(Adnkronos) – “While President Donald Trump promises the largest mass deportation operation of irregular migrants in US history, his administration is planning the potential transfer of thousands of people – hundreds of whom come from friendly European nations – to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, starting as early as this week.” Thus the Washington Post returns to what was anticipated in recent days, and underlines that “US officials shared the plans – subject to change – with the Washington Post, including some documents, on condition of anonymity because the matter is considered extremely sensitive.” “The White House – it also points out – refused to comment, but – it recalls – spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote on social media that the plans are ‘Fake News’. And that all this ‘Will not happen’.”
If Trump’s plans materialize, it would be a marked escalation of his use of Guantanamo, the newspaper comments further, recalling that at the end of January, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to set up a migrant center for 30,000 people at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. “We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst illegal immigrant criminals who threaten the American people,” the president said at the time. (continues)
At the time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said migrants would not be held alongside terror suspects and that the detention camp would be a place where detainees would stay temporarily while officials arranged their travel to third countries if their home countries did not accept them. The newspaper then recalls having written that among the foreign citizens considered for possible transfer to Guantanamo are those from Great Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, and other parts of the world, including many from Haiti.
The operation to transfer migrants has struggled to expand due to legal, logistical and financial obstacles. In total, about 300 migrants have been held there, the newspaper wrote in March. The US government has deployed military transport planes, an operation that cost at least $21 million between January and April, but by mid-May only 32 were being held, NBC reported that month, noting that many of them were likely been repatriated to the United States. According to US officials quoted by the Washington Post, the plan to send migrants to Guantanamo is necessary to make room in domestic detention centers, which have become overcrowded.
Human rights organizations – which claim that US government agencies and private contractors have held asylum seekers and refugees in Guantanamo facilities for decades – have condemned Trump’s plans to transfer migrants there. “Migrants and asylum seekers are being labeled the new terrorist threat, worthy of being abandoned in an island prison, excluded from services and legal and social support,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said in January, after Trump’s announcement.
