'Give us back our sons': A look at the Venezuelan migrants Trump sent to Guantanamo

Biking on the wrong side of the road. Crossing the Rio Grande on foot. Shoplifting at Target.

These are the arrest records for some of the 178 Venezuelan migrants who were detained this month in Guantanamo Bay – the U.S. Navy base in Cuba notorious for imprisoning terrorism suspects in connection to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In January, the Trump administration announced it would expand capacity at the base so it could hold up to 30,000 migrants. Officials said the “worst of the worst” would be detained there, including members of the feared Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

But a Miami Herald review of 18 cases found that six of the migrants appear to have no previous record, and an additional five were only charged with illegal entry into the U.S. and sentenced to time served. Several were detained during scheduled appointments with border authorities for those seeking asylum or legal entry, relatives of detainees said, or never spent time in the U.S. outside of detention. Only two were convicted of felonies – one for illegal reentry into the U.S. and the other for conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants. Another faced felony charges for driving undocumented passengers and evading arrest but wasn’t convicted. At least one of the 178 detainees is 19 years old.

“If the administration is looking for the worst of the worst,” said Leonard Morales, a Texas-based criminal defense attorney, referring to a man he represented who was charged with a felony and sent to Guantanamo, “this is more the mundane of the mundane.”

Since early February, government agencies have declined to release the names of the detainees. Relatives have not known if their loved ones were in Venezuela, in another detention facility, or Guantanamo.

“I’m here talking with you, but my mind is over there thinking, what are they doing?” Doris Arape told reporters last week, after she recognized her 21-year-old son’s curly hair in government photos of the first arrivals at the naval base. “If he has eaten, if he drank water, if they hit my son, if they hurt him, if he’s alive.”

On Feb. 20, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flew 177 detainees from Guantanamo to Honduras. From there, the Venezuelan government transported them to their home country.

Some of the men described the harrowing conditions they faced to their relatives and to Herald reporters. They launched a five-day hunger strike in the prison, abstaining from food and water in protest, one man said. On Monday, CNN reported that the Trump administration has halted plans to use tent camps to house detainees in Guantanamo over concerns they might not be up to national detention standards.

They were the first immigrants to be detained in Guantanamo under Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

They will likely not be the last.

Federal officials said in court filings that the majority of men were held in a prison used for suspected terrorists, and that U.S. Army military police served as guards. One man told the Herald they were left in single cells for nearly their whole time in detention.

“We spoke from cell to cell,” Yoiner Jose Purroy Roldan, 21, recalled. “And prayed to God to help us.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not confirm any names nor respond to Herald questions about what criteria the government is using to send migrants to Guantanamo or its plans for people sent there. All the men had final deportation orders, an agency spokesperson told the Herald, adding that “all of these individuals committed a crime by entering the United States illegally.”

Asked by reporters at a press conference on Tuesday about a Washington Post story in which men described isolation and suicide attempts during their time at Guantanamo, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “these are criminals.”

“If you invade our nations borders, if you break our country’s laws, and if then you further commit heinous brutal crimes in the interior of our country, like raping and murdering innocent law-abiding women, and girls, and committing heinous acts of violence, you are going to be deported from this country and you may be held at Guantanamo Bay,” she said.

Crossing into the U.S. illegally is a misdemeanor, and illegal reentry can be charged as a felony. But showing up at ports of entry — including with scheduled appointments through a mobile app the Trump administration shut down — and seeking asylum are not crimes. Deportation hearings are civil proceedings and repatriations are not a criminal punishment. Still, the Trump administration has taken the stance that all undocumented immigrants, regardless of how they came to the U.S, are criminals.

On Feb. 9, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked on CNN about the men in Guantanamo, and her visit to the base two days before. She described watching a flight land at the base on Feb. 7, and seeing 15 men walking out.

“Those were mainly child pedophiles,” she said. “Trafficking drugs.”

Photos taken by the New York Times of her visit show a young man being escorted into a van, his hands in shackles. The photos were circulated in Venezuela, and by Noem herself on X.

In Bogota, Colombia, Yohana Roldan, who is Venezuelan, recognized him as her son, Purroy Roldan. Government documents in Venezuela show he has no criminal record in his home country. He left to support his family and young daughter, she said.

“I don’t understand why he had to go through this whole process,” Roldan said.

Venezuela to El Paso

When Luis Augusto Urbaez Urbina told his mother in 2023 that he wanted to make the difficult journey from Venezuela to the United States, she begged him to stay.

“I told him not to go, that one never knows” what will happen, Fanny Urbina, 51, told reporters on a phone call from Caracas. She remembered his response: “Mom, I’m going to buy you a house.”

Urbina was assaulted in a robbery two decades ago that left one person dead, she said. She underwent surgery, but soon began to have convulsions and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Her anti-seizure medication costs $30 a pill, and Urbaez Urbina, the eldest of her four children, was not making enough as a delivery driver in recent years. He decided to search for work in the U.S. in September 2023.

Urbaez Urbina, 24, surrendered himself to border authorities in 2023, and began working fixing up cars and whatever other jobs he could find, his mother said. But in June 2024, police arrested him for driving with undocumented passengers. Attorneys who represented him said he faced felony charges for human smuggling, but he was never convicted. His family said that he was taken into ICE custody, before ultimately being sent to Guantanamo.

Many of the men sent to Guantanamo had left their homes because of the lack of food, jobs, or healthcare. At least four of the detainees whose families spoke with the Herald are fathers to children 5 years old or younger. Another is a 39-year-old father to four children. Venezuela has suffered through a political, economic and humanitarian crisis described by some – and once President Trump himself – as the worst in the Western Hemisphere. Over 7.7 million people have fled, with many settling in neighboring countries like Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.

Since entering office, Trump has ended programs that allow Venezuelans to legally enter and stay in the United States. He suspended the U.S. refugee program; shut down a mobile app to schedule appointments with border authorities; ended a parole process that allowed vetted Venezuelans to legally live and work in the United States for two years; and terminated deportation protections through Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Venezuelans already here.

Yohana Roldan also remembered her son making promises to her before he left.

“The day that I get into [the U.S.], everything will go well for you,” she said he told her. “You won’t need anything.”

In October 2023, Yoiner Jose Purroy Roldan began his journey to the United States, determined to find a better life for himself and his family, including his daughter, now aged 3. After leaving Venezuela, he made his way through the dangerous Darién Gap, the stretch of jungle that connects Colombia to Panama. Criminals “rob people and rape women” in the wilderness, he said. He crossed Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, he waded through a river and turned himself over to border authorities in November 2023. He spent over two months in detention before being sent to southern Mexico, he said. From the Mexican capital, he waited for his scheduled appointment with border authorities in September 2024. But once he arrived in the U.S, he was detained in Texas, he said.

On Feb. 7, he and other Venezuelan men in ICE detention in El Paso were awakened and told they were going back to Venezuela, Purroy Roldan said. They were transported to Miami and put aboard a military plane – and realized they were actually going to Guantanamo.

‘We wanted answers’

For some family members, it was as though their loved ones had vanished. The daily calls from U.S. detention centers stopped. The ICE government website suddenly showed their relative in an unknown location in Florida.

Fanny Urbina found out her son had been transferred after his calls stopped, and she saw his location changed to Florida. “I am desperately searching for him,” she told reporters the day before he was deported to Honduras, and then back to Venezuela.

“Give us back our sons. They are really young men, who can study, can keep moving forward,” she said. “It’s unjust, what is happening, very unjust.”

Emely Romero, the wife of Deiby Jose Orellana, 31, one of the men who was detained in Guantanamo, sought any way to help him. She lives in Bogota with their three-year-old son.

“If I had the opportunity to investigate, to question, believe me I would. What do I have to do? Where do I have to go for them to give me, I don’t know, at least a sign of life from him?” Romero said on Feb. 14. “But what can I do?”

Officials claimed in court documents on Feb. 20 that none of the Venezuelan migrants in Guantanamo ahd requested a phone call with a lawyer – but Purroy Roldan said that wasn’t true. They requested lawyers, he said, but were told there were no phones.

Purroy Roldan described the facility he was held in as a prison. Court records show the majority of the Venezuelans – 127 – were placed in Camp VI: the prison at the base used to incarcerate suspected terrorists in conditions that have been criticized by international human-rights organizations like Amnesty International. The rest were detained in a lower security facility, where U.S. officials have long processed asylum claims and resettlement to third countries for Cuban and Haitian immigrants the Coast Guard apprehended at sea.

In Guantanamo, the men ate meals that “didn’t fill even half their stomachs” and slept with thin sheets, Purroy Roldan said. He said the lights were on 24 hours a day, cameras watched their every move, and the guards hit one of his friends. The detainees couldn’t use the restroom in privacy, he said. Soldiers who watched over them would swear at them when they spoke, he said, so he spent most of his time in detention in silence. The conditions led the men to start the hunger strike.

“We wanted answers, we wanted a phone call, and they didn’t want to pay attention to us,” he said, adding he lost nearly 20 pounds in less than two weeks in Guantanamo.

Purroy Roldan was among the men the federal government, without evidence, singled out publicly as being part of the Tren de Aragua gang. It’s a claim he and his family vehemently denied. After outlets such as the Washington-based Migrant Insider profiled several individuals, and The New York Times obtained a list of 53 names, DHS officials doubled down on social media, claiming that individuals featured were gang members, without publicly sharing any evidence.

Families of the men detained wondered if their relatives were profiled for their tattoos or for simply being Venezuelan. Many of the men had tattoos that their families said are unconnected to gangs: roses, clocks, stars, crowns or relatives’ names. Public safety agencies in the U.S. have linked some of these symbols to Tren de Aragua, but tattoo artists also highlight them as common body art. U.S. authorities have long used tattoos to link criminals to gangs, including Tren de Aragua. The tattoo motifs of the Venezuelan gang, however, are not as clear cut as those of other criminal organizations, like El Salvador’s MS-13.

“I felt like we were paying for someone else’s broken dishes, paying the consequences of others while we had come to this country to work and do things right,” Purroy Roldan said.

Biking on the wrong side

Noem, talking to CNN on Feb. 9, portrayed the migrants sent to Guantanamo as the “worst of the worst that we’ve pulled off of our streets.” But many of the men were transferred to Guantanamo from a detention center in El Paso, Texas, where some had been detained for as long as a year and a half.

Five men pled guilty to a misdemeanor for “improper entry,” according to a Herald review of court documents, and were sentenced to time served. One man pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants. Another was charged for a misdemeanor for shoplifting at Target, which his family say was a misunderstanding. Court records show the case as pending. One man pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for domestic violence in December 2024.

Another was arrested for riding his bicycle the wrong way on the street in July 2024 in Texas, and placed into ICE custody. ICE found that he had been previously removed from the U.S. to Mexico, according to court documents. He pleaded guilty to a felony for illegal reentry to the country.

Sherilyn Ann Bunn, an attorney in Texas, represented him and another man, Mayfreed Duran Arape, who was detained during a scheduled appointment with authorities in July 2023. Duran Arape was later convicted of a misdemeanor for assaulting or resisting an officer during a riot at the El Paso Detention Center. His mother, Doris Arape said that he was defending a friend during the riot. Duran Arape had no criminal history in Venezuela, according to government documents his family provided to the Herald.

“Who is accountable for my son? No one,” Doris Arape said. “My son is not a criminal. He hasn’t killed or raped anyone, nothing for them to treat him this way.”

Bunn called the transfer of her two clients “a waste of time, money and resources.”

“I’ve represented hundreds of individuals in federal and military courts-martial over the course of my career, many of whom faced charges for violent, heinous offenses,” Bunn said. The two men, she added, “are nowhere close to being ‘the worst of the worst.’”

‘A black box’

On Feb. 12, the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Refugee Assistance Project and several other immigrant and civil rights organizations sued the Trump administration for access to the detainees.

In the lawsuit, they said the government has legal responsibility to offer detainees in ICE detention access to legal counsel – a right granted to accused enemy combatants detained at the facility. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the organization was not prepared to trust the administration’s characterization of the migrants as “the worst” – and the public should not “have to take the administration at its word.”

Anwen Hughes, a human-rights lawyer with the advocacy group Human Rights First, also sued in federal court on behalf of the mother of a man who was detained in Guantanamo.

“They should have the same right to legal counsel, the same rights to communicate, the same rights to be free from arbitrary detention in violation of due process that they would have here in the United States,” she said. “That’s clearly not happening in practice.”

On Feb. 20, the Trump administration filed a response to the ACLU lawsuit. In it, officials argue that detainees with final deportation orders – like the Venezuelans in Guantanamo – are not entitled to the same due process protections as those seeking protections like asylum during deportation hearings. The men mentioned in the lawsuit were given access to legal counsel on Feb. 17, the document said. A top Navy official testified in the filing that a notice about how to contact an attorney was posted at the detention center and prison in English and Spanish on Feb. 19 – weeks after the first migrants arrived.

Juan Agudelo, a top ICE official in Miami, said in a sworn statement that detainees in Guantanamo have access to private phone calls and that mail to and from lawyers would be delivered to Guantanamo on a weekly basis. But he claimed that none had asked DHS officials to speak to a lawyer. One man who was detained in Guantanamo told the Herald they did request lawyers.

The decision to send migrants to Guantanamo is “unprecedented,” said Kimberly Grano, a staff attorney for litigation at the International Refugee Project. Grano and other lawyers raised concerns about what the facility would look like as the administration expands it. She described the base as “a black box.”

“It appears to be a means of sending a message that, you know, no cruelty is off limits for this administration and its treatment of immigrants,” she said. “The reality is that it’s already resulted in incredible harm to these people.”

Last week, a passenger plane landed in the Caracas night carrying 177 men who had been held in Guantanamo. Wearing gray sweatsuits and red face masks, they walked in single file back into the country where their long migration had begun. Some lifted their arms, as if in victory.

But once they got home, at least one of them sought out treatment from a mental health professional. The mother of another said that her son needs to get help. The last thing that he had told her from an ICE facility in El Paso was that he if he remained in detention, he was going to kill himself. He was among the first sent to Guantanamo on Feb. 4, and spent over two weeks at the U.S. Navy base.

Yoiner Jose Purroy Roldan said it felt good to be back with his family, speaking with reporters from Caracas on Monday. He said he felt a little more comfortable, and his mind “is already clearer.”

“We immigrated for a better life for our families. Well, to fight for one,” he said. “But the truth is that they took many things from us, treating us like criminals.”

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Miami Herald staff writers Ana Ceballos and Grethel Aguila contributed to this story.

This story was produced with financial support from the Esserman Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.