News

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/22433558

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would sign an executive order to begin preparing a facility on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to detain tens of thousands of “the worst” undocumented immigrants.

The order, which Trump said he would sign later Wednesday, will instruct the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to prepare 30,000 beds at the site of the infamous U.S. military prison in Cuba, the president said, “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 gonna send them out to Guantanamo,” Trump said.

“This will double our capacity immediately,” he said, calling it “a tough place to get out of.”

Trump’s remarks came just before he signed the Laken Riley Act, a hardline immigration measure pushed through with some Democratic support — and the first law the president has signed in his second term.

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base — both a military base and the site of a controversial U.S. military prison that has held terrorism suspects for more than two decades — housed Hatian refugees in the 1990s, before the detention facility was built there. Cubans were also housed there in the 1990s, and former President Joe Biden last year explored plans to house Haitians there if the nation’s precarious government collapsed.

But other presidents who held refugees on the base, or considered doing so, cast their plans as emergency humanitarian measures, rather than harsh deterrents.

The 45-square-mile land and water base, on the southeastern portion of Cuba, has been controlled by the U.S. since 1903 and has long been a thorn in the side of Cuba’s communist government, which resents the U.S. presence on the island. In addition to housing the military prison, whose detainee population had shrunk to 15 people by the end of the Biden administration, the base is used by the Navy as “a key operational and logistics hub, supporting a variety of missions including maritime security, humanitarian assistance, and joint operations,” according to The Navy.

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for additional details on the contents of the executive order or when Trump would sign it.