Trump wants Pentagon to prepare facility at Guantanamo to detain 30,000 migrants

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 migrants.

The US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility – separate from the high-security US prison for foreign terrorism suspects – that has been used on occasion for decades, including to hold Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.

Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan said later on Wednesday that the administration would expand the already existing facility and that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would run it.

“Today I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said at the White House.

He said the facility would be used 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, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And, tough.”