Trump’s Guantanamo Bay Plan Sends Pentagon Scrambling

President Donald Trump’s plan to use Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants thrusts the Pentagon into a challenging, costly new effort just as officials vow to refocus the military on its core mission.

The recent executive order to move thousands of noncitizens to an aging military base in Cuba came as a shock to the Pentagon. Officials are now rushing to come up with a plan to house up to 30,000 people, far more than the 780 detainees who stayed in a detention camp on the base during the peak of the war on terror.

Defense Department officials are discussing using tents, although they face the challenge of tropical weather, limited staff and access to medical treatments for migrants. And they’re attempting to balance resources and finances with another Trump order that troops head to the southern border to enhance security.

“Things are moving as we speak,” said one defense official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a rapidly evolving issue.

The official, like others, was caught flatfooted on Wednesday by Trump’s announcement. The person had no details about what the precise orders would be, when the detainees would arrive or what their housing might look like.

The effort to hold such a large number of people on the 45 square-mile naval base, which the U.S. has leased since 1903, would prove a much greater logistical lift than what the military has handled before. Only 15 detainees remain at the base’s detention facility after the Biden administration transferred nearly a dozen people from Guantanamo to Oman in an effort to reduce the inmate population.

The new detainees would not stay in the same area where terrorism suspects have been kept but likely in tents on the sprawling Navy base. This would broadly resemble what the military did in the 1990s when former President Bill Clinton moved the processing of Haitian refugees to the base and ordered thousands of Cuban asylum seekers held there.

That mission had a clearly defined timeline. This one has no end in sight.

Trump’s executive order directed his administration to provide additional detention space for “high-profile criminal aliens.” His plans to send migrants to Guantanamo Bay would greatly expand the country’s detention capacity, which has been strained since before Trump took office.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has the detention capacity for about 40,000 people. The nation’s largest ICE facilities have roughly 2,000 beds, much smaller than the major undertaking Trump has proposed.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said Wednesday that ICE would run an expanded facility on Guantanamo. But it’s not yet clear what specific role the military would play, although active-duty troops have historically guarded Guantanamo. The Pentagon also could operate flights to bring people to the base.

The base’s detention facilities were designed for the Coast Guard to bring in migrants they pick up at sea. A small group of people, mostly Haitian and Cuban refugees, are currently housed at Guantanamo’s Migrant Operations Center.

The Defense and Homeland Security departments could stand up a "reasonable tent city" at Guantanamo within 10 days to two weeks, said a former senior administration official, who was granted anonymity to talk about the logistical challenges on the base.

But providing sanitation, food, drinkable water and medical care for tens of thousands of migrants could take months. Those supplies would need to arrive by air or sea, and the Trump administration would have to swell the American presence on the base to include a migrant camp with law enforcement officers, military police, doctors, nurses, and even teachers and janitors.

“The total cost for this would quickly skyrocket into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars,” the former senior official said. “Guantanamo can look like the easy button to press, but it brings with it a whole bundle of problems.”

Pentagon spokesperson Chris Sherwood said it’s still too early to know what the overall price tag for expanded operations at the southern border and Guantanamo might be. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a video posted to the Pentagon’s social media channels on Thursday, said that he'd spoken to other top defense leaders about “ongoing” planning.

“We’re leaning forward on supporting the president’s directive to make sure that we have a location for violent criminal illegals as they are deported out of the country,” Hegseth said.

The Homeland Security Department declined to comment.

The announcement sparked anger among immigration and human rights advocates, who viewed it as a further attempt to demonize migrants by conflating them with terror suspects. And it spurred concerns from immigration lawyers and legal experts who questioned whether the plan would be feasible.

“I can’t imagine how detained immigrants would have access to counsel, funds to pay for attorneys to travel there, lodging, ease of access to computers to communicate,” said Debra Schneider, an immigration attorney who went to Guantanamo to visit with a client nearly 15 years ago. “The suggested idea of 30,000 would be logistically impossible to have the means for an equal number of attorneys for representation.”

Others expressed concerns about the conditions within the detention facilities used on terror suspects — and the lack of oversight.

“It’s intended to isolate from legal representation, from oversight, from transparency, from any capacity to provide representation or to even see the conditions to which people are being subjected,” said Lucas Guttentag, a former Biden Justice Department official and Homeland Security official under the Obama administration.

The plan could also run into legal challenges. Taking migrants who are already in the U.S. waiting for immigration court hearings would be unprecedented, said Tom Jawetz, a senior lawyer in the Homeland Security Department during the Biden administration.

“I just don’t know how that’s legal,” he said.

Trump could also run into hurdles if he intends to use the facility to detain people who have been ordered to leave the U.S. but who cannot be returned to their home country, said Jawetz, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Supreme Court has long recognized — and it’s been the standing position of the U.S. government — that Guantanamo is within the sovereign territory of Cuba. If Trump were to send Venezuelan nationals who the U.S. has ordered removed to Venezuela, for example, immigration law would require him to get the permission of the Cuban government.

Trump referenced “countries that won’t take back their criminals” on Thursday, adding that he may increase the 30,000 figure and that the new facilities would be up “pretty quickly.”