“This administration is just getting started down in Guantanamo Bay,” Hamadeh tweeted Wednesday, linking to an interview with Real America’s Voice. “The goal is to ramp up capacity to 30,000 illegal immigrants and ensure that America is protected while these criminals are quickly processed and deported back home.”
This administration is just getting started down in Guantanamo Bay, where they currently have TWO facilities to house illegal immigrants,
— Office of Congressman Abe Hamadeh (@RepAbeHamadeh) March 13, 2025
One is for serious threats.
The other for lower level.
The goal is to ramp up capacity to 30,000 illegal immigrants and ensure that America… pic.twitter.com/5exrQWGPDn
If by “just getting started,” Hamadeh really meant “winding down completely,” he’d be exactly right. Five hours before Hamadeh’s tweet about the supposedly burgeoning effort to hold undocumented immigrants at the infamous military base — which was previously used to hold suspected terrorists — Fox News reported that no migrants were being held there anymore and that no more are expected to arrive.
“All 40 migrants held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been sent back to the United States and are now being held in Louisiana, according to two U.S. defense officials,” Fox News Pentagon reporter Liz Friden tweeted. “There are currently no migrants being held at Gitmo, and no flights scheduled to arrive with more migrants.”
Hamadeh’s spokesperson, Lori Hunnicut, has not responded to questions about Hamadeh’s visit to the Cuba-set base, though a news story from the site Cactus Politics — which Hamadeh promoted in a tweet Thursday morning, a day after the Fox News report that no migrants remained there — says the visit occurred in the first week of March.
Hamadeh’s description of the setup at Guantanamo Bay doesn’t appear to be inaccurate. In the interview with Real America’s Voice, the freshman congressman described a high-security area for higher-risk detainees, such as those with serious felony convictions, and a set-up of tents for those with lower-level or no criminal offenses on their record.
Friden reported that the base indeed held 23 “high threat illegal aliens” and 17 other migrants. But she also reported that “none of the 195 tents set up have been used due to not meeting ICE standards” and that “the operation to build more tents was halted in February, several weeks after it started.” Notably, tent construction also stopped before Hamadeh visited.
To this point in his young congressional career, the 33-year-old Hamadeh has made more news by what he hasn’t said. Despite sitting on the House Committee for Veterans Affairs, Hamadeh has been largely silent on the Trump administration’s cuts to the Veterans Administration. He also has been mum on Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, which is the kind of citizenship Hamadeh himself enjoys.
This time, instead of keeping himself out of the conversation, Hamadeh has exposed himself as out of the loop.
“Operations are underway as we move forward with securing OUR homeland & returning dangerous criminals to THEIR own,” Hamadeh’s official account tweeted Thursday.
Unless their homeland is an immigration detention center in Louisiana, Hamadeh might want to check his sources.
