US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he planned to detain 30,000 “criminal illegal aliens” at the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison, used for holding terrorism suspects since the 9/11 attacks.
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.
He said he was signing an executive order instructing the Pentagon and the Homeland Security department to “begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said at the White House.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo 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,” Trump said.
The Republican said the move would “double our capacity immediately” to hold illegal migrants, amid a huge crackdown that he promised at the start of his second term.
Calling Guantanamo a “tough place to get out of,” Trump said the measures announced on Wednesday would “bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.”
Trump hosted the parents of Laken Riley, the murdered 22-year-old US nursing student whose name the new migrant crime bill bears, at the White House for the ceremony.
“We will keep Laken’s memory alive in our hearts forever,” 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.”
Migrant crime claims
It is the first bill Trump has signed since his return to the White House, and was passed by the Republican-led US Congress just two days after Trump‘s inauguration on January 20.
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.
The 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.
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 has long prompted domestic and international criticism.
On Wednesday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel described Trump‘s plan as “an act of brutality,” saying migrants would be held near facilities used by the United States for “torture and illegal detention.”
Former Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama pledged to close the prison, but both left office with it still open.