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Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to prepare the American naval base of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to receive thousands of immigrants with a criminal record.
The American president announced on Wednesday the plan of the White House, in a decision which would massively expand the use of an installation which was the destination of the suspects of high -level terrorism since 2002.
This decision comes as the Trump administration is trying to quickly implement a promised repression against undocumented immigrants, including the first raids in major cities and the deployment of troops on the Mexican border.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to hold the worst illegal criminal threatening the American people,” said Trump. “Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust countries to hold them. Because we don’t want them to come back, so we’re going to send them to Guantánamo. “”
Trump has exerted a strong pressure on countries such as Mexico and Colombia to accept dismissed immigrants from the United States in their countries of origin, but his comments suggest that some would be transferred to the Cuba military base.
The president said he was asking the US Department of Defense and Internal Security to “start preparing” the installation of Guantánamo bay to host migrants.
“It will double our ability immediately, right?” It’s a difficult place to go out, ”added Trump. He then signed a memorandum to implement the plan.
“We are looking for these guys,” said Kristi Noem, interior security secretary on Wednesday afternoon at the White House, speaking alongside Tom Homan, Tsar on Trump’s border.
Homan said that the immigration and customs application agency would manage the installation in Cuba. “There has already been a migrant center there, it has been there for decades. We will therefore simply develop this existing migrant center, “he said.
The American naval base of Guantánamo Bay housed migrants in the past, including Haiti refugees, but not on the scale that Trump suggested in his comments on Wednesday. During his presidential campaign last year, he promised on several occasions of mass deportations targeting undocumented immigrants estimated at 11 million in the United States, although administration officials have declared that the initial priority would be to expel those who have a criminal record.
The island’s naval base has been rented in the United States by Cuba since 1903 and has continued to be used despite an economic embargo of several decades that Washington kept in the island nation. The prison gained notoriety during the “war against terrorism” for the alleged torture of the United States and the ill-treatment of detained persons in the establishment.
