Trump to prepare Guantanamo facility for 30,000 migrants

US President Donald Trump has said that he will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 migrants.

The US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility - separate from the high-security US prison for foreign terrorism suspects - that has been used on occasion for decades, including to house Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea.

But a move to house tens of thousands of migrants at the base would again widen the Pentagon's role in Mr Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.

"Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay," Mr Trump said at the White House.

He said the facility would be used to "detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.

"Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And, tough."

Mr Trump made the shock announcement as he signed a bill allowing the pre-trial detention of undocumented migrants charged with theft and violent crime - named after a US student killed by a Venezuelan immigrant.

Calling Guantanamo a "tough place to get out of," Mr Trump said the measures announced would "bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all."

Mr Trump hosted the parents of Laken Riley, the murdered 22-year-old US nursing student whose name the new migrant crime bill act bears, at the White House for the ceremony.

"We will keep Laken's memory alive in our hearts forever," Mr Trump said.

"With today's action, her name will also live forever in the laws of our country, and this is a very important law."

Rights concerns

It is the first bill Mr Trump has signed since his return to the White House, and was passed by the Republican-led US Congress passed the law just two days after Mr Trump's inauguration on 20 January.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan with no papers, was convicted of murdering Riley in 2024 after she went missing on her morning run near the University of Georgia in Athens.

But it was the Guantanamo announcement that will grab the headlines.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had told Fox News earlier that "we're evaluating and talking about" using the facility for migrants, calling it an "asset".

The Guantanamo prison was opened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States by Al-Qaeda.

It has been used to indefinitely hold detainees, many of whom were never charged with a crime, seized during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other operations that followed.

At its peak about 800 people were incarcerated at the site on the eastern tip of Cuba. Testimony from detainees documenting their abuse and torture by US security personnel have long prompted domestic and international criticism.

The conditions there and the denial of basic legal principles have sparked consistent outcry from rights groups, and UN experts have condemned it as a site of "unparalleled notoriety".

Former Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama both pledged to close the facility, but both left office with the prison still open.

Last September, the New York Times obtained government documents showing that the Guantanamo Bay military base has also been used for decades by the United States to detain migrants intercepted at sea, but in an area separate from that used to hold those accused of terrorism.