President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an order directing his administration to revive a migrant detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba to hold detained migrants while they await deportation.
Speaking at a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act — the first bill he has signed into law since becoming president — Trump said the facility would be used to warehouse detainees and massively increase the number of detention beds available for holding migrants after they are arrested by American immigration officials.
“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 declared while signing the Laken Riley Act into law.
“Most people don‘t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” he added. “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.”
The American military facility, which the US has controlled under the terms of an indefinite lease signed in 1903 and disputed by the current Cuban government, has previously been used to detain refugees from Cuba and Haiti during periods of high migration in the 1990s.
After Haiti’s government was overthrown in a 1991 coup, then-president Bill Clinton ordered refugees encountered at sea to be taken to the naval facility by the US Coast Guard. At the time, US government policy was to detain and repatriate Haitian refugees found at sea, and later, detain refugees who tested positive for HIV.
In 1994, the facility was used to house roughly 50,000 Cuban and Haitian migrants. The practice ended following a series of lawsuits, but the US base has also been used since 2002 to house War on Terror detainees captured in the early years following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, although only a small number remain in a purpose-built prison operated by the Department of Defense.
The idea of once more using Guantanamo Bay to house migrants may have occurred to the president, a frequent Fox News viewer, earlier on Wednesday after Fox & Friends morning show host Brian Kilmeade ended a discussion on revoking Venezuelan migrants’ temporary protected status by asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem if she planned on housing immigrants in a prison facility most known for housing 9/11 terror suspects.
Calling the Guantanamo Bay prison camp an “asset,” Noem said that the administration was “evaluating” that possibility but that it was ultimately President Donald Trump’s decision.
Hours after the idea was floated on Trump’s favorite morning show, the president revealed that he was indeed going to use the infamous prison camp to house tens of thousands of migrants — once again showing the Trump-Fox feedback loop in real-time.
The shocking revelation comes amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign that has already resulted in thousands of arrested immigrants, many of whom have no criminal record, Noem announced that she was revoking the Temporary Protected Status extension that had recently been granted to over 600,000 Venezuelan migrants.
The protection is intended to assist people who have come to the United States and cannot safely return to their country of origin due to natural disasters, armed conflicts, or political upheaval. In the case of Venezuela, residents have fled the country as its economy has collapsed amid President Nicolás Maduro’s autocratic rule, which has also resulted in the stifling of political dissent.
The cancellation of the extension would likely cause fear and confusion among Venezuelan migrants, immigration advocates told The New York Times. “By taking this action, Secretary Noem is throwing over 600,000 into a state of ongoing bureaucratic limbo. People will no longer have any certainty as to whether they can stay in the country legally through the end of the year,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said.
Fresh off joining her first ICE raid in which she referred to immigrants as “dirtbags,” Noem appeared on Fox & Friends on Tuesday to unveil her revocation of Venezuelans’ protected status, declaring that she was committed to deporting people who were in the United States illegally.
