Haitian refugees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

Over the years a the United States has interned a varying number of Refugees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. In 1991 a coup in Haiti overthrew the first democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, triggering a flood of refugees.

Within six months the USA had interned over 30,000 Haitian refugees in Guantanamo, while another 30,000 fled to the Dominican Republic. Eventually the USA would admit 10,747 of the Haitians to refugee status in the United States.

Most of the refugees were housed in a tent city on the re-purposed airstrip that would later be used to house the complex used for the Guantanamo military commissions. The refugees who represented discipline or security problems were held on the site that would later become Camp XRay, the initial site of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

In 2007 the United States Coast Guard reported they estimated they intercepted" 600 refugees at sea every month, and estimated that another 50 reach U.S. soil weekly." The DoD budgeted $16.5 USD to build a new detention center for refugees.

Small numbers of refugees occasionally slip into the camp to this day. In 2007 the camp was holding approximately 30 refugees at a time.

In January 2010 United States Air Force reservists were deployed to help victims of a massive earthquake in Haiti, and some of those reservists worked to prepare the Guantanamo base to receive more Haitian refugees.