Trump Says U.S.
Will Hold Migrants at Guantánamo Bay Concentration Camp for Iraq War
The president
suggested 30,000 migrants could be housed on the base. It is unclear how the
plan will take shape.
[ABS News Service/30.01.2025]
President Trump on Wednesday
ordered his administration to prepare to house tens of thousands of “criminal
aliens” at the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, the latest prong in his widening
crackdown on immigration.
Mr. Trump did not offer details
on how the plan would take shape, but he instructed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to get the site ready.
“We have 30,000 beds in
Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American
people,” he 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 Guantánamo.”
He said the move would “double
our capacity immediately,” adding that Guantánamo was a “tough place to get out
of.”
In recent weeks, about 40,000
immigrants have been held in private detention centers
and local jails around the country as funding constraints have limited the
number of detention sites.
Adding 30,000 beds would
dramatically expand the government’s detention capacity. A site on the
45-square-mile base could hold those 30,000 deportees. That site is on the
opposite side of the body of water called Guantánamo Bay from the Pentagon’s
prison for terrorism suspects.
Successive administrations have
prepared fields on a remote section, near the airfield but far from the
population center, to accommodate tens of thousands
of migrants in a sprawling tent city.
The infrastructure was set up
starting in the mid-2000s to shelter Cubans and others from the region who had
been intercepted while fleeing their country. The Clinton administration had
tasked Guantánamo with the role in the 1990s. It was designed as a humanitarian
relief operation.
It was not immediately clear how
such an operation under Mr. Trump would be staffed, secured and what rights, if
any, the deportees would have at Guantánamo Bay. Civil liberties groups
expressed concerns.
Vincent Warren, executive
director of the Center for Constitutional Rights,
said Mr. Trump’s order sent a dark message that “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.”
Mr. Trump’s memo called for
expanding the Migrant Operations Center, which
currently occupies a small former barracks that has had capacity for up to 120
migrants but in recent years held at most dozens at a time. It is near empty
fields that could be transformed into a tent city.
Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border
czar, told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday that certain migrants
could be flown to the island, and that the operation would be run by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.
“The worst of the worst, the
significant public safety threats we can fly them,” he said.
U.S. military and Homeland
Security forces have periodically rehearsed how to handle a migrant crisis
at the site.
In the 1990s, the base was
overwhelmed by more than 45,000 people fleeing crises in both Haiti and Cuba.
They were housed in crude tent cities on the populated side of the base,
including on the current site of the Pentagon’s detention facility for
detainees in the war against terrorism. Today, that facility houses 15
prisoners and is staffed by 800 troops and civilians.
Starting with the George W. Bush
administration, the government created a new footprint for a future
humanitarian relief operation on the mostly empty side of the base.
During semiannual
drills for a humanitarian relief operation, the Southern Command typically flew
in a few hundred soldiers from Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to play
different roles.
The proposed site of the tent
camps could be surrounded with barbed wire, like the military did for the tent
camps of the 1990s, which housed both families and single men.
Deborah Fleischaker,
an ICE official during the Biden administration, said that detaining immigrants
at the base would be particularly difficult.
“Gitmo is very small and very
remote,” she said, using the military’s nickname for the site. “Moving
materials and people in and out would be a logistical nightmare. And the makeup
of who would be held there is very important. Only men? Women and children? If
women and children are there, the housing challenges become even more
difficult.”