Trump's new deportation plan from POLITICO.
It is a wild pipedream scheme that lacks details yet will be doggone expensive:
“Pentagon shocked by
Trump’s order to house migrants in Guantanamo Bay”
Defense officials
are trying to figure out how to hold thousands of people on an aging military
base with minimal staff.
The effort to hold such a large number of people on the 45 square-mile naval base, which the U.S. has leased since 1903, would prove a much greater logistical lift than what the military has.
Trump’s plan to use Gitmo
to detain migrants thrusts the Pentagon into a challenging, costly new effort
just as officials vow to refocus the military on its core mission.
Trump’s recent EO came as
a shock to the Pentagon. Officials are now rushing to come up with a plan to
house up to 30,000 people, far more than the 780 detainees who stayed
in a detention camp on the base during the peak of the war on terror.
DOD officials are
discussing using tents, although they face the challenges of: (1) Tropical
weather; (2) Limited Staff; (3) Access to medical treatments for migrants; and (4)
How to balance resources and finances with another Trump EO that ordered troops
to the southern border to enhance security.
One DOD official, granted anonymity to discuss a rapidly evolving issue
said: “Things are moving as we speak.”
That official, like others, was caught flatfooted by Trump’s
announcement and had no details about what the precise orders would be, when
the detainees would arrive, or what their housing might look like.
The effort to hold such a large number of people on the 45 square-mile naval base, which the U.S. has leased since 1903, would prove a much greater logistical lift than what the military has handled before.
Only 15 detainees remain at the base’s detention
facility after the Biden administration transferred nearly a dozen people from
Guantanamo to Oman in an effort to reduce the inmate population.
The new detainees would not stay in the same area where terrorism suspects have been kept but more likely housed in tents on the sprawling Naval base.
This would broadly resemble what the military did in the
1990s when former President Clinton moved the processing of Haitian refugees to
the base and ordered thousands of Cuban asylum seekers held there. That mission
had a clearly defined timeline. This one has no end in sight.
Trump’s EO directs his administration to provide additional detention space for high-profile criminal aliens.
His plans for Gitmo would greatly expand the country’s detention capacity, which has been strained since before Trump took office. ICE has the detention capacity for about 40,000 people. The nation’s largest ICE facilities have roughly 2,000 beds, much smaller than the major undertaking Trump has proposed for Gitmo. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said that ICE would run an expanded facility at Gitmo.
It’s still not clear what specific role the military would play, even though active-duty troops have historically been the guards there.
The base’s original detention facilities were designed for the Coast Guard to bring in migrants they pick up at sea.
A small group of people, mostly Haitian and Cuban refugees, are currently housed at the Migrant Operations Center there now.
DOD & DHS could stand
up a “reasonable tent city” at Guantanamo within 10 days to two weeks, said the
former senior administration official who also had anonymity to talk about the
logistical challenges.
Providing sanitation, food, drinkable water, and medical care for tens of thousands of migrants could take months.
Those supplies would need to arrive by air or sea, and the Trump administration would have to swell the American presence on the base to include a migrant camp with law enforcement officers, military police, doctors, nurses, and even teachers, and janitors.
Plus, the total cost for this would quickly
skyrocket into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars said
the same former senior official, adding: “Guantanamo can look like the easy
button to press, but it brings with it a whole bundle of problems.”
Pentagon spokesperson
Chris Sherwood said: “It’s still too
early to know what the overall price tag for expanded operations at the
southern border and Guantanamo might be.”
Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegseth, in a video posted to the Pentagon’s social media channels, said that
he’d spoken to other top defense leaders about “ongoing” planning and he added:
“We’re leaning forward on supporting the
president’s directive to make sure that we have a location for violent criminal
illegals as they are deported out of the country.”
The announcement sparked anger among immigration and human
rights advocates, who viewed it as a further attempt to demonize migrants by
conflating them with terror suspects and it spurred concerns from immigration
lawyers and legal experts who questioned whether the plan would be feasible.
Debra Schneider, immigration attorney who went to Guantanamo to visit
with a client nearly 15 years ago said: “I can’t imagine how detained immigrants would have access to counsel,
funds to pay for attorneys to travel there, lodging, and ease of access to
computers to communicate. The idea of 30,000 would be logistically impossible
to have the means for an equal number of attorneys for representation.”
She further said: “It’s
intended to isolate from legal representation, from oversight, from
transparency, from any capacity to provide representation or to even see the
conditions to which people are being subjected.”
Others have expressed concerns about the conditions within the
detention facilities used on terror suspects — and the lack of oversight like
Tom Jawetz, a senior lawyer in the HSD during the Biden administration said:
“The plan could also run into legal
challenges. Taking migrants who are already in the U.S. waiting for immigration
court hearings would be unprecedented, and I just don’t know how that’s legal.”
Jawetz, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress further said: “Trump could also run into hurdles if he intends
to use the facility to detain people who have been ordered to leave the U.S.
but who cannot be returned to their home country.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized — and it’s been the standing position of the U.S. government — that Guantanamo is within the sovereign territory of Cuba.
So, if Trump were to
send Venezuelan nationals who the U.S. has ordered removed to Venezuela, for
example, immigration law would require him to get the permission of the Cuban
government.
Trump referred to that
saying about countries that won’t take back their criminal migrants: “We may increase the 30,000 figure and that the
new facilities would be up pretty quickly.”
My 2 Cents: Trump has lost all his senses of logic and rationality and this issue proves that. Where he goes now is anyone’s guess.
He has no plan. But, he’s said before in the past about replacing the ACA that he “…has a concept of a plan.” Oops!!!
That’s not a plan not at all. Stay tuned.
This really a big deal even for Trump to
conquer.
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