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Trump’s Guantánamo Plan Will Be a Costly, Morally Bankrupt Fiasco [1]

['Jeffrey S. Kahn', 'Elie Mystal', 'Dave Zirin', 'Joan Walsh', 'Jeet Heer', 'Todd Miller', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Bryce Covert', 'Felipe Galindo', 'Steve Brodner']

Date: 2025-02-17 14:44:48+00:00

Trump’s Guantánamo Plan Will Be a Costly, Morally Bankrupt Fiasco The US government has begun to shuttle immigrants from the United States to Gitmo, post photos of them in shackles, and lock them away.

The Department of Homeland Security released photos on February 4 of the first flight of migrants to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

(Department of Homeland Security)

President Donald Trump caught the Pentagon off-guard when he announced late last month that he would be expanding the migrant holding facility at Guantánamo Bay to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Since then, the administration has begun to shuttle immigrants from the United States to the base aboard military planes, post photos of them in shackles arriving at Guantánamo’s airstrip, and lock them away in a facility previously used to incarcerate War on Terror detainees. Across the bay, Navy and Coast Guard forces have started erecting a tent city, presumably to hold thousands of other noncitizens the administration has promised to send to the base in the coming weeks.

While shipping immigrants from the United States to Guantánamo is new, using the base to detain migrants is not. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred asylum seekers who were held at the naval station during the 1990s. I’ve walked the exterior of the Migrant Operations Center and the Mass Migration Complex that are the subject of Trump’s order to expand detention capacity at the base. From what I can see, Trump’s proposal is a bet on no-oversight immigration detention and a branding campaign designed to make immigrants appear as threatening as the War on Terror captives still held in Guantánamo’s prison complex. Despite the bluster with which the administration has rolled out the proposal, it’s a bet that’s not likely to pay off in the way the administration thinks it will.

To explain why this wager is reckless—even on Trump’s own cruel terms—let me begin with the base’s history as a site for detaining asylum seekers. The United States has held Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s, though a formal policy of processing asylum seekers began only in 1991, and an early iteration of the Migrant Operations Center, the facility mentioned in Trump’s recent memorandum, has existed since 1996. No immigrants detained as part of civil removal proceedings, however, have ever been sent to Guantánamo from the United States. Still, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called Guantánamo “the perfect spot” for the new detention mission, he was leaning heavily on this history.

The Migrant Operations Center, or MOC, is a small facility on the leeward side of the base with a maximum capacity of 120, although it typically houses a much smaller population of asylum seekers who are, in rare instances, held at the base after being stopped at sea by the US Coast Guard. It has been described to me as looking like a small barracks with claustrophobic, prison-like rooms. I say “described,” because, although I’ve walked around the fence line of the MOC, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in charge were so sensitive about revealing any details that they wouldn’t allow an agency representative or their contractors to discuss it with me, let alone provide a tour. One of the naval station’s public-affairs officers was baffled by the level of secrecy, especially given that the Joint Task Force that runs the War on Terror detention complex did, at that time, permit such tours for visitors to examine the cells and grounds of its camps. This is in part what’s so troubling about the MOC—a near paranoid desire to keep all that happens there hidden away.

A stone’s throw away from the MOC is the much larger Mass Migration Complex, which, when I was there in 2017, was slated for an expansion meant to accommodate more than 12,000 migrants during a mass migration event from Haiti or Cuba. Under “surge conditions,” the Complex would supposedly hold as many as 19,000 asylum seekers. Under those plans, increasing the number of beds from 12,000 to 19,000 would mean nearly doubling the “normal” capacity of the tents, cramming them with 20 migrants apiece.

Trump and Hegseth have talked about expanding the MOC, but what they mean, I believe, is that they plan to use both the Center and the Mass Migration Complex. During normal conditions, the Complex is little more than an empty field with some rudimentary camp infrastructure. But when needed, it can be outfitted with tents and cots to temporarily accommodate large numbers of immigrants, although not the 30,000 figure administration officials have been repeating. Navy service members are currently working to set up a tent city on the site of the complex. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has locked the first groups of detainees away in Camp 6, one of the War on Terror detention facilities on the windward side of the base, and at another, currently undisclosed, site at the base.

The use of Camp 6 brings us to the other reason the Trump administration is cleaving to Guantánamo as a “perfect” place to detain immigrants. The base is a powerful symbol in the administration’s intensifying propaganda around the necessity of militarized border enforcement. For boomers, Guantánamo radiates Cold War vibes: the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and, more generally, an aura of hypermasculine martial toughness, embodied best perhaps in the condescending swagger of Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessep in the 1992 film A Few Good Men.

For younger generations, Guantánamo brings to mind the George W. Bush administration’s willingness to abandon the rule of law and its embrace of the “dark side,” as Dick Cheney put it in the days following 9/11. Guantánamo was advertised as a legal black hole where the CIA could send the “worst of the worst,” in the words of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and where the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, remains imprisoned to this day.

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-guantanamo-bay-migrant-detention/

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