The United States has dismantled large parts of a camp built to accommodate migrants at the Guantanamo Naval Base, satellite images viewed by the BBC Cerify Show.
President Donald Trump has ordered the existing facility in Cuba to be expanded to hold 30,000 migrants shortly after the post in January. However, at the heart, however, he actually actually kept the basis.
The Pentagon has spent about $ 38 million (28.7 million pounds) on deportation and detention operations in Guantanamo Bay in the first month of operations alone this year, said an employee of the Ministry of Defense.
But now the new images show that about two -thirds of approximately 260 tents installed as part of the operation were removed as of April 16.
Asked about the removal of tents, a US defense employee answered: “This strength adjustment is a deliberate and effective use of resources – not reducing readiness.”
The camp started construction only a day after President Trump announced the plan, with tents rising between January 30 and February 12. Visible construction continued until March 8, with scattered temporary structures appearing on satellite images.
Construction marks a significant expansion of the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center, a long -used facility to retain some migrants and differently from a high -security military prison used to accommodate detainees suspected of US terrorist crimes.
The photos below show a combination of about 260 green and white military tents in an area southwest of the Guantanamo Bay Bay on April 1. But by April 10, many were removed.
The following images with a lower resolution show that since April 16, it seems that about 175 tents have been removed.
It is not clear how many migrants remain in the facility. Stephen Miller – Deputy Chief of White House Staff – insisted in an interview with Fox News last week that the base remains open and that “a large number of foreign terrorist aliens are still there.
The White House did not respond to a request to comment on whether the removal of tents is a cancellation of Trump's plans to expand the detention facility.
Despite Trump's promise to send 30,000 migrants to the base, a US Defense official said the island's deployment was to support a population of 2500 detainees.
The BBC Verify analysis of the tent's likely capacity estimated at less than 3,000 people based on the military instructions of US military dream.
Trump said in January that the expansion would largely be used to hold undocumented migrants who are considered dangerous criminals or risks to national security.
“Some of them are so bad that we don't even believe the parties to hold them because we don't want them to come back,” he told the migrants. “So we'll send them to Guantanamo … It's a difficult place to get out.”
But since its inception two and a half months ago, about 400 migrants have been sent there, with more than half having returned to the facilities in the United States. Others were deported, with 177 people sent to Venezuela through Honduras on February 20.
On March 28, a group of five Democrat senators visited the base. In a statement, they said they were “outraged by the scale and waste of the Trump administration's abuse of our military” and described the camp as “at first glance intended to undermine the proper process and to avoid legal control.”
The delegation of senators said the cost of immigrants from the United States and detention in Guantanamo Bay reached “tens of millions of dollars a month” and called it “insult to US taxpayers.”
Additional reporting by Joshua Cheethm.