The White House reported the transfer of detained illegal immigrants to a migrant detention facility in US-occupied Cuba. During the George W. Bush administration, the US opened a prison at Guantanamo Bay in an effort to deny the detainees’ Constitutional rights. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that the first flight carrying a dozen illegal immigrants from Texas to Guantanamo Bay took place on Tuesday. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to expand the migrant facility to 30,000 beds and prepare to begin receiving detainees. 

The WSJ added that the migrant facility can only currently hold 120 detainees and the Pentagon is in the process of deploying 500 Marines to expand the prison.

The order was met with backlash as Guantanamo Bay is the site of the infamous torture prison operated by the CIA. During the Bush administration, hundreds of detainees were moved to GITMO to deny them Constitutional rights as they were subjected to torture and other abuses.

While the migrant facility is separate from the prison, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeated talking points from Bush officials to justify opening the facility. “There might be some resources that could be established for the worst of the worst at Guantanamo Bay, and that’s something that [Trump] is evaluating along with our team at the Department of Homeland Security,” she said. 

During the Bush administration, it was frequently repeated that the detainees at the GITMO facility were the “worst of the worst.” Many of those held at the CIA-run prison were later found to be innocent and released. 

Like Bush, Trump may see Guantanamo Bay as a place to circumvent prisoners’ Constitutional rights, suggesting they could remain at the facility for an extended period of time. “We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” he said at a press conference last week. “This will double our capacity immediately, right? And tough. That’s a tough – that’s a tough place to get out of.”

Additionally, while signing the executive order, Trump suggested the illegal immigrants did not have another place to be moved after being deported to Guantanamo Bay.  “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,” he said.