30,000 migrants to be held at Guantanamo Bay

President Trump announced January 29 that he was signing an executive order to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare the notorious Guantanamo Bay migrant facility in Cuba to house 30,000 migrants deported from the US.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” the President 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.”

Trump added that sending migrants to Guantanamo would “double our capacity immediately,” and made the point that it was a “tough place to get out of,” according to The New York Times.

The US naval base in Guantanamo is separate from the high-security US prison for foreign terrorism suspects, reports Reuters.

It is already a detention center for migrants that has been used off and on for several decades and has been used as a place to hold Haitians and Cubans rescued at sea.

Matthew Bartlett, Republican strategist and former Trump advisor who resigned due to the January 6 Capitol riots, told the BBC that the move had come as a shock.

Referring to Trump as “the ultimate disruptor,” he said “This really is a last resort. It seems as if the President is now pushing this forward as something of a potential plan.”

“It seems to be nothing more than projection but with President Trump we have seen how projection can become a reality.”

As many as 40,000 migrants have been farmed out to private detention centers and local jails in recent weeks as official detention sites have filled up.

A facility with a capacity for 30,000 would ease Trump’s capacity problem and make it possible to maintain the hectic pace of migrant arrests.

More than 3,500 undocumented migrants have been detained since Trump took power on January 20, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Sweeping arrests have taken place across the US, including in New York, LA and Chicago, terrifying pockets of migrants, some of whom have chosen to keep a low-profile and are avoiding school and work, the BBC reports.

According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, no undocumented migrant “is off the table.”

Trump’s Guantanamo solution has been met with outrage, with Cuba condemning the initiative as an “act of brutality.”

Politicians, jurors and human rights organizations have also expressed horror that Trump would go to such extreme lengths to fulfill his campaign promise.

“Migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supports,” Head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vincent Warren, told The New York Times.

“Guantanamo is a black hole designed to escape scrutiny and with a dark history of inhumane conditions. It is a transparent attempt to avoid legal oversight that will fail,” said Lucas Guttentag, a Justice Department official in the Biden administration.

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