Above photo: A group of peace activists gathered in front of the New York Public Library to protest the Guantanamo Bay detention camp built on January 11, 2002 by Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11. Selçuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images.
‘We Have 30,000 Beds.’
“There’s a reason I went to Gitmo twice while researching the last chapter of my global history of concentration camps,” wrote one journalist.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will sign an executive order instructing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare the U.S. naval base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold tens of thousands of migrants.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said at the White House at a ceremony to sign the Laken Riley Act, an immigrant detention bill, into law.
“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,” he said.
The U.S. military base on Guantánamo Bay—which also houses the eponymous detention center that opened in 2002 to hold foreign terrorism suspects (many without charge)—already has a migrant facility that is separate from the prison, according to Reuters.
“Guantánamo Bay has been the site of torture, indefinite detention without charge or trial and other unlawful practices by the U.S. government. President Trump should be using his authority to finally close the prison there, not re-purposing the facility for offshore immigration detention,” wrote the human rights organization Amnesty International on X.
The news comes as the U.S. military announced on Tuesday that it will permit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain migrants at Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.
Since his inauguration, Trump has made good on his promise to enact a sweeping crackdown on immigration, including through a slew of executive orders focused on immigration enforcement. Over the weekend, ICE began an operation in Chicago on Sunday as part of a nationwide effort that federal officials said resulted in 1,000 people arrested, according to the Chicago Tribune—though an ICE spokesperson declined to say how many were from the Chicago area.
Journalist and author Andrea Pitzer reacted to Wednesday’s news on Bluesky, writing: “Keep in mind that an executive order authorizing a detention camp isn’t a done deal. That said, there’s a reason I went to Gitmo twice while researching the last chapter of my global history of concentration camps.”
Another observer pointed out that this move by Trump is not entirely unprecedented.
“This move is as bipartisan as they come,” wrote Jack Mirkinson, an editor at The Nation. “The Biden administration was discussing using it to hold Haitian migrants just last year.”