WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Sunday declined to say whether migrant women, children or families would be included in Trump administration expansion plans for the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention center, saying instead the federal government would utilize all available facilities under the law.
Republican President Donald Trump last week said he was expanding a detention facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold 30,000 people. His White House border czar, Tom Homan, has said he hopes to start moving migrants there within 30 days.
Asked repeatedly on NBC News whether women, children and families would be among those held at the detention center, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declined to directly answer.
“We’re going to use the facilities that we have,” she told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “We have other detention facilities, other places in the country. So, we will utilize what we have according to what’s appropriate for the individuals.”
In separate Sunday interviews, Noem and Homan both reiterated that the administration was targeting “the worst of the worst” with its sweeps to detain people who are in the United States illegally, noting that a recent enforcement action in New York City focused on individuals with criminal arrest warrants.
“The worst of the worst need to go to Guantanamo Bay,” Homan told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program. “We’ve had a migrant processing center there for decades … We’re going to expand it a lot.”
Noem said that the plan was not to hold people at Guantanamo indefinitely and that the administration would follow U.S. law.
“The plan is to have a process that we follow that’s laid out in law and make sure that we’re dealing with these individuals appropriately,” she said. “But it is an asset that we have that we fully intend to utilize.”
Noem reiterated that the Homeland Security Department would work with Congress on the facility but gave no other details.
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly told NBC the decision to expand migrant detention at Guantanamo “just sounds very frightening to a lot of folk.”
The administration has not said how much it would cost to expand Guantanamo, which was established in 2002 to detain foreign militants in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Its high-security U.S. prison was criticized in 2023 by a United Nations expert, who said the U.S. government treatment of Guantanamo Bay inmates was cruel, inhuman and degrading under international law.
The base also includes a migrant facility that has been used to detain Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea as they processed their asylum cases during the Clinton administration.
Recent Democratic presidents have sought to close the base, which has long been condemned by human rights groups for indefinite detention and reports of abuse and torture. Migrant and refugee advocacy groups have also called on Congress to investigate alleged abuses. Trump, who took office Jan. 20, has vowed to keep the aging military base open.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also received U.S. military approval to detain migrants at other installations, including Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Doug Gillison; Editing by Scott Malone and Aurora Ellis)
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