President Donald Trump, who made the deportation of migrants a central part of his campaign and presidency, said Wednesday that the U.S. will use a detention center at , to hold tens of thousands of people who can't be sent back to their home countries.
鈥淲e鈥檙e going to send them out to Guantanamo,鈥� Trump said at at the signing of the .
Here's a look at the U.S. naval base and its history:
How does the U.S. government use the base at Guantanamo Bay?
While the U.S. naval base in Cuba is best-known for the suspects brought in after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it also has a separate facility used for decades to hold migrants.
The Migrant Operations Center holds those detained at sea, many from Haiti and Cuba.
The nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project said in a report last year that the migrants are held in 鈥減rison-like鈥� conditions. It said migrants there were 鈥渢rapped in a punitive system鈥� indefinitely, with no accountability for the officials running it.
The U.S. has leased Guantanamo from Cuba for more than a century. Cuba opposes the lease and typically rejects the nominal U.S. rent payments.
Does the U.S. have sufficient space for Trump's plans?
Trump has vowed to deport millions of people living illegally in the U.S., but the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget only has enough funds to detain about 41,000 people.
ICE detains migrants at its processing centers and privately operated detention facilities, along with local prisons and jails. It has no facilities geared toward detention of families, who account for roughly one-third of arrivals on the southern U.S. border.
During Trump鈥檚 first term, he . In 2014, then-President Barack Obama temporarily relied on military bases to detain immigrant children while ramping up privately operated family detention centers to hold many of the tens of thousands of Central American families caught illegally crossing the border.
U.S. military bases have been used repeatedly since the 1970s to accommodate the resettlement of waves of immigrants fleeing Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Associated Press, The Associated Press
