When Italy began laying out its controversial plan to process refugees beyond its borders in Albania, Italian officials defended the action by saying the centers would not be like Guantanamo Bay.

Now that President Donald Trump announced a plan to turn the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo into a large-scale migrant detention center, Italy’s struggles with its Albania strategy may be a preview to some of the legal and political challenges that lay ahead for the U.S.

One of the priorities that helped forge strong relations between the reelected U.S. presient and Italy’s leader, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has been a desire to curb mass migration – for Trump from Latin America via Mexico and for Meloni from Africa and the Middle East via the Mediterranean Sea. 

Trump said he wants to turn Guantanamo from a Naval base and high-security prison for 9/11-era terrorism suspects into a base with space, facilities, and personnel to process as many as 30,000 “high-priority” immigrants – nearly five times the base’s current number of residents. It’s part of Trump’s plan to deport as many as 20 million undocumented migrants from the U.S.

Covering about 45 square miles (around two-thirds the size of the District of Columbia) in southeastern Cuba, the prison at Guantanamo at its peak in 2002 and 2003 housed roughly 800 people accused of terror-related crimes. But there are just 15 prisoners there now.

Trump’s fast-moving plan to repurpose the facility is getting underway nearly a decade after Barack Obama announced plans to close the base in the waning days of his presidency. Already, 10 migrant detainees in Trump's roughly 40 days back in office have been sent there from Texas, with plans calling for many more to follow. 

“President Trump is dead serious about getting illegal criminals out of our country,” newly installed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in late January. “This is a temporary transit, which is already the mission of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.”

But if Italy’s Albania plan is any indication, it may not be that easy.

Since taking office in 2022, Meloni made reducing the number of migrant arrivals in her country the central plank of her government, and as part of that effort the Italians constructed and staffed two facilities in Albania, which is about 50 miles from Italy, across the Adriatic. There, advocates say, the housing migrants will be less stress on Italian infrastructure, and ones who slipped through the cracks would still be as far from Italy’s shores as they were when they set out from Africa.

But Italian and European courts have struck repeated blows to the strategy, so far ordering three shiploads of migrants sent there since October to be taken to Italy for processing. 

Concerns center on whether the would-be asylum seekers hailed from countries considered “safe,” and if Italy’s strategy ran afoul of European Union rights to asylum (Albania is not part of the European Union). So far, no migrants have been processed at the centers, which carry a price tag of around $700 million over five years, ending in 2028.

Meloni has blasted the courts that ruled against her as having political agendas. 

“If some judges want to govern, they should run for elections and then govern,” she said. Still Meloni remains undeterred.

Early indications are that Trump’s plans for Guantanamo may already be on a similar path. 

According to Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the UCLA School of Law's Center for Immigration Law and Policy, sending refugees to Guantanamo was illegal since by virtue of having spent time in the U.S. before being sent there they should be entitled to protections of U.S. immigration law. 

John B. Bellinger III, in a brief for the Council on Foreign Relations, went even further. 

“Unauthorized immigrants detained in the United States have a right to counsel and to be visited by a consular official from their country of nationality,” Bellinger wrote. “Such immigrants may claim that their transfer to Guantanamo will interfere with their ability to exercise these rights.”