Trump to Send Up to 30K Migrants to Guantanamo Bay

Only around 15 people are currently detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, but that number could soon be going up 2,000-fold. President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to prepare a facility to detain 30,000 migrants at the base on Cuba's south coast, the BBC reports. "We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people," Trump said, per AFP. "Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them, because we don't want them coming back."

Trump, speaking after he signed the Laken Riley Act into law at the White House, said the move would double the country's capacity to hold migrants who are in the US illegally, adding, "it's a tough place to get out of." Detaining migrants at Guantanamo Bay is nothing new, but the numbers have generally been very low, CNBC reports. The Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center has a capacity of 130, according to researchers at the Global Detention Project. In February of last year, only four people were held there, the New York Times reported in a look at the place last fall.

Trump's order directs officials to bring the facility "to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States." Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel slammed the move as "an act of brutality," the BBC reports. The base itself, he said, is on "illegally occupied territory." (More Guantanamo Bay stories.)