white house —
U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would sign an executive action directing his administration to prepare to detain undocumented migrants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The U.S. detention facility is known mostly for housing military prisoners and terror suspects, including those involved in the 9/11 attacks and members of the Taliban.
His order will instruct the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare the U.S. naval base to hold 30,000 migrants, Trump said.
“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,” Trump added. “This will double our capacity immediately. And tough, it’s a tough place to get out of.”
Trump made the announcement during a White House event during which he signed the Laken Riley Act into law. It was the first legislation he’d signed in his second term. The bill, named after a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered last year by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant, aims to expand the federal government’s mandate to detain immigrants who are in the country illegally.
It’s unclear how the administration proposes to do this. Asked by reporters, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this was something the White House was “working on, to use resources that we currently have there at Guantanamo Bay.”
“We’ll go through the process,” she said, adding that the administration was working with lawmakers to fund it. She offered no estimate of the cost.
A White House official, speaking on background, a method often used by U.S. officials to remain anonymous, told VOA that Trump had signed a presidential memorandum regarding housing migrants at Guantanamo.
Presidential memoranda are less formal than executive orders. For example, they do not have to be submitted to the Federal Register for publication.
Late Wednesday, the White House published the executive memorandum.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said Wednesday that U.S. Coast Guard personnel already tasked to intercept illegal migrants at sea “can take them straight to Guantanamo Bay.”
Homan told reporters that migrants had been housed there before.
“So we’re just going to expand upon the existing migrant center logistics to work for that,” he said.
According to a September 2024 report from the International Refugee Assistance Project, the U.S. has for decades detained migrants intercepted at sea in the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay under prisonlike conditions.
IRAP and other immigration rights advocates have called for the immediate closure of the migrant center. The organization also called on Congress to investigate alleged human rights abuses at the facility and called for the end of migrant detention operations everywhere.
Later Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Guantanamo Bay the “perfect place” for criminal migrants. Hegseth told Fox News that Guantanamo Bay could also temporarily hold other undocumented immigrants while they’re waiting to be sent back to their home countries.
“It’s folks who maybe are in transit to their home country or a safe harbor country, and it’s taking a little time to move with that processing of the paperwork,” he said, adding, “Better they be held at a safe location, like Guantanamo Bay, which is meant and built for migrants, meant and built to sustain that away from the American people.”
According to media reports, Immigration and Customs Enforcement averaged 710 arrests per day from Thursday through Monday, more than double the daily average of 311 recorded in the 12-month period through September under President Joe Biden.
If ICE officers continue with these detentions, it would exceed the agency’s previous record set during President Barack Obama’s administration in 2013, when daily arrests averaged 636.
The Trump administration has intensified deportations, with ICE regularly updating arrest figures. The swift removals have sometimes created challenges in determining where to send deportees, especially when certain countries refuse to accept them.
Closing Guantanamo
Democratic administrations under Obama and Biden had sought to close the notorious detention camp. It was built by the George W. Bush administration in the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base facility in 2002 following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that began shortly after the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
Rights groups say that Guantanamo is a symbol of U.S. disregard for the rule of law, as many detainees were held there without charge or trial.
Sue Hendrickson, president and CEO of Human Rights First, said in a statement that sending migrants to Guantanamo would create a human rights catastrophe.
“Housing accused terrorists at Guantanamo has been a debacle. For the past 20 years, the U.S. government has locked up people it never even accused of taking action against the United States while continually failing to try those credibly charged with serious crimes,” she wrote.
“The Trump administration may find the symbolism of sending migrants to Guantanamo darkly appealing; its practical result would be more injustice, waste and self-inflicted loss of credibility,” Hendrickson added.
At its height during the Global War on Terror, the detention facility held about 680 prisoners. According to the Pentagon, as of January 6, there were just 15 detainees at the facility.
Before being used to detain terror suspects, the U.S. naval facility was also used to house migrants from Cuba and Haiti in the early 1990s, per the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
“At one point in late 1994, the migrant population of the naval station approached 45,000,” a CRS report dated August 2022 said. The report noted the last of the migrants had left by the end of January 1996.
VOA’s Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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