ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
The White House is touting the first month of its immigration crackdown as a big success, but there are still big questions about whether the reality on the ground matches the Trump administration's narrative. Many of those questions have to do with the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Trump administration says it's now removed all of the Venezuelan migrants who had been detained there. NPR's Joel Rose covers immigration and joins us now. Hi, Joel.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hey, Adrian.
FLORIDO: So what is the latest, Joel? Where are these Venezuelan migrants now?
ROSE: Lawyers for the Trump administration said in a filing last night that all 178 Venezuelan migrants who were being held at Guantanamo have been removed and that all but one are on their - were on their way headed back to Venezuela. They were initially flown to Honduras, where the Venezuelan government met them and then flew them on to Venezuela. They landed last night around 10 p.m. local time.
FLORIDO: The Trump administration said, Joel, that it was sending the worst of the worst criminal immigrants to Guantanamo. What do we know now about these migrants who have just been returned home?
ROSE: Yeah, Trump officials have said everyone that they transferred to Guantanamo was a hardened criminal, but we have now learned that is not true. In court filings this week, the administration said that nearly 30% of the detainees who are - were considered, quote, "low-threat illegal aliens," unquote. And family and friends of the men detained had also been pushing back against that narrative.
What many of the men seem to have in common is that they had tattoos, and some family members think that is why they wound up at Guantanamo. Trump administration officials say these men all had final orders of removal and that many of them were members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has now designated as a terrorist organization, but it now appears almost a third of them were not.
FLORIDO: And Joel, do we know why these men were sent home so abruptly?
ROSE: No, in a word, but the timing definitely suggests that the administration is trying to head off a lawsuit that was brought by the ACLU and other immigrant advocates, which is questioning whether it is legal to hold immigration detainees in Guantanamo.
It's not clear if the administration intends to bring more detainees there or not, but I think we can say that it is very expensive and logistically complicated to put detainees in Guantanamo, especially when many of them had already been in detention during the Biden administration and potentially could have been flown directly from the U.S. to Venezuela now that the country has begun accepting migrants back.
So to the administration's critics, it looks like this is all about optics - that these migrants were used essentially as props in a public relations operation to create visuals of migrants arriving in Guantanamo on military planes.
FLORIDO: Joel, let's step back a bit. The Trump administration is saying that the president's immigration crackdown has been a huge success so far, but is that lining up with reality, with what we're seeing on the ground?
ROSE: I think it's a mixed bag. I mean, the administration has been talking a lot about the southern border this week because illegal crossings declined in January to their lowest level in years. Although we should note that crossings already dropped significantly last year under President Biden, after reaching record levels earlier in his term. But in other ways, we are seeing some gaps between the narrative that the Trump administration is pushing and the reality on the ground. And one place where I think you see that is with arrests of immigrants without legal status in the interior of the country.
FLORIDO: What do the numbers tell us there?
ROSE: Yeah, the White House has said that they want to see at least 1,200 arrests per day, but the reality in recent weeks is that ICE has not been able to deliver that many. According to data published by the Department of Homeland Security, ICE has been falling short of those goals. In the first week of February, it was arresting fewer than 600 people a day. And today, we saw the White House shaking up the leadership at ICE and removing the acting director from his post.
FLORIDO: Finally, Joel, what do we know about how the public is reacting to the president's immigration policies so far?
ROSE: NPR and Ipsos have done some polling on this, and we saw that Americans are deeply divided along partisan lines. There is some support for tougher restrictions. For example, President Trump's call for mass deportation of all the immigrants in the U.S. without legal status - we see a plurality of Americans in support of that, 44% in favor to 42% against.
But when you dig down into the details of President Trump's plans, the support starts to get smaller. For example, detaining migrants at Guantanamo Bay or allowing immigration authorities to make arrests in schools and churches and hospitals, so-called sensitive locations - both of those policies were supported by less than 40% of Americans in our poll.
FLORIDO: We've been speaking with NPR correspondent Joel Rose. He's covering immigration for us. Thanks for joining us.
ROSE: You're welcome.
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