President Donald Trump has introduced plans to rework the USA detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, right into a holding centre for undocumented immigrants.
The shock announcement got here on Wednesday, because the Republican president signed his first main piece of laws, the Laken Riley Act.
Trump had campaigned for a second time period on the promise of main a “mass deportation” marketing campaign, focusing on the almost 11 million undocumented individuals dwelling within the US. Many have been within the nation for many years, serving as pillars for his or her households and communities.
The Laken Riley Act dovetailed with the Trump administration’s push to expel as many undocumented people as attainable.
Beneath the regulation’s provisions, the Division of Homeland Safety is required to detain non-citizens unlawfully within the US who’re both arrested or charged with housebreaking, theft, larceny or shoplifting. These people can then be topic to deportation, no matter whether or not they’re convicted of against the law.
However as Trump spoke to an viewers on the White Home in regards to the act, he pivoted to a brand new announcement: a brand new use for the Guantanamo facility.
“Right this moment, I’m additionally signing an govt order to instruct the Departments of Protection and Homeland Safety to start getting ready the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. Most individuals don’t even learn about it,” Trump mentioned.
Requires jail to shut
Human rights organisations have lengthy referred to as for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, citing inhumane therapy within the facility and a scarcity of authorized protections.
“Twenty years of practising arbitrary detention with out trial accompanied by torture or ailing therapy is solely unacceptable for any authorities,” a gaggle of United Nations specialists said in 2022, calling Guantanamo an “ugly chapter” in US historical past.
The ability opened in 2002 as a holding facility for suspects swept up within the US’s so-called “warfare on terror”, and lots of detainees had been held for years with out a trial.
Earlier this month, the ability marked its 23rd anniversary with a diminishing variety of detainees imprisoned in its wall. The outgoing administration of President Joe Biden had just lately transferred prisoners to different international locations, leaving solely 15 detainees within the facility.
The jail had beforehand been slated to be closed beneath President Barack Obama. However Trump, throughout his first time period in 2018, signed an govt order to maintain Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future.
He has lengthy sought to broaden US use of the ability, together with by means of the switch of recent detainees.
That imaginative and prescient began to take form with Wednesday’s announcement, lower than two weeks into his second time period.
“We now have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst felony unlawful aliens threatening the American individuals,” mentioned Trump. “A few of them are so unhealthy we don’t even belief the international locations to carry them, as a result of we don’t need them coming again, so we’re going to ship them out to Guantanamo.”
A hardline strategy
The Republican chief has lengthy conflated immigration with criminality, although research have repeatedly proven that undocumented individuals commit crimes at a considerably decrease charge than US-born residents.
His marketing campaign for re-election in 2024, nevertheless, hinged on the premise that the US wanted to fend off a “migrant invasion”, citing incidents just like the Laken Riley case as examples.
Riley was a 22-year-old nursing pupil on the College of Georgia when she was murdered whereas out for a jog in February 2024. The person convicted in her demise was an undocumented immigrant who had beforehand been arrested for shoplifting.
Riley’s mom, Allyson Phillips, spoke at Wednesday’s occasion, simply earlier than Trump signed her daughter’s namesake invoice. Between tears, she thanked the US president.
“There’s no quantity of tears that may ever carry again our valuable Laken,” she mentioned. “Our hope shifting ahead is that her life saves lives.”
Trump tied the invoice to his choice to repurpose Guantanamo as a migration detention centre, saying they served the same purpose.
“Right this moment’s signings carry us one step nearer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities as soon as and for all,” he mentioned.
However Trump has confronted criticism for whipping up nativist sentiment in opposition to immigrants – and pursuing a hardline crackdown that threatens to impede entry to due course of, asylum and different rights.
Critics have additionally questioned whether or not Trump has the manpower and sources to fulfil his “mass deportation” scheme. Trump, nevertheless, mentioned on Wednesday that using Guantanamo would “double” immigration detention capability.
Nayna Gupta, the coverage director on the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit, dismissed his announcement as an act of desperation.
“Trump is determined to search out detention beds for the 1000’s of people that pose no public security menace however nonetheless have develop into targets of a wasteful and merciless immigration agenda that makes us much less protected [and] wastes billions of {dollars},” she wrote on social media.
