President Donald Trump on Jan. 29 signed a memorandum to prepare Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to house illegal immigrants, according to the White House.
“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.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad ... so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”
Trump said that Congress needs to provide financial support to “remove record numbers of illegal aliens.”
The president first mentioned the idea of using the prison to house illegal immigrants during a speech on Jan. 27 at his Doral golf club, where House Republican members were holding their annual retreat.
At the time, he said he was hoping to get approval to remove illegal immigrants from the United States and have them placed in a “foreign land and maintained by others for a very small fee.”
This would be more economical than keeping them in U.S. prisons, he said.
Following the White House event, newly sworn-in Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that the White House is working on utilizing the resources currently available at Guantanamo Bay.
The costs associated with operating these detention centers could be addressed through the reconciliation process in the House, she noted.
Speaking alongside Noem, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan stated that ICE would be running these centers.
“There’s already a migrant center there. It’s been there for decades. So we’re just going to expand upon the existing migrant center,” Homan said.
President George W. Bush established the Guantanamo Bay military prison on the Cuban coast in 2002 to detain foreign militant suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
The nation first leased the 45-square miles of land and water from the newly independent Cuban government in 1903, several years after U.S. forces and Cuban allies took control of the bay from Spain.
In 1964, Cuban leader Fidel Castro cut off water and supply access to the base after aligning with the Soviet Union and cutting diplomatic ties with the United States three years prior. Since then, the Guantanamo Bay Navy base has been self-sufficient, with its own power and water.
After President Barack Obama spent years pledging to shut the base down as a detention facility, Trump signed an executive order in 2018 keeping Guantanamo Bay open as a military prison.
