Donald Trump signs bill to hold migrants in Guantanamo Bay

Donald Trump will order the construction of a facility to hold as many as 30,000 of the ‘worst criminal illegal aliens’ at Guantanamo Bay.

Donald Trump poses after signing the Laken Riley Act in the East Room of the White House. Picture: AFP.

Donald Trump plans to order the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to construct a facility for holding as many as 30,000 migrants at Guantanamo Bay.

The US Navy base in Cuba would be used to “contain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said. He didn’t offer further details.

“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump said of the migrants while signing of a bill passed in response to a murder by a migrant who was in the US illegally. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.”

Guantanamo Bay has been used in the past as a migrant detention center, including in the 1980s and ‘90s when thousands of Haitians were sent there, sometimes even after winning asylum cases. The Biden administration also used the facility to house a small number of migrants so they could be resettled to third countries.

Pentagon officials said they were unaware of the plan. Housing thousands of migrants would require construction of temporary housing and other facilities at the base.

The Cuban base is better known for its prison built to hold suspected terrorists. There are currently 15 prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, ranging in age from 45 to 63. Opened just after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the prison held nearly 800 people at its peak.

Hundreds of US troops are currently guarding the detainees at the base. No Americans are held at Guantanamo Bay and none of the prisoners now held there can be transferred to the US, under laws passed by Congress.

“We’re evaluating and talking about that right now,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said of the transfer of immigrants to the facility in eastern Cuba during a Fox News interview on Wednesday.

It wasn’t clear how long Trump plans to hold migrants at Guantanamo. Under existing law, the government isn’t allowed to detain migrants indefinitely on immigration offenses if it has no hope of deporting them. Venezuelans have fast become one of the largest populations of immigrants in the country illegally but Caracas has refused to take back deportees.

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it would detain migrants at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colo., but paused that plan Wednesday. A DHS spokeswoman, whose agency is responsible for running detention centers on military bases, wouldn’t give a reason.

The last two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, promised to close the detention facility but failed to do so. Trump in his first term closed an office that worked to release Guantanamo detainees.

Dow Jones