Trump says he will open migrant detention center at Guantánamo Bay
In his bill signing remarks, Trump said he was planning to sign an executive order opening a detention center at Guantánamo Bay that would hold up to 30,000 people in the US illegally.
Trump said the camp would be used “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people”. 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 house Cubans picked up at sea.
“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. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”
Of the camp in Cuba, used to hold terrorism suspects, Trump said: “That’s a tough place to get out of.”
An internal government report said the camp was beset by rats and overflowing toilets and inmates were blindfolded while being moved around the facility.
Only 37 migrants were held at Gitmo—the name used as shorthand for the island by the U.S. military—between 2020 to 2023.
Cuban Dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel called the move “an act of brutality” in an X post and reiterated Havana’s position that the land upon which the base is located is “illegally occupied.” The island nation’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, added in a separate post that the decision “shows a lack of concern for the human condition and international law.”
Ira Kurzban, a prominent Miami immigration attorney who had sued numerous U.S. administrations including Trump’s, said the president’s words are all theater, but they still provoke anxiety throughout immigrant communities. “Disgraceful, unlawful, unworkable, and will cost U.S. taxpayers billions, not millions of dollars that are better spent on helping educate our children,” Kurzban said.