The United States government is looking at doubling the capacity of a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which it can use to accommodate the surge of migrants from Haiti it anticipates, NBC News claims, citing two US officials and an internal planning document reviewed by its staff.
Amid fears of “mass exodus,” Washington is looking at doubling the current capacity of about 200 migrants in an existing facility at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay and also thinking of other options, including temporarily holding migrants in a third country.
According to NBC, migrants would be sent to Guantanamo only if and when that third country is itself overwhelmed but the National Security Council has, nonetheless, asked the Department of Homeland Security at which point would the US need to designate a third country, knowns as a “lily pad”, to handle the incoming Haitians.
The NSC is also organizing a series of meetings with the State Department, the Department of Defense, and Homeland Security.
Guantanamo was last considered as a potential solution for overflow migration by President Joe Biden’s government in September 2021, when some 15,000 Haitians set up a tent city under a highway bridge in Texas after crossing the US-Mexico border.
To deal with the influx, the Biden administration subsequently ramped up deportation flights, but they have been halted since August.
However, the Democrats who thought Guantanamo was the camp for holding terrorist suspects, roundly denounced the idea regardless of the fact that the Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo, which has been around for more than 30 years, is different from the nearby Camp Delta where the suspected terrorists are being held.
Guantanamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center is currently used by the US Coast Guard, which accommodates in the facility the migrants it rescues at sea in the Caribbean.
Be the first to comment