President Donald Trump announced Wednesday he would instruct the Pentagon to prepare Guantanamo Bay to detain 30,000 “criminal illegal aliens.”
“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. “Most people don’t even know about it.”
It was later learned that Trump signed a presidential memorandum, not an executive order, on the matter.
He said there are 30,000 beds at Guantanamo to house the detainees who pose a threat to the American public, adding that putting them there will ensure they do not come back.
“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump said. “We’re going to send them to Guantanamo.”
He added, “It’s a tough place to get out of.”
The president said the move will bring the U.S. one step closer to “eradicating the scourge” of migrant crime in communities, once and for all.
He also called on Congress to provide full funding for the complete and total restoration of U.S. borders and financial support to remove record numbers of illegal aliens.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel called Trump’s move to send 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo an “act of brutality.”
“In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory [Cuba], of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” he said in a translated post on X.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News’ Will Cain on the “Will Cain Show” on Wednesday that Guantanamo Bay is already being used to house illegal immigrants, particularly the worst of the worst.
She confirmed Trump’s mission to use resources to expand the capacity at Guantanamo, and said her department will make sure resources are placed there to ensure there is enough space to get criminal illegal aliens out of the U.S.
Also appearing on Cain’s show was his former colleague, and now Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who was stationed at the facility from 2004 to 2005.
Hegseth explained that Gitmo is the perfect option for rounding up tens of thousands of illegal aliens and sending them back to their countries of origin with proper processing.
He said it is better to be held in a safe location like Guantanamo Bay, which was built for this.
“The [Department of Defense} – in conjunction with [Homeland Security] – will immediately expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (‘Gitmo’) to Full Capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens we have deported,” Hegseth said in a post on X.
“Gitmo has been used for DECADES, including under Democrat presidents like Bill Clinton, to temporarily house migrants,” he continued. “This is not the detention facilities (where I served) for Al Qaeda; this is using specific facilities for migrants/illegals on other parts of the naval station.”
On Tuesday, the Trump administration rolled out a social media thread highlighting the latest apprehensions conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as the president’s immigration crackdown became a reality.
“969 TOTAL ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ARRESTS by ICE were recorded yesterday, January 27, 2025,” the White House shared on X. “HERE ARE SOME OF THE WORST.”
The post shows nine different illegal immigrants who have already been convicted of crimes, such as child rape, or who have alleged links to gangs and terrorist organizations and other serious crimes.
Trump’s 2024 campaign promised to curb illegal immigration that skyrocketed under the Biden administration. The 47th president promised to deport migrants, including those who had long rap sheets or ties to gangs or terrorist organizations.
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued ten executive orders aimed at overhauling U.S. immigration law and policy. After less than a week back in the Oval Office, Trump said he is keeping his promises.
His executive orders included sealing the U.S. asylum system for those without proper documents, discharging the military with deporting immigration violators and tasking ICE with removing migrants.
Since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, armed federal immigration agents have swept cities in the first deportation raids.
America’s gulag’: Trump’s Guantánamo ploy tars migrants as terrorists
Tom Phillips
Latin America correspondent
The president wants to detain thousands of people at a site that is notorious for its secrecy and history of abuse
It has been denounced as “America’s gulag”: a secretive, abuse-ridden Caribbean prison camp for terror suspects that Donald Rumsfeld once said contained “the worst of the worst”.
“All of us have scars in our souls, deformities, from living at Guantánamo,” a former Yemeni inmate recalled of his time at the notorious military detention facility in south-east Cuba.
Even Donald Trump once balked at the “crazy” amount of money being spent confining prisoners in orange jumpsuits to Guantánamo’s concertina-wired cages.
This week the US president changed his tune, announcing plans to send tens of thousands of “criminal illegal aliens” to the US naval base that houses the Guantánamo Bay jail as part of his “mass deportation” campaign.
“It’s a tough place to get out of,” Trump noted sarcastically after revealing that he had instructed the heads of the defense and homeland security departments to prepare a “30,000-person migrant facility” on the island.
FILE – In this photo reviewed by U.S. military officials, an Army soldier, right, and a Marine stand in front of the gates that separate the Cuban side from the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, June 6, 2018. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa, File)
Guantánamo Bay: the US prison camp in Cuba Trump is eyeing for illegal migrants
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“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” said Trump, who claimed the move would help eradicate “the scourge of migrant crime in our communities, once and for all”.
The announcement delighted Trumpists. “The president is 100% correct to use Guantánamo,” the Texas Republican Chip Roy told Fox News, with the channel’s reporter celebrating Trump’s “creative” and “innovative” idea.
But it also sparked anger and revulsion, in the US and around the world. Many interpreted Trump’s move as an attempt to further demonize undocumented migrants by conflating them with the terror suspects who were imprisoned at Guantánamo’s detention centre after the then secretary of defense Rumsfeld opened it for “enemy combatants” three months after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
“This is political theater and part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to paint immigrants as threats in the United States … and fan anti-immigrant sentiment,” said Eleanor Acer, the senior director for refugee protection at the advocacy group Human Rights First.
Vincent Warren, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights legal advocacy group, said: “Trump’s order [sends] a clear message … Migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supporters”.
There was even stronger condemnation in Latin America, from where many of the migrants expected to end up in Trump’s camp hail. An editorial in Mexico’s leftwing newspaper La Jornada called the move “institutionalized sadism” and a Trumpian “spectacle of violence” designed to excite hardcore supporters. “The reopening of an international symbol of human rights abuses is a signal to Trumpists who believe the workers of the global south deserve the same punishment as supposed members of al-Qaida and the Islamic State,” it said.
“What Trump is doing in sending migrants to Guantánamo – a place of torture and death – makes me think that the author of the book about Trump being the antichrist is on to something,” tweeted the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff.
Adam Isacson, a migration expert from the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank, said Trump’s headline-grabbing initiative was “absolutely part of the narrative” that a military response was needed to tackle the supposed threat from migrants, whom the recently installed US president has repeatedly cast as dangerous “animals” and “trash”.
“And the idea is to just scare the hell out of immigrant communities all around the United States too,” Isacson added. “They’re just trying to scare people and maybe scare people into just making their own arrangements and leaving the country on their own. This is all shock and awe.”
