Trump Plans A Holding Camp at Guantanamo Bay for 30,000 Detained Migrants

US President Donald Trump has ordered the construction of a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, which he said would hold as many as 30,000 people.

He said that the facility at the US Navy base in Cuba, which would be separate from its high-security military prison, would house “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”

Human rights groups have long criticised the practice of housing immigrants in Guantanamo Bay.

Later on Wednesday, Trump’s “border tsar,” Tom Homan, said the existing facility was there. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would expand and run the facility.

President Donald Trump, who made the deportation of immigrants a central part of his campaign and presidency, said Wednesday that the U.S. will use a detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold tens of thousands of people who can’t be sent back to their home countries.

“We’re going to “send them out to Guantanamo,” Trump stated during the signing of the Laken Agreement. Riley Act.

The US could intercept the migrants at sea and transport them directly there, he said. The Coast Guard would apply the “highest” detention standards.

The facility’s cost and completion date are unknown.
Cuba’s government swiftly condemned the plan, accusing the US of torture and illegal detention in “occupied” land.

Trump’s announcement came as he signed the so-called Laken Riley Act into law, which requires undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.

The bill, named after a Venezuelan migrant who murdered a Georgia nursing student last year, was approved by Congress last week, an early legislative win for the administration.

At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Trump said the new Guantanamo executive order would instruct the defence and homeland security departments to “begin preparing” the 30,000-bed facility.

“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” he said of migrants. “So we’re going to send them to Guantanamo… it’s a tough place to get out.”

According to Trump, the facility will double the US capacity to hold undocumented migrants.

The US has already been using a facility in Guantanamo—known as the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Centre (GMOC)—for decades and through various administrations, both Republican and Democrat.

In a 2024 report, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) accused the government of secretly holding migrants there in “inhumane” conditions indefinitely after detaining them at sea.

The GMOC has principally housed migrants picked up at sea and was recently the subject of a Freedom of Information request by the American Civil Liberties Union for the disclosure of records about the site.

In response, the Biden administration stated that it “is not a detention facility” and that none of the migrants there are in detention.

The Trump However, the administration asserts that the expanded facility’s primary purpose is to serve as a detention centre.

According to reports, Republicans are working to assemble a spending bill that includes a request for Congress to fund the expansion of the existing detention facility.