Trump Said a Guantanamo Bay Facility Can Hold 30,000 Migrants, But The Number Likely Won't Be Reached Anytime Soon

President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday plans to reopen a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, claiming the facility can hold up to 30,000 undocumented migrants. But documents show the actual capacity of the center may be much lower than that.

Trump made the announcement right before signing the Laken Riley Act into law, which gives federal authorities broader power to deport undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who have been accused of certain crimes. The legislation was named after Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan undocumented migrant.

As the president has promised to drastically increase deportations, he said that some of the people being sent back to their home countries couldn't be counted on to stay there.

"Some of them are so bad that we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're gonna send them out to Guantanamo," Trump said. He also explained that he'd direct federal officials to get facilities in Cuba ready to receive immigrant criminals.

"We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people," the president said.

However, Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site New show that the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility anytime soon. Those documents show the migrant detention center only has the capacity to hold 400 people at the moment.

A Switzerland-based organization believes that number to be even lower, estimating the center's capacity to be at just 130, citing 2009 documents from the private prison company the Geo Group, which helped run the center.

Last year, The New York Times reported that the facility held just 37 migrants from 2020 to 2023, and, "in the past decade, the number of families has been in the single digits."

Trump is not the first U.S. president to communicate interest in Guantanamo. In fact, for years now, both Democratic and Republican authorities have used a little-known section of Guantanamo to detain migrants, primarily from the Caribbean. Little information is known about that center. At the same time, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.

Holding immigrants in such facilities is also costly for the government. In fact, that may be the most expensive option. According to an Axios review of various estimates put yearly detention costs at $66 billion under Trump's possible mass deportation plans. ICE currently has only about 38,000 people in detention— prioritizing noncitizens the border patrol arrested at the Southwest border and noncitizens with criminal histories.