President Donald Trump wants to use the facility as a holding centre and said it has the capacity to hold as many as 30,000.
The first US military flight deporting migrants from the United States to Guantanamo Bay landed in Cuba on Tuesday evening, according to a US official.
It was the first step in an an expected surge in the number of migrants sent to the US naval base, which for decades was primarily used to detain foreigners associated with the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was assigned to Guantanamo Bay when he was on active duty, has called it a “perfect place” to house migrants. Additional US troops been deployed to the facility in the past few days to help prepare.
There are currently approximately 300 service members supporting the holding operations at Guantanamo Bay, and the numbers will fluctuate based on the requirements of the Department of Homeland Security, which is the lead federal agency.
At least 230 of those service members are US Marines from the 6th Marine Regiment, who began deploying on Friday.
Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, has criticised the use of Guantanamo.
“Sending immigrants to Guantanamo is a profoundly cruel, costly move. It will cut people off from lawyers, family and support systems, throwing them into a black hole so the U.S. government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight. Shut Gitmo down now and forever!” Fischer said in a statement.
The US also flew Indian immigrants back to India on Monday and the first group of Haitian migrants deported from the US arrived back in the Caribbean nation on Tuesday.
There had previously been seven deportation flights; to Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru. A number of Colombian officials also flew to the US and took two flights of migrants back to their country.
There are more than 725,000 immigrants from India living in the US without authorisation, the third most of any country after Mexico and El Salvador, according to the Pew Research Centre.
Recent years have also seen a jump in the number of Indians attempting to enter the country along the US-Canada border. The US Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending 30 September, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
