President Donald Trump ordered his administration to send tens of thousands of illegal migrants to Guantanamo Bay to help aid in his large-scale detention and deportation operation.
For more than two decades, the Cuba-based Guantanamo Bay Naval Base has been used to hold suspected terrorists. While speaking at a ceremony for the signing of the Laken Riley Act, the president revealed that he would also be ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD) to construct a facility at the base to hold as many as 30,000 illegal migrants in an area distinct from where suspected terrorists are currently detained.
This is not the first time the U.S. has utilized Guantanamo Bay for migrant detention. The Clinton administration previously housed thousands of Haitian nationals at the naval base during the 1990s, the Obama administration considered similar measures after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Biden administration also mulled the idea.
“Today, I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said Wednesday. “Most people don’t even know that we have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo,” he continued. “This will double our capacity immediately.”
The White House issued a memorandum ordering DHS and DoD secretaries to “take all appropriate actions” to expand detention capacity for high-priority criminal aliens living illegally in the United States.
The move highlights the administration’s reliance on military assets to help facilitate its ambitious immigration enforcement agenda. Since re-assuming office, Trump has ordered troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and is utilizing military aircraft in the deportation of illegal migrants.
While critics of the Laken Riley Act have argued that the law — which calls for the detention of illegal migrants accused of certain crimes, including theft — will result in migrant holding centers being overwhelmed, the move to use Guantanamo Bay would dramatically increase the country’s migrant detention capabilities.
Not everyone is happy with the announcement. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, a communist leader whose regime has routinely engaged in human rights violations, called the move “an act of brutality.”
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