Press Release

Washington, D.C. – On January 29, President Trump issued a memo ordering the construction of a massive detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, with the intent of incarcerating up to 30,000 immigrants and asylum seekers swept up in the administration’s mass deportation policies. The president announced these plans as he signed into law the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the indefinite detention of immigrants, including children, who are merely accused of crimes as trivial as shoplifting.

Guantánamo Bay is a notorious legal black hole where people have been subject to torture, indefinite imprisonment, and grievous human rights violations. Human rights organizations have long raised concerns about the detention of immigrants at the secretive naval base. These include a September 2024 report by the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) detailing the indefinite detention of refugee families, an October 2024 letter from 131 human rights organizations urging the U.S. to shut down the facility, and a December 2024 report by human rights organizations to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants documenting the U.S. government’s abuses against migrants interdicted and forcibly disappeared in the Guantánamo facility.

People seeking safety must have the opportunity to exercise their legal right to seek asylum. They should never be unlawfully deprived of their freedom and subjected to inhumane conditions. An expanded detention camp at Guantánamo will no doubt become the site of further abuses against immigrants and people seeking safety. This facility should be shuttered, not expanded to facilitate the Trump administration’s cruel, anti-immigrant agenda. 

“Sending people to Guantánamo Bay for immigration detention, indefinite detention or some purported “immigration enforcement” purpose would be a colossal legal, moral and strategic mistake,” said Eleanor Acer, Senior Director for Refugee Protection at Human Rights First. “Gitmo is a stain on our nation’s reputation that should be shut down for good, not expanded to detain thousands of immigrants.  People who are in the United States should not be transported to a legal black hole that is notorious for its horrible  conditions and its lack of legal, family and human rights monitoring access. Building and maintaining a massive detention camp would not only be a human rights fiasco, it would also be an outrageous waste of government resources and diversion of military resources.  

“Everyone should be alarmed that President Trump is attempting to create a mass detention camp insulated from oversight and the public eye. Refugees are already detained at Guantánamo Bay in inhumane conditions, and expanding the facility will be nothing short of disastrous,” said Deepa Alagesan, Senior Supervising Attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “IRAP previously represented a Cuban refugee family that was held at Guantánamo for nearly a year. Our clients were denied the ability to speak to their lawyers without guards violating confidentiality and were subjected to collective punishment including confinement to their rooms for weeks on end. Their children experienced such acute physical and psychological distress that a medical provider at the base urged the U.S. government to release them from custody. Our clients were finally resettled to a safe third country only after IRAP threatened to sue. Forcibly separating tens of thousands of people from their families and communities and sending them to an offshore black box that is unable to provide basic standards of care even to a small population is beyond the pale and must be rejected. This is a dangerous escalation of the Trump administration’s indiscriminate and harmful mass deportation agenda and must not go unchecked. Guantánamo should be closed, not expanded.”

Stacy Suh, Program Director of Detention Watch Network, said: “Use of Guantánamo Bay to detain people is the latest in a shocking plan to expand the immigration detention system. Guantánamo Bay’s abusive history speaks for itself and in no uncertain terms will put people’s physical and mental health in jeopardy. If realized, Trump’s immigration detention expansion will tear apart families, put people’s lives in danger, and cost taxpayers greatly.  It will also increase the targeting and racial profiling of people within their communities based on what they look like, the language they speak, and where they work, while further expanding the detention system that is rife with abuse. This moment demands a national outcry — our elected officials cannot afford to remain silent on Trump’s excessive cruelty. Rather, they must vocally oppose Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda by denying Trump the resources he needs to carry out his agenda, including by cutting funds to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

“The administration’s plans for a mass detention camp at Guantánamo Bay is the latest escalation in an increasingly vicious campaign against immigrants and marks yet another return to failed policies of the past,” said Kate Jastram, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS). “In the 1990s the U.S. Coast Guard incarcerated thousands of interdicted Haitian refugees fleeing political violence at Guantánamo, where they languished for years in deplorable and abusive conditions. Human rights advocates have long urged the U.S. government to shut down Guantánamo. Instead, the Trump administration is poised to erect a mass detention camp where people seeking asylum will undoubtedly suffer egregious abuses in a legal black hole devoid of accountability.”

Naureen Shah, Deputy Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division, ACLU, said: “Sending scores of immigrants to an inaccessible military base in Cuba could enable the government to deprive them of basic human rights, far from lawyers, the press, and Congressional oversight. Unfortunately, that appears to be the point. Building a massive migrant detention facility at Guantanamo would be a disastrous mistake.”

“For decades, Guantánamo Bay has been a site of racialized detention and abuse, a place where Haitian immigrants—many fleeing political persecution—were unlawfully imprisoned, denied due process, and subjected to horrific mistreatment. More recently, the prison has held Muslim and Arab men, some of whom were never charged or convicted of a crime. Guantanamo Bay’s reputation for torture and human rights violations remains intact. The Trump administration’s Presidential Memorandum is not just an escalation of these injustices; it is a direct attack on the fundamental constitutional right to due process, which the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed that also applies to noncitizens”, said Haddy Gassama, National Director of Policy at UndocuBlack Network. “By detaining immigrants in such an isolated facility, where access to legal representation and language access is virtually impossible, this administration is engineering a system of indefinite imprisonment and forced deportation. These measures bear a stark similarity to the dark history of internment and concentration camps. This action will not just be a violation of human rights—it is a deliberate strategy to strip Black and Brown immigrants, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable communities of their dignity and their legal protections. Black immigrants already bear the brunt of systemic biases in policing, immigration enforcement, and mass incarceration. This framing not only justifies extreme measures like Guantanamo’s notorious detention system but also perpetuates the dehumanization of our communities. The UndocuBlack Network unequivocally condemns this harmful policy, which is rooted in xenophobia and anti-Blackness. The Guantanamo Bay detention center should be shut down, not be used as a tool to perpetuate state-sponsored cruelty.”

“The Trump administration’s desire to wildly expand the Guantanamo Bay ICE detention center further shows that their intentions are inhumane and deadly,” said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “Not only are they ripping through communities separating people from their loved ones and deploying the military, they are threatening to send thousands more people interdicted at sea to a place notorious for its racism and islamophobia. It is imperative that our elected officials oppose the expansion of this abhorrent facility and that private companies such as Akima and MVM Inc. drop their multi-million dollar contracts with ICE and refuse to provide services to this site.”

“For decades, Guantanamo Bay has been the site of unrelenting abuse and detention without due process, including for many Afghans,” said Arash Azizzada, co-director for Afghans For A Better Tomorrow. “Now, the Trump administration’s proposal to turn it into a vast immigrant-holding site conjures up memories of internment camps during World War II and Muslim community members being disappeared in the post-9/11 days. For our community, the War on Terror and inhumane immigration policy has always intersected. Guantanamo Bay as a large immigrant internment and detention camp will be a testament to these failed, horrendous policies. Guantanamo Bay should be shut down and returned to its rightful owners, the Cuban people.”

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The #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign for asylum rights is composed of more than 125 organizations committed to transforming the way the United States receives and protects people forced to flee their homes to ensure they are treated humanely and fairly. To learn more about what we stand for, visit us online: https://wwdignity.org/solutions; to request an interview with an experts from the #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign, visit us here: welcomewithdignity.org