Inside the Secretive Facility Housing Migrants at Guantánamo Bay

Reports and interviews shed new light on the holding center, where migrants’ calls with lawyers are monitored and some say they’ve been forced to wear blackout goggles.

For decades, migrants intercepted at sea as they try to reach the United States have been sent to a facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a place better known for the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects.

Although migrants are kept in a separate space, they exist in a form of legal limbo, confined to a military base that operates outside of standard American immigration laws. The situation has always been opaque, with little public information about what happens there.

Now, internal government reports obtained by The New York Times, along with interviews with migrants and advocacy groups, have shed more light on the conditions on Guantánamo, including allegations that migrants have been forced to wear blackout goggles during transport through the base; that their calls with lawyers are monitored; and that some areas are unfit for habitation, with rats and overflowing toilets.

“I left Cuba hoping to find freedom,” said Alberto Corzo, who fled his country with his wife, three sons and a handful of others who managed to squeeze into the small wooden boat that he spent a month building as he planned his escape.

After the Coast Guard stopped them and delivered them to Guantánamo, Mr. Corzo said he and his family saw their dreams of America dwindle. “We felt like prisoners of the United States,” he said, “with certain privileges.”

In response to a request for comment, the Department of Homeland Security said migrants were kept in a facility consistent with its care and housing policies. But the agency’s own inspectors, who visited the facility in March 2023 to look into complaints from advocacy groups, found cause for concern. They recommended that the department stop holding children at Guantánamo altogether and bring families to the United States to be processed instead.

The number of people held at Guantánamo is only a fraction of those who try to cross the southern border. Just 37 migrants were held there from 2020 to 2023; in the past decade, the number of families has been in the single digits. As of February, the facility was holding four migrants, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Those numbers include only the people who passed their asylum screenings and were allowed to petition for resettlement in a third country. It is not clear how many people have been held there who were quickly deported back to their home countries.

Government officials noted that holding migrants at Guantánamo is a practice that has spanned presidential administrations, with the goal of deterring asylum seekers from making the dangerous trip by boat or raft to the United States.

But the facility is emblematic of the growing desire in both parties to keep migrants at arm’s length, and U.S. officials have considered expanding it as crises like the chaos in Haiti send desperate people toward American shores. In 2019, President Donald J. Trump suggested using the military base as a large-scale holding pen for immigrants from around the world, and he has promised to revive and toughen his immigration agenda if he wins re-election.

Asylum Screenings at Sea

Migrants who set off on boats from countries like Cuba and Haiti are given a choice if they are picked up at sea and pass their asylum screening: They can go home to the country they were trying to escape, or go to Guantánamo and try to find another country to take them in. They do not have a pathway to the United States.

About 500 migrants from Guantánamo have been resettled since the late 1990s, when U.S. officials first started relocating the migrants it held there. Government data obtained by The Times shows that, on average, families stay more than six months at the facility. At one point, a migrant was held there for nearly four years.

Unlike other migrants in the U.S. immigration detention system, those at Guantánamo are not searchable in a public detainee database. The State Department does not even consider them detainees because they can agree to leave by being deported back to their home countries.

The rules governing asylum for migrants at the southern border do not apply to those at Guantánamo: “The provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and immigration regulations governing asylum, protection from removal, and removal proceedings do not apply to migrants interdicted at sea,” the State Department said.

Mr. Corzo and his family decided that going home was not an option.

A journalist in Cuba, Mr. Corzo said he had been beaten by government agents, with one of the assaults documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Voice of America.

Soon after the family passed their initial asylum screening at sea — a version of the process commonly seen at the southern border of the United States — a van carried them across the naval base on Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Corzo was told to put his head on the seat in front of him, he recalled in an interview. The windows of the van were tinted.

Some people have said they were forced to wear blackout goggles during the trip across the base, according to a report by inspectors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office. The inspectors also said they reviewed guidance for handling migrants that said blackout goggles are meant to obscure what they see.

The inspectors were informed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the measures were necessary “to preserve the safety and security of a U.S. military base’s operations,” they said in their report. “Nonetheless, the impact of using blackout goggles on international terrorists has been well documented, including the disorienting nature of the inability to see, and the psychological impact of their use.”

Migrants get up to 30 minutes a week to make phone calls, all of which are monitored. They cannot discuss facilities on the base, information about other migrants, or “information distorting or exaggerating” their treatment, according to a copy of the rules. The migrants also cannot say anything in the calls that may “further encourage others to attempt illegal migration,” though no specific examples of such language are listed.

The main detention facility is a two-story, nondescript building that once functioned as military barracks. It is on the west side of the island and a ferry ride away from the main shopping areas for the U.S. military employees and contractors, and from the parts of the island that house terror suspects.

The migrants have a curfew that runs from sunset until early the next morning. The national anthem plays across the base as part of a flag ceremony conducted each day, which also doubles as a reminder of the curfew.

Migrants at Guantánamo, unlike those in ICE or Border Patrol detention in the United States, can leave the facility during the day. If approved, they can get jobs on the other side of the island.

But access to legal counsel is limited. The State Department said it had helped facilitate legal counsel for some migrants, though there are concerns that the call monitoring could hamper attorney-client privilege. ICE said that some calls can be private on a case-by-case basis.

The International Refugee Assistance Project, an immigrant advocacy group, has raised concerns with the State Department and D.H.S. about the conditions at the Guantánamo facility, known as the Migrant Operations Center.

IRAP, whose own investigators spoke to migrants at Guantánamo, said in a report, “Interviewees described signs of deterioration and dilapidation: toilets spewing sewage when someone in another room flushed their toilet, a plumbing problem known in notorious prisons as ‘Ping-Pong toilets’; showers overflowing; fungi growing on ceilings; and rats running around in the room.”

The report said the conditions were particularly bad for children.

The group said it received a tip in 2022 that a Cuban family, including two children ages 10 and 12, was being held on the base and needed help. A pediatrician at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Guantánamo Bay had written a memo saying both children needed to be taken off the island because they faced risks of self-harm and, in the boy’s case, emergency surgery for a hernia.

“It is my medical opinion that these conditions will continue to get worse without proper treatment,” the doctor wrote in a memo, which was obtained by IRAP.

Weeks later, the family was resettled in a third country.

D.H.S. inspectors also expressed concern that the “harms” to families and children at the facility “outweigh the department’s policies of deterrence,” they said in a report.

ICE responded to the inspectors by saying that it could not unilaterally refuse to hold children at the facility, and deferred to the National Security Council.

Between Freedom and Captivity

As Mr. Corzo’s family settled into the routines of life on Guantánamo, they felt caught between freedom and captivity. “It’s a very isolated place,” Martha Liset Sánchez, Mr. Corzo’s wife, said. “It’s isolated from the world.”

Mr. Corzo tried to arrange formal schooling for their two youngest children, both 12 at the time, but none was available. The closest thing was English lessons.

“I don’t think families should be held in Guantánamo,” Mr. Corzo said. “It doesn’t have the conditions for families to stay there and be detained. Children need to be free, to socialize. They need to feel safe — not to be monitored or supervised constantly. They also need to go to school.”

Lucas Guttentag, a former Justice Department official during the Biden administration, said Guantánamo was a way for the government to avoid oversight.

“Putting families in a location where the legal and constitutional oversight is essentially nonexistent makes those families even more subject to suffering and mistreatment,” said Mr. Guttentag, who once represented Haitian migrants in lawsuits over their detention at Guantánamo in the 1990s.

After five months at Guantánamo, Mr. Corzo learned that Canada was willing to take his family in. They live as permanent residents now, with Mr. Corzo working in construction.

Looking back on his time at Guantánamo, Mr. Corzo still feels he made the right decision when he set off for the United States that evening in 2022.

“In the end,” Mr. Corzo said, “I think we were better off than we were in Cuba.”