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The US president introduced the plan from the White Home on Wednesday, in a transfer that might massively broaden using a facility that has been the vacation spot for high-profile terrorism suspects since 2002.
The transfer comes because the Trump administration tries to quickly implement a promised crackdown on undocumented immigrants, together with the first raids in major cities and the deployment of troops to the Mexican border.
“Now we have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst prison unlawful aliens threatening the American individuals,” Trump mentioned. “A few of them are so unhealthy we don’t even belief the international locations to maintain them. As a result of we don’t need them coming again, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”
Trump has been placing heavy strain on international locations together with Mexico and Colombia to settle for immigrants sent from the US again to their international locations of origin, however his feedback recommend some can be transferred to the army base in Cuba as an alternative.
The president mentioned he was asking the US departments of defence and the homeland safety to “start making ready” the Guantánamo Bay facility to home the migrants.
“This will double our capability instantly, proper? It’s a troublesome place to get out of,” Trump added. He later signed a memorandum to implement the plan.
“We’re going after these guys,” Kristi Noem, the homeland safety secretary, mentioned on the White Home on Wednesday afternoon, talking alongside Tom Homan, Trump’s border tsar.
Homan mentioned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement company would run the power in Cuba. “There’s already a migrant centre there, it’s been there for many years. So we’re simply going to broaden upon that current migrant centre,” he mentioned.
The US naval base at Guantánamo Bay has housed migrants previously, together with refugees from Haiti, however not on the dimensions Trump prompt in his feedback on Wednesday. Throughout his presidential marketing campaign final 12 months, he repeatedly pledged mass deportations focusing on the estimated 11mn undocumented immigrants within the US, although administration officers have mentioned the preliminary precedence can be to deport these with prison data.
The naval base on the island has been leased to the US by Cuba since 1903, and has continued to be used regardless of a decades-long financial embargo Washington has maintained on the island nation. The jail gained notoriety in the course of the ‘conflict on terror’ for the US’s alleged torture and mistreatment of individuals held within the facility.
