An immigration service employee brought 200 pocket-size New Testaments. A chaplain found some Buddhist spiritual literature, just in case. A couple of detainees were given rosary beads.
These details about the migrant detention operation at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba were contained in emails among government employees as the Trump administration rushed to set up the site early this year.
The documents show how soldiers and civilian workers improvised to prepare for the foreign men who would suddenly find themselves held on the base as immigration detainees. They also reveal uncertainty about the size and scope of the operation; the Trump administration had initially ordered the Defense and Homeland Security departments to establish sites that could accommodate up to 30,000 people, requiring tent cities.
Now in its 10th month, the detention site on the base never reached that capacity. The most migrants held there on a single day was 178, in February, all but one of whom were deported to Venezuela.
In all, a little over 700 men have been housed in two buildings on the base, a prison that once held al-Qaida suspects and a dormitory-style detention site.
The emails, between employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the base and their supervisors back in the United States, span from February through the summer. They were obtained by American Oversight, a government watchdog group that sued in federal court using the Freedom of Information Act to get 84 pages of partly redacted records.
The correspondence includes a range of issues, such as establishing a training program for U.S. military security forces who were handling immigration detainees and arranging for the detainees to have access to recreation yards and phone calls.
Taken together, said Chioma Chukwu, American Oversight’s executive director, the documents show that the administration had “no plan, no foresight and no concern for the human cost of its own chaos.”
The names in them are covered up, but most of the exchanges appear to have been written by two temporary employees: a Spanish-speaking contractor with social-work skills and a chaplain, whose denomination is not disclosed.
The chaplain was on the scene by March after experiencing “some bureaucratic hiccups, including both arriving and departing the island.”
He collected spiritual literature and began making “pastoral visits” to the detainees, including to a man who was in isolation in May as a disciplinary measure for covering up the camera in his cell and for possessing a fork.
At the adjacent prison for the last 15 detainees of the war against terrorism, Army guards have routinely collected eating utensils after meals. The migrant detention operation under Homeland Security’s ICE operation was apparently doing the same.
The contractor’s weekly reports reflected the churn of immigration detainees, whom the records identify as “IAs,” Homeland Security-speak for illegal aliens.
In April, after about 20 men were brought on an ICE flight from Louisiana, the contractor visited both sites “to introduce myself and explain my roles and my capacity.” He told the detainees that he worked for ICE but that he was not an ICE officer.
In addition to the chaplain, psychologist and medical staff were there, the contractor said.
Health concerns had arisen by mid-May, when 69 men were being held as detainees. Four tested positive for COVID-19, including one who was in isolation on suicide watch. No additional details were given.
By then, the chaplain had sorted out some religious arrangements, the records show.
“Thus far, there have been no requests for religious diets as the population is homogenous,” a summary on April 25 stated. But the operation had a plan to accommodate kosher and halal dietary restrictions so “no one will be forced to eat any food which is prohibited.”
The pocket-size New Testaments that the ICE employee brought were donated by the chaplain’s office at the Krome detention center, an overcrowded site in South Florida that has been the object of congressional concern and frequent protests.
Two detainees at Guantánamo were given “breakaway rosaries,” which are designed so that they cannot be used to cause harm.
A summary from May described all detainees held in the previous month as “Hispanic speakers,” of whom 55% were Catholic and 35% were other Christians, with 10% reporting no religious affiliation.
But the chaplain was preparing for a more diverse influx, as he reports in his emails.
Purchase orders were placed for “basic religious items and materials commonly used in Hinduism, Sikhism and Rastafarianism.” The operation was also acquiring Bibles in “Creole, French, Hindi and Punjabi to accommodate the expected Christian population.”
A June 17 email entitled “Weekly Updates” from an unnamed contractor to recipients whose names are redacted said “the facility was having a hard time obtaining bodies” to detain there because “ICE and other agencies are having to vet them.”
The contractor added: “There was also a mention of no longer accepting Venezuelans, not sure why.”
ICE officials declined to comment on the difficulties described in the document, and would not confirm the pause in sending Venezuelan deportees to the site.
No ICE detainees were being held there this week. The last detainees, 18 men, were sent to Guatemala and El Salvador last month.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
