Trump to send 30,000 illegal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay

President Trump said Wednesday he will sign an order directing the Defense Department to use up to 30,000 beds at a detention facility  at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold illegal immigrants.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Mr. Trump said at the White House.

He revealed the plans just before signing the Laken Riley Act, a law that will push Homeland Security to detain and deport even some lower-level criminal migrants.

Mr. Trump said the space will virtually double America’s capacity to hold illegal immigrants, which has long been a limiting factor in deportations.

The president celebrated his early wins on immigration, an issue he called “the single biggest reason” he won last year’s election.

Interior arrests of illegal immigrants have soared, while illegal crossings at the southern border are down dramatically.

Mr. Trump also touted his tough talk over the weekend with Colombia, which had initially refused to accept two deportation flights. After threats of crippling tariffs and no more visitors’ visas for Colombia’s ruling elites, the nation quickly backed down.

Mr. Trump said it was a warning to countries that are pondering resisting deportations.

“You’re gonna take ‘em, you’re gonna like it too,” he said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been pushing to make arrests of illegal immigrants in the interior.

It tallied another 1,016 apprehensions on Tuesday, bringing the total to more than 5,500 for the week dating back to Jan. 23.

That’s a pace of nearly 800 ICE arrests a day, or well more than double the Biden administration’s rate in 2024.

Those last seven days also saw ICE place more than 4,300 “detainer” requests asking other law enforcement agencies to turn over deportation targets when they are released from those agencies’ custody.

Mr. Trump, in his remarks Wednesday, said Congress will need to come up with money to fund his full-court press on immigration enforcement.

A large part of that is detention space.

ICE is currently funded for about 41,500 beds on any given day. 

Immigration experts say that if migrants can be detained they can be deported, and rather quickly, because their cases are prioritized in the immigration courts.

But if they are released into communities, those cases can stretch for years, giving illegal immigrants time to burrow into society and making them difficult to uproot.

Guantanamo Bay is a U.S. Navy-run facility on Cuba’s southern coast, as part of a lease dating back to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

It is best known today for having been the prison for detainees from the War on Terror, including the alleged mastermind of the 2001 terrorist attack.

But the facility has also long housed what’s known as the Migrant Operations Center.

In a report last year the International Refugee Assistance Project said the GMOC, as it’s known, has held migrants in dilapidated buildings, where they were confined to their rooms for weeks at a time. The facility’s location on Cuba put it beyond the scrutiny that applies to domestic migrant detention centers, the investigation said.