U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the creation of a detention center for highly dangerous criminal migrants at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Up to 30,000 individuals deemed security threats will be relocated there.
The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have received instructions to implement the plan.
We have allocated 30,000 places in Guantanamo for the most dangerous illegal immigrants. Some are so dangerous that we cannot trust their countries of origin to hold them, Trump stated.
The Guantanamo Bay military prison, originally opened in 2002 to hold terrorism suspects, previously detained illegal migrants from Haiti and Cuba.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth assured that the facility would be quickly prepared, and the migrants would be housed separately from terrorism convicts.
Additionally, Trump signed his first bill of his new term—the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention of illegal migrants suspected of theft and violent crimes, even without formal charges. The law is named after 22-year-old student Laken Riley, who was killed in February 2024 by an illegal migrant from Venezuela.
