As he promised, U.S. President Donald Trump significantly trying to curtail immigration and strengthen border controls. The newly elected president is going to sign an order to establish a detention center in Guantanamo Bay – the Guardian reports.
In September 2019, Trump told reporters that “it’s crazy” that the US spends roughly $13 million annually on each terrorist suspect detained at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility. He also promised to look for alternatives. In January 2024, the US president changed stance and declared that, as part of his “mass deportation” campaign, tens of thousands of “criminal illegal aliens” would be sent to the US naval base that houses the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Known as “America’s gulag,” Guantanamo was a covert, brutal, and abusive Caribbean prison camp for terrorist suspects. “All of us have scars in our souls, deformities, from living at Guantanamo,” a former Yemeni inmate recalled of his time at the notorious military detention facility in southeast Cuba.
“It’s a tough place to get out of,” Trump remarked mockingly after he disclosed that he had given the heads of the homeland security and defense agencies instructions to set up a “30,000-person migrant facility” on the island. Trump also noted the action would help end “the scourge of migrant crime in our communities, once and for all.” He said, “We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
“Institutionalized Sadism”
Additionally, Trump’s announcement provoked outrage and disgust both domestically and internationally. By linking undocumented migrants to the terror suspects who were detained at Guantanamo’s detention facility after then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld opened it for “enemy combatants” three months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, many saw Trump’s action as an effort to further demonize undocumented migrants.
According to Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at the advocacy group Human Rights First, “this is political theater and part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to paint immigrants as threats in the United States … and fan anti-immigrant sentiment.” According to Acer, “the US chose to hold people on the Guantanamo base because they believed that it would be removed from legal scrutiny” during George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”
Many of the migrants who anticipated joining Trump’s campaign came from Latin America, where the condemnation was even more pronounced. The action was described as “institutionalized sadism” and a Trumpian “spectacle of violence” intended to thrill ardent supporters in an editorial in Mexico’s left-leaning newspaper La Jornada. It claimed that the reopening of a global symbol of human rights violations is a clue to Trumpists who think that workers in the global south should face the same penalties as alleged members of the Islamic State and al-Qaida.
A significantly fewer number of migrants have reportedly been detained there in more recent times after the US Coast Guard intercepted them. In contrast to hundreds following al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks, those migrants have been detained in a different area of the base from suspected terrorists, 15 of whom are currently detained there. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported Pakistani mastermind behind that conspiracy, is the most infamous inmate.