What to know about Guantánamo Bay as Trump prepares more migrant transfers

Washington Post

a day ago

As President Donald Trump pledges the largest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in U.S. history, his administration is planning to transfer potentially thousands to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, including hundreds from friendly European nations, starting as early as this week.
U.S. officials shared the plans — which are subject to change — with The Washington Post, including some documents, on the condition of anonymity because the matter is considered highly sensitive. The White House declined to comment, but press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on social media that the plans are 'Fake News. Not happening.'
If Trump's plans come to pass, it would be a marked escalation of his use of Guantánamo. Here's what to know about the facility.
Guantánamo Bay is a military base that has been operated for decades by the U.S. Navy. It is the oldest overseas U.S. military installation and the only one in a communist country. It's located on the southeastern coast of Cuba, about 400 air miles from Miami.
Guantánamo Bay was seized in 1898 by U.S. forces and their Cuban allies during their efforts to wrest the island from Spanish control. The United States formally established a naval base on the bay in 1903, after leasing 45 square miles of land and water from the newly independent Cuban government, according to the U.S. Navy.
Since the 1960s, Guantánamo Bay has had its own power and water sources. The base has enabled both Navy and Coast Guard ships to operate in the Caribbean region. It has been used for a variety of purposes including fleet training, ship repair, disaster assistance, and search and rescue support.
The prison that holds terrorism suspects at the base was established by President George W. Bush in 2002. It became most notorious for holding suspected terrorists and others captured on battlefields in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Since then, the base has been mired in controversy over allegations that the U.S. military tortured terrorism suspects, and it has faced scrutiny over the detention of hundreds of prisoners without formal charges. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden said they wanted to close Guantánamo.
In late January, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person migrant facility at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
'We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,' Trump said that month.
At the time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said migrants would not be held with terrorism suspects and that the detention camp would be a place for detainees to stay temporarily while officials made travel arrangements for them to third countries if their home nations wouldn't accept them.
The Post reported Tuesday that the foreign nationals under consideration for transfer to Guantánamo include citizens of Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, and other parts of the world, including many from Haiti.
The operation to move migrants has struggled to scale up amid legal, logistical and financial hurdles. In all, about 300 migrants total have been detained there, The Post reported in March.
The U.S. government has deployed military planes to transport migrants, an effort that cost at least $21 million for the period between January and April, but only held 32 migrants as of mid-May, NBC reported that month, noting that many of them were likely flown back to the United States.
DHS recently requested the expansion of a medium-security detention facility at the base from 140 to 300 detainees, The Post reported. While authorities could detain thousands more migrants there if tents put up by troops were equipped with utilities like air conditioning, Defense Department officials said in March that they held off on taking steps to fix them up for further use without the migrants to fill them.
A document recently reviewed by The Post said that 'GTMO,' the government acronym for the base, 'is not at capacity.'
Trump administration officials say the plan to send migrants to Guantánamo is necessary to free up capacity at domestic detention facilities, which have become overcrowded. Overall, ICE has detention capacity for about 40,000 people.
Human rights groups — which say U.S. government agencies and private contractors have detained asylum seekers and refugees at Guantánamo facilities for several decades — have condemned Trump's plans to move migrants there.
'Migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supports,' the Center for Constitutional Rights said in January, after Trump's announcement.
In 1994, for instance, President Bill Clinton resumed the previous administration's use of the Guantánamo base for processing Haitian refugees and later ordered Cuban asylum seekers caught at sea to be held there. Later that year, the migrant population at the base's camps totaled 45,000, according to a government report.
In 2024, the International Refugee Assistance Project released a report accusing the U.S.-run Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay, or GMOC, of detaining migrants fleeing Haiti, Cuba and other Caribbean countries throughout its history. Many of those refugees are intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard at sea and then 'detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world,' often 'with little to no transparency or accountability,' the report said.
'These refugees are forced to endure this treatment until a third country agrees to accept them for resettlement, even if they have family in the United States,' it said, adding that the process can take years.
John Hudson, Alex Horton and Silvia Foster-Frau contributed to this report.