Trump Says He Is Going to Send Migrants to Guantanamo Bay, but Will That Work?

For most of its history, Guantanamo Bay has been known primarily as a high-security military prison used to hold suspected terrorists. The facility has long been the subject of political controversy, in part because it exists outside of the American legal system.

Following the news that President Trump is planning to expand the U.S. holding facilities on Guantanamo Bay so that they can hold migrants, many wanted to know more about the facility's existing capacity. Here's what we know.

Guantanamo Bay is capable of holding as many as 680 prisoners, but the detention facility is undoubtedly not capable of housing the thousands of people that the Trump administration is planning to send to the Cuban naval station.

Trump's initial order suggested that as many as 30,000 people may be housed at the facility, which has led many to wonder how that could even be sort of possible.

As it turns out, though, Trump's plan is to build an entirely new, separate facility on the naval base. This facility would be separate from the high-security military prison that has been used to house suspected terrorists since just after 9/11, and still has 15 occupants.

This new detention facility would house "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people," according to Trump's order.

Tom Homan, the Trump administration's border tzar, clarified that the military facility would be expanded, and this new wing would be run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Human rights groups have long criticized the use of Guantanamo Bay as a holding facility for immigrants, in part because those who are living in the facility are not subject to the same rights that prisoners on American shores receive.

In a signing ceremony announcing the executive order, Trump said that the facility was necessary because some migrants were too dangerous to deport.

"Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back," he said. "So we're going to send them to Guantanamo ... It's a tough place to get out."

Trump's immigration policies are among his major priorities, but some pointed out that building camps to house groups of people has not been the kind of thing that ends well, historically speaking.

"Just going to continue emphasizing that this, detaining a bunch of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime and incarcerating them en masse in a fortified location against their will because they are part of a specific ethnicity or other group, is a concentration camp," one person wrote.

It's unclear how much this new facility will cost, or what the timeline might be for building it. What's clear already, though, is that Guantanamo Bay is not going to be out of the headlines anytime soon, and human rights groups may be watching U.S. activity there more vigilantly than ever.