WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that the people of Illinois want to have Guantanamo prisoners transferred to their state.
When asked by The Daily Caller about the president’s threat to veto the defense authorization bill over the provision that would keep the Guatanamo Bay prison facility open, Pelosi responded, “It would totally undermine our ability to lift the caps, to end sequestration and to have the investments that we need in our national security at the appropriations level and in the omnibus bill and at the domestic level dollar for dollar.”
She later added, “Guantanamo is an issue. It isn’t actually completely factually a case. The people in Illinois were looking forward to having some people transferred there. They saw it as economic opportunity, as you may recall. The problem with Guantanamo has been the resistance of the Republicans to enable that policy to go forward.”
Since the beginning of his first term, President Obama vowed to close the detention center that holds overseas terrorist detainees. A 2009 poll showed Illinois voters overwhelmingly did not support bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States.
A more recent poll conducted in early 2015 by Rasmussen reports that Americans in general continue to stand against bringing Gitmo detainees to the Unites States.