The Trump administration on Thursday transferred all of the Venezuelan migrants it had brought to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, suddenly emptying a detention operation that it had just as abruptly started this month.

Two passenger planes operated by Global X, a charter aircraft company, flew to the naval base Thursday morning and shuttled most of the migrants to an airfield in Honduras. They were to then be put aboard a Venezuelan plane.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, said 177 migrants had been transferred to Venezuelan custody, and one had been brought back to an immigration facility in the United States. In a declaration filed in court earlier Thursday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had said 178 Venezuelans were at the base. The transfers cleared out the migrants at a time when the operation has raised numerous questions about whether the government had legitimate legal authority to take people from ICE facilities in the United States to the base in Cuba for continued detention.

— The New York Times