Trump orders to send 30,000 illegal migrants to Guantanamo Bay

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to construct a huge migrant detention facility at Guantanamo Bay that could be used to hold up to 30,000 immigrants deported from the United States.

He said the facility at the US Navy base in Cuba, which would be separate from its high-security military prison, would house “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people”.

“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” he said. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”

Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan said the existing facility there would be expanded and run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He said the migrants could be transported there directly after being intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard.

Guantanamo Bay has long been used to house immigrants, a practice that has been criticised by some human rights groups. It is unclear how much the facility will cost or when it would be completed.

Trump’s announcement came as he signed the Laken Riley Act into law, which requires undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.

The bill, named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan migrant, was approved by Congress last week.

Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, called the plan “an act of brutality”. Cuba foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla condemned the move claiming the idea “shows contempt towards the human condition and international law”.

In a statement on social media platform X, he slammed the “US government’s decision to imprison migrants at the Guantánamo Naval Base, in an enclave where it created torture centers and indefinite detention”.

The US naval base outpost already has a facility used to house migrants known as the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC) which is separate from the high-security prison for foreign terrorism suspects established in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.