President Donald Trump said he was signing an executive order asking the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to examine creating a facility at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay that could house as many as 30,000 undocumented migrants.
“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,” Trump said Wednesday as he signed the Laken Riley Act requiring the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of crimes.
Trump said the Guantanamo effort could double US capacity for migrant detentions. It was signaled by his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who earlier told Fox News that the administration was weighing sending migrants to the prison facility located on the southeastern end of Cuba.
It’s part of a much broader overhaul of immigration policy with the administration conducting high-profile arrests in New York, Chicago and Denver of those convicted of serious crimes. But Trump has also vowed the largest deportation in US history, declaring a national emergency at the southern border, ordering thousands of additional troops to assist with enforcement and cutting off access to asylum.
The administration on Tuesday canceled former President Joe Biden’s extension of Temporary Protected Status for 600,000 Venezuelans already in the US. The 18-month extension of TPS would have shielded Venezuelan migrants from being sent back to their country and allowed them to work legally in the US. The Biden administration announced the extension days before leaving office.
“We stopped that,” Noem said on Fox News. “We signed an executive order within the Department of Homeland Security that we are not going to follow through on what they did to tie our hands.”
The TPS program was expanded aggressively under Biden, who used it to shield people from countries seen as unstable, such as Haiti, El Salvador and Ukraine. Trump’s decision to revoke the extension for Venezuelans was reported earlier by the New York Times.
In the last several years, Venezuelans have ranked among the largest groups of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border without authorization to ask for asylum. While the TPS program for the South American country initially enjoyed broad support, it later became a target of Republicans who argued that it has been granted too liberally and acts as a draw to migrants.
Florida, Texas and New York are home to the largest population of individuals with TPS, with about half the total recipients coming from Venezuela. Patricia Andrade, of Miami-based nonprofit Raíces Venezolanas, has been advising TPS holders to apply for other visas and alternative immigration options.
“Many of those who received TPS have already opted for asylum or an immigrant visa, but others are still waiting for these new visas,” she said. “These are the people we are concerned about.”
