Unlock the White House View Newspaper FREE
Your guide to what the 2024 American elections mean for Washington and the world
Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to prepare the US naval base in the Gulf of Guantánamo, Cuba to receive thousands of immigrants with criminal data.
The US president announced a plan from the White House on Wednesday, in a move that would massively expand the use of a facility that has been the destination to suspect high profile terrorism since 2002.
The measure comes as the Trump administration tries to rapidly implement a promised blow to non -documentary immigrants, including the first raids on large cities and the placement of troops on the Mexican border.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to stop the worst illegal criminal aliens that threaten the American people,” Trump said. “Some of them are so bad. We don’t even trust the places to keep them. Because we don’t want them to come back, so we’ll send them to Guantánamo.”
Trump has put heavy pressure on countries including Mexico and Colombia to accept immigrants sent by the US to their countries of origin, but his comments suggest that some will be transferred to the military base in Cuba in the country.
The president said he was asking the US Defense Departments and the safety of the homeland to “start preparing” the Guantánamo Bay facility to accommodate migrants.
“It will double our capacity right away, right, is it a hard place to go out,” Trump added. He later signed a memorandum to implement the plan.
“We’re going after these boys,” said Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, speaking with Tom Homan, Trump Tsar’s border.
Homan said the immigration and customs implementation agency would run the building in Cuba. “There is already a migrant center there, it has been there for decades. So we will simply expand to that existing migrant center,” he said.
The US naval base in the Gulf of Guantánamo has housed migrants in the past, including refugees from Haiti, but not to the extent Trump suggested in his comments Wednesday. During his presidential campaign last year, he constantly promised mass deportations aiming at the estimated 11 million non -documents to the US, though administration officials said the initial advantage would be to expel those with criminal data.
The marine base on the island has been rented at the US from Cuba since 1903, and has continued to be used despite an economic embargo for decades of Washington has preserved the island site. The prison gained famous fame during the ‘fight against terror’ for the alleged US torture and the mistreatment of people held in the facility.
