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South Florida officials react to Trump’s plans to send undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay
South Florida officials react to Trump’s plans to send undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay
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President Trump on Wednesday announced he’s signing an executive order instructing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to prep Guantanamo Bay for use as a migrant detention facility for “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”The president made the announcement from the White House before he signed the Laken Riley Act, a new law that expands the mandatory detention of migrants to include noncitizens who are charged with burglary, larceny, theft or shoplifting. The law is named after a 22-year-old nursing student, Laken Riley, who was murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant. Mr. Trump said Guantanamo Bay has thousands of beds available, and “most people don’t even know about it.” “We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo.” It’s not clear how many beds Guantanamo has, or how Mr. Trump arrived at that number. The president has previously floated the idea of sending migrants with criminal backgrounds to be detained or imprisoned outside the U.S., although the logistics and legalities of such a feat remain unclear.
The base also includes a facility, known as the Migrant Operations Center, where U.S. immigration officials have screened some asylum-seekers intercepted at sea for years. That area is separate from the detention center, the post-9/11 military prison where the U.S. still holds 15 terrorism suspects. The U.S. military prison at Guantanamo was opened in January 2002 and was designated for War on Terror suspects.A relatively small number of migrants are housed there while they undergo interviews with asylum officers. Asylum-seekers who passed those initial interviews have been referred for resettlement in third countries like Australia. They are not allowed into the U.S. — a policy to deter maritime migration.The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan suggested today the president’s plan would expand the current facility.Going back early in history, the early 1990s, thousands of Haitians were detained inside the base, which included a notorious camp for those diagnosed with HIV, who were banned from entering the U.S. at the time.
The Guantanamo Bay executive order is one of a plethora of executive actions the president has taken related to immigration.Cuba, where Guantanamo Bay is located, did not respond favorably to the president’s remarks. Miguel Diaz-Canel, president of Cuba, called the move an “act of brutality,” according to a translation if his remarks. “In an act of brutality, the new U.S. government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory #Cuba, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” he wrote on X.
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Kathryn Watson
Kathryn Watson is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
