President Trump on Wednesday introduced he is signing an govt order instructing the Pentagon and Division of Homeland Safety to prep Guantanamo Bay to be used as a migrant detention facility for “the worst felony unlawful aliens threatening the American folks.”
The president made the announcement from the White Home earlier than he signed the Laken Riley Act, a brand new legislation that expands the obligatory detention of migrants to incorporate noncitizens who’re charged with housebreaking, larceny, theft or shoplifting. The legislation is known as after a 22-year-old nursing pupil, Laken Riley, who was murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant.
Mr. Trump mentioned Guantanamo Bay has hundreds of beds accessible, and “most individuals do not even learn about it.”
“We’ve got 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst felony unlawful aliens threatening the American folks,” he mentioned. “A few of them are so dangerous we do not even belief the international locations to carry them, as a result of we do not need them coming again. So we will ship them out to Guantanamo.”
It isn’t clear what number of beds Guantanamo has, or how Mr. Trump arrived at that quantity. The president has beforehand floated the thought of sending migrants with felony backgrounds to be detained or imprisoned outdoors the U.S., though the logistics and legalities of such a feat stay unclear.
The bottom additionally features a facility, generally known as the Migrant Operations Middle, the place U.S. immigration officers have screened some asylum-seekers intercepted at sea for years. That space is separate from the detention heart, the post-9/11 army jail the place the U.S. nonetheless holds 15 terrorism suspects. The U.S. army jail at Guantanamo was opened in January 2002 and was designated for Battle on Terror suspects.
A comparatively small variety of migrants are housed there whereas they endure interviews with asylum officers. Asylum-seekers who handed these preliminary interviews have been referred for resettlement in third international locations like Australia. They don’t seem to be allowed into the U.S. — a coverage to discourage maritime migration.
The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan recommended right this moment the president’s plan would develop the present facility.
Going again early in historical past, the early Nineteen Nineties, hundreds of Haitians have been detained inside the bottom, which included a infamous camp for these identified with HIV, who have been banned from coming into the U.S. on the time.
The Guantanamo Bay govt order is one in all a plethora of govt actions the president has taken associated to immigration.
Cuba, the place Guantanamo Bay is positioned, didn’t reply favorably to the president’s remarks.
Miguel Diaz-Canel, president of Cuba, referred to as the transfer an “act of brutality,” in response to a translation if his remarks.
“In an act of brutality, the brand new U.S. authorities pronounces the imprisonment on the Guantanamo Naval Base, positioned in illegally occupied territory #Cuba, of hundreds of migrants that it forcibly expels, and can place them subsequent to the well-known prisons of torture and unlawful detention,” he wrote on X.
