Guantánamo, a synonym for horror, could soon be used to hold thousands of migrants

The name of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba often sends shivers down one’s spine. Its still-open penitentiary is synonymous with the most sinister excesses, torture and abuses of the U.S. war on terror following the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the base also houses a much lesser-known center for holding migrants intercepted at sea — most of them from Cuba or Haiti — in conditions that have also been heavily criticized by humanitarian organizations.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Wednesday ordering the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to expand the facilities of the “Migrant Operations Center” — the official name of these facilities — by preparing 30,000 beds “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”

Trump had already flirted during his first term with the idea of sending illegal immigrants to the Guantánamo base, an enclave in eastern Cuba that the U.S. has been renting — although Havana systematically returns the payments — for more than a century and where nearly 6,000 people live, including military personnel and civilians. Now he wants to make it a reality.

The place, from the point of view of Trump and his team, who want to seal the southern border with Mexico and consider that the ideal solution to irregular migration is a mass deportation operation, has the advantage of being located on a military base abroad, outside the U.S. immigration system. According to Trump’s statements on Wednesday, it would mean the possibility of almost doubling the number of spots available to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to confine apprehended migrants, some 41,000 beds. And they would be far away, in an isolated place that instills fear because of its sinister connotations and from which, as Trump pointed out, it is “a tough place to get out of.”

A report by the NGO International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) describes the facilities of this center, which between 2020 and 2023 housed 36 immigrants, most of them Cubans and Haitians, as a place that is not much better than the neighboring penitentiary, and which operates outside the U.S. immigration system.

Immigrants held there indefinitely remain “trapped without access to the outside world in a punitive system operated by the Departments of Homeland Security and State, the International Organization for Migration, and other private contractors, with little to no transparency or accountability.”

In a report released last year, IRAP cited people held at the center and staff who described a “dilapidated building with mold and sewage issues, where families with young children are housed alongside single adults. They are denied confidential phone calls, even with their attorneys, and punished if they dare share accounts of mistreatment.”

These refugees remain there until a third country agrees to take them in for resettlement, a process that can take years unless they “choose” to return to their country of origin, the NGO notes.

The migrant center is located in a different area from the penitentiary, which remains open despite attempts by the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to close it. Fifteen inmates, some of whom were responsible for some of the worst attacks of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, remain in its cells, with physical and mental health problems caused by their age, long confinement and the trauma of torture, according to their lawyers.

Of these, only two have been tried and convicted. Three are waiting for a third country to take them in. Seven are being tried by the military tribunals created especially for the Guantánamo cases. Three others, whose cases are subject to periodic review, are nicknamed “the eternal prisoners”: the United States does not want to put them on trial, but it does not want to release them either.

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