Guantanamo immigration detention nearly empty, far below Trump pledge

Guantanamo's migrant detention mission is running almost empty, a stark contrast to Donald Trump’s pledge for a 30,000-bed operation on the base. Internal government documents and information provided to Congress show that on May 11 the U.S. held just six immigration detainees at Guantanamo Bay, all of them Haitian nationals, in a system with 398 beds, fewer than 2% of them occupied.

The numbers point to a detention effort built around far more capacity, personnel and cost than detainees. Over the past year, 832 immigration detainees were transferred to Guantanamo on 109 flights, yet Defense Department figures given to Congress list 522 military personnel assigned to the mission, along with 62 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and non-military staff. That means the government workforce at the base outnumbers detainees by roughly 100 to 1.

Trump’s January 29, 2025 memorandum directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity for what the administration described as additional detention space for “high-priority criminal aliens” unlawfully present in the United States. But the facility’s documented immigration-detention capacity has remained far smaller than the rhetoric suggested. The January claim of 30,000 detention beds at Guantanamo was never close to the 398-bed capacity reflected in the internal records.

The first transfer flight to the base carried 10 detainees from Fort Bliss in early February 2025. Later reporting showed the administration was also sending some low-risk and nonviolent migrants to Guantanamo, not just the most serious offenders Trump highlighted publicly. That widened the gap between the administration’s message and the actual use of a base long associated with the post-9/11 detention of terrorism suspects, abuse allegations, due-process violations and torture.

The cost has climbed as the population has stayed low. In April, the Defense Department told Sen. Elizabeth Warren that the military’s share of the immigration-detention operation was expected to reach $73 million, up from an earlier estimate of $40 million. Civil-rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the International Refugee Assistance Project and the ACLU of the District of Columbia sued in February 2025, joined by legal service organizations including Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, RAICES, American Gateways and Americans for Immigrant Justice, seeking access to detainees and attorney visits.

For the administration, Guantanamo has become a test of whether immigration enforcement can be sold as a show of force while operating as an expensive, underused system with a fraught legal legacy. The public promise was mass capacity. The reality is a nearly empty detention site, heavy staffing and a far higher price tag than the head count can justify.