US President Trump to transfer undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo

President Donald Trump has announced plans to transform the United States detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a holding centre for undocumented immigrants.

The surprise announcement came on Wednesday, as the Republican president signed his first major piece of legislation, the Laken Riley Act.

Trump had campaigned for a second term on the promise of leading a “mass deportation” campaign, targeting the nearly 11 million undocumented people living in the US. Many have been in the country for decades, serving as pillars for their families and communities.

The Laken Riley Act dovetailed with the Trump administration’s push to expel as many undocumented individuals as possible.

Under the law’s provisions, the Department of Homeland Security is required to detain non-citizens unlawfully in the US who are either arrested or charged with burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting. Those individuals can then be subject to deportation, regardless of whether they are convicted of a crime.

But as Trump spoke to an audience at the White House about the act, he pivoted to a new announcement: a new use for the Guantanamo facility.

“Today, I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. Most people don’t even know about it,” Trump said.

Calls for prison to close

Human rights organisations have long called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, citing inhumane treatment in the facility and a lack of legal protections.

“Twenty years of practising arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment is simply unacceptable for any government,” a group of United Nations experts said in 2022, calling Guantanamo an “ugly chapter” in US history.

The facility opened in 2002 as a holding facility for suspects swept up in the US’s so-called “war on terror”, and many detainees were held for years without a trial.

Earlier this month, the facility marked its 23rd anniversary with a diminishing number of detainees imprisoned in its wall. The outgoing administration of President Joe Biden had recently transferred prisoners to other countries, leaving only 15 detainees in the facility.

The prison had previously been slated to be closed under President Barack Obama. But Trump, during his first term in 2018, signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future.

He has long sought to expand US use of the facility, including through the transfer of new detainees.

That vision started to take shape with Wednesday’s announcement, less than two weeks into his second term.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” said Trump. “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 Guantanamo.”

A hardline approach

The Republican leader has long conflated immigration with criminality, though studies have repeatedly shown that undocumented people commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than US-born citizens.

His campaign for re-election in 2024, however, hinged on the premise that the US needed to fend off a “migrant invasion”, citing incidents like the Laken Riley case as examples.

Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia when she was murdered while out for a jog in February 2024. The man convicted in her death was an undocumented immigrant who had previously been arrested for shoplifting.

Riley’s mother, Allyson Phillips, spoke at Wednesday’s event, just before Trump signed her daughter’s namesake bill. Between tears, she thanked the US president.

“There’s no amount of tears that will ever bring back our precious Laken,” she said. “Our hope moving forward is that her life saves lives.”

Trump tied the bill to his decision to repurpose Guantanamo as a migration detention centre, saying they served a similar goal.

“Today’s signings bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all,” he said.

But Trump has faced criticism for whipping up nativist sentiment against immigrants – and pursuing a hardline crackdown that threatens to impede access to due process, asylum and other rights.

Critics have also questioned whether Trump has the manpower and resources to fulfil his “mass deportation” scheme. Trump, however, said on Wednesday that the use of Guantanamo would “double” immigration detention capacity.

Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit, dismissed his announcement as an act of desperation.

“Trump is desperate to find detention beds for the thousands of people who pose no public safety threat but nevertheless have become targets of a wasteful and cruel immigration agenda that makes us less safe [and] wastes billions of dollars,” she wrote on social media.

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