30 January 2025 , 07:00
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President Donald Trump has vowed to send 30,000 of the ‘worst criminal illegal aliens’ to the US’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.
Trump on Wednesday said the facility at the US naval base in Guantanamo has thousands of beds to house migrants who are ‘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,’ he said.
‘This will double our capacity immediately, right?’
President Donald Trump said the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is a ‘tough place to get out of’. (Picture: AP)
He added that the facility is a ‘tough place to get out of’.
‘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.
The Guantanamo Bay detention center has been holding hundreds of people accused of terrorism and other crimes in high security prison style since 2002. It also has a separate facility that has housed migrants including Cubans and Haitians found at sea.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan later said that the existing facility will be expanded and run by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The migrant detention facility is separate from a high security prison housing people accues of terrorism and other crimes (Picture: Getty Images)
President Donald Trump signs the Laken Riley Act during an event in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday (Picture: AP)
The US Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already has a facility for holding migrants (Picture: Getty Images)
The president’s newly sworn in defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, called Guantanamo a ‘perfect place’ to detain migrants.
‘This is not the camps,’ Hegseth told Fox News. ‘This is a temporary transit, which is already the mission of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, where we can plus up thousands and tens of thousands, if necessary, to humanely move illegals out of our country where they do not belong back to the countries where they came from in [a] proper process.’
Trump announced his Guantanamo plans while at a ceremony to sign an immigration detention bill into law.
The Laken Riley Act, which received final approval from lawmakers a week ago, calls on ICE to detain illegal immigrants accused of crimes including burglary, theft, shoplifting and larceny. It was named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who out for a run when she was murdered by Jose Ibarra, an illegal migrant from Venezuela.