(WASHINGTON) — According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is “a perfect place” where the Trump administration could hold up to 30,000 migrants while they await being deported from the United States to their home countries.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum directing the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare the base to hold what he had earlier said might be 30,000 migrants described as “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
Hegseth, who at one time served as a junior Army officer at the detention facility at Guantanamo that housed enemy combatants from the war on terror, explained that deported migrants would not be housed at that location.
“That’s one part of Guantanamo Bay. The other part of Guantanamo Bay, Will, is a naval station where it has long been, for decades, a mission of that naval station to provide for migrants and refugees and resettlement,” Hegseth said in a live interview on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show”
Over the last week, U.S. military aircraft have been been used to carry out deportation flights, taking deported migrants back to their home countries. The military flights are in addition to the chartered flights that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has undertaken for years. However, the pace of those flights can be slow as the U.S. has to secure commitments from countries that they will agree to take back their citizens.
“We want somewhere else to hold them safely in the interim,” Hegseth said. “Guantanamo Bay, Will, is a perfect place.”
Hegseth described how the base could be used to house deportees on their way to their home countries or a third country “and it’s taking a little time to move with that process and with the paperwork.”
He said that as that process drags on, it is “better they be held at a safe location like Guantanamo Bay, which is meant and built for migrants. Meant and built to sustain that away from the American people as they are processed properly, to where they came from.”
“This is a temporary transit which is already the mission of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, where we can plus up thousands and tens of thousands, if necessary, to humanely move illegals out of our country where they do not belong, back to the countries where they came from in proper process,” he added.
Hegseth described the grounds of the Navy base’s golf course as a place that could possibly house as many as 6,000 migrants.
“So this is a plan in movement, but not in movement because we’re behind, but because we’re ramping up for the possibility to expand mass deportations, because President Trump is dead serious about getting illegal criminals out of our country,” Hegseth said. “And the DOD is not only willing to, he’s proud to partner with DHS to defend the sovereignty of our southern border and advance that mission.”
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