Washington Six people familiar with the plans told NBC News that the Trump administration’s decision this week to detain some immigrants at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which was established after 9/11 to house prisoners accused of terrorism, is the first step in a larger plan to house more immigrants in the high-security prison rather than the low-level detention area for immigrants that was previously built.
According to three people involved with the planning, the proposal is to extend the prison so that immigrants can be housed in partially constructed tent camps encircled by fencing in addition to the prison itself. A portion of the tent camps have been constructed, according to a person with knowledge of the planning.
Last Wednesday, Trump declared that he would order the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department to prepare Guantanamo to hold 30,000 migrants. On Tuesday, the first group of immigrants reached Guantanamo. Ten immigrants were on the trip, including suspected Tren de Aragua gang members who are being kept at the same detention center used to hold suspected terrorists, according to a senior White House official and the person familiar with the plans.
The administration has been using the detention facility to house individuals accused of terrorism since 2002, but it is unclear under what legal authorities and for what length of time it plans to confine immigrants who are transferred there. Trump made the decision to label some gangs and drug cartels, including MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations on his first day in office.
A Department of Homeland Security official chose not to comment. Requests for additional comment from the White House were not answered.
Trump hinted that certain immigrants would be detained there for longer periods of time when he announced plans to house 30,000 of them on the naval installation. Trump stated at the time, “Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.” Thus, we will dispatch them to Guantanamo.
Concerning what immigrants would be brought to fill a 30,000-bed facility, a former top ICE officer stated that the agency had less than 10,000 inmates deemed to represent a serious risk to public safety at the time the Biden administration left office.
The U.S. has previously detained migrants on a section of the huge naval base campus that is entirely distinct from the detention center where terrorist suspects are housed. It has been used to temporarily detain migrants who have been interdicted at sea and is known as the Migrant Operation Center, or MOC. The MOC at Guantanamo can only accommodate 200 people and has to be repaired, according to two Biden administration officials who recently departed the Department of Homeland Security and spoke to NBC News. According to those sources, a Biden-era study estimated that $15 million would be needed for renovations that would not increase capacity beyond 200 beds.
According to those familiar with the plan, most of the immigrants sent to Guantanamo under Trump’s plan will not use the MOC; instead, they will be detained in temporary tent camps close to the prison until they are taken back to their home country or a third-party country that has agreed to take them. Although the immigrants would not be housed directly with the 15 detainees who are currently housed at the facility, those deemed by the administration to be the most dangerous criminals are anticipated to be held separately there, according to three officials familiar with the planning. How and to what degree immigrants living in tents will be kept apart from those incarcerated is unclear.
As late as Saturday, two Homeland Security Department officials said that Trump administration attorneys were still examining possible legal issues with sending immigrants to Guantanamo.
ICE has not disclosed the specifics of how immigrants are classified as gang or cartel members. Some of them have been convicted of crimes connected to gangs or cartels, or they are suspected of having ties to them.
Immigration detention in the United States is subject to certain humanitarian requirements, especially if minors are detained there, and is not intended to be punitive, like a jail sentence, due to long-standing federal court rulings. Additionally, if there is no obvious path to deportation, court decisions prohibit Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining immigrants indefinitely, which has been construed to mean more than six months. If they can demonstrate that circumstances in Guantanamo are in violation of earlier court rulings, immigrant rights organizations may be able to take the Trump administration to court.
It’s unclear if the Trump administration will try to use a different classification than the one the US uses for those who have broken civil immigration laws to detain immigrants who have been found guilty of major crimes or who are thought to be affiliated with gangs or cartels.
If approved, the designation of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations would give the administration more authority to target known members of the gangs as well as anyone who assists or works with them. It enables the federal government to bring charges of material assistance to terrorists against anyone who has any kind of affiliation with the groups. In order to prevent suspected members of the groups from being arrested, prevented from traveling into the United States by plane, or prevented from crossing the U.S. border, the government can also place them on a watchlist.
In an interview with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated that due process will be adhered to for foreign nationals held in Guantanamo. Although she would not exclude it out, she said that it is not the intention to hold immigrants there indefinitely.
Since 2002, detainees accused of terrorism have been housed at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The holding center housed hundreds of suspected terrorists during its height. While Trump is in power, it seems unlikely that many of the people who are left in the facility will be transferred out, even though they are eligible to do so. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the suspected 9/11 mastermind, is one of the current detainees who is considered too dangerous to be moved from U.S. custody.
Due in major part to a 2015 congressional law that forbade the transfer of any of the inmates to American jails, several administrations have attempted but failed to dismantle the Guantanamo detention facility.
Operations at the Guantanamo detention center, which houses captives accused of terrorism, have involved U.S. military, and they may do the same if any immigrants are detained there as well.
According to John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration, their legal rights may be impacted by where they are kept within Guantanamo. According to Yoo, there are still unanswered questions regarding the ability of any of the foreign nationals detained in Guantanamo to challenge their detention.
Yoo stated that while those who had previously been detained in the Migrant Operations Center had the same rights as anyone in a regular ICE facility, where they cannot be held indefinitely, those detained in the detention facility that houses detainees accused of terrorism may be able to appeal through the military commissions at Guantanamo.
Among the challenging concerns that the government will face are: What if there are employees of these drug gangs who are not undocumented immigrants? Would they also be detained in Guantanamo? Would they also be subject to arrest by the military? Will the military be permitted to make any arrests in the United States? “Yoo said.”
Yoo stated, “I don’t believe the Trump administration will want to test these questions in court.” We had to resolve all of this twenty years ago, and I hoped it wouldn’t resurface.
According to several officials in both the Defense and Homeland Security Departments, Trump’s announcement of his intention to send immigrants to Guantanamo shocked officials at the time and sparked a rush to figure out the difficult and expensive logistics of implementing his order.
Building a facility at Guantanamo Bay that could accommodate 30,000 aliens would more than double ICE’s present immigration detention capacity. As of Tuesday morning, ICE detention facilities, which have over 40,000 beds countrywide, were operating at 109% full, according to a DHS official.
However, even with the additional cost of sending immigrants to Guantanamo, it might be expensive to do.
“Anything down there is going to be very costly and logistically difficult,” a former top ICE officer told NBC News.
ICE already has a budget deficit.
The right to counsel is likewise granted to immigrants under U.S. law. They can still ask for a meeting with a lawyer, and attorneys must be permitted to enter the facility, even if the Trump administration just issued a stop work order for contracts that gave immigrants know your rights presentations in ICE detention.