Trump to send 30,000 illegal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay

President Trump said Wednesday he would sign an order directing the government to expand a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 migrants, giving the government more space to help deport illegal immigrants.

In recent decades, the U.S. Navy base there has been used to detain figures from the war on terror. Officials said an American migrant facility there will be expanded to handle the numbers Mr. Trump expects.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Mr. Trump said at the White House.

He revealed the plans just before signing the Laken Riley Act. This law pushes the Department of Homeland Security to detain and deport even some lower-level criminal migrants.

Mr. Trump said the space will virtually double America’s capacity to hold illegal immigrants, which has long been a limiting factor in deportations.

The president also celebrated his early wins on immigration, an issue he called “the single biggest reason” he won reelection in November.

Interior arrests of illegal immigrants have soared, and illegal crossings at the southern border are down dramatically.

Mr. Trump touted his tough talk over the weekend with Colombia, which initially refused to accept two deportation flights. After threats of crippling tariffs and no more visitor visas for Colombia’s ruling elites, the nation quickly backed down.

Mr. Trump said it was a warning to countries considering resistance to deportations.

“You’re going to take ’em, you’re going to like it too,” he said.

Also Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would revoke an 18-month extension of a deportation amnesty, known as Temporary Protected Status, that the Biden administration granted to Venezuelans this month.

Some 600,000 Venezuelans will lose their tentative protections this year without the extension.

The moves are part of Mr. Trump’s effort to rewrite four years of lax immigration policies under President Biden and to usher in an unprecedented era of enforcement.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, unshackled by Biden-era rules, has been making arrests at a torrid pace. It tallied another 1,016 apprehensions on Tuesday, bringing the total to more than 5,500 since Jan. 23.

That’s a pace of nearly 800 ICE arrests a day, or well more than double the Biden administration’s rate in 2024.

In those seven days, ICE placed more than 4,300 “detainer” requests asking other law enforcement agencies to turn over deportation targets when they are released from those agencies’ custody.

In his remarks Wednesday, Mr. Trump said Congress must provide money to fund his full-court press on immigration enforcement.

Ms. Noem said her department was working with Congress to include money in looming spending and budget action.

A large part of the spending will be for detention space.

ICE is currently funded for about 41,500 beds on any given day.

Immigration experts say that if migrants can be detained, they can be deported, and rather quickly because their cases are prioritized in the immigration courts.

If they are released into communities, those cases can stretch for years, giving illegal immigrants time to burrow into society and making them difficult to uproot.

Guantanamo Bay is a U.S. Navy-run facility on Cuba’s southern coast, as part of a lease dating to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

It is best known today for having been the prison for detainees from the war on terror, including the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

The facility also has long housed the Migrant Operations Center.

In a report last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project said the GMOC, as it’s known, has held migrants in dilapidated buildings, where they were confined to their rooms for weeks at a time. The facility’s location in Cuba put it beyond the scrutiny that applies to domestic migrant detention centers, the investigation said.

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, told reporters Wednesday that the facility will be reserved for “the worst of the worst” illegal immigrants.