when he ordered detainees to be housed there.
Civil rights advocates, meanwhile, say holding immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay is punitive and against the law. They argue in an active lawsuit that federal law doesn't allow the government to hold people awaiting deportation outside of U.S. territory.
Guantanamo Bay is on Cuban land that the United States has said for decades is being leased. However, the Cuban government has demanded that the base be returned to its country and has rejected payments from the United States.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.