About 300 servicemembers have landed at Guantánamo Bay to provide security and begin setting up at a new tent city for migrants, as officials comply with President Trump’s order to prepare the Navy base for as many as 30,000 deportees, The New York Times reports. The small base in southeast Cuba is on the verge of undergoing its most drastic change since the Pentagon opened its wartime prison there after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In response to Mr. Trump’s order, U.S. forces have already put up 50 Army green tents inside a chain-link-fence enclosure, adjacent to a barracks-style building called the Migrant Operations Center. The first wave of about 50 Marines arrived Saturday night from Camp Lejeune, N.C. The next 50 arrived on Sunday. Trump’s order called for expanding the current “Migrant Operations Center” to accommodate 30,000 people. It is currently a 120-bed former barracks that in recent years housed Cubans, sometimes families, whom the U.S. Coast Guard found at sea trying to reach Florida. They were housed there until a third country agreed to receive them. Some migrants – the most dangerous people, Trump has pledged -- would be housed at the prison.
The New York Times obtained a plan from 2017 describing the detention of 11,000 immigrants on the site, but The Southern Command, which has oversight of troops assigned there, would not discuss the plan. What is clear is that fulfilling Trump’s order could grow the population at Guantánamo tenfold because of the staff it would take to operate the encampment, which is on a unpopulated corner of the base, far from the prison as well as the commissary, school and suburban-style neighborhoods for servicemembers and their families. Even the supply logistics are tricky, because the base is isolated, sitting behind a Cuban minefield, and so all supplies must arrive by air or sea from the United States. Everything from pallets of bottled water and frozen food for the commissary to school supplies and government vehicles come twice a month on a barge. Fresh fruits and vegetables for the 4,200 residents come on a weekly refrigerator flight. The base makes its own water for everything except drinking purposes.
Comentarios