{"id":124552,"date":"2025-01-30T01:06:46","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T01:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/us-president-trump-to-transfer-undocumented-immigrants-to-guantanamo-al-jazeera-english\/"},"modified":"2025-01-30T01:06:46","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T01:06:46","slug":"us-president-trump-to-transfer-undocumented-immigrants-to-guantanamo-al-jazeera-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/us-president-trump-to-transfer-undocumented-immigrants-to-guantanamo-al-jazeera-english\/","title":{"rendered":"US President Trump to transfer undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo – Al Jazeera English"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guantanamo Bay detention centre has garnered a reputation for human rights abuses during the US \u2018war on terror\u2019.<\/em>
President Donald Trump has announced plans<\/a> to transform the United States detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a holding centre for undocumented immigrants.
The surprise announcement came on Wednesday, as the Republican president signed his first major piece of legislation, the Laken Riley Act.
Trump had campaigned<\/a> for a second term on the promise of leading a \u201cmass deportation\u201d campaign, targeting the nearly 11 million undocumented people living in the US. Many have been in the country for decades, serving as pillars for their families and communities.
The Laken Riley Act<\/a> dovetailed with the Trump administration\u2019s push to expel as many undocumented individuals as possible.
Under the law\u2019s provisions, the Department of Homeland Security is required to detain non-citizens unlawfully in the US who are either arrested or charged with burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting. Those individuals can then be subject to deportation, regardless of whether they are convicted of a crime.
But as Trump spoke to an audience at the White House about the act, he pivoted to a new announcement: a new use for the Guantanamo facility.
\u201cToday, I\u2019m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. Most people don\u2019t even know about it,\u201d Trump said.
Human rights organisations have long called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, citing inhumane treatment in the facility and a lack of legal protections.
\u201cTwenty years of practising arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment is simply unacceptable for any government,\u201d a group of United Nations experts said<\/a> in 2022, calling Guantanamo an \u201cugly chapter\u201d in US history.
The facility opened in 2002 as a holding facility for suspects swept up in the US\u2019s so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d, and many detainees were held for years without a trial.
Earlier this month, the facility marked its 23rd anniversary<\/a> with a diminishing number of detainees imprisoned in its wall. The outgoing administration of President Joe Biden had recently transferred prisoners to other countries, leaving only 15 detainees<\/a> in the facility.
The prison had previously been slated to be closed under President Barack Obama. But Trump, during his first term in 2018, signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future.
He has long sought to expand US use of the facility, including through the transfer of new detainees.
That vision started to take shape with Wednesday\u2019s announcement, less than two weeks into his second term.
\u201cWe have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,\u201d said Trump. \u201cSome of them are so bad we don\u2019t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don\u2019t want them coming back, so we\u2019re going to send them out to Guantanamo.\u201d
The Republican leader has long conflated immigration with criminality, though studies have repeatedly shown that undocumented people commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than US-born citizens.
His campaign for re-election in 2024, however, hinged on the premise that the US needed to fend off a \u201cmigrant invasion\u201d, citing incidents like the Laken Riley case as examples.
Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia when she was murdered while out for a jog in February 2024. The man convicted in her death was an undocumented immigrant who had previously been arrested for shoplifting.
Riley\u2019s mother, Allyson Phillips, spoke at Wednesday\u2019s event, just before Trump signed her daughter\u2019s namesake bill. Between tears, she thanked the US president.
\u201cThere\u2019s no amount of tears that will ever bring back our precious Laken,\u201d she said. \u201cOur hope moving forward is that her life saves lives.\u201d
Trump tied the bill to his decision to repurpose Guantanamo as a migration detention centre, saying they served a similar goal.
\u201cToday\u2019s signings bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all,\u201d he said.
But Trump has faced criticism for whipping up nativist sentiment against immigrants \u2013 and pursuing a hardline crackdown that threatens to impede access to due process, asylum and other rights.
Critics have also questioned whether Trump has the manpower and resources to fulfil his \u201cmass deportation\u201d scheme. Trump, however, said on Wednesday that the use of Guantanamo would \u201cdouble\u201d immigration detention capacity.
Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit, dismissed his announcement as an act of desperation.
\u201cTrump is desperate to find detention beds for the thousands of people who pose no public safety threat but nevertheless have become targets of a wasteful and cruel immigration agenda that makes us less safe [and] wastes billions of dollars,\u201d she wrote<\/a> on social media.<\/p>\n

Follow Al Jazeera English:<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Guantanamo Bay detention centre has garnered a reputation for human rights abuses during the US \u2018war on terror\u2019.President Donald Trump has announced plans to transform the United States detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a holding centre for undocumented immigrants.The surprise announcement came on Wednesday, as the Republican president signed his first major […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":124553,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}