WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has halted efforts to place migrants in tent structures built at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amid concerns that the emerging facilities don’t meet detention standards because they lack air conditioning or electricity, a US official and a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

It comes weeks after officials scrambled to set up additional housing for migrants at the controversial US base on the island — and only days after those on location were deported. While the tent structures are currently not being used, migrants are still being placed in the detention facility on the base, and at the Migrant Operations Center, or MOC.

The Trump administration said it would be building out tent structures at Guantanamo Bay to house an anticipated 30,000 people transferred there from the southern border. But the sources said Monday that the tents don’t currently meet detention standards set by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The two sources, and a third US official, also said there haven’t been enough people transferred to the base to justify building more.

The situation is indicative of the harried efforts undertaken by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to house migrants at the naval base, after President Donald Trump ordered the move in January. Sources previously told CNN the mission has been embroiled in confusion and conflicting internal messaging over who is in charge and what will happen to migrants once they arrive.

The Pentagon referred questions to US Southern Command.

“There should have been a greater degree of planning before the execution. Now execution has begun, and everyone is trying to back into planning,” a source with knowledge of the situation previously told CNN.

Last week, more than 170 migrants at the naval base were flown to Venezuela, nearly emptying Guantanamo. Since then, 17 migrants have been brought to the detention facility portion of the base, the official said.

There are no migrants currently being housed at the MOC and no flights with more migrants expected over the next two days. There are currently roughly 1,000 US service members supporting the mission at Guantanamo.

One of the US officials told CNN that there is a cap of 50 for how many migrants can be brought to the MOC to avoid an overflow of people, which would require them to be placed in the tents, largely because the tents do not meet detention standards set by ICE — which is the agency in charge of the migrants.

But there also haven’t been enough migrants coming to Guantanamo yet to justify building more tents for them, the two US officials said.

“Depending on how many people we get, they may be trickled down to the tents, but at this moment we haven’t reached that threshold to put people in tents,” one of the officials said.

It has been unclear how officials are determining who is sent to Guantanamo; one source previously told CNN that all have been deemed to have what was described as “criminality.” A senior Homeland Security official told CNN that while some are “violent gang members and other high-threat illegal aliens,” others are “illegal aliens with final deportation orders.”

“All these individuals committed a crime by entering the United States illegally,” the senior DHS official said.

CNN reported that of the 177 Venezuelan migrants flown to their home country out of Guantanamo last week, 126 people had criminal charges or convictions, while 51 had no criminal record.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.