Trump plans to keep around 30,000 people at Guantanamo Bay and, to that end, more than 150 US military personnel arrived at the naval base on Monday to prepare for the expansion of the detention center for undocumented immigrants.
Two weeks after taking office as President of the United States, Donald Trump has already made changes to many areas, particularly immigration. On Tuesday, the White House spokeswoman reported that the first flights of irregular immigrants to the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba have already begun - and this is a measure, and location, that has been criticized.
Guantánamo has already made headlines, particularly due to accusations of poor conditions and torture in which detainees are held.
The site has been a military base for Washington for more than 20 years and is known to have housed hundreds of prisoners accused of terrorism, including some members of al-Qaeda.
Trump plans to keep around 30,000 people at Guantanamo Bay and, to that end, more than 150 US military personnel arrived at the naval base on Monday to prepare for the expansion of the detention center for undocumented immigrants.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has operated an immigration detention center at the Guantanamo Bay military base for decades, separate from the prison for terrorism suspects — Guantanamo Bay prison and Guantanamo Naval Base are attached.
But what prison is this?
Guantanamo became better known during the campaign created by George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks, a campaign called the 'War on Terror'. The prison was established in 2002 to hold terrorism suspects and alleged "illegal" combatants detained during US military operations outside the US. The facility has received around 780 prisoners since its creation, with 15 people still being held there.
Several human rights groups and news reports have reported cases of torture that took place at the site, such as the practice of 'waterboarding' or so-called 'simulated drowning' - which, as the name suggests, consists of placing the subject's head underwater until he or she nearly drowns.
"Trump's decision to use Guantanamo Bay - a global and local symbol of lawlessness, torture and racism - to house immigrants should horrify us all," said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement quoted by CNN International.
"Like many of Trump's authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in US history. Long before the second Bush administration used the facilities to detain and abuse some 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its 'war on terror,' the first Bush administration detained Haitian refugees to try to deny them their rights under international law."
According to the press, around ten people died at the facilities and the hundreds who ended up there came from 48 countries.
The announcement
The announcement that his administration would move people to Guantanamo came during a White House ceremony. In the last 15 days, people who were in the US and were going to countries such as Guatemala, Peru, Honduras and India have already been deported.
"We have 30,000 beds at Guantanamo Bay to hold the worst criminal illegal aliens who threaten the American people," Trump said in announcing his intentions.
"Some of them are so bad that we don't even trust the countries that are holding them, because we don't want them to come back [...]. So let's send them to Guantanamo. That will immediately double our capacity, right? And it's hard. It's a hard place - it's a hard place to get out of," he said.
A person close to the process told CNN International that the detention center facilities could accommodate around 30,000 people in the 1990s, but that more staff would now be needed to keep so many people there.
