On 4 February 2025, the United Stares began sending migrants to its offshore detention site in eastern Cuba, the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC). According to Reuters, "The first U.S. military aircraft carrying detained migrants to Guantanamo Bay departed on Tuesday, U.S. officials said, as President Donald Trump's administration prepares to potentially house tens of thousands of migrants at the naval base in Cuba. Trump said he wants the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to expand a migrant detention facility at the base to hold more than 30,000 migrants."

The move followed a directive issued by the White House to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security on 26 February directing them to prepare for expansion of the detention site. In the memo, President Trump announced, "I hereby direct the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs identified by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security."

Many questions remain about who will be detained at the site, for how long, and where. The site previously had a reported capacity of only 130 detainees and was heavily criticised for indefinitely detaining children and families, with assistance provided by the International Organisation for Migration.

As per Reuters, "The head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Sunday declined to say whether migrant women, children or families would be held in the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the plan was not to hold people at Guantanamo indefinitely and that the administration would follow U.S. law. The base already houses a migrant facility - separate from the high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects - that has been used occasionally for decades, including to hold Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea."

Former detainees at GMOC said that "the IOM-managed building where protected refugees await resettlement is a two-story structure separated from the main base. ... Interviewees described signs of deterioration and dilapidation: toilets spewing sewage when someone in another room flushed their toilet, a plumbing problem known in notorious prisons a 'ping-pong toilets';showers overflowing; fungi growing on ceilings; and rats running around in the room. ... Several refugees IRAP interviewed after their incarceration at the GMOC remained dismayed by their mistreatment by IOM and the guards, especially IOM’s insistence that, despite their protected status, they had no rights and could be sent home or return home at any time." (International Refugee Assistance Project, "OFFSHORING HUMAN RIGHTS: Detention of Refugees at Guantánamo Bay," September 2024)

New York Times, 19 September 2024: "About 500 migrants from Guantánamo have been resettled since the late 1990s, when U.S. officials first started relocating the migrants it held there. Government data obtained by The Times shows that, on average, families stay more than six months at the facility. At one point, a migrant was held there for nearly four years. Unlike other migrants in the U.S. immigration detention system, those at Guantánamo are not searchable in a public detainee database. The State Department does not even consider them detainees because they can agree to leave by being deported back to their home countries." ////////
"Migrants get up to 30 minutes a week to make phone calls, all of which are monitored. They cannot discuss facilities on the base, information about other migrants, or 'information distorting or exaggerating' their treatment, according to a copy of the rules. The migrants also cannot say anything in the calls that may 'further encourage others to attempt illegal migration,' though no specific examples of such language are listed. The main detention facility is a two-story, nondescript building that once functioned as military barracks. It is on the west side of the island and a ferry ride away from the main shopping areas for the U.S. military employees and contractors, and from the parts of the island that house terror suspects. The migrants have a curfew that runs from sunset until early the next morning. The national anthem plays across the base as part of a flag ceremony conducted each day, which also doubles as a reminder of the curfew. Migrants at Guantánamo, unlike those in ICE or Border Patrol detention in the United States, can leave the facility during the day. If approved, they can get jobs on the other side of the island."

On the Origins of Guantanamo
By Michael Flynn, Executive Director, Global Detention Project

(Excerpt from: Michael Flynn, How and Why Immigration Detention Crossed the Globe, Global Detention Project Working Paper, April 2014, pp 5-8, https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/how-and-why-immigration-detention-crossed-the-globe)

The modern U.S. immigration detention estate first began to take shape in the early 1980s, when the Reagan-era INS began systematically apprehending undocumented migrants from certain countries in response to growing migration pressures from the Caribbean and opened a number of new detention centres in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland to cope with the resulting surge in detainees (Frenzen 2010, p. 377). According to Welch (2002, p. 107), “Prior to the 1980s, the INS enforced a policy of detaining only those individuals deemed likely to abscond or who posed a security risk.”

In a key U.S. Supreme Court case from the time, Jean v Nelson (1985), the court overturned a mandatory detention policy put in place in 1981 that strictly targeted Haitian nationals. According to one migration scholar, “To a large extent once the Jean v Nelson decision came down and the Reagan administration did not have the authority to detain only Haitians, the current detention system was born, i.e. detain all nationalities” (Frenzen 2014).

... The increased pressure on internal enforcement measures helped lead to a number of innovations in U.S. policy. In particular, the need to quickly ramp up detention capacity was exploited by prison privatization entrepreneurs and their supporters in Congress to pressure the INS to allocate funds in the mid-1980s for establishing the country’s first privately-run immigration detention centre. Since then, numerous other countries, particularly in the Anglophone world, have invited private prison companies to manage their immigration detention facilities, raising important questions about legal accountability at detention centres and the social forces that may be involved in promoting increased growth in this practice (Flynn and Cannon 2009).

This period also saw early efforts by the United States to extend enforcement measures beyond its physical borders in order to deter asylum seekers and prevent “alien smuggling,” a process that eventually led to the establishment of one of the world’s first offshore immigration detention facilities—which is now privately-operated and called the “Migrant Operations Center”—at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (The bases’s central role in the history of immigration detention is of course today overshadowed by its more notorious role as the detention site for alleged “unlawful combatants” apprehended as part of the U.S. “war on terror.”)

... According to the Congressional Research Service (2009), “President George H.W. Bush began using facilities at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Guantanamo, Cuba, to detain Haitians who tried to flee to the United States in 1991 as a result of the military coup in Haiti. DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to operate the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo. There are reportedly no more than 20-40 interdicted migrants detained at Guantanamo at any one time.”

Throughout the 1990s, Guantanamo was a key element of the U.S. response to boat migration events. In July 1994, for instance, as the U.S. prepared to overthrow the military junta then in power in Port-au-Prince, it began sending all interdicted Haitians to Guantanamo as part of a new safe haven policy, ultimately detaining some 16,000 people there. After the overthrow of the junta, the United States gave the detainees that remained at the facility the option of voluntarily returning and receiving $80 or being forcibly repatriated without payment (Frenzen 2010, p. 384).

In addition to Guantanamo, by the early 1990s, the United States had access to a network of offshore “processing” facilities that extended from the Bahamas to Panama. As one scholar writes, these sites presented a “range of logistical constraints” for detainees, and importantly the camps ensured that asylum seekers “were cut off from access to the U.S. asylum program” (Magner 2004).