U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he plans to sign an executive order instructing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare an existing migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to house tens of thousands of migrants.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said at the White House. “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.”
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he plans to sign an executive order instructing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare an existing migrant detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to house tens of thousands of migrants.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said at the White House. “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.”
Guantánamo Bay, the site of a U.S. naval base, is perhaps best known as the location of the infamous detention camp where the United States has held foreign terrorist suspects for more than two decades. Rights groups have called for the facility’s closure for years due to its association with indefinite detention and torture. The prison camp has housed nearly 800 men—many of whom were never charged with a crime—since its inception in 2002. Over the course of the Biden administration, the population dropped from 40 to 15, but U.S. President Joe Biden failed to fulfill his stated pledge to shut the prison down.
In addition to the prison, Guantánamo is also home to a separate, lesser-known facility that the United States, under both Republican and Democratic administrations—including the Biden administration—has used since the mid-1990s to detain migrants intercepted at sea as they attempted to reach the United States. Advocacy groups have called for the U.S. government to stop the practice and shutter the facility, which is known as the Migrant Operations Center.
Last October, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and other organizations implored Biden “to stop detaining asylum seekers at Guantánamo Bay and to allow people interdicted at sea to seek protection in the United States.” IRAP accused the U.S. government of denying detainees access to attorneys and depriving children held in the facility of “appropriate access to education, medical care, and mental health support.”
Given this history, Trump’s move to potentially detain tens of thousands of migrants at Guantánamo is already being criticized by human rights organizations. “Another terrible idea, just when we were getting closer to closing the unlawful prison that’s there already,” Daphne Eviatar, the director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, posted on X on Wednesday in response to the news.
“Indefinite detention without due process at Guantanamo has been a powerful recruiting tool for US enemies; it has not made anyone safer,” Eviatar added.
Meanwhile, Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as the White House communications director during Trump’s first administration, in an X post likened Wednesday’s announcement to opening a “concentration camp.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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