Washington: US President Donald Trump has signed a presidential memorandum to set up a 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay to detain “high-priority criminal aliens.”
The Guantanamo Bay facility, which has so far been used to hold terrorists, will now also house illegal immigrants with criminal records.
The signing took place on Wednesday, with Trump directing the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security to prepare the facility. According to the memorandum, he ordered the expansion of the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to accommodate “high-priority criminal aliens” and address related enforcement needs.
But a move to house tens of thousands of migrants at the base would again widen the Pentagon’s role in Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
“Today I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said at the White House.
He said the facility would be used to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. 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 Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And, tough.”
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then-U.S. President George W. Bush to detain foreign militant suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. There are 15 detainees left in the prison.
But the facility for migrants is separate from the detention center on the base.
On Tuesday, the U.S. military said that it would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.
The decision comes on top of U.S. military deportation flights of migrants out of the country and the deployment of just over 1,600 active-duty troops to the U.S. border with Mexico following Trump’s emergency declaration on immigration last week.
