President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is directing the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 immigrants who are living illegally in the United States. People who are in the United States illegally and are accused of theft and violent crimes would have to be detained and potentially deported even before a conviction.

Trump made the announcement right before he signed the Laken Riley Act into law as his administration’s first piece of legislation.

The Cuban government criticized Trump’s announcement to send immigrants to the U.S. Guantanamo naval base

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel deemed the decision as “an act of brutality” in a message on his X account, and he described the based as one “located in illegally occupied #Cuba territory.”

The Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez also lambasted the announcement.

“The US government’s decision to imprison migrants at the Guantanamo Naval Base, in an enclave where it created torture and indefinite detention centers, shows contempt for the human condition and international law,” Rodriguez said on X.

How does the U.S. government use the base at Guantanamo Bay?

While the U.S. naval base in Cuba is best-known for the suspects brought in after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it also has a separate facility used for decades to hold migrants.

The Migrant Operations Center holds those detained at sea, many from Haiti and Cuba.

The nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project said in a report last year that the migrants are held in “prison-like” conditions. It said migrants there were “trapped in a punitive system” indefinitely, with no accountability for the officials running it.

The U.S. has leased Guantanamo from Cuba for more than a century. Cuba opposes the lease and typically rejects the nominal U.S. rent payments.

Does the U.S. have sufficient space for Trump’s plans?

Trump has vowed to deport millions of people living illegally in the U.S., but the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget only has enough funds to detain about 41,000 people.

ICE detains migrants at its processing centers and privately operated detention facilities, along with local prisons and jails. It has no facilities geared toward detention of families, who account for roughly one-third of arrivals on the southern U.S. border.

During Trump’s first term, he authorized the use of military bases to detain migrant children. In 2014, then-President Barack Obama temporarily relied on military bases to detain immigrant children while ramping up privately operated family detention centers to hold many of the tens of thousands of Central American families caught illegally crossing the border.

U.S. military bases have been used repeatedly since the 1970s to accommodate the resettlement of waves of immigrants fleeing Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

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