Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a staunch warning to illegal immigrants even as he defended their treatment at the infamous Guantánamo Bay detention facility.

The former Fox News host arrived at the 45-square-mile military base in Cuba on Tuesday, and provided an exclusive tour to his former colleague, Laura Ingraham, showing her the rooms where migrants will be held before they are deported back to their home country.

‘It’s an incredibly professional operation,’ said Hegseth, who served as a US Army lieutenant at Guantanamo Bay from 2004 to 2005.

‘The message is clear: If you break the law, if you are a criminal, you can find your way at Guantanamo Bay. 

‘You don’t want to be at Guantanamo Bay, which is where we housed al Qaeda after 9/11,’ he added, noting that it is a ‘maximum security prison.’

Still, he denied reports of mistreatment and inhumane conditions, calling allegations ‘BS.’

Hegseth described the living conditions for the migrants as ‘austere’ and ‘basic, but it’s every basic amenity that you could need is provided.’

‘These are top notch, top tier facilities run by professionals where they bend over backwards to make sure medical, dental, health care, food, religious accommodations, language accommodations,’ he said, while admitting ‘you’re not going to have universal freedom at Guantanamo Bay. It’s a prison.’

The defense secretary’s remarks came as he showed Ingraham rooms with four bunk beds each, with clothes folded on top of them and toiletries in a bag.

But Ingraham was not allowed to see the rooms where the migrants who committed serious offenses in the United States were being held, as some of the migrants who have already spent time at the camp claimed to the Latin Times they lived in shackles and inside cages.

One young Venezuelan even said inhumane conditions at the facility left him traumatized.

‘I really don’t think I’ll leave my country again because I was really traumatized by everything that happened,’ Kevin Rodriguez said, noting that he lost nine pounds and was provided with very little food.

The American Civil Liberties Union is now suing the Trump administration for access to the camp. 

It is seeking a court order requiring the administration to give its attorneys in-person access to detainees as soon as possible and immediate video and telephone access in the interim, according to Politico. 

The suit argues that the detainees’ lack of access to attorneys violates their Constitutional right to counsel, and that the ACLU has their own First Amendment right to meet with the migrants.

Hegseth, though, denied the claims.

‘I know what their agenda is,’ he told Ingraham of the ACLU. 

‘They want to make America look bad, they want to make our commander in chief, President Trump, look bad,’ he claimed.

Yet the Trump administration also faced a setback when a federal judge blocked it from sending a group of Venezuelans to the naval base.

And as Hegseth toured the facility for the first time as the Secretary of Defense, a group of Democratic senators sent him a letter saying the use of Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants risks long-term damage to the readiness and reputation of the armed forces.

The US Navy has deployed 2,000 troops to the naval base along with Marines assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment.

‘This open-ended mass detention effort of a US military facility risks costing [the Department of Defense] hundreds of millions of unbudgeted dollars – if not billions- and thousands of men-hours which cannot be regained,’ Jon Ossoff, Chris Coons, Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen wrote in the letter obtained by Stars and Stripes.

They asked for an estimated cost of the Department of Defense’s support to the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains the facility, and when the department would be reimbursed.

The senators also asked for an estimated cost and timeline to increase Guantanamo Bay’s migrant capacity to 30,000 and what is the source of the funding.

‘Our men and women in uniform are war fighters, not jailers of migrants,’ the senators argued as they gave Hegseth a March 7 deadline to respond. 

Trump had unveiled plans to detain as many as 30,000 high priority migrants with criminal records at the military base at Guantanamo Bay shortly after he took office.

‘Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send them out to Guantanamo,’ he said in January.   

As of Tuesday, 26 men whom the Trump administration said are designated for deportation were being held at the base.