Critics, including the human rights organization Amnesty International, slammed Donald Trump’s announcement about opening a detention center at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay to house up to 30,000 undocumented immigrants.
“We’re going to send them out to Guantanamo,” the president said Wednesday, just before signing the Laken Riley Act into law.
Trump did not expand on his plan to move people who are living illegally in America — but who for various reasons can’t be deported to their home nations — to the U.S. military base where only a handful of suspects remain being held after being detained during the U.S.’s early-2000s war on terror.
On social media, critics slammed the move as “disgusting” and cruel.
Some pointed out the logistical issues of housing so many people in the relatively small base.
Amnesty International said in a statement that Guantanamo Bay “has been the site of torture, indefinite detention without charge or trial and other unlawful practices by the U.S. government.”
“President Trump should be using his authority to finally close the prison there, not re-purposing the facility for offshore immigration detention,” it added.
Trump’s first term (and shortlived) White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who is now a vocal critic of his onetime boss, railed: “Also known as a concentration camp. Yet no dissent. No courageous political leader willing to stand up to this.”
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