While signing Laken Riley Act, Trump says he'll send 'worst criminal aliens' to Guantanamo
Last edited Wed Jan 29, 2025, 09:04 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: AP
Updated 6:00 PM EST, January 29, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed the Laken Riley Act into law, giving federal authorities broader power to deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally who have been accused of crimes. He also announced at the ceremony that his administration planned to send the "worst criminal aliens" to a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The bipartisan act, the first piece of legislation approved during Trump's second term, was named for Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was slain last year by a Venezuelan man in the U.S. illegally. "She was a light of warmth and kindness," Trump said during a ceremony that included Riley's parents and sister. "It's a tremendous tribute to your daughter what's taking place today, that's all I can say. It's so sad we have to be doing it."
Trump has promised to drastically increase deportations, but he also said at the signing that some of the people being sent back to their home countries couldn't be counted on to stay there.
"Some of them are so bad that we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're gonna send 'em out to Guantanamo," Trump said. He said that he'd direct federal officials to get facilities in Cuba ready to receive immigrant criminals.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/trump-signs-laken-riley-act-immigration-crackdown-30a34248fa984d8d46b809c3e6d8731a
Article updated.
Previous article/headline -
Updated 3:14 PM EST, January 29, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) -- At the signing of the Laken Riley Act, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is directing the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 migrants who are living illegally in the United States and cannot be deported to their home countries.
Trump made the announcement just before he signed the immigrant detention measure, the first law of his new administration.
"We're going to send them out to Guantanamo," the president said in the White House East Room. He did not elaborate.
The U.S. military base has been used to house detainees from the U.S. war on terrorism.
Original article/headline -
Updated 2:54 PM EST, January 29, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is directing the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 migrants who are living illegally in the United States.
Trump made the announcement right before he signed the Laken Riley Act into law as his administration's first piece of legislation. The bipartisan measure means that people who are in the U.S. illegally and are accused of theft and violent crimes would have to be detained and potentially deported even before a conviction.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP's earlier story follows below.
= new reply since forum marked as read
We had detention facilities opened under Obama
By Patrick Danner,
Staff writer
Updated July 25, 2024 12:58 p.m.
The facility in Dilley, a town of about 3,300 people 70 miles southwest of San Antonio, was opened during the Obama administration in 2014 to hold a surge of Central American families who surrendered at the border and requested asylum. Tennessee-based CoreCivic Inc., which has operated the center, said its mission shifted to detention of single adults in 2021.
https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/closure-south-texas-detention-facility-leads-600-19594211.php
I believe some asylum seekers were sent to centers if they had no contacts/sponsors in the US. I might be mistaken, but I think one of the requirements for community release was a friend or family member somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Family_Residential_Center
The South Texas Family Residential Center is the largest immigrant detention center in the United States. Opened in December 2014 in Dilley, Texas, it has a capacity of 2,400 and is intended to detain mainly women and children from Central America.[2]
asylum seekers in response to a twofold situation: the exodus of tens of
thousands of Haitians fleeing a brutal military dictatorship257 and increasing
panic among policymakers over the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S.—
culminating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)
designation of Haitians as a high-risk group in 1983 and an immigration
ban on individuals living with HIV/AIDS in 1987.258 In the early 1990s, the
U.S. began detaining Haitian asylum seekers intercepted at sea en masse
away from the U.S. mainland, even if they were not HIV-positive,259 veering
sharply from the policy formally adopted by the U.S. in the 1950s of not
incarcerating migrants.260
Large numbers of Haitians fled by boat to the United States in 1980—the
same year that the U.S. codified non-refoulement in its domestic asylum
code, the Refugee Act of 1980. One year later, President Ronald Reagan
struck a deal with Haiti’s government to return anyone apprehended at sea
who travelled “illegally.”261 Though Reagan pledged not to return asylum
seekers, only 6 out of 21,000 Haitians received asylum hearings over the
course of nine years. https://immigrantjustice.org/sites/default/files/content-type/research-item/documents/2021-11/Offshoring%20Asylum%20Report_Chapter4%20%281%29.pdf
https://www.propublica.org/article/takeaways-coast-guard-intercepts-people-at-sea
Seth Freed Wessler, New York Times, Dec. 6, 2023
"People intercepted at sea, even in U.S. waters, have fewer rights than those who come by land. “Asylum does not apply at sea,” a Coast Guard spokesman told me. Even people who are fleeing violence, rape and death, who on land would be likely to pass an initial asylum screening, are routinely sent back to the countries they’ve fled. ... The treatment of children is perhaps the starkest difference between immigration policy on land and at sea. At land borders, unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada cannot simply be turned back. They are assigned government caseworkers and are often placed in shelters, then with family members, on track to gain legal status. That system has its own serious failings, but the principle is that children must be protected. Not so at sea. U.S. courts have not determined what protections should extend to minors held on U.S. ships, even those detained well within U.S. waters."
Last year there were 30 or so migrants at Gitmo. To be detained at Gitmo they must apprehended at sea.
. https://archive.ph/cX4HF
GITMO is currently not an option for those apprehended on land.
This EO will be challenged in court. OTOH, there are immigrants who have deportation orders who currently cannot be deported because their countries will not accept them back. I don't know what immigration law says about those particular situations.
It's a struggle because much of the media is obscuring some critical things by drowning half their main pages in "entertainment" news, minimizing negative news about the GOP and what Democrats are doing to fight them, using tiny font on their website links for what should be a major news story, and in some cases, not even featuring those stories on their main pages until a day or more later. 
