President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a memorandum directing the federal government to prepare the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house tens of thousands of migrants.
The memorandum calls for the Defense and Homeland Security Departments to provide additional detention space at Guantanamo for “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
“Most people don’t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately,” Trump said from the White House earlier in the day.
Trump’s remarks came just before he signed the Laken Riley Act, the first major legislative win of his second term, which requires the detention of undocumented migrants charged with certain crimes. Congress passed it earlier this month with Democratic support.
“Today’s signings bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all,” Trump said.
Trump’s top immigration advisers later said that management of a Guantanamo Bay detention facility for migrants would be overseen by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
“We’re just going to expand upon existing migrant centers,” border czar Tom Homan said, adding the facility would be overseen by “our migrant center run out of Miami.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the base could be reserved to detain what she described as “the worst of the worst.”
“There might be some resources that could be established for the worst of the worst at Guantanamo Bay, and that’s something that he is evaluating along with our team at the Department of Homeland Security,” Noem said on Wednesday.
While the base is well-known for its detention camp where the United States holds terrorism suspects, Guantanamo Bay also hosts a separate migrant-processing center.
The Biden administration had discussed using that center to process Haitian migrants who were fleeing worsening conditions in their country last year. The US military also prepared the site to host migrants fleeing the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
But a US official told journalists that the facilities at Guantanamo Bay are far from prepared to house up to 30,000 migrants.
“There’s no way there’s 30,000 beds anymore,” the US official said, adding that the capacity existed in the 1990s but no longer. And in order to care for that number of people, the official said, the US would have to bring “a lot of military staff” in.
“If they sent a lot of migrants (to Guantanamo Bay), they would need a lot more staff to manage them,” the official added. “They couldn’t do it with what they’ve got now, no way.”
The Cuban government criticized Trump’s plans to house tens of thousands of migrants.
“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,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X.
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