WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is directing the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 migrants who are living illegally in the United States and cannot be deported to their home countries for a variety of reasons.
Trump made the announcement right before he signed the Laken Riley Act into law as his administration’s first piece of legislation. The bipartisan measure means that people who are in the U.S. illegally and are accused of theft and violent crimes would have to be detained and potentially deported even before a conviction.
"Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to began preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay — most people don't even know about it," Trump said. "We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people."
The White House announced a short time later that Trump had signed a presidential memorandum on Guantanamo.
The move immediately doubles U.S. detention lockup capacities, Trump said at the signing ceremony, noting that Guantanamo, is “a tough place to get out of.”
In subsequent comments to reporters outside the White House, new Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said of expanded detention facilities that “we’re building it out” and that the administration would seek funding via spending bills Congress is set to consider.
The administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, said U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement would run the facility in Cuba and that the “the worst of the worst" could go to Guantanamo.
Still, the details of Trump’s plan were not immediately clear. The U.S. military base in Cuba has been used to house detainees from the United States' "war on terror" since 2002. Many of the foreign detainees had been tortured in CIA custody. Trump's new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was stationed at the base in the mid-2000s with his National Guard unit. In his remarks at the Penagon earlier this week, Hegseth said he wears a wristband every day honoring one of the soldiers he served with at Guantanamo Bay who was later killed in Afghanistan.
But authorities have also detained migrants at sea at a facility known as the Migrant Operations Center on Guantanamo, a site the U.S. has long leased from the Cuban government. Many of those housed there have been migrants from Haiti and Cuba.
Earlier Wednesday, Noem said on Fox News that the administration was “evaluating and talking about that right now” when asked about using Guantanamo Bay to house immigrants. She made the comments in regards to Venezuelans living in the U.S., who number in the hundreds of thousands and who the Trump administration just rolled back deportation protections on after September 2025. Venezuela and the U.S. do not have diplomatic relations, and deportation flights to the South American country have dwindled to zero in recent years.
At its peak during the George W. Bush administration, Guantanamo held almost 800 Muslim men who had been captured by the U.S. or its partners in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, and flown shackled and blindfolded or hooded to the special military-run prison.
President Joe Biden had cut the population of Guantanamo down from 40 since taking office. Much of that had been in an extraordinary push in his last weeks in office. That includes 11 men from Yemen held more than two decades without charge, whose transfers were announced earlier this month after Oman agreed to take them.
The base has been leased by the U.S. from Cuba since 1903, with the Cuban government that took power in 1959 protesting its existence ever since.
On Wednesday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel deemed the decision as “an act of brutality” in a message on his X account, and he described the based as one “located in illegally occupied #Cuba territory.”
The Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez also lambasted the announcement.
“The US government’s decision to imprison migrants at the Guantanamo Naval Base, in an enclave where it created torture and indefinite detention centers, shows contempt for the human condition and international law,” Rodriguez said on X.