U.S. President Donald Trump has announced plans to expand the offshore detention base, Guantánamo Bay, to hold an extra 30,000 people.
The bay, based in south-eastern Cuba, is home to an offshore detention facility used by the U.S. to hold suspected terrorists post-9/11.
Trump has proposed using a separate facility in Guantánamo to detain those who he described as “high-priority criminal aliens”.
Refugee advocates have criticised the measure as “nothing short of disastrous”.
Guantánamo Bay
Guantánamo Bay was originally a U.S. naval station based in southern Cuba.
In 2002, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was turned into an offshore detention facility for suspected war criminals and perpetrators of terrorism, overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Around 800 people have been detained in Guantánamo Bay since then.
Roughly 30 people remain imprisoned there.
Torture
Human rights groups have repeatedly accused the CIA of using Guantánamo Bay as a site to
A 2014 U.S. Senate report revealed evidence the CIA tortured people suspected of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The CIA branded some of these strategies as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
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This included ‘waterboarding’, a form of torture when a person has water poured into their nose and mouth, simulating drowning.
Trump’s plan
Earlier this week, Congress passed a law allowing for non-US citizens to be held in immigration detention for
After the law was passed, Trump held a press conference where he spruiked his government’s efforts to curb migration.
He then announced he would order defence and immigration officials to open up the “30,000 beds” in Guantánamo “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens”. Under U.S. law, an ‘alien’ is anyone in the country who isn’t a citizen.
Trump signed an executive order to provide “additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States” at the Guantánamo migration detention facility.
An executive order is a presidential directive for government officials to act upon.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border ‘tsar’ (senior adviser), told reporters the migrant centre at Guantánamo has “been there for there for decades” and authorities are now working to “expand upon the existing migrant centre”.
Reaction
Deepa Alagesan, a senior lawyer at the International Refugee Assistance Project, said expanding the Guantánamo migrant facility would be “nothing short of disastrous.”
She described the facility as an “offshore black box” and said it would deprive detainees of the “basic standards of care”.
Cuba’s President,, voiced his criticism on social media, calling Trump’s plans an “act of brutality”.
