Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Guantanamo Bay is the “perfect place” to house criminal illegal immigrants whose countries do not immediately take them back.
“It’s a smart move. It’s the perfect place,” Hegseth, who spent a year at Guantanamo Bay with the Army guarding detainees, told Fox News’s Fox and Friends on Friday. “As we identify criminal illegals in our country, the military is leaning forward to help with moving them out to their home countries or someone else in the interim.”
If illegal immigrants cannot go to a different country immediately, they can go to Guantanamo Bay, according to Hegseth.
“Going back to the ’90s, there were tens of thousands of Haitians and Cuban migrants who were housed there because it was a transit point in the Caribbean, and I knew of those places when I was there, and those we’re gonna stand up fairly quickly,” he said. “You can get thousands of individuals in tents, secured, in places at Guantanamo Bay.”
“There’s also the eventuality that we could have hardened criminals, hardened gang members with violent criminal pasts in transit,” he added. “If that is the case, we’re preparing options for the actual detention facilities.”
President Donald Trump announced the plan to begin preparing a 30,000-bed detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for illegal immigrants during Wednesday’s signing of the Laken Riley Act.
“Today, 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. Most people don’t even know about it,” Trump said.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” the president added. “Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust [their home] countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back. So, we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.”
Guantanamo Bay’s facilities are practically supermax prisons that will temporarily house the criminal illegal immigrants, according to Hegseth.
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“We don’t want to put our personnel, any Americans, at risk in transit,” he said. “So, if you have those existing facilities, let’s use them, and we will use them to serve the interest of the American people who’ve been suffering under an open border and an invasion under Joe Biden.”
“We’ve said, ‘Enough is enough. They’re going home.’ So, Guantanamo Bay is a perfect transit point to temporarily house the worst of the worst until we move them back to their home countries, who, as President Trump has made it very clear, better be prepared to take them robustly and soon.”