Trump signed memo directing Pentagon and DHS to expand Guantánamo Bay to house up to 30,000 migrant detainees

On January 29, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary 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." Trump announced the directive at a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act and declared that the U.S. has "30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated that evening that Guantánamo was "a perfect spot" for Trump's deportation plans.

Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, on leased Cuban territory, has hosted a small Migrant Operations Center for decades — used for migrants intercepted at sea — but had never been used at scale for interior immigration enforcement. The site's offshore location complicates judicial access: while the Supreme Court held in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) that terrorism detainees have habeas corpus rights at Guantánamo, that ruling did not address immigration detainees, leaving due-process protections uncertain for this new category. Advocacy groups reported that the facility held detainees in "prison-like" conditions with limited accountability for the officials running it.

Beginning February 4, 2025, the administration transferred migrants to the base — first Venezuelans described as members of the gang Tren de Aragua, then additional groups. Subsequent reporting found that the administration was also sending low-risk, nonviolent detainees with no serious criminal records, contradicting official assurances that only "the worst of the worst" would be held there. Multiple lawsuits challenged the transfers as unauthorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act. In December 2025, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan denied the government's motion to dismiss in Luna Gutierrez v. Noem, finding the detention policy "not authorized by the INA and impermissibly punitive in violation of the Fifth Amendment," and certified a class of immigration detainees held or at risk of transfer to Guantánamo.