The Pentagon had few details to offer Thursday on its new mandate from President Donald Trump to detain tens of thousands of migrants from the U.S. at its Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 9/11 terrorism suspects have been jailed for more than two decades.
The surprise move was announced by Trump on Wednesday amid a bill signing where he declared that “we have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.”
Independent reports say that the facility currently has just a fraction of that capacity, making the logistics and cost of massively ramping up the detention facilities a challenge. It was also unclear what criteria the administration would use to determine which migrants would be swept up and what legal rights they might have while held at Guantanamo, where suspects in the 2001 attack have languished in legal purgatory for years — albeit at a separate site on the base.
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“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,” Trump said.
An executive order followed later that day, but it just directed both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to “take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
The order was the latest in what Trump has promised will be the largest migrant deportation effort in U.S. history. It follows the deployment of 1,600 active-duty troops to the Mexico border during his first week in office and Air Force deportation flights — rather than civilian flights used in the past — to transport migrants to their countries of origin.
Throughout Wednesday both officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Navy wouldn’t comment on the Guantanamo order, often with the explanation that they had learned about it at the same time as the public and were working to get more information.
In a pre-recorded video uploaded to social media Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had little more to add beyond noting that the Pentagon was “leaning forward on supporting the president’s directive.”
“We’re working that in real time,” he added.
Military.com also reached out to U.S. Southern Command, the combatant command that appears to be tasked with overseeing the mission, with a list of basic questions on the Migrant Operations Center but did not receive a reply in time for publication.
One nonprofit organization said in a report on the facility that it began operations under the Reagan administration as a place to keep Cuban and Haitian refugees who were intercepted at sea. Several organizations and press reports say that function has persisted to the present day, but it’s set up to hold just over a hundred people — not tens of thousands.
Last year, The New York Times reported that the facility held just 37 migrants from 2020 to 2023 and, “in the past decade, the number of families has been in the single digits.”
A Swiss-based refugee nonprofit estimated the center’s capacity at 130, citing 2009 documents from the private prison company the Geo Group that helped run the center.
A 2024 report from the International Refugee Assistance Project, or IRAP, said that migrants who ended up there “are detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world and trapped in a punitive system” operated by the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies “with little to no transparency or accountability.”
The group said that “on United States soil, extensive laws, procedures, and rules govern adjudication and review of asylum decisions” at the migrant center at Guantanamo Bay, but “there is no known guidance about how asylum and refugee decisions are made or what standards are being applied” and “there is no access to attorneys, appeal procedures, or due process.”
In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled that the Refugee Act of 1980, which bars the U.S. from forcibly returning refugees who feel threatened or persecuted in their home countries, did not apply outside the territory of the U.S. — like at Guantanamo Bay.
The American Civil Liberties Union, along with IRAP, sued the government in 2024 for failing to disclose records about the interdiction and detention of refugees at the site.
It was also unclear whether Guantanamo Bay is the only military installation to be tapped for housing people slated for deportation.
On Tuesday, CBS reported that Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado was being used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, “to stage and process” undocumented migrants within the United States.
However, when Military.com reached out to U.S. Northern Command, a spokesperson said that Buckley “is no longer identified as an installation support base” and directed any other questions to ICE.
ICE did not immediately return a request for comment.
The order to expand Guantanamo as a migrant detention facility is also far from the first issued by Trump that drew questions and silence from the Pentagon.
Late Monday evening, Trump fulfilled a promise and signed an executive order that he said would reinstate troops who were discharged over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate with back pay.
Neither the order nor Pentagon officials said what, if any, conditions would be applied to that promise or how to go about claiming it. Instead, a statement was issued saying the Pentagon “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the executive orders issued by the president” and “provide status updates as we are able.”
That same night, Trump also moved to ban transgender people from serving in the military, but that order also left most of the details to the Pentagon and newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to figure out, including the top question of what will happen to trans troops who are already serving.
Again, the only reply from the Pentagon was attributed to a nameless defense official who said they “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the executive orders issued by the president.”
–Thomas Novelly contributed to this report.
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