Donald Trump stepped up his assault on migrants on Wednesday evening, announcing plans to hold detained immigrants at the notorious military prison at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.
Trump shared his vision for the Cuban prison before signing the Laken Riley Act. That law requires the detention of undocumented immigrants who have been accused of certain crimes. Expecting a glut of immigrants in detention, Trump signed a memo ordering the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to prepare the prison to hold 30,000 additional detainees.
“Most people don’t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Trump said. “That’s a tough place to get out of.”
The U.S. has operated a base at the site since 1903. The prison began operation in the wake of the September 11 attacks and has since been used to detain suspects accused of terrorism or declared enemy combatants. The prison and its practice of detaining people who have not been charged with crimes has been a regular sticking point in the years since. President Barack Obama campaigned on plans to close the detention facility, but that never came to fruition.
Guantanamo does house a migrant processing center already, but it doesn’t operate at anywhere near the scale of Trump’s request. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canal called the order an “act of brutality” and lambasted the United States for housing migrants “next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention.”
Newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth supported the move in a stop by Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show.”
“This is a temporary transit, which is already the mission of naval station Guantanamo Bay, where we can plus up thousands and tens of thousands if necessary, to humanely move illegals out of our country where they do not belong, back to the countries where they came from in proper process,” Hegseth said. “We’re ramping up for the possibility to expand mass deportations.”
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