Sasha Pfeiffer
speaker
350 appearances
23 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 21 Aug
Sasha Pfeiffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Up First from NPR · Trump And Gaza, Migrants At Guantanamo, USAID Staff On Leave · 5 Feb 2025
podcast
The U.S. has not released an official figure, but it appears to be a small number, possibly just one flight with about a dozen migrants on board. The Department of Homeland Security says they're all members of a Venezuelan organized crime group called Tren de Aragua.
And overnight, it released photos of handcuffed men in gray sweatpants outfits, some with neck tattoos, being led onto military planes. And several hundred U.S. service members were deployed to Guantanamo in the past few days to prepare for these arrivals.
The U.S. says they will not be housed alongside the accused foreign terrorists held at the military prison there. Instead, a Guantanamo's U.S. naval base has had a detention facility used for migrants intercepted at sea, usually Haitians and Cubans. It's had that for years. But it's been mostly empty for a long time. It's not ready for large numbers of people.
So the military has also circulated photos of service members putting up green army tents to help with what it's calling a migrant operations center expansion. And the defense secretary says migrants will be held at Guantanamo only temporarily until the U.S. finds other countries to take them.
I've gotten conflicting answers from lawyers. Some say yes, some say no. One who thinks it is not legal is a lawyer at UCLA named Ahilan Arulanatham. He says U.S. immigration law dictates where these migrants can be sent. And if Cuba has presumably not agreed to take them, he says it's an illegal deportation. But Steve Vladek at Georgetown Law School thinks it's legal.
He argues a deportation is not official until the U.S. has relinquished custody of the migrants And that won't happen until they're moved to another country after being at Guantanamo. But you know that they disagree, suggest we're in murky legal territory. Vladek also thinks the Trump administration is sending migrants there as a kind of macho performance art. Here's Steve Vladek.
You know, he points out it'd be cheaper and easier to hold them somewhere in some big open space elsewhere in the U.S. But by shipping them to Guantanamo, you send a certain message. Here's how the editor of the website Lawfare, Ben Wittes, put it.
And by the way, all those people I interviewed are skeptical that 30,000 migrants will ever end up at Gitmo, given the legal questions plus financial, political, practical barriers. But even sending a handful is getting a ton of public attention, which is part of the point.
You're welcome.
We are not. The Trump administration is saying that migrants would not be in that U.S. military prison detention facility where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is held. They would instead be on the naval base portion of Guantanamo, which is a separate area. And for decades, the naval base has had a detention facility that houses migrants intercepted at sea. They're usually Haitian or Cuban or Dominican.
It's been mostly empty for years. So Trump is saying he wants to expand that migrant detention facility to make room for deported migrants. So once there, how long would migrants be held there? This came up on Fox News, where the Trump administration basically broke this news yesterday.
Fox had on Pete Hegseth, the new defense secretary, and Hegseth said the plan is not to hold these migrants indefinitely. Indefinite detention is what is happening at the military prison. Some people there have been held for two decades, more than two decades, without being charged.
But Hegseth says when it comes to deported migrants, Guantanamo would be a way station, as he called it, until the administration finds other countries to take them. Here he is on Fox.
But, Michelle, details are very thin so far, and the Trump administration has not said how it would define what Hegseth called temporary transit. Does the existing migrant holding facility at Guantanamo actually have 30,000 beds? Unclear. When Trump first announced this, he said it did, but he later said he plans to expand the facility to full capacity.
I spoke about this with the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vince Warren, and he said this about the current status of Guantanamo's migrant detention operation.
He told me he knows that through reports from migrants who've been there. Defense Secretary Hegseth also said a golf course on the naval base would have room for 6,000 deported migrants. So the administration seems to be trying to identify different spaces at Guantanamo that could have room for tens of thousands of people.
The administration did not give a dollar figure, but you're right. The plan would require construction, food, lodging for people held there, guards or staff to oversee it, money to transport migrants there. because Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said the migrants would be flown there directly.
So on cost, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said only that money would be appropriated by Congress for that. She also said ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would run the facility. As for when migrants might start being flown there, they didn't say. There'll certainly be a lot of litigation about this. That is NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer. Sasha, thank you. You're welcome.
Who are these 11 people? All of them are men. All are from Yemen. All were captured after the 9-11 attacks. And all are former al-Qaeda, according to the Pentagon. All had also been held for more than two decades without charge or trial. Now, eventually they were approved for transfer after national security officials said they weren't dangerous enough to keep holding.
And they had been approved for transfer for at least two years, sometimes much longer, once since 2010. But they had stayed behind bars due to diplomatic and political challenges like resistance to releasing them. And the really difficult, slow process of finding countries to take them. The problem is they could not go back to their home country of Yemen because it's unstable. So the U.S.
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