Feb. 4 (UPI) — The Trump administration has begun flights taking illegal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, with plans in the works to use the Cuban detention facility to hold thousands of other migrants eventually.
On Tuesday, the White House confirmed the first of its flights from the United States was underway.
“President Trump is not messing around, and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox Business.
The flight on Tuesday was expected to carry roughly 10 migrants with known criminal records, a Homeland Security official confirmed to CNN.
Trump this past week signed a presidential memorandum directing the use of Guantanamo as a migrant detention facility for the president called “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people”
The president’s memo ordered the U.S. departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prep for the likelihood of up to 30,000 foreign migrants at the facility located at the southeastern end of Cuba.
But it raises legitimate concern over the legality of Trump’s act.
“They’d be pushing the limits of where the (1952 Immigration and Nationality Act) applies,” according to an unnamed former Homeland Security official.
In 2009, then-President Barack Obama, in one his first orders of business, shuttered the U.S. Navy’s prison complex at Guantanamo that took nearly seven years to reach its “final stages.”
The 45-square-mile military base housed a multitude of American prisoners, including a number who were involved in the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, and became infamous for subsequent credible accusations of abuse and torture by U.S. military personnel.
Officials say it could take 30 days or longer for the build-out to house tens of thousands of new people.
The previous Biden administration took a number of steps to wind down operations on Guantanamo. In 2021 when Biden took office, 40 prisoners were in detainment, and over his four-year term repatriated a number of foreign detainees to their country of origin.
By June 2015 there were still about 116 U.S. detainees on the island.
Biden left Trump four others that U.S officials will not release, but also cannot put on trial — the so-called “forever prisoners.” The former president also left intact the troubled military commissions system, with three pending criminal cases against a total of six detainees.
Meanwhile, some 15 or so are currently held on one part of the multifaceted property, including a “high security” area and a migrant processing center which holds less than 200 people at max capacity.
Nearly 700 detainees were kept at the prison in 2003 — its most populous year to date.
Management of a detention facility, according to Trump’s top immigration advisers, will be overseen out of Miami by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency, otherwise known as ICE.
“Due process will be followed, and having facilities at Guantánamo Bay will be an asset to us,” U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated Sunday on Meet the Press. The former South Dakota governor said it’s “not the plan” to hold migrants indefinitely.
Meanwhile, tents started to pop up last week with Pentagon assets sent to Guantanamo to build temporary structures near its migrant operations center, sources say.
However, Noem did not indicate if women and children will be held in captivity at Guantanamo Bay.