Latest news with #USNaval
Euronews
5 days ago
- Business
- Euronews
A UK politician turned himself into an AI chatbot. Here's how it works
Imagine being able to corral your local politician and grill them about their views, anytime you fancy – no appointments, no red tape. That's exactly what one British Member of Parliament has set out to achieve. Mark Sewards, a Labour Party politician who represents Leeds South West and Morley, has unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) clone of himself that is designed to answer questions and assist with constituents' queries around the clock. 'I'm very keen to explore how new technologies, such as AI, can help strengthen the connection between an MP's office and the constituents we serve,' Sewards said in a statement. He encouraged his constituents to 'give AI Mark a try' – but noted in an Instagram post that the tool isn't designed to replace his official duties. Rather, the idea is to provide a 24/7 service where constituents can raise local issues, ask about policy matters, or drop a message to their MP's office without waiting weeks for a formal reply. The bot 'simply gives people another option to contact me, any time of day,' Sewards wrote. How a tech firm cloned Sewards The Leeds-based startup Neural Voice developed Seward's AI twin, dubbing him the 'UK's first virtual MP'. The company says it uses cutting-edge neural voice synthesis and advanced natural language processing to help create voice AI assistants for phone systems and websites. It used voice recordings of Sewards in parliamentary sessions, social media profiles, and previous correspondences with constituents to create a digital double that mirrors his speaking style, tone, and mannerisms with uncanny accuracy, the company said. It hopes the new technology will make local politicians more accessible to their constituents. "For too long, politicians have been out of reach for their constituents,' said Jeremy Smith, Neural Voice's CEO and co-founder. 'The vast majority of people do not know the name of their MP, let alone their voice and what they stand for,' Smith added. He believes this technology could soon become par for the course, with other MPs and even businesses potentially following suit in a bid to bridge the communication gap. Digital doubles in politics and business AI is increasingly being deployed in public-facing roles to overcome physical barriers and create constant feedback loops. Last year, the mayor of a Japanese city, Yokosuka, created an AI avatar of himself to improve communication with the thousands of English-speaking US Naval personnel based there. Meanwhile, a political outfit in Denmark called the Synthetic Party created an AI candidate called 'Leader Lars' to stand in the country's 2022 elections, though the party did not win votes. The AI model, which the party says was fed with material from fringe political parties in Denmark dating back to 1970, was designed to engage with citizens who typically do not vote and to demonstrate AI's role in democracy. Companies in Poland and China have also experimented with having AI CEOs front their brands. Yet such tools can be repurposed to impersonate public figures without their approval, or to generate convincing fake personas that appear to be real public figures. High-profile deepfake scams have targeted Italian defense minister Guido Crosetto, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and several celebrities, including Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan, whose voices were used to promote a scam that promised people government funds. Deepfakes were created every five minutes in 2024, according to a report from think tank Entrust Cybersecurity Institute. Whether a digital doppelgänger can truly replace an in-person chat with a public figure remains to be seen, but back in the United Kingdom, Sewards believes it will be at least one promising option. 'The AI revolution is happening and we must embrace it or be left behind,' he said on the social media platform X.
Arab News
23-02-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
French aircraft carrier stages combat drills with Filipinos in disputed sea and visits Philippines
MANILA: France's nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and accompanying warships were in the Philippines on Sunday after holding combat drills with Filipino forces in the disputed South China Sea in a show of firepower that would likely antagonize China. The Charles de Gaulle docked on Friday at Subic Bay, a former US Naval base northwest of Manila, for a break after more than two months of deployment in the Indo-Pacific. The French carrier engaged with security allies for contingency readiness and to promote regional security, including with Filipino forces, navy ships and fighter jets. They held anti-submarine warfare drills and aerial combat training on Friday in the South China Sea, Philippine and French officials said. Last year, the French navy deployed a frigate for the first time to participate in a joint sail with United States and Philippine counterpart forces in and near the disputed waters. It was part of the largest annual combat exercises in years by American and Filipino allied forces. The drills, known as Balikatan (Tagalog for 'shoulder-to-shoulder'), involved more than 16,000 military personnel. China strongly criticized the exercises then, saying the Philippines was 'ganging up' with countries from outside Asia in an obvious reference to the US and its security partners, and warned the drills could instigate confrontation and undermine regional stability. France's recent and ongoing military deployments to the Philippines underscore its 'commitment to regional security and the shared goal of strengthening maritime cooperation in the Indo-Pacific,' Armed Forces of the Philippines spokesperson Co. Xerxes Trinidad said. The Charles de Gaulle, the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world other than those of the US Navy, led a strike group that included three destroyer warships and an oil replenishment ship in its first-ever visit to the Philippines, French officials said. France has been shoring up its military engagements with the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations at odds with China in the disputed waters, a key global trade and security route although it says those emergency-preparedness actions were not aimed at any particular country. China, however, has bristled at any presence of foreign forces, especially the US military and its allies, which carry out war drills or patrols in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety although it has not publicly released exact coordinates of its claim other than 10 dashed lines to demarcate vaguely what it calls its territory on maps. Beijing's claims overlap with those of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan in long-unresolved territorial standoffs. Indonesia has also figured in violent confrontations with Chinese coast guard and fishing fleets in the Natuna waters. Two weeks ago, Australia protested after a Chinese J-16 fighter jet released flares that passed within 30 meters (100 feet) of an Australian P-8 Poseidon surveillance jet over the South China Sea, according to Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles. The Australian military plane did not sustain any damage and no crewmember was injured in the Feb. 11 incident. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson accused the Australian aircraft of 'deliberately' intruding into airspace over the disputed Paracel Islands, which China and Vietnam contest. In late 2023, French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu and Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro signed an accord to boost military cooperation and joint engagements. France and the Philippines began talks last year on a defense pact that would allow troops from each country to hold exercises in the other's territory. French negotiators have handed a draft of the agreement to their Filipino counterparts to start the negotiations. The Philippines has also signed such status-of-forces agreements with the US and Australia. A signed agreement with Japan was expected to be ratified by Japanese legislators this year for it to be enforced while talks between New Zealand and the Philippines for a similar defense pact recently concluded.
CNN
30-01-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's Guantanamo migrant plan evokes a dark history
The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is about to get a new chapter added to its notorious history. The facility in Cuba has long attracted the ire of human rights groups who accuse Washington of using it as an outpost outside the reach of US law to shield from scrutiny alleged abuses of the asylum process and in the war on terror. Now the base could have yet another new incarnation — playing a key role in President Donald Trump's immigration blitz. The US has maintained a migrant detention facility there for decades that is separate from the notorious high-security jail for foreign terror suspects, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The base could fulfill two important goals for Trump's border enforcement program. First, it could offer badly needed space to detain migrants ahead of a potential accommodation crisis if the pace of detentions ramps up. And just as importantly, it could make Trump look tough – a key consideration in an operation choreographed to send a message to would-be migrants to stay home and to show Trump's voters he is honoring his campaign pledges. Trump signed a memorandum Wednesday instructing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person facility at the base — although it's far from clear it's currently suitable to house anywhere close to that number of detainees potentially awaiting deportation. The center, used traditionally to house Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea before they reach the United States, is dogged by its own long history of complaints about conditions and claims that it short-circuits migrants' access to the asylum process. Nevertheless, the Biden administration considered using the base last year to process Haitian migrants. The symbolism of the location is perfectly resonant with the hardline tone of a migrant crackdown run by the gruff White House border czar Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who joined a federal enforcement team on the streets of New York soon after being confirmed. She hailed the arrest of an undocumented migrant facing criminal charges on X, saying, 'Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.' It was not clear which categories of migrants would be held in the Guantanamo Bay center, but the announcement opened the possibility that it could include some detainees arrested in the interior of the United States and then transported to the Cuban military base. Noem, for instance, told 'CNN News Central' that the base could be reserved to detain what she described as 'the worst of the worst.' Such language risks raising due process concerns. And the symbolic association between the military detention center and the migrant camp — even though they are separate — is likely to further stigmatize migrants. 'President Trump's decision to use Guantánamo – global symbol and site of lawlessness, torture, and racism – to house immigrants should horrify us all,' said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement. 'Like many of Trump's authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in US history. Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its 'war on terror,' the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights under international law.' Trump announced the Guantanamo initiative at a White House signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, a new law in memory of a Georgia nursing student who was killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant last year. The law – which passed Congress with Democratic support – requires the detention of undocumented migrants charged with certain crimes, including theft or burglary. The president leaned heavily into the theatrics of a restored migrant facility in Guantanamo, conjuring a vision of a fearsome fate for migrants sent there. 'We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens 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,' Trump said. 'So we're going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And tough. That's a tough – that's a tough place to get out of.' If the associations with Guantanamo invoke toughness for Republicans, they stir equally intense feelings for many liberals and Democrats. The war on terror facility on the base is the prison that refuses to die, defying the efforts of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden to close it. Both only managed to reduce the population of prisoners still housed there. The prison opened in 2002 as a holding center for suspects taken off battlefields in South Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere who were treated outside the legal system and often held for years without trial. The camp became a symbol of human rights abuses, and the failure to provide inmates with due process made it a stain on the reputation of the United States around the world. The case of Mohammed, one of the camp's most notorious prisoners, remains unresolved and was delayed for years. There were initial concerns that evidence obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, which critics called torture, may not be admissible in civilian courts. Then a furor erupted over fears that trying him in New York, as Obama preferred, could be a terrorism risk. The Obama administration eventually decided that Mohammed would go before a military tribunal and blamed Congress for passing laws to prevent him and other suspects from being brought to the US mainland. Incredibly, the case is still dragging on, more than 23 years after the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. The Biden administration earlier this month succeeded in pausing a deal to allow the former al Qaeda kingpin to plead guilty and evade the risk of execution. The Biden administration announced its final transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees on January 6, sending 11 Yemenis to Oman. It said 15 detainees remain at the facility. The separate migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay has its own checkered civil rights record and its use will concern migrant rights groups who are already raising concerns that Trump's deportation crackdown infringes access to asylum claims for undocumented migrants. In a report late last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project cited testimony from refugees that conditions at the facility were inhumane and unlawful. The report called on the government to shut down the center and to give asylum seekers the same legal rights as migrants detained in the interior United States. It said conditions were characterized by undrinkable water, exposure to open sewage, and poor medical care and schooling facilities for children. But two of Trump's top immigration advisers told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials would be in charge of the Guantanamo Bay expansion. 'ICE has the highest detention standards in the industry,' Homan said. 'You can't find another state, federal, or local facility that has higher detention standards than ICE.' A US official, however, told CNN that the facilities may have had 30,000 beds in the 1990s but was nowhere near such capacity now and that many more staff would be needed to accommodate that number of migrants. This points to another critical question for the Trump immigration sweep: the need for urgent and significant congressional action to fund its expansion. The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeastern coast of Cuba and is permanently leased from the communist government in one of the last, and most extraordinary, holdovers from the Cold War. It has long been a thorn in the side of the Havana government — and, since the opening of the military prison, has also been a powerful element of Cuba's propaganda offensive against the United States, which is likely to ramp up as the new White House adopts a far more hostile tone than the Biden administration. It didn't take long for the US base's newest possible incarnation to draw the ire of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who wrote on X: 'In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory Cuba, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention.'
CNN
30-01-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's Guantanamo migrant plan evokes a dark history
The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is about to get a new chapter added to its notorious history. The facility in Cuba has long attracted the ire of human rights groups who accuse Washington of using it as an outpost outside the reach of US law to shield from scrutiny alleged abuses of the asylum process and in the war on terror. Now the base could have yet another new incarnation — playing a key role in President Donald Trump's immigration blitz. The US has maintained a migrant detention facility there for decades that is separate from the notorious high-security jail for foreign terror suspects, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The base could fulfill two important goals for Trump's border enforcement program. First, it could offer badly needed space to detain migrants ahead of a potential accommodation crisis if the pace of detentions ramps up. And just as importantly, it could make Trump look tough – a key consideration in an operation choreographed to send a message to would-be migrants to stay home and to show Trump's voters he is honoring his campaign pledges. Trump signed a memorandum Wednesday instructing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person facility at the base — although it's far from clear it's currently suitable to house anywhere close to that number of detainees potentially awaiting deportation. The center, used traditionally to house Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea before they reach the United States, is dogged by its own long history of complaints about conditions and claims that it short-circuits migrants' access to the asylum process. Nevertheless, the Biden administration considered using the base last year to process Haitian migrants. The symbolism of the location is perfectly resonant with the hardline tone of a migrant crackdown run by the gruff White House border czar Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who joined a federal enforcement team on the streets of New York soon after being confirmed. She hailed the arrest of an undocumented migrant facing criminal charges on X, saying, 'Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.' It was not clear which categories of migrants would be held in the Guantanamo Bay center, but the announcement opened the possibility that it could include some detainees arrested in the interior of the United States and then transported to the Cuban military base. Noem, for instance, told 'CNN News Central' that the base could be reserved to detain what she described as 'the worst of the worst.' Such language risks raising due process concerns. And the symbolic association between the military detention center and the migrant camp — even though they are separate — is likely to further stigmatize migrants. 'President Trump's decision to use Guantánamo – global symbol and site of lawlessness, torture, and racism – to house immigrants should horrify us all,' said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement. 'Like many of Trump's authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in US history. Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its 'war on terror,' the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights under international law.' Trump announced the Guantanamo initiative at a White House signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, a new law in memory of a Georgia nursing student who was killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant last year. The law – which passed Congress with Democratic support – requires the detention of undocumented migrants charged with certain crimes, including theft or burglary. The president leaned heavily into the theatrics of a restored migrant facility in Guantanamo, conjuring a vision of a fearsome fate for migrants sent there. 'We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens 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,' Trump said. 'So we're going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And tough. That's a tough – that's a tough place to get out of.' If the associations with Guantanamo invoke toughness for Republicans, they stir equally intense feelings for many liberals and Democrats. The war on terror facility on the base is the prison that refuses to die, defying the efforts of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden to close it. Both only managed to reduce the population of prisoners still housed there. The prison opened in 2002 as a holding center for suspects taken off battlefields in South Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere who were treated outside the legal system and often held for years without trial. The camp became a symbol of human rights abuses, and the failure to provide inmates with due process made it a stain on the reputation of the United States around the world. The case of Mohammed, one of the camp's most notorious prisoners, remains unresolved and was delayed for years. There were initial concerns that evidence obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, which critics called torture, may not be admissible in civilian courts. Then a furor erupted over fears that trying him in New York, as Obama preferred, could be a terrorism risk. The Obama administration eventually decided that Mohammed would go before a military tribunal and blamed Congress for passing laws to prevent him and other suspects from being brought to the US mainland. Incredibly, the case is still dragging on, more than 23 years after the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. The Biden administration earlier this month succeeded in pausing a deal to allow the former al Qaeda kingpin to plead guilty and evade the risk of execution. The Biden administration announced its final transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees on January 6, sending 11 Yemenis to Oman. It said 15 detainees remain at the facility. The separate migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay has its own checkered civil rights record and its use will concern migrant rights groups who are already raising concerns that Trump's deportation crackdown infringes access to asylum claims for undocumented migrants. In a report late last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project cited testimony from refugees that conditions at the facility were inhumane and unlawful. The report called on the government to shut down the center and to give asylum seekers the same legal rights as migrants detained in the interior United States. It said conditions were characterized by undrinkable water, exposure to open sewage, and poor medical care and schooling facilities for children. But two of Trump's top immigration advisers told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials would be in charge of the Guantanamo Bay expansion. 'ICE has the highest detention standards in the industry,' Homan said. 'You can't find another state, federal, or local facility that has higher detention standards than ICE.' A US official, however, told CNN that the facilities may have had 30,000 beds in the 1990s but was nowhere near such capacity now and that many more staff would be needed to accommodate that number of migrants. This points to another critical question for the Trump immigration sweep: the need for urgent and significant congressional action to fund its expansion. The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeastern coast of Cuba and is permanently leased from the communist government in one of the last, and most extraordinary, holdovers from the Cold War. It has long been a thorn in the side of the Havana government — and, since the opening of the military prison, has also been a powerful element of Cuba's propaganda offensive against the United States, which is likely to ramp up as the new White House adopts a far more hostile tone than the Biden administration. It didn't take long for the US base's newest possible incarnation to draw the ire of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who wrote on X: 'In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory Cuba, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention.'
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Guantanamo migrant plan evokes a dark history
The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is about to get a new chapter added to its notorious history. The facility in Cuba has long attracted the ire of human rights groups who accuse Washington of using it as an outpost outside the reach of US law to shield from scrutiny alleged abuses of the asylum process and in the war on terror. Now the base could have yet another new incarnation — playing a key role in President Donald Trump's immigration blitz. The US has maintained a migrant detention facility there for decades that is separate from the notorious high-security jail for foreign terror suspects, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The base could fulfill two important goals for Trump's border enforcement program. First, it could offer badly needed space to detain migrants ahead of a potential accommodation crisis if the pace of detentions ramps up. And just as importantly, it could make Trump look tough – a key consideration in an operation choreographed to send a message to would-be migrants to stay home and to show Trump's voters he is honoring his campaign pledges. Trump signed a memorandum Wednesday instructing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person facility at the base — although it's far from clear it's currently suitable to house anywhere close to that number of detainees potentially awaiting deportation. The center, used traditionally to house Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea before they reach the United States, is dogged by its own long history of complaints about conditions and claims that it short-circuits migrants' access to the asylum process. Nevertheless, the Biden administration considered using the base last year to process Haitian migrants. The symbolism of the location is perfectly resonant with the hardline tone of a migrant crackdown run by the gruff White House border czar Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who joined a federal enforcement team on the streets of New York soon after being confirmed. She hailed the arrest of an undocumented migrant facing criminal charges on X, saying, 'Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.' It was not clear which categories of migrants would be held in the Guantanamo Bay center, but the announcement opened the possibility that it could include some detainees arrested in the interior of the United States and then transported to the Cuban military base. Noem, for instance, told 'CNN News Central' that the base could be reserved to detain what she described as 'the worst of the worst.' Such language risks raising due process concerns. And the symbolic association between the military detention center and the migrant camp — even though they are separate — is likely to further stigmatize migrants. 'President Trump's decision to use Guantánamo – global symbol and site of lawlessness, torture, and racism – to house immigrants should horrify us all,' said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement. 'Like many of Trump's authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in US history. Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its 'war on terror,' the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights under international law.' Trump announced the Guantanamo initiative at a White House signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, a new law in memory of a Georgia nursing student who was killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant last year. The law – which passed Congress with Democratic support – requires the detention of undocumented migrants charged with certain crimes, including theft or burglary. The president leaned heavily into the theatrics of a restored migrant facility in Guantanamo, conjuring a vision of a fearsome fate for migrants sent there. 'We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens 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,' Trump said. 'So we're going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And tough. That's a tough – that's a tough place to get out of.' If the associations with Guantanamo invoke toughness for Republicans, they stir equally intense feelings for many liberals and Democrats. The war on terror facility on the base is the prison that refuses to die, defying the efforts of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden to close it. Both only managed to reduce the population of prisoners still housed there. The prison opened in 2002 as a holding center for suspects taken off battlefields in South Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere who were treated outside the legal system and often held for years without trial. The camp became a symbol of human rights abuses, and the failure to provide inmates with due process made it a stain on the reputation of the United States around the world. The case of Mohammed, one of the camp's most notorious prisoners, remains unresolved and was delayed for years. There were initial concerns that evidence obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, which critics called torture, may not be admissible in civilian courts. Then a furor erupted over fears that trying him in New York, as Obama preferred, could be a terrorism risk. The Obama administration eventually decided that Mohammed would go before a military tribunal and blamed Congress for passing laws to prevent him and other suspects from being brought to the US mainland. Incredibly, the case is still dragging on, more than 23 years after the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. The Biden administration earlier this month succeeded in pausing a deal to allow the former al Qaeda kingpin to plead guilty and evade the risk of execution. The Biden administration announced its final transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees on January 6, sending 11 Yemenis to Oman. It said 15 detainees remain at the facility. The separate migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay has its own checkered civil rights record and its use will concern migrant rights groups who are already raising concerns that Trump's deportation crackdown infringes access to asylum claims for undocumented migrants. In a report late last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project cited testimony from refugees that conditions at the facility were inhumane and unlawful. The report called on the government to shut down the center and to give asylum seekers the same legal rights as migrants detained in the interior United States. It said conditions were characterized by undrinkable water, exposure to open sewage, and poor medical care and schooling facilities for children. But two of Trump's top immigration advisers told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials would be in charge of the Guantanamo Bay expansion. 'ICE has the highest detention standards in the industry,' Homan said. 'You can't find another state, federal, or local facility that has higher detention standards than ICE.' A US official, however, told CNN that the facilities may have had 30,000 beds in the 1990s but was nowhere near such capacity now and that many more staff would be needed to accommodate that number of migrants. This points to another critical question for the Trump immigration sweep: the need for urgent and significant congressional action to fund its expansion. The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeastern coast of Cuba and is permanently leased from the communist government in one of the last, and most extraordinary, holdovers from the Cold War. It has long been a thorn in the side of the Havana government — and, since the opening of the military prison, has also been a powerful element of Cuba's propaganda offensive against the United States, which is likely to ramp up as the new White House adopts a far more hostile tone than the Biden administration. It didn't take long for the US base's newest possible incarnation to draw the ire of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who wrote on X: 'In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory Cuba, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention.'
