By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 migrants.
The U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility – separate from the high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects – that has been used on occasion for decades, including to house Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.
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.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Writing by Jasper Ward and Idrees Ali; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alistair Bell)
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