President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Wednesday to start preparing a facility on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to house tens of thousands of “the worst” undocumented immigrants.
The action, which Trump discussed for the first time earlier Wednesday, will direct the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to prepare 30,000 beds at the site of the infamous US military prison in Cuba, “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
“Some of them are so bad we do not even trust the countries to hold them, because we do not want them coming back, so we are going to send them out to Guantanamo,” Donald Trump claimed.
“This will immediately double our capacity,” he said, describing it as “a tough place to get out of.”
Trump’s remarks came shortly before he signed the Laken Riley Act, a hardline immigration measure backed by some Democrats and the president’s first law of his second term.
After the signing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that “the White House is currently working on [using] resources we already have in Guantanamo Bay” to increase the number of beds for “the worst of the worst.”
“We are already doing it,” Noem explained. “We are building it out.”
Noem clarified that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would operate the facility, and Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, stated that immigrants would be flown there directly. When asked how much the facility would cost, Noem said it would be determined by congressional appropriators.
Later Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News that the facility would be used for “temporary transit,” emphasizing that “this is not the camps” and pointing out that the base had previously housed migrants.
The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which serves as both a military base and a controversial US military prison that has held terrorism suspects for more than two decades, housed Hatian refugees in the 1990s before the detention facility was built there.
Cubans were also housed there in the 1990s, and former President Joe Biden last year considered relocating Haitians there if the country’s fragile government collapsed.
Other presidents who held or considered holding refugees on the base justified their actions as emergency humanitarian measures rather than harsh deterrents.
The 45-square-mile land and water base in southeastern Cuba has been under US control since 1903, and it has long been a source of contention for Cuba’s communist government, which resents the US presence there.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the move “an act of brutality” in an X post and reiterated Havana’s position that the base’s land is “illegally occupied.” In a separate post, the island nation’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, stated that the decision “shows a lack of concern for the human condition and international law.”
In addition to housing the military prison, whose detainee population had shrunk to 15 by the end of the Biden administration, the base is used by the Navy as “a key operational and logistics hub, supporting a variety of missions including maritime security, humanitarian assistance, and joint operations,” according to The Navy.
The Pentagon referred questions to the White House, with one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a rapidly evolving issue, stating that no orders had been issued by the secretary of Defense to begin work on the base.
Trump initially referred to his decision as an executive order, but the White House later issued it as a memorandum.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the executive order’s contents or when Trump planned to sign it.
