A young Venezuelan who was deported back to his country said he was “traumatized” by his time in a U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Kevin Rodríguez, 22, is one of the 178 Venezuelan immigrants sent to Guantánamo this month, after President Donald Trump’s order to use the detention camp to speed up his administration’s goal of mass deportations.
In an exclusive interview with Noticias Telemundo, NBC’s Spanish-language sister network, Rodríguez detailed the conditions he said he experienced at the military prison during the two weeks he was detained before returning to Venezuela on Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to emails seeking comment about Rodríguez’s case and his allegations about the conditions in Guantánamo.
Rodríguez said the cobwebs and ants inside the approximately 6 by 9 feet cell gave the sense that the place had long been unoccupied. “Those cells were in very bad condition,” he said in one of the first personal accounts from a migrant detained there. “You could really see that no one had been there in a long time. They didn’t even clean them.”
He said a thin mattress separated him from the concrete bed top he slept on for 14 days, “enduring the cold.”
According to Rodríguez, detainees were taken out, in handcuffs, to shower every three days. “They searched us before we went into the shower,” he said. “When we came out, they searched us again.”
“The food was really bad and there was very little food,” Rodríguez said, adding he lost 9 pounds while he was there. “The last meal of the day was at 4 p.m. And then by 7, 8, 9 p.m., we were very hungry.”
On Jan. 29, the president ordered the Defense and Homeland Security departments to ready Guantánamo to detain 30,000 migrants. The Trump administration started flying immigrants there on Feb. 4, after announcing that Guantánamo would be housing the “worst of the worst.”
The number of immigration detainees without a criminal conviction or pending criminal charges has increased by more than 1,800 in the first two weeks of February, NBC News reported.
As of last week, there were 178 immigrants from Venezuela detained at Guantánamo. They had arrived in a military plane that transferred them from an immigration holding site in Texas.
At the time of the transfer, officials did not disclose the names of those being relocated; they were only described as Venezuelan citizens under final deportation orders. By withholding that information, Venezuelans like Nelson Rodríguez, Kevin Rodríguez’s father, lost track of their loved ones for weeks.
“Please help me,” Nelson Rodríguez told Noticias Telemundo on Feb. 15.
Built as a wartime prison in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Guantánamo is often associated with the idea of indefinite detention without a charge.
“Is not just me, but all those parents, all those relatives who have their children there and don’t know anything about them,” the father said.
Kevin Rodríguez said the uncertainty of not knowing how long he was going to be in Guantánamo ate away at him.
“That was what worried me the most, how long I was going to be there, how long my family was going to be without news of me,” he said.
All 178 detainees, except one, were put on a deportation flight to Venezuela, with a layover in Honduras, on Thursday. The remaining detainee was relocated to a detention facility in the U.S.
In a statement, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yvan Gil had requested the repatriation of citizens “unjustly” taken to Guantánamo.
According to Nelson Rodríguez, his son did not belong to Tren de Aragua. Kevin Rodríguez was handed over to immigration authorities after being arrested in El Paso, Texas, following an altercation with his girlfriend last year.
Kevin Rodríguez said that during his time in Guantánamo, everyone was treated the same regardless of whether they had a criminal record or not. To him, it felt more like they were “practically discriminated against for being Venezuelan.”
Rodríguez said there were people “who didn’t even have tattoos, people who really weren’t linked to any gang,” Kevin Rodríguez said. “They treated everyone the same.”
Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello was at the airport outside Caracas when the plane carrying Rodríguez and 176 other deportees landed at around 10 p.m. on Thursday.
After not knowing his son’s whereabouts, Nelson Rodríguez saw him on TV that night. Venezuelan state media was live at the scene showing the moment Kevin Rodríguez and the other Venezuelans returned from the U.S.
“I managed to see my son,” Nelson Rodríguez told Noticias Telemundo. “As one would say, my soul returned to my body.”
The Department of Homeland Security said that of the 178 detained Venezuelans, 51 had no criminal record, 126 had criminal records and 80 belonged to Tren de Aragua, one of the gangs Trump recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
While at the Caracas airport, Cabello said that all those returning would be subject to health checks and those with pending criminal charges would be placed in the hands of the courts.
“The United States says that there are people from Tren de Aragua (gang) and criminals. We checked the first group that were said to be from Tren de Aragua and there was no one from Tren de Aragua, not one,” Cabello added. “We are going to check the legal situation of each one of them. Those without a record will go home and we will take them, and we will take them with care.”
Kevin Rodríguez is now with his family in Barinas, Venezuela, figuring out how to “start from scratch in my country.”
“I really don’t think I’ll leave my country again,” he said, “because I was really traumatized by everything that happened.”
