United States President Donald Trump will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 immigrants.
The US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility — separate from the high-security US prison for foreign terrorism suspects — that has been used on occasion for decades, including to house Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.
But a move to house tens of thousands of migrants at the base would again widen the Pentagon’s role in Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
“Today I’m … signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday (local time).
Trump said the facility would be used to “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 said the move would “double our capacity immediately” to hold illegal migrants, amid a huge crackdown that he promised at the start of his second term.
Trump made the shock announcement as he signed a bill allowing the pre-trial detention of undocumented migrants charged with theft and violent crime — named after a US student killed by a Venezuelan immigrant.
Donald Trump has signed the Laken Riley Act, which will allow the pre-trial detention of undocumented migrants charged with theft and violent crime. Source: AAP, SIPA USA / Jim Lo Scalzo
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has sharply rebuked Trump’s plans for Guantanamo Bay.
“In an act of brutality, the new US government announces imprisonment at the Guantanamo naval base, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory,” Díaz-Canel wrote on X, adding the migrants would be held near facilities he said the US had used for “torture and illegal detention”.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but personnel from DHS will likely be responsible for the migrants themselves.
It is unclear how the facility would be funded.
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then-president George W Bush to detain foreign militant suspects following the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001.
There are 15 detainees left in the prison.
However, the facility for migrants is separate from the detention centre on the base.
Pro-refugee groups have called for the Guantanamo migrant facility to be closed and for Congress to investigate alleged abuses there.
The International Refugee Assistance Project said in a 2024 report that detainees described unsanitary conditions, families with young children housed together with single adults, a lack of access to confidential phone calls, and the absence of educational services for children.
