Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States will “humanely move” criminal migrants out of the country and work with other agencies to secure the southern border in his first interview since he was confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate.
Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host, addressed President Donald Trump’s memorandum to the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense (DOD), calling on them to prepare a 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. Naval base in Cuba.
He told Fox News host Will Cain Wednesday that Guantanamo Bay is a “perfect place” to hold criminal migrants “safely in the interim” as the process to repatriate them to their homelands plays out.
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Guantanamo Bay is most known for being a detention camp that holds terrorism suspects.
Trump said the facility will “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,” he told reporters at the White House.
Hegseth clarified that criminal migrants aren’t being put in camps with “ISIS and other criminals.”
“This is a temporary transit, which is already the mission of naval station Guantanamo Bay, where we can plus up thousands and tens of thousands if necessary, to humanely move illegals out of our country where they do not belong, back to the countries where they came from in proper process,” Hegseth said on “The Will Cain Show.”
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“This is a plan in movement, but not in movement because we’re behind, but because we’re ramping up for the possibility to expand mass deportations because President Trump is dead serious about getting illegal criminals out of our country,” he continued. “And the DOD is not only willing to, it’s proud to partner with DHS to defend the sovereignty of our southern border and advance that mission.”
The 29th U.S. defense secretary also vowed to make the DOD “color-blind” and “merit-based” so it can return to “the business of fighting and winning wars.”
Hegseth added that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is “gone” from the military and they’ll continue to rip it out “root and branch.”
“We want the best people, regardless of backgrounds, competing for those positions, ready to fight, accountable to their senior leaders. DEI does not do that,” he explained. “Not only does it not do it, it undermines it. So, everyone’s going to be treated equally based on merit.”
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