Trump team plans to send thousands of migrants to Guantanamo starting as soon as this week

Yahoo

a day ago

The Trump administration is planning to dramatically ramp up sending undocumented migrants to Guantanamo Bay starting this week, with at least 9,000 people being vetted for transfer, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
That would be an exponential increase from the roughly 500 migrants who have been held for short periods at the base since February and a major step toward realizing a plan President Donald Trump announced in January to use the facility to hold as many as 30,000 migrants.
The transfers to Guantanamo could start as soon as Wednesday, the documents state. The expectation is that the detainees would be at the facility temporarily before being deported to their countries of origin.
The official reason for the transfers is to free up bed space at detention facilities on domestic American soil, but the use of the notorious facility, which has long housed terrorism suspects, would also send another signal aimed at deterring illegal immigration to the United States.
The plans have come together only in the last few days and could still change, the documents say. But the Department of Homeland Security may not notify the countries of the individuals affected in advance, according to the documents.
Spokespeople for DHS and the State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The discussions come as the White House presses Immigration and Customs Enforcement for higher arrest numbers, with senior policy adviser Stephen Miller calling for 3,000 arrests a day. The agency is also tight on detention space and pushing for funding from Congress to hire more agents and expand domestic detention capacity.
Some 800 Europeans — including one Austrian, 100 Romanians and 170 Russians — are being considered for the transfers, according to one of the documents. That element of the plan has alarmed some U.S. diplomats, who note that most European countries are American allies that are cooperative in taking back deportees and that there's no need to send the people to Guantanamo.
State Department officials who deal with Europe are trying to persuade DHS to abandon the plan.
'The message is to shock and horrify people, to upset people,' one State Department official familiar with the situation said of the Guantanamo plan. 'But we're allies.' The person was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
The plan also comes amid intensifying legal efforts to block the administration from using Guantanamo Bay to house immigrant detainees altogether. A federal class-action lawsuit pending in Washington indicates that there are roughly 70 immigrant detaineescurrently held there and facing 'punitive' conditions, such as insufficient food, weekly changes of clothes and rodent infestation.
'The government has identified no legitimate purpose that is served by holding immigrant detainees at Guantanamo, rather than at detention facilities inside the United States,' ACLU attorneys argue in the lawsuit. 'Instead, defendants are using the threat of detention at Guantanamo to frighten immigrants, deter future migration, induce self-deportation, and coerce people in detention to give up claims against removal and accept deportation elsewhere.'
The case is pending before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by President Donald Trump.
The U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay has for years held terrorism suspects detained after the 9/11 attacks. The Trump administration has been using the territory, which is on Cuban soil but has long housed a U.S. naval base, to hold migrants subject to deportation.
It is not clear how long people newly sent to Guantanamo would stay there before being sent to their home countries.
Since February, the U.S. has held approximately 500 migrants at the Guantanamo facility, according to last week's court filing. Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said last month that the use of the facility appears to cost $100,000 per day for each detainee.
During the peak of the war on terror, the U.S. held 780 people at the Guantanamo Bay facility. Pentagon officials were shocked by Trump's order in January to house some 30,000 people there. Many said they worried about tropical weather challenges, limited staff and access to medical treatment for migrants — as well as the broader challenges with balancing resources and financing as Trump uses the military to bolster border security.
The 45 square mile naval base, which the U.S. has leased since 1903, held 178 migrants in February, before the Trump administration abruptly transferred the Venezuelans from the facility that month. At the time, in a Feb. 20 court filing, the administration said the detention center would be used as a temporary holding facility.
'The removal also underscores that immigration detention at [Guantanamo Bay] is intended for temporary staging and not for indefinite detention, as Petitioners have suggested in their filings,' Justice Department lawyers said.
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.