The Politics of Guantánamo Grow Stronger
Weeks after entering the Oval Office, President Trump has set in motion plans to fulfil his most substantial campaign promise: mass deportations at any cost. Starting with 10 migrants described as “high-threat individuals” and later totalling nearly 180, President Trump began his plans to send the "worst criminal illegal aliens" to Guantánamo Bay, a United States military base located on the southeastern end of Cuba. Housed in holding tents or Camp VI, the high-security detention facility, migrants are often without legal representation and separated from the outside world, as spokespeople for the Homeland Security and Defense Departments have not formally disclosed the identities of those in detention publicly or to their families (The NY Times obtained and published the names of 53 men). Hoping to expand migrant operations to full capacity in the bay, Trump’s latest venture expands the problematic legacy of detention in the Guantánamo Naval Base and does so without regard for law and human rights.
Opening one year after the 9/11 attacks, the United States first established the detention facility at Guantánamo to “house people outside the reach of the law” in the name of counter-terrorism. With nearly 800 predominately Muslim men and boys having lived in its cells since its inception, most have never been charged with a crime yet have remained in detention, subjected to torture and other brutal treatment.
Mansoor Adayfi, one of the men detained in Guantánamo, detailed in an interview with Amnesty International the horrors he experienced in detention and the facility's psychological impacts. “There are people that leave Guantanamo in wheelchairs and people who leave Guantanamo in a coffin or a body bag,” says Adayfi “You are totally forgotten. Totally disconnected from the world. You start to lose your sense of who you are, your identity.”
Yet this legacy of injustice in Guantánamo goes further back than the 21st century and its fight to counter terrorism, as it has housed Latino immigrants before. During the 1990s, the Republican Administration used Guantánamo as a detention centre for Haitians fleeing the repressive Duvalier regime, intercepting boats with Haitian refugees and taking many to Guantánamo. With more than 12,000 people being held there to await their asylum claims, which the administration would ultimately deny, they, too, experienced a lack of due process and abominable conditions.
“We didn’t have no rights because, technically, we’re not in the U.S.,” said Marie Genard in a 2017 documentary Forever Prison. “So it felt like you were in prison. I mean, that’s what it was to us, it was being in a prison.”
Guantánamo’s history and politics have long lived in the shadows of the so-called “just” American justice system, and with Trump’s repurposing of the facility, injustice and terror will seal its fate and leak into other forms of incarceration in the United States, especially in regards to the immigrant detention. By seeking to label immigrants and violent immigrant criminals in the same vein, Trump is blending the populist nationalist immigration politics of his movements with the counter-terrorism tactics of his early 21st-century predecessors, posing dangerous risks for human rights and formalising xenophobia in governance.
As mentioned earlier, it is clear that Trump aims to pursue mass deportations at any cost, but it is worth noting his approach is not new. Passed in 2001, the Patriot Act, or the “Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” legitimised the Guantánamo Bay detention camp as a tool to combat terrorism, alongside incorporating other mass surveillance techniques. Yet this act grounded the US’ approach toward inhumane practices, militarisation, detention, profiling and unfair trials in the name of national security, something the Trump administration is doing to immigration currently to avoid oversight and further cement populist nationalist-driven xenophobia in governance.
According to court filings, contrary to what Trump’s comments have echoed, nearly one-third of detainees - around 28 percent - transported to Guantánamo in this first wave were considered “lower threat” and did not have any serious criminal records, with two cases noting detainees only charged on their records entering the country illegally. Treating immigrants like terrorists makes the politics of Guantánamo even stronger, bringing to light a shadow the US has been secretly feeding for generations.
“Trump’s order [sends] a clear message … Migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supporters,” states Vincent Warren, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Despite recently flying almost all of the migrants it had held in the facilities during this first wave out of Guantánamo, this new incarceration outlook will become the new normal and take new forms. ICE reports have shown that Trump's mass deportation promise was not looking to arrest only the “worst” as the agency has increased its percentage of detainees without a criminal conviction compared to the Biden administration. It also continues to add more detention centres, a trait surely to grow the prison-industrial complex, as current centres reach over a 100% capacity rate. Additionally, Trump looks to utilise military sites nationwide to detain immigrants in the process of deportation, echoing totalitarian and authoritarian pasts. While in the early 2000s, the politics of Guantánamo were “out of sight, out of mind,” in the 2020s, Trump is putting them on full display, with the world watching.
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