President Trump says he plans to use a migrant holding facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to house up to 30,000 criminal migrants deported from the United States.
In a White House memo, he ordered the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to begin that process to "halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels and restore national sovereignty."
The Trump administration said the deported migrants would not be held in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo that now houses suspected foreign terrorists, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Instead, it said, they would be held in a separate area on the naval station portion of Guantánamo, which for decades has had a detention facility for migrants intercepted at sea, mostly Haitians, Cubans and Dominicans.
That facility has been largely empty for years, and Trump said he now wants to use it to house "high-priority criminal aliens."
The Trump administration broke the news Wednesday on Fox News, which had Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the air sharing details about the plan.
Hegseth said migrants would not be held indefinitely -- as they are at Guantánamo's military prison, where some detainees have been for two decades without being charged. He said Guantánamo would be a "waystation" for them until the administration finds other countries to take them.
"This is not the camps. You're not putting criminals in camps where ISIS and other criminals [are]," he said. "This is a temporary transit … where we can plus-up thousands and tens of thousands, if necessary, to humanely move illegals out of our country, where they do not belong, back to the countries where they came from in a proper process."
The Trump administration has not defined what length of time it considers "temporary transit."
It is unclear whether Guantánamo's current migrant holding facility has enough space for 30,000 people. When Trump first announced his plan, he said it did: "We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people," he said. "Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back so we're going to send them out to Guantánamo."
But Trump later said he intends to "expand" the facility to "full capacity."
Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said he knows through reports from migrants who have been held at Guantánamo's detention facility that "there haven't been 30,000 beds [there] in decades."
"The facility is decrepit. It's been falling apart. It's in disrepair," Warren added, "And, as a practical matter, the conditions that would be created if people went there would be so substandard that it would give people opportunities to file lawsuits around the conditions of their confinement while they're being deported."
Warren acknowledged that the U.S. has the right to deport people with certain criminal convictions and that the Trump administration has widened the types of criminal convictions for which people are deportable.
But, Warren added, "it does not give the United States the right to put them in a legal black hole in an offshore prison just to get them out of sight and out of mind. That's not something that human rights law would allow."
Secretary Hegseth also said that a golf course on the naval base would have room for 6,000 deported migrants, so the Trump administration appears to be trying to identify different spaces at Guantánamo that could provide room for tens of thousands of people.
The administration did not say how much its plan might cost. But it would require construction; food and lodging for the people held there; guards or staff to oversee the facility; and transportation to get migrants there.
Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said migrants would be flown there directly. Homeland Security Secretary Noem said Immigration and Customs Enforcement would run the facility. And she said Congress would appropriate money for all that.
The administration did not say when deportations of migrants to Guantánamo might begin.
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