Analysis: Trump’s Guantanamo migrant plan evokes a dark history

The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is about to get a new chapter added to its notorious history. The facility in Cuba has long attracted the ire of human rights groups who accuse Washington of using it as an outpost outside the reach of US law to shield from scrutiny alleged abuses of the asylum process and in the war on terror. Now the base could have yet another new incarnation — playing a key role in President Donald Trump’s immigration blitz .

The US has maintained a migrant detention facility there for decades that is separate from the notorious high-security jail for foreign terror suspects, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The base could fulfill two important goals for Trump’s border enforcement program. First, it could offer badly needed space to detain migrants ahead of a potential accommodation crisis if the pace of detentions ramps up.

And just as importantly, it could make Trump look tough – a key consideration in an operation choreographed to send a message to would-be migrants to stay home and to show Trump’s voters he is honoring his campaign pledges. Trump signed a memorandum Wednesday instructing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person facility at the base — although it’s far from clear it’s currently suitable to house anywhere close to that number of detainees potentially awaiting deportation. The center, used traditionally to house Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea before they reach the United States, is dogged by its own long history of complaints about conditions and claims that it short-circuits migrants’ access to the asylum process.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration considered using the base last year to process Haitian migrants. Guantanamo’s symbolic power The symbolism of the location is perfectly resonant with the hardline tone of a migrant crackdown run by the gruff White House border czar Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who joined a federal enforcement team on the streets of New York soon after being confirmed. She hailed the arrest of an undocumented migrant facing criminal charges on X, saying, “Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.

” It was not clear which categories of migrants would be held in the Guantanamo Bay center, but the announcement opened the possibility that it could include some detainees arrested in the interior of the United States and then transported to the Cuban military base. Noem, for instance, told “CNN News Central” that the base could be reserved to detain what she described as “the worst of the worst.” Such language risks raising due process concerns.

And the symbolic association between the military detention center and the migrant camp — even though they are separate — is likely to further stigmatize migrants. “President Trump’s decision to use Guantánamo – global symbol and site of lawlessness, torture, and racism – to house immigrants should horrify us all,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement. “Like many of Trump’s authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in US history.

Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its ‘war on terror,’ the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights under international law.” Trump leans into the theater of his border crackdown Trump announced the Guantanamo initiative at a White House signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, a new law in memory of a Georgia nursing student who was killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant last year. The law – which passed Congress with Democratic support – requires the detention of undocumented migrants charged with certain crimes, including theft or burglary.

The president leaned heavily into the theatrics of a restored migrant facility in Guantanamo, conjuring a vision of a fearsome fate for migrants sent there. “We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump said.

“So we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity immediately, right? And tough. That’s a tough – that’s a tough place to get out of.

” If the associations with Guantanamo invoke toughness for Republicans, they stir equally intense feelings for many liberals and Democrats. The war on terror facility on the base is the prison that refuses to die, defying the efforts of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden to close it. Both only managed to reduce the population of prisoners still housed there.

The prison opened in 2002 as a holding center for suspects taken off battlefields in South Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere who were treated outside the legal system and often held for years without trial. The camp became a symbol of human rights abuses, and the failure to provide inmates with due process made it a stain on the reputation of the United States around the world. The case of Mohammed, one of the camp’s most notorious prisoners, remains unresolved and was delayed for years.

There were initial concerns that evidence obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, which critics called torture, may not be admissible in civilian courts. Then a furor erupted over fears that trying him in New York, as Obama preferred, could be a terrorism risk. The Obama administration eventually decided that Mohammed would go before a military tribunal and blamed Congress for passing laws to prevent him and other suspects from being brought to the US mainland.

Incredibly, the case is still dragging on, more than 23 years after the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. The Biden administration earlier this month succeeded in pausing a deal to allow the former al Qaeda kingpin to plead guilty and evade the risk of execution. The Biden administration announced its final transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees on January 6, sending 11 Yemenis to Oman.

It said 15 detainees remain at the facility. Warnings of inhumane conditions at migrant center The separate migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay has its own checkered civil rights record and its use will concern migrant rights groups who are already raising concerns that Trump’s deportation crackdown infringes access to asylum claims for undocumented migrants. In a report late last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project cited testimony from refugees that conditions at the facility were inhumane and unlawful.

The report called on the government to shut down the center and to give asylum seekers the same legal rights as migrants detained in the interior United States. It said conditions were characterized by undrinkable water, exposure to open sewage, and poor medical care and schooling facilities for children. But two of Trump’s top immigration advisers told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials would be in charge of the Guantanamo Bay expansion.

“ICE has the highest detention standards in the industry,” Homan said. “You can’t find another state, federal, or local facility that has higher detention standards than ICE.” A US official, however, told CNN that the facilities may have had 30,000 beds in the 1990s but was nowhere near such capacity now and that many more staff would be needed to accommodate that number of migrants.

This points to another critical question for the Trump immigration sweep: the need for urgent and significant congressional action to fund its expansion. The US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeastern coast of Cuba and is permanently leased from the communist government in one of the last, and most extraordinary, holdovers from the Cold War. It has long been a thorn in the side of the Havana government — and, since the opening of the military prison, has also been a powerful element of Cuba’s propaganda offensive against the United States, which is likely to ramp up as the new White House adopts a far more hostile tone than the Biden administration.

It didn’t take long for the US base’s newest possible incarnation to draw the ire of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who wrote on X: “In an act of brutality, the new US government announces the imprisonment at the Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory Cuba, of thousands of migrants that it forcibly expels, and will place them next to the well-known prisons of torture and illegal detention.”.