President Trump has directed that the US military prison complex at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be used to detain criminal aliens pending repatriation to their home nation or some other destination. Using the occasion of the official signing of the Laken Riley Act (Wednesday Morning Minute: May the MAHA Be With You – RedState), President Trump directed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to work together to refurbish a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo for use.

Today, I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Most people don’t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.

This will double our capacity immediately right… and tough… that's a tough… that's a tough place to get out of. Today's signings bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all and it was just a purely, it's just an unforced error that we even have to be doing this now.

We need Congress to provide full funding for the complete and total restoration of our sovereign borders as well as financial support to remove record numbers of illegal aliens. And these are illegal alien killers, criminals at levels that nobody's ever seen before. And you would have known that, and you were there when I said it. I said everybody that's bad is going to be thrown. If you look at Venezuela, Venezuela's crime is down 77 percent because they've taken their gang members, their prisoners, their drug dealers, their drug lords, they've shipped them all into the United States. Many other countries, their crime is way down, and our crime is not doing well, But we're going to have it do really well very soon, and we're shipping all these people back where they came from.

And now, before I sign the Laken Riley Act into law, I would like to ask Laken's really incredible mother, I've gotten to know; a very sad day I got to know her uh but, uh, this is an amazing tribute to an amazing young person

The facility at Guantanamo was built in response to the Haitian refugee crisis in 1991, and it was used for Haitians again following the earthquake of 2010.

On the whole, this seems like a reasonable strategy. There is no reason to keep criminal aliens in detention facilities with other illegals and let them victimize other people. As Trump has established a quota of 1800 arrests per day, equating to 675,000 arrests in 2025 as the floor figure, we can look forward to expanding this facility to hold more than just criminals.