Trump to use Guantanamo Bay prison to hold 30,000 migrants

On Tuesday, the US military said that it would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.

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The decisions come on top of US military deportation flights and the deployment of just over 1600 active-duty troops to the US border with Mexico following Trump’s emergency declaration on immigration last week.

The administration on Tuesday also cancelled former president Joe Biden’s extension of Temporary Protected Status for 600,000 Venezuelans already in the US. The 18-month extension of TPS would have shielded Venezuelan migrants from being sent back to their country and allowed them to work legally in the US. The Biden administration announced the extension days before leaving office.

“We stopped that,” Noem said on Fox News. “We signed an executive order within the Department of Homeland Security that we are not going to follow through on what they did to tie our hands.”

The TPS program was expanded aggressively under Biden, who used it to shield people from countries seen as unstable, such as Haiti, El Salvador and Ukraine. Trump’s decision to revoke the extension for Venezuelans was reported earlier by The New York Times.

In the last several years, Venezuelans have ranked among the largest groups of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border without authorisation to ask for asylum. While the TPS program for the South American country initially enjoyed broad support, it later became a target of Republicans who argued that it has been granted too liberally and acts as a draw to migrants.

Florida, Texas and New York are home to the largest population of individuals with TPS, with about half the total recipients coming from Venezuela. Patricia Andrade, of Miami-based non-profit Raíces Venezolanas (Venezuelan Roots), has been advising TPS holders to apply for other visas and alternative immigration options.

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“Many of those who received TPS have already opted for asylum or an immigrant visa, but others are still waiting for these new visas,” she said. “These are the people we are concerned about.”