Biden Gave Trump Plan To Lock Up Migrants at Guantánamo
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “expand” a migrant detention center located within the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Prior to the release of the executive order, the administration announced that 30,000 migrants would be detained at Guantánamo.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately,” Trump said.
But according to Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site News, the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility — at least not immediately. Documents show the Guantánamo migrant detention center only has the capacity to expand to hold 400 people, far below the announced tens of thousands.
Although it is unclear whether, or how, Trump might expand migrant detention at Guantánamo, administration officials have already received a head start from someone else: former president Joe Biden.
For years now, both Democratic and Republican administrations have used a little-known section of the Guantánamo Bay Naval base to detain migrants, primarily from the Caribbean. And due to the secrecy of the facility, known as the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center (MOC), conditions at the facility are generally unknown.
In the fall, Drop Site News published previously unreported details of the treatment of migrants at the MOC, the bureaucratic process of how migrants are detained, and the private prison companies profiting from the detention center. In August 2024, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.
"For decades, the Guantanamo migrant detention center has been the hallmark of the most inhumane, racist, and brutal U.S. policies against people seeking refuge," said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center. "The Biden administration could have shut down the facility but tragically renewed and entered into new contracts to keep it up and running."
Drop Site News revealed that the MOC can detain single adults, families, and unaccompanied children. Because the MOC is inside of a military base, migrants awaiting processing are transported in black out vans “with hand restraints and black out goggles to obscure their vision,” according to the documents obtained by Drop Site. Migrants also have limited communication with the outside world, with their few phone calls monitored for “restricted information,” including information about the navy base, the documents showed.
“The idea that the Trump administration is going to send 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard all week. It’s utterly absurd,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents detainees at the Guantánamo military prison and frequently visits the base. “It’s purely performative. President Trump is trying to use the image of Guantánamo to project toughness towards refugees and asylum seekers.”
The Guantánamo Naval Base was first used to detain migrants in the early 1990s, after Haiti’s military coup in 1991 forced thousands to flee. The U.S. converted a section of the military base to “screen” those taken in by the U.S. Coast Guard. Reports from the 1990s describe horrific conditions at the refugee camp and in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the closure of the migrant camp.
But in 1994, the Clinton administration resumed migrant detention at Guantánamo, primarily for Haitians and Cubans. In 1996, the number of people detained finally went back down.
In 2002, President George W. Bush began using the Guantánamo Bay naval base to imprison War on Terror detainees, held under the custody of the military. In the years following, the War on Terror detainees denounced torture and mistreatment by military and intelligence officers. That same year, Bush signed an executive order to, once again, begin sending migrants intercepted at sea to the Guantánamo MOC.
Migrants detained at the MOC are divided into two camps. Those deemed to be refugees and slated to be resettled in third countries fall under custody of the State Department and the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. Migrants who are of “undetermined” status, meaning they have yet to be interviewed by immigration officials and those who are not found to have a valid case for refugee resettlement are under the custody of ICE.
From December 2021 to December 2022, the MOC held an average monthly population of 14 “undetermined” migrants. During that time, there was also an average population of 20 refugees per day, according to records reviewed by Drop Site.
“The MOC is a dilapidated dormitory,” said Dixon, who has seen the facility during his visits to the base. Dixon has also interacted with refugees under State Department custody, who are granted work opportunities at the military base, while waiting to be resettled in a third country.
Thanks to MOC operations contracts, private prison companies have raked in millions of dollars. Since 2003, three different companies have received contracts to operate the immigration detention facility, including the GEO Group and defense contractor MVM.
Last year, the Biden administration granted a multi-million dollar contract to Akima Infrastructure Protection, a government contractor that runs other immigration jails in the mainland U.S.
Akima continues to search for staff to work at Guantánamo. According to a job posting on its website, part of the work requires the guards to escort migrants “using proper security measures with blackout goggles and in vehicles with black out windows for overall facility security and to ensure inability to identify protected migrants.”
“There’s no way there’s 30,000 beds anymore,” a U.S. official told CNN on Wednesday, commenting on Trump’s desire to expand the use of the detention center. The MOC’s operators “would need a lot more staff to manage them. They couldn’t do it with what they’ve got now, no way.”
It is unclear what the process of expanding the Guantánamo facility will look like. Currently, the facility can hold 120 people. And according to government contracting documents reviewed by Drop Site, whoever operates the MOC must have the ability to build a “tent city” and detain up to 400 people in preparation for a possible “surge” in migrant detention. Even at its peak in the early 1990s when Haitian asylum seekers were detained en masse, the center only had the capacity to detain 12,500 people, according to court records from 1993.
A report from the National Immigrant Justice Center describes conditions at the facility when it was at full capacity in the 1990s: “Asylum seekers were housed in tents covered in garbage bags, which barely protected them from the rain, and enclosed by barbed wire fencing,” the report reads. “They were forced to eat spoiled and sometimes maggot-filled food in extreme heat.”
“The numbers that Trump is speaking about now would mean mass horrors worse than what we witnessed in the 1990s,” said Franzblau.
Because of the secrecy of the Guantanamo naval base, little is known about the migrant detention center’s conditions. Congress mandates government inspections for ICE detention centers throughout the country. Those reports, although oftentimes limited, are publicly shared. But no public inspection reports or audits for the Guantanamo migrant facility appear to exist.
“The Migrant Operation Center on Guantánamo is such a black box that advocacy organizations do not get to visit nor to communicate with migrants there, including recognized refugees, potentially families with children,” Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, told Drop Site last September.
Following the publication of Drop Site’s story on the MOC, The New York Times reported on the existence of an internal DHS document from 2023 detailing the treatment of migrants at the facility, confirming Drop Site’s reporting on the use of “black-out goggles.”
The International Refugee Assistance Project also released a report about the facility. Drawing on interviews with migrants previously detained at Guantanamo, the report said the migrants complained of “toilets spewing sewage,” “fungi growing on ceilings,” and “rats running around in the room.” A separate document obtained by Drop Site said that in 2022 officials found “critical physical and logistical complications at the site.”
In December, a coalition of human rights organizations submitted a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. In their report, they said the U.S. government “forcibly disappears migrants” at the Guantanamo facility.
On Wednesday, Trump signed the Laken Riley bill into law, a bipartisan bill that will increase immigration detention throughout the country.
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