Obama’s Failure To Close Guantanamo Meant It Was Open for Trump To Use
Since retaking office last week, President Donald Trump has issued numerous executive orders to address a nonexistent national immigration emergency. This week, Trump pledged to house undocumented migrants in the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The plan is certain to spark blowback from progressives and civil libertarians alike and will likely provoke legal challenges. But ironically, Trump’s action is partly enabled by former President Barack Obama’s failure to close the facility in the first place.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said, according to CBS News. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back.”
Trump later issued a memo directing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security “to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” (The Global Detention Project notes that the facility where Trump plans to house 30,000 migrants had “a previous capacity of only 130.”)
Secretary Pete Hegseth affirmed that the Department of Defense was prepared to enforce Trump’s order. “We don’t want illegal criminals in the United States, not a minute longer than they have to be,” he told Fox News’ Jesse Watters. “Move them off to Guantanamo Bay where they can be safely maintained until they are deported to their final location, their country of origin, where they’re headed. We feel great about this plan, we know we can execute it, and the Defense Department is prepared to do everything we can.”
Located on the southeastern coast of Cuba, Guantanamo occupies an odd historical position as a vestige of American imperialism: The U.S. seized the bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War as Cubans fought against the colonizing Spanish. When Cuba achieved independence, the U.S. leased the property from the new government and built a naval base. After Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, relations between the countries soured, but the lease had no end date and required the consent of both parties to terminate.
Ever since, the Cuban government has simply refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the arrangement and does not cash the United States’ lease
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