US plans to send as many as 30,000 detained migrants to US Navy base in Guantanamo

President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Wednesday to ready a detention facility for migrants in the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could hold as many as 30,000 people as his administration ramps up deportations.

The memo directs the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to take “all appropriate actions” to expand the Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay “to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs” identified by the agencies.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said in remarks before signing the Laken Riley Act at the White House, a new law that allows for the detention of immigrants suspected of committing theft and other crimes.

“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 Guantánamo,” Trump added. “This will double our capacity immediately. It’s a tough place to get out of.”

The base is well known as the detention center for suspected terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. But the U.S. government also keeps a facility where some Cuban and Haitian migrants intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard await the result of their asylum cases. The State Department manages that facility, with assistance from the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. The Guantanamo facility came under fire during the Biden administration for human rights violations, a claim that the State Department has vehemently denied.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House “border czar” Tom Homan told reporters Wednesday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will run the facility following “the highest standards” and that the White House was already working on the plan.

“What you probably don’t know, there’s already a migrant center there, it’s been there for decades,” Homan said. “So we’re just going to expand upon that existing migrant center.”

Noem said the White House was working on the plan “to use resources that we currently have.”

“We’re going after these guys,” she added. “We’re already doing it. We’re building it out.”

Both referred to Guantanamo Bay as being for “the worst of the worst.”

It is unclear if the 30,000-beds figure mentioned by Trump is a goal for an expansion plan.

In 2021, Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Biden administration issued an open call for contractors to provide security services at the base’s Migrant Operations Center. The notice said the facility had a capacity for only 120 people and the administration wanted to expand that to house up to 400 migrants. At the time, the worsening situation in Haiti was raising concerns about a surge of migrants coming to the U.S.

Cuban government authorities, who contend the U.S. is illegally maintaining the base on Cuban territory, quickly slammed the plan.

“In an act of brutality, the new U.S. government announces imprisonment at the Naval Base in Guantánamo, located in illegally occupied #Cuba territory, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, whom it will place next to the well-known torture and illegal detention prisons,” Cuba’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said.

This is not the first time U.S. presidents have sought to use Guantanamo to detain thousands of migrants. From August 1994 to February 1996, President Bill Clinton sent over 30,000 Cubans and thousands of Haitians to the base after they were intercepted trying to reach U.S. shores on rafts and rustic boats.

Former President Barack Obama failed at trying to close the prison there, after it was tainted by allegations of torture against suspected terrorists held there. During his first time in office, Trump signed an executive order to keep it open. And plans involving the base to house migrants is sure to create controversy.

Ira Kurzban, a prominent Miami immigration attorney who had sued numerous U.S. administrations including Trump’s, said the president’s words are all theater, but they still provoke anxiety throughout immigrant communities.

“Disgraceful, unlawful, unworkable, and will cost U.S. taxpayers billions, not millions of dollars that are better spent on helping educate our children,” Kurzban said.

Brian Concannon, executive director of Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, has long been a critic of detaining migrants in Guantanamo.

“When Guantanamo Bay held thousands of Haitians in the 1990s, it functioned as a concentration camp with deplorable conditions, beyond the rule of law,” he said “Reviving this practice, especially to hold people of color, would constitute an outrageous betrayal of our humanity and the rule of law.”

The Trump administration has reportedly been in talks with other countries, including El Salvador, to see if they would be willing to accept deported migrants from countries that refuse to accept them such as Venezuela. This week, Noem revoked a recent Biden-era extension of temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States.