What to know about Guantanamo Bay, the base where Trump says he'll send migrants

US President Donald Trump, who made the deportation of migrants a central part of his campaign and presidency, has stated that the US will utilize a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold tens of thousands of individuals who cannot be repatriated to their home countries. "We're going to send them out to Guantanamo," Trump declared today at the signing of the Laken Riley Act. This announcement marks a significant shift in how the US plans to manage migrants who are unable to be deported.

Here's a look at the US naval base and its history: While the American naval base in Cuba is most known for the suspects brought in after the September 11, 2001, attacks, it also includes a separate facility that has been used for decades to hold migrants. The Migrant Operations Center accommodates those detained at sea, many of whom are from Haiti and Cuba. A report last year from the non-profit International Refugee Assistance Project described the conditions as "prison-like," indicating a severe environment for the detainees.

The report further detailed that migrants are "trapped in a punitive system" indefinitely, with no accountability for the officials managing the facility. The US has leased Guantanamo from Cuba for over a century, a lease that Cuba opposes, typically rejecting the nominal US rent payments. Trump has pledged to deport millions of people living illegally in the US, but the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget is only sufficient to detain around 41,000 people. ICE detains migrants at its processing centers, privately operated detention facilities, and local prisons and jails, lacking facilities designed for families, who constitute about one-third of arrivals at the southern US border.

During Trump's first term, he authorized the use of military bases to detain migrant children. In 2014, then-President Barack Obama temporarily used military bases to detain immigrant children while expanding privately operated family detention centers to hold many of the tens of thousands of Central American families caught illegally crossing the border. US military bases have been used repeatedly since the 1970s to accommodate the resettlement of waves of immigrants fleeing Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, highlighting a pattern of utilizing military facilities during immigration crises.

The Cuban government has criticized Trump's plans to house tens of thousands of migrants. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X, "In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory Cuba, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention." This strong condemnation underscores the ongoing tension between the US and Cuba regarding the Guantanamo Bay naval base and its use.