menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

Trump’s Guantánamo plan is an old idea — with an ugly history

1 19
yesterday
A group of peace activists gathered in front of the New York Public Library to protest the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on January 11, 2025. | Selçuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

President Donald Trump is looking to vastly expand immigrant detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Trump hopes to eventually detain up to 30,000 immigrants at Guantánamo, which would require a massive investment in infrastructure, given that existing immigrant detention facilities are only designed to hold about 120 people.

The Trump administration has already sent a few dozen immigrants — those deemed high-risk — to Guantánamo. That includes 13 known members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the federal government designated last year as a “transnational criminal organization.”

Trump’s team is reportedly planning to ramp up to at least one military flight carrying detainees per day, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Guantánamo on Friday to survey the site. However, those plans might face roadblocks in the courts: On Sunday, a federal judge prevented the Trump administration from sending three Venezuelan immigrants accused of gang ties to Guantánamo.

Under Trump’s plans, most immigrants will not be held at the notorious terror suspects prison. Instead, they’ll be put in immigration detention facilities nearby.

But those facilities have their own sordid history, and critics argue that Trump’s plan will violate immigrants’ human rights. And while the Trump administration has tried to wave away those concerns, history is on the critics’ side.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations have a record of detaining — and mistreating — immigrants at Guantánamo, mostly Cubans and Haitians traveling in boats intercepted at sea. The most egregious abuses occurred in the early 1990s amid a refugee crisis in which the US kept Haitians in inhumane conditions at Guantánamo rather than allow them to reach American shores.

Trump is trying something new: He is now planning to send people arrested in the US to the American naval base on a large scale. But just as in the 1990s, his plans raise concerns about inhumane detention conditions, especially given his first administration’s lack of oversight —

© Vox