Trump signs order for Guantanamo Bay migrant detention centre
Trump signs order for Guantanamo Bay migrant detention centre
Share:
Donald Trump has signed an executive order to open a migrant detention centre at Guantanamo Bay. Speaking before making the act official, Mr Trump said that thousands of migrants who cannot be deported to their home countries will be held at the complex, on the island of Cuba.
"I'm 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," he said. Follow latest: White House U-turns on funding pause. "Most people don't even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.
"Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them, because we don't want them coming back.". It comes as Mr Trump's controversial pick for health secretary - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - faced a hearing committee where he was grilled on his views, including on vaccines and abortion.
Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then president George W. Bush to hold detainees in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Only 15 prisoners - including Ramzi bin al Shibh, accused of being a 9/11 co-conspirator - remain at the detention centre. US correspondent.
Guantanamo Bay is infamous. A strip of land on the Cuban coast - leased in perpetuity from Cuba since 1903. It's the site of a notorious US military prison where detainees were taken and held after the September 11 attacks. It has become synonymous with the US "war on terror", with CIA rendition, with torture and with orange jumpsuits.
