The announcement marks a stark escalation in Trump's immigration policies, reviving a controversial strategy last used during the Clinton administration, when thousands of Cuban and Haitian migrants were detained at Guantanamo Bay naval base between 1994 and 1996. "We're going to send them out to Guantanamo. Most people don't even know that we have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people," Trump said, framing the move as a necessity for national security. "Some of them are so bad, we don't even trust the countries to hold them, because we don't want them coming back."

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he will order the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a migrant detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for as many as 30,000 migrants. The U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already houses a migrant facility - separate from the high-security U.S. prison for foreign terrorism suspects - that has been used on occasion for decades, including to hold Haitians and Cubans picked up at sea. Trump's border czar Tom Homan said later on Wednesday that the administration would expand the already existing facility and that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would run it. "Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay," Trump said at the White House.

The memorandum requires the Defense Department and DHS to “take all appropriate actions to expand” facilities “to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” The United States has a long-term lease from Cuba’s government for a naval facility at Guantanamo Bay, which has housed terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Only 15 terror suspects remain there, down from nearly 700 in 2003. A small number of asylum seekers intercepted at sea also currently are housed in a migration facility in the 45-square-mile territory — though historically there were many more.