The U.S. will house migrants who entered the country illegally at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — the military prison where terrorism suspects have been kept for more than 20 years.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would sign an executive order directing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to “begin preparing” a 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said. “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 Guantanamo.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested on Fox News that the base’s golf course could be used to build housing for 6,000 deported migrants. He also said that the thousands of migrants planned for the new facilities would not be housed on the same side as the handful of military detainees still imprisoned on the base.
The base, which is operated by the U.S. Navy on the south eastern end of Cuba, has a fraught history as a U.S. military outpost that is tolerated but not recognized by the Cuban government. The base gained international attention, and some infamy, soon after 9/11as a military detention facility to house suspects of terror attacks against the U.S. and the site of Uniform Code of Military Justice hearings surrounding those incidents.
It would not be the first time that the U.S. used Guantanamo Bay to house migrants fleeing their countries for the U.S. In the 1990s, President George H W Bush sent tends of thousands of Haitians who came to the U.S. after the 1991 military coup to the Cuba base and in 1994, the base also housed 30,000 Cubans who tried to reach the U.S. by raft and other makeshift vessels.
The order specifically calls for DoD and DHS officials to “provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs.”
It’s unclear how many or what kind of U.S. troops will be part of the detention operation at the military base. Earlier this week, the Army announced that 111 military police soldiers from the New York National Guard deployed to Guantanamo Bay on Jan. 25 as part of regular rotations to “secure” the existing detention facility. Last week several military police companies were deployed to the southern U.S. in response to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border.
The announcement came during Trump’s signing of the Laken Riley Act, a bill meant to broaden the scope of immigrants able to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement including immigrants without legal status who have been arrested, face charges or been convicted of burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.
The U.S. military has so far used transportation aircraft to fly thousands of migrants from the U.S. into countries in South America. But to house migrants in the meantime at the American military base in Cuba, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy ships could “play a role” in transporting them between military bases, the Heritage Foundation noted in a report released Wednesday.
Several presidential administrations have pledged to shut down the military detention center where just over a dozen detainees remain imprisoned. In 2018, Trump signed an executive order to keep the facility open, reversing a decision by the previous Obama administration.
At one point, the facilities housed 680 prisoners in 2003 but in recent years, a small population of 15 detainees remain, including the masterminds behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as well as others who have never been officially charged by the U.S. with a crime.
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