US has held migrants at Guantánamo Bay before, but Trump’s approach is different

The Donald Trump administration has started sending flights of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally to Guantánamo Bay. The officials in charge have painted the move as common practice, saying Guantánamo Bay has always been used for immigration enforcement.

"We'll have the capacity to continue to do there what we've always done. We've always had a presence of illegal immigrants there that have been detained. We're just building out some capacity," Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Feb. 2 on NBC’s "Meet the Press."

Noem made a similar claim Feb. 9 on CNN’s "State of the Union," two days after visiting the Guantánamo Bay facility.

The U.S. has previously used a Guantánamo Bay camp to detain certain migrants, but Trump’s use is different, immigration experts said.

On Jan. 29, Trump signed a memo directing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay to "provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States."

The administration has provided conflicting information about where migrants will be held within Guantánamo Bay, for how long and under what conditions. 

Based on available information, there are key differences between the naval center’s previous immigration operations and the Trump administration’s approach:

• Historically, the U.S. has used Guantánamo Bay to hold migrants stopped at sea. Now, Trump is sending people who were detained on U.S. soil.

• Previously, migrants were held at the Migrant Operations Center, a different part of the base from the prisons where terrorism suspects are detained. The first group of migrants that arrived at Guantánamo Bay under Trump are detained in the prisons where terrorism suspects were held.

• In recent years, the Migrant Operations Center has held few migrants and had limited capacity. Trump says he plans to detain 30,000 people. That many people haven’t been detained at Guantánamo Bay since the 1990s.

Haitian refugees are lined up in cots Dec. 5, 1991, in the McCalla hangar in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. (AP)

The Guantánamo Bay naval base is better known as a high-security prison for foreign terrorism suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But about a decade before, the U.S. used a section of it as a migrant detention center.

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Coast Guard held Haitians and Cubans intercepted at sea at Guantánamo Bay. In September 1994, 12,000 Haitians and 33,000 Cubans were held in Guantánamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center, the Congressional Research Service found. People were held in tentlike structures surrounded by razor wire.

People held in Guantánamo Bay did not have access to lawyers to help them apply for asylum, Yale Law professor Harold Koh told PBS News in 2017. Koh sued the U.S. government over its treatment of Haitians in Guantánamo Bay. 

Some Haitians and Cubans were allowed to apply for asylum; few got it. Many Haitians whom the government determined could apply for asylum were barred from entering the U.S. to apply because they were HIV-positive, the National Immigrant Justice Center, an immigrant advocacy organization, wrote in a 2021 report. 

The migrant camp closed in 1996. But that wasn’t the last time migrants were held in Guantánamo Bay.

Haitian refugees look out across barbed wire to other camps holding Haitians at the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba on Sept. 7, 1994. (AP)

The Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center, which is separate from the detention center where terrorism suspects are kept, can hold about 130 people, according to the Global Detention Project, an international group that documents immigration detention worldwide.

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer PolitiFact’s query about how many migrants were at Guantánamo Bay before Trump’s order. But in September 2024, The New York Times reported the center had held 37 people from 2020 to 2023, and four people as of February 2024. People detained there were intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard.

People intercepted at sea and sent to Guantánamo don’t have the option to seek asylum in the U.S., the International Refugee Assistance Project said in a September 2024 report. Instead they must choose between returning to the country they’re fleeing or waiting in Guantánamo Bay for a third country to accept them.

Migrants at Guantánamo Bay lack "access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water," the refugee project said in its report. Migrants don’t have access to unmonitored calls with attorneys and can’t candidly speak about poor conditions at the naval base, the report said. 

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How long people have been held in Guantánamo Bay varies. The New York Times reported in 2024 that families have been there for more than six months. But in one case, someone was held for nearly four years.

Trump’s unprecedented proposal raises legal questions. 

The U.S. has never sent people who were arrested or detained in the United States to Guantánamo, the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, wrote Feb. 4.

Under federal law, people in the U.S. accused of civil immigration violations have more rights than the people intercepted at sea, Hannah Flamm, interim senior policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project, said.

People who have been on U.S. soil "have rights and protections, even if they are sent to Guantánamo. Whether these rights will be respected is another question," she said.

It’s not clear how due process for migrants will be followed, as Noem assured.

"The U.S. government intentionally uses Guantánamo in hopes of avoiding oversight and the public eye, which makes the facility ripe for abuse," Flamm said.

The American Civil Liberties Union wrote the Trump administration a letter Feb. 7 requesting access to the migrants who have been sent to Guantánamo Bay so they have "access to legal counsel, and so advocates and the public can understand the conditions under which the government is detaining them."

In her Feb. 9 CNN interview, Noem said she and Trump were "comfortable" that it is legal to bring migrants who were already on U.S. soil to the island.

It’s unclear how long the migrants will be at Guantánamo Bay under Trump’s plan.

Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said immigrants’ detention at Guantánamo Bay will be temporary while they await deportation. On CNN, Noem said, "My goal is that people are not in these facilities for weeks and months," though she wouldn’t rule out longer stays if other countries don’t accept them.

On Jan. 29, Trump said he intends Guantánamo Bay to hold "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back."

It’s unclear what will happen if the government tries to indefinitely detain migrants sent to Guantánamo Bay. 

People cannot be indefinitely held in immigration detention in the U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001. So immigrants who cannot be deported because their home countries won’t accept deportation flights are generally released. 

Another shift from the previous use of Guantánamo Bay for immigration detention is the location where migrants will be held under Trump’s administration.

Hegseth said migrants sent to Guantánamo Bay would be detained separately from the camp where terrorism suspects are kept. He said they would be detained in the Migrant Operations Center.

The 10 migrants on the first flight from the U.S. to Guantánamo Bay were placed in one of the detention centers where terrorism suspects previously held, not in the Migrant Operations Center. The building the migrants are in is not the same building where the remaining 15 wartime detainees are held, the Defense Department said.

Wartime detainees have been held in Guantánamo Bay for decades. 

In this Feb. 6, 2016 photo, a detainee cell in Camp 6 is seen inside the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. (AP)

Noem said that at Guantánamo Bay, "we'll have the capacity to continue to do there what we've always done. We've always had a presence of illegal immigrants there that have been detained." 

The Trump administration has provided limited and conflicting information about its plans to detain migrants in Guantánamo Bay. Noem’s characterization that the administration is continuing what the U.S. has previously done leaves out key details.

In the 1990s, the U.S. used Guantánamo Bay to hold Haitian and Cuban immigrants intercepted at sea. The Trump administration is now sending to Guantánamo people who were arrested on U.S. soil. That hasn’t happened before.

In the 1990s, more than 30,000 people were held in tentlike structures. In recent years, fewer than a hundred people have been held at the migrant center at a time. 

Trump is planning to significantly increase Guantánamo Bay’s immigration detention capacity to 30,000.  

The first group of migrants to arrive in Guantánamo Bay under Trump’s proposal are being held in the detention center that has historically held terrorism suspects. That’s not the same place where migrants have historically been held. 

Noem’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.