Trump Orders Guantanamo Bay Be Prepared For ‘the Worst’ Undocumented Immigrants

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a memorandum to begin preparing a facility on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to detain tens of thousands of “the worst” undocumented immigrants.

The action, which Trump discussed for the first time earlier Wednesday, will instruct the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to prepare 30,000 beds at the site of the infamous U.S. military prison in Cuba, the president said, “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”

“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 gonna send them out to Guantanamo,” Trump said.

“This will double our capacity immediately,” he said, calling it “a tough place to get out of.”

Trump’s remarks came just before he signed the Laken Riley Act, a hardline immigration measure pushed through with some Democratic support — and the first law the president has signed in his second term.

After the signing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that “the White House is currently working on [using] resources we currently have in Guantanamo Bay” to increase the number of beds for “the worst of the worst.”

“We’re already doing it,” Noem said. “We’re building it out.”

Noem clarified that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would run the facility, and Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said the immigrants would be flown there directly. Asked how much the facility would cost, Noem said it would be up to appropriators in Congress.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said later Wednesday on Fox News the facility would be used for “temporary transit,” emphasizing “this is not the camps” and noting that the base had housed migrants before.

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base — both a military base and the site of a controversial U.S. military prison that has held terrorism suspects for more than two decades — housed Hatian refugees in the 1990s, before the detention facility was built there. Cubans were also housed there in the 1990s, and former President Joe Biden last year explored plans to house Haitians there if the nation’s precarious government collapsed.

But other presidents who held refugees on the base, or considered doing so, cast their plans as emergency humanitarian measures, rather than harsh deterrents.

The 45-square-mile land and water base, on the southeastern portion of Cuba, has been controlled by the U.S. since 1903 and has long been a thorn in the side of Cuba’s communist government, which resents the U.S. presence on the island.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the move "an act of brutality" in an X post and reiterated Havana's position that the land upon which the base is located is "illegally occupied." The island nation's foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, added in a separate post that the decision "shows a lack of concern for the human condition and international law."

In addition to housing the military prison, whose detainee population had shrunk to 15 people by the end of the Biden administration, the base is used by the Navy as “a key operational and logistics hub, supporting a variety of missions including maritime security, humanitarian assistance, and joint operations,” according to The Navy.

The Pentagon referred questions to the White House, with one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a rapidly evolving issue, saying no orders had been given by the secretary of Defense to start work at the base.

Trump initially described his decision as an executive order, but the White House subsequently released it as a memorandum.

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for additional details on the contents of the executive order or when Trump would sign it.

Paul McLeary and Eric Bazail-Eimil contributed to this report.