U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay capable of housing up to 30,000 migrants.
The U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already hosts a migrant facility—distinct from the high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects—that has been used intermittently for decades to house migrants, including Haitians and Cubans intercepted at sea.
However, a move to house tens of thousands of migrants at the base would further expand 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 established in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush to hold foreign militant suspects following the September 11, 2001, attacks. There are currently 15 detainees remaining at the facility, but the migrant holding area is separate from the prison.
On Tuesday, the U.S. military announced it would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado. This decision follows U.S. military deportation flights and the deployment of over 1,600 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border after Trump’s emergency immigration declaration last week.