Send border children to Guantanamo

Send them to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That’s what President Obama should do with the children surging across our country’s borders in search of a better life...

Rather than let the children be treated as political pawns, the president should send them to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. While this U.S. military installation is known as a prison for enemy combatants, that penal colony occupies just a small portion of the 45-square-mile base...

At the Navy base, which boasts movie theaters, American fast-food restaurants and excellent recreational facilities, care of the child migrants should be put in the hands of officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than the Department of Homeland Security.

Scattering them across the U.S. to immigration centers that lack the space and staff to deal with large numbers of children will turn the problem into a ticking time bomb. Relocating them to Guantanamo would ratchet up the pressure on their home countries to repatriate them...

The U.S. has a long history of offering haven to dispossessed children, from World War II’s Operation Pied Piper that evacuated children from Britain, to Operation Pedro Pan that moved more than 14,000 children out of Cuba, to Operation Baby lift’s rescue of youngsters from Vietnam.

But today’s child migrants present a special problem. They are neither refugees of a war the U.S. was involved in, nor the product of a lingering ideological tug of war. Instead, they are part of what, for many Americans, is a crisis of little concern....

The best way to do that is to house all the children, temporarily, at Guantanamo Bay.