US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he would order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migration center at Guantanamo Bay to house up to 30,000 migrants, UNN reports, citing Reuters.
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The U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba already houses a migration center - separate from the U.S. maximum-security prison for foreign terrorism suspects - that has been used sporadically for decades, including to house Haitians and Cubans detained at sea.
But the decision to house tens of thousands of migrants at the base will again expand the Pentagon's role in Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.
"Today, I am also signing an executive order directing the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to begin preparing a 30,000-person migration center at Guantanamo Bay," Trump said at the White House.
He said the facility would be used to "detain the most dangerous illegal immigrants who threaten the American people. Some of them are so bad that we don't even trust countries to detain them because we don't want them to come back, so we're going to send them to Guantanamo Bay. That would immediately double our capacity, right? And, tough.
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The Guantanamo Bay detention facility was established in 2002 by then-U.S. President George W. Bush Jr. to hold foreign fighters suspected after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Fifteen prisoners remain at the prison.
But the migrant facility is separate from the detention center at the base.
The U.S. military said Tuesday it will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at Buckley Space Base in Colorado.
The decision came amid deportation flights by the U.S. military to remove migrants from the country and the deployment of just over 1,600 active-duty troops to the U.S. border with Mexico following Trump's emergency declaration on immigration last week.