Since being inaugurated US President Donald Trump has issued a spree of Executive Orders. Now he has signed an executive order asking the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to construct a migrant detention facility in the dreaded Guantanamo Bay.
Trump also claimed that the detention facility would be able to hold up to 30,000 immigrants who would be deported from the US.
Since taking over Donald Trump has been on the charge to take on what he sees as an illegal migrant crisis. After clashing with Mexico and Colombia over the same now he is apparently taking sterner measures.
What is the Guantanamo Bay?
The detention centre of Guantanamo is on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the eastern tip of Cuba. It is about 800km (500 miles) southeast of Florida, USA.
In November 2001, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the then-US President George W Bush signed a military order allowing the US to detain foreign nationals without charge indefinitely on the naval base.
The prison that held them was within the Guantanamo base. It opened on January 11, 2002, and the first 20 prisoners – mostly from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Kuwait and the United Kingdom – were brought in.
The facility has come under heavy attack from human rights groups for the apparent human rights abuse of the inmates. Over the years former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had attempted to close down the facility. However they could only cut down on the inmate numbers to 15.
Trump’s View
Trump however has a very different view of the facility. He holds a very strong anti immigration stance and his followers are looking at him to pull all stops on the immigration influx in the US. Trump has already began his deportation and has even threatened countries with tariffs if they do not comply, putting him directly at odds with a number of Latin American nations.
After signing the executive orders Trump shared the reason behind signing the executive order, Trump said, “Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.” “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately,”
The newly confirmed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth lauded the move. The former Fox News anchor said that Guantánamo Bay is the “perfect spot” to house deported migrants.
“We don’t want illegal criminals in the United States and— not a minute longer than they have to be,” he continued. “Move them off to Guantánamo Bay, where they can be safely maintained until they are deported to their final location, their country of origin, where they are headed,” he added.
Meanwhile, Cuba condemned the order. The foreign minister of the Latin American nation said that Trump’s idea “shows contempt towards the human condition and international law”. “The US government’s decision to imprison migrants at the Guantánamo Naval Base, in an enclave where it created torture centres and indefinite detention,” the Cuban diplomat wrote in the post on X.
News of the facility’s expansion was met with swift condemnation by the Cuban government, which has long considered Guantanamo Bay to be “occupied” and has denounced the existence of a US naval base on the island ever since Fidel Castro swept to power in 1959.
“In act act of brutality, the new government of the US has announced it will incarcerate, at the naval base at Guantanamo, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory, thousands of forcibly expulsed migrants, who will be located near known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X.
Trump’s promise
Amid the chaos, Amnesty International also released a statement, emphasising that Guantánamo has been a “site of torture, indefinite detention without charge or trial and other unlawful practices.” They insisted that Trump should be using his authority to close the prison and not repurposing it for offshore immigration detention.
In a 2024 report, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) accused the government of secretly holding migrants there in “inhumane” conditions indefinitely after detaining them at sea.
Trump’s announcement of the executive order came as he signed the ‘Laken Riley Act’ into law, which requires undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.
The bill, named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan migrant, was approved by Congress last week, an early legislative win for the administration.
At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Trump said the new Guantanamo executive order would instruct the departments of defence and homeland security to “begin preparing” the 30,000-bed facility.
Calling Guantanamo a “tough place to get out of,” Trump said the measures announced on Wednesday would “bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.”
It seems Trump is no mood to back down from his campaign promises, putting out illegal migrants was a core part of his Presidential run. Now that he occupies the White House he is leaving no stone unturned in making sure he follows through, even without regard to the global fallout of such direct action. Though one thing is for sure, the dangling threat of the once again fully active ‘Gitmo’ Guantanamo bay is definitely going to severely cut down on the illegal immigration and act as a massive deterrence for criminals all over.
