The Donald Trump administration has started sending flights of undocumented migrants in the United States to Guantanamo Bay. The officials in charge have painted the move as a common practice, saying Guantanamo Bay has always been used for immigration enforcement.
“We’ll have the capacity to continue to do there what we’ve always done. We’ve always had a presence of illegal immigrants there that have been detained. We’re just building out some capacity,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on February 2 on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Noem made a similar claim February 9 on CNN’s State of the Union, two days after visiting the Guantanamo Bay facility.
The US has indeed previously used a Guantanamo Bay camp to detain certain migrants, but Trump’s use is different, immigration experts have said.
On January 29, Trump signed a memo directing the departments of defence and homeland security to expand the Migrant Operations Centre at Guantanamo Bay to “provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States”.
The administration has provided conflicting information about where migrants will be held within Guantanamo Bay, for how long and under what conditions.
Based on available information, there are key differences between the naval centre’s previous immigration operations and the Trump administration’s approach:
Historically, the US has used Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants stopped at sea. Now, Trump is sending people who were detained on US soil.
Previously, migrants were held at the Migrant Operations Center, a different part of the base from the prisons where suspects accused of “terrorism” are detained. The first group of migrants that arrived at Guantanamo Bay under Trump are detained in the prisons where such suspects were held.
In recent years, the Migrant Operations Center has held few migrants and had limited capacity. Trump says he plans to detain 30,000 people. That many people haven’t been detained at Guantanamo Bay since the 1990s.
When the US held Haitians and Cubans at Guantanamo Bay
The Guantanamo Bay naval base is better known as a high-security prison for foreign “terrorism” suspects following the September 11, 2001, attacks. But about a decade before, the US used a section of it as a migrant detention centre.
In the early 1990s, the US Coast Guard held Haitians and Cubans intercepted at sea at Guantanamo Bay. In September 1994, 12,000 Haitians and 33,000 Cubans were held in Guantanamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center, the Congressional Research Service found. People were held in tent-like structures surrounded by razor wire.
People held in Guantanamo Bay did not have access to lawyers to help them apply for asylum, Yale law professor Harold Koh told PBS News in 2017. Koh sued the US government over its treatment of Haitians in Guantanamo Bay.
Some Haitians and Cubans were allowed to apply for asylum; few got it. Many Haitians whom the government determined could apply for asylum were barred from entering the US to apply because they were HIV-positive, the National Immigrant Justice Center, an immigrant advocacy organisation, wrote in a 2021 report.
The migrant camp closed in 1996. But that wasn’t the last time migrants were held in Guantanamo Bay.
How the practice was restarted
The Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center, which is separate from the detention centre where terrorism suspects are kept, can hold about 130 people, according to the Global Detention Project, an international group that documents immigration detention worldwide.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer PolitiFact’s query about how many migrants were at Guantanamo Bay before Trump’s order. But in September 2024, The New York Times reported the centre had held 37 people from 2020 to 2023, and four people as of February 2024. People detained there were intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard.
People intercepted at sea and sent to Guantanamo don’t have the option to seek asylum in the US, the International Refugee Assistance Project said in a September 2024 report. Instead, they must choose between returning to the country they’re fleeing or waiting in Guantanamo Bay for a third country to accept them.
Migrants at Guantanamo Bay lack “access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water,” the refugee project said in its report. Migrants don’t have access to unmonitored calls with lawyers and can’t candidly speak about poor conditions at the naval base, the report said.
How long people have been held in Guantanamo Bay varies. The New York Times reported in 2024 that families have been there for more than six months. But in one case, someone was held for nearly four years.
What’s different about the Trump administration’s approach?
Trump’s unprecedented proposal raises legal questions.
The US has never sent people who were arrested or detained in the United States to Guantanamo, the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, wrote on February 4.
Under federal law, people in the US accused of civil immigration violations have more rights than people intercepted at sea, Hannah Flamm, interim senior policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project, said.
People who have been on US soil “have rights and protections, even if they are sent to Guantanamo. Whether these rights will be respected is another question,” she said.
It’s not clear how due process for migrants will be followed, as Noem assured.
“The US government intentionally uses Guantanamo in hopes of avoiding oversight and the public eye, which makes the facility ripe for abuse,” Flamm said.
The American Civil Liberties Union wrote the Trump administration a letter on February 7 requesting access to the migrants who have been sent to Guantanamo Bay so they have “access to legal counsel, and so advocates and the public can understand the conditions under which the government is detaining them”.
In her February 9 CNN interview, Noem said she and Trump were “comfortable” that it is legal to bring migrants who were already on US soil to the island.
It’s unclear how long the migrants will be at Guantanamo Bay under Trump’s plan.
Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said migrants’ detention at Guantanamo Bay will be temporary while they await deportation. On CNN, Noem said, “My goal is that people are not in these facilities for weeks and months,” though she wouldn’t rule out longer stays if other countries don’t accept them.
On January 29, Trump said he intends that Guantanamo Bay hold “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back.”
It’s unclear what will happen if the government tries to detain migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay indefinitely.
People cannot be indefinitely held in immigration detention in the US, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2001. So immigrants who cannot be deported because their home countries won’t accept deportation flights are generally released.
Another shift from the previous use of Guantanamo Bay for immigration detention is the location where migrants will be held under Trump’s administration.
Hegseth said migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay would be detained separately from the camp where terrorism suspects are kept. He said they would be detained in the Migrant Operations Center.
The 10 migrants on the first flight from the US to Guantanamo Bay were placed in one of the detention centres where terrorism suspects were previously held, not in the Migrant Operations Center. The building the migrants are in is not the same building where the remaining 15 wartime detainees are held, the Defense Department said.
Wartime detainees have been held in Guantanamo Bay for decades.
