President Donald Trump, who made deporting illegal immigrants a central part of his campaign and presidency, said Wednesday that the United States will use a detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to hold tens of thousands of the "worst foreign criminals."
"We're going to send them to Guantanamo," Mr. Trump said as he signed the Laken Riley Act, which would deport illegal immigrants with criminal records. The law is named after Laken Riley, a student who was killed in Georgia by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
President Trump later signed a presidential memorandum saying he would direct federal officials to prepare facilities to hold immigrants with criminal records who are in the United States illegally. U.S. Border Patrol Agent Tom Homan said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would manage the facility. However, details of the plan were not immediately clear.
Below you can read a history of the United States naval base, known for short as "Gitmo".
How does the US government use the base at Guantanamo Bay?
While the United States naval base in Cuba is best known for sending terrorism suspects after the September 11, 2001 attacks, it has a small, separate facility that has been used for decades to hold detained immigrants.
The Migrant Operations Center is used for people caught trying to illegally enter the United States by boat. Most of them are from Haiti and Cuba.
The center occupies a small portion of the base and does not have the capacity to house the 30,000 people that President Trump says could be sent there.
"We're just going to expand that existing immigrant center," Mr. Homan told reporters.
The immigration detention center operates separately from the military detention center and courtrooms for aliens detained during the George W. Bush administration's "war on terror." The facility houses 15 detainees, including the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. At the height of the counterterrorism operation, the center housed nearly 800 people accused of terrorism.
Who will be held in Guantanamo?
The Guantanamo immigration detention facilities will be used for the "worst criminals," administration officials said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Mr. Homan used these words during a press conference outside the White House.
A White House statement was less specific, saying the expanded facility would "provide additional detention space for aliens with criminal histories who are in the United States illegally, which is the highest priority and to meet the needs of immigration enforcement."
An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the base would be used to house "dangerous criminals" and people who are "difficult to deport."
A number of countries are not accepting some immigrants that the United States is trying to deport.
President Trump has repeatedly spoken out about the dangers Americans face from the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. While immigrants are regularly accused of committing major crimes, they make up a small percentage of the overall population. Peer-reviewed academic studies have generally found no link between immigration and violent crime, although their conclusions vary.
What else is known about the Immigrant Operations Center?
Not much. The nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project said in a report last year that people are being held in “prison-like” conditions. The report says people at the center are “locked in a punitive system” indefinitely, with no accountability for the officials who run it.
Deepa Alagesan, a senior supervising attorney with the group, said Wednesday that the center is used to hold a small number of people.
She stressed that the possibility of using this center to house more immigrants is concerning.
"It's definitely a scary prospect," she said.
Does the United States have enough detention space for President Trump's plans?
President Trump has vowed to deport millions of people living in the United States illegally, but the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget has enough funds to arrest about 41,000 people.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains immigrants in its own centers, privately operated detention facilities, and federal and local jails. It does not have adequate space to detain families, who make up about a third of immigrants entering the country through the southern border.
During his first term, President Trump authorized the use of military bases to hold migrant children. In 2014, then-President Barack Obama temporarily relied on military bases to detain migrant children while expanding family detention centers operated by private companies to hold many of the tens of thousands of Central American migrant families caught crossing the border illegally.
US military bases have been used repeatedly since the 1970s to house waves of immigrants from Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
What do lawyers say about the September 11, 2001 cases?
The decision to send immigrants to Guantanamo "should horrify us all," said a legal defense center that has represented dozens of detainees held at the US base since the September 11 attacks.
President Trump's order "sends a clear message: immigrants and asylum seekers are seen as the new terrorist threat, deserving of being thrown into an island prison, cut off from legal and social services and supports," Vince Warren, executive director of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement.
The United States has leased Guantanamo from Cuba for more than a century. Cuba objects to the lease and routinely refuses rent payments from the United States.
Government officials criticized the news on Wednesday. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, in a message on the X platform, called the decision "an act of brutality" and stressed that the base "is located in illegally occupied Cuban territory."
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said in a post on the social network X that "The US government's decision to imprison immigrants at the Guantanamo naval base, in an area where it created torture and indefinite detention centers, shows a contempt for human rights and international law."/ VOA (A2 Televizion)
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