White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the first flights carrying illegal aliens to be housed at Guantanamo Bay were officially “underway.”
During an interview Tuesday on Fox Business, Leavitt told host Stuart Varney that President Donald Trump was not “messing around” with his plan to deport violent illegal aliens from the United States and return them to their home countries.
“He’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world,” Leavitt said.
“Venezuela as well has agreed to repatriation flights and Colombia also agreed to cooperate with the repatriation of illegal Colombian nationals that we have found in the interior of our country,” Leavitt added. “And I can also confirm that today the first flights from the United States to Guantanamo Bay with illegal migrants are underway.”
Leavitt also addressed New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy suggesting earlier this week about housing an undocumented immigrant in his home. The governor recently walked back his comments that he had invited an illegal immigrant to live with him.
“I will say that this administration will hold Democrat governors and leaders across the country accountable if they break the law, if they harbor illegal aliens, or if they are not abiding by the federal immigration laws,” Leavitt warned.
WATCH:
🚨 🔥 Karoline Leavitt confirms that flights full of illegals to GITMO have already startedpic.twitter.com/K4QNWenvmQ
— Martin Walsh (@martinwalsh__) February 4, 2025
Leavitt shredded the legacy media on Monday night for the way it mocked President Trump and many conservatives during the height of the COVID pandemic when the president and others said they believed that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Her comments came after Trump’s new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, confirmed that intelligence indicates that the virus originated from the lab.
“Many years too late, the Biden administration had a chance to let the American people know the truth about that, and for some reason, they chose not to,” Leavitt said during a White House press briefing this week.
She mentioned how the media responded with ridicule when, in 2020, Trump veered from the accepted narrative that the virus originated from a bat.
“Many members in this very room mocked him for that, said he was spewing conspiracy theories. He was not,” she said, scolding the press. “We now know that to be the confirmable truth. It took many years for it to come out, but the president was right in this instance again.”
Ratcliffe discussed the discrepancy in an interview with Breitbart News.
“I know from conversations with the president about where his priorities are and where he wants things to be as it concerns foreign threats to America’s national security posture, and it starts with China,” Ratcliffe said. “One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID.”
“That’s a day-one thing for me,” he said. “I’ve been on record, as you know, in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”
Ratcliffe also revealed last week that Trump’s administration is exploring the idea of establishing a national laboratory, similar to the Manhattan Project, to drive the development and direction of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“When you talk about AI, one of the things I want to explore is whether we can expand and establish a national laboratory for the development of AI to help the U.S. government leverage emerging technology to make sure American leadership is that,” Ratcliffe said.
The former Texas lawmaker and federal prosecutor, who served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term and who was confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate, spoke about his plans to fulfill the president’s directive to depoliticize the world’s leading intelligence agency and refocus it on its core missions of intelligence gathering and providing the U.S. government with the most accurate national security information possible.
He suggested that Trump’s recent announcement of “Project Stargate,” a half-trillion-dollar initiative to advance AI, could be expanded to include additional public-private partnerships modeled after the Manhattan Project. Such efforts, he said, would position the U.S. ahead of its adversaries in the race for AI dominance, Breitbart noted.
“You saw this initiative the president discussed—Project Stargate—which is the four-year, $500 billion AI infrastructure project that’s been proposed with all of our great technology companies,” Ratcliffe said. “We could expand on that with a public-private partnership where a government element could participate, and we’ve done this before—our constellation of national laboratories can be traced back to the Manhattan Project, which we used as a public-private partnership to develop the first nuclear weapon to win World War II.
“We need to be thinking about the ways we can do that to counter how our adversaries are using things like the cyber threats to their strategic advantage and putting our national security interests in a place where we’re able to harness the data and computational speed of AI to understand trends and events and threats and opportunities faster than our adversaries do,” he added.