Trump to send 9,000 migrants to terrorist detention center
Donald Trump is set to send thousands more illegal migrants to the infamous terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay starting this week in an acceleration of his mass deportation plan. In February, Trump deployed members of the Armed Forces to expand the capacity of a detention facility at the Cuba base.
This week, at least 9,000 people are being identified for a potential transfer to the prison as early as Wednesday, Politico reported. Currently, around 500 migrants have been held at the jail known as 'Gitmo' for short stints in the past few months. These holds would also be temporary, as it would be a pit stop on the way to being deported to the country they came from.
However, it would reportedly send a message to foreign countries that America is closed to migrants who aren't willing to go through the legal process. A document obtained by the outlet said that several hundred Europeans - including over a hundred Russians and Romanians - that has the State Department worried. 'The message is to shock and horrify people, to upset people, but we're allies,' an anonymous State Department official familiar with the plans said. The White House also faces legal challenges to the policy.
The United States Navy announced that its combat ship USS St. Louis was moored at the Guantanamo Bay naval station and that the crew was supporting the expansion in February. Photographs showed members of the armed forces setting up army green tents and pounding large stakes into the ground to hold them up.
The first phase of the expansion is expected to increase the center's capacity to 2,000, according to the Navy, with plans to expand it to fit 30,000 migrants. The detention facility is widely known as the location for detained terrorism suspects in recent years, but the Trump administration has decided to expand it's use for detaining migrants scheduled for deportation.
Trump announced plans for his administration to detain as many as 30,000 high priority migrants with criminal records at the military base at Guantanamo Bay. Legal experts stress that detainees at Guantanamo Bay will still have legal rights afforded to them by the Constitution, as the Supreme Court defended terror suspects right to habeas corpus and a lawyer.
'The government's view at that time was that Guantanamo was sort of outside the parameters of the U.S. Constitution, and whoever was there had no rights, whatever. And the Supreme Court rejected that,' Eugene Fidell, Yale Law School military law expert noted. 'We don't want them coming back, so we're sending them to Guantanamo,' he said at the White House.
Trump's border czar Tom Homan (pictured) told reporters the administration would expand the capacity of the facility as the military has planned to erect temporary tents. 'We're just going to expand upon that existing migrant center,' Homan said.
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