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Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to prepare the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to receive thousands of immigrants with criminal records.
The US president announced the plan from the White House on Wednesday, in a move that would massively expand the use of a facility that has been the destination for high-profile terrorism suspects since 2002.
The move comes as the Trump administration tries to rapidly implement a promised crackdown on undocumented immigrants, including the first raids in major cities and the deployment of troops to the Mexican border.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump 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 Guantánamo.”
Trump has been putting heavy pressure on countries including Mexico and Colombia to accept immigrants sent from the US back to their countries of origin, but his comments suggest some would be transferred to the military base in Cuba instead.
The president said he was asking the US departments of defence and the homeland security to “begin preparing” the Guantánamo Bay facility to house the migrants.
“This will double our capacity immediately, right? It’s a tough place to get out of,” Trump added. He later signed a memorandum to implement the plan.
“We’re going after these guys,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, speaking alongside Tom Homan, Trump’s border tsar.
Homan said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would run the facility in Cuba. “There’s already a migrant centre there, it’s been there for decades. So we’re just going to expand upon that existing migrant centre,” he said.
The US naval base at Guantánamo Bay has housed migrants in the past, including refugees from Haiti, but not on the scale Trump suggested in his comments on Wednesday. During his presidential campaign last year, he repeatedly pledged mass deportations targeting the estimated 11mn undocumented immigrants in the US, though administration officials have said the initial priority would be to deport those with criminal records.
The naval base on the island has been leased to the US by Cuba since 1903, and has continued to be used despite a decades-long economic embargo Washington has maintained on the island nation. The prison gained notoriety during the ‘war on terror’ for the US’s alleged torture and mistreatment of people held in the facility.