WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 migrants.
The U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility – separate from the high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects – that has been used on occasion for decades, including to hold Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said later on Wednesday that the administration would expand the already existing facility and that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would run it.
“Today I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said at the White House.
He 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. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And, tough.”
Soon after, Trump signed a memorandum, which did not have a number of migrants in it but called for “additional detention space” at the expanded facility.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Homan said the center would be used for the “worst of the worst.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, asked how much money would be required for the facility, said the administration was working on it with reconciliation and appropriators in Congress.
‘ACT OF BRUTALITY’
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then-U.S. President George W. Bush to detain foreign militant suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. There are 15 detainees left in the prison.
Trump’s two Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, sought to shut down the Guantanamo prison and were only able to reduce its inmate population, but Trump has vowed to keep it open.
The jail has long been condemned by human rights groups for indefinite detention and came to symbolize the early excesses the U.S. “war on terror” because of harsh interrogation methods that critics say amounted to torture.
The facility for migrants is separate from the detention center on the base.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel called Trump’s plan “an act of brutality.”
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.
On Tuesday, the U.S. military said that it would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.
The decision comes on top of U.S. military deportation flights of migrants out of the country and the deployment of just over 1,600 active-duty troops to the U.S. border with Mexico following Trump’s emergency declaration on immigration last week.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason, Idrees Ali, Ted Hesson, Matt Spetalnick; Writing by Jasper Ward and Idrees Ali; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alistair Bell)
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