President Donald Trump is looking to vastly expand immigrant detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Trump hopes to eventually detain up to 30,000 immigrants at Guantánamo, which would require a massive investment in infrastructure, given that existing immigrant detention facilities are only designed to hold about 120 people.
The Trump administration has already sent a few dozen immigrants — those deemed high-risk — to Guantánamo. That includes 13 known members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the federal government designated last year as a “transnational criminal organization.”
Trump’s team is reportedly planning to ramp up to at least one military flight carrying detainees per day, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Guantánamo on Friday to survey the site. However, those plans might face roadblocks in the courts: On Sunday, a federal judge prevented the Trump administration from sending three Venezuelan immigrants accused of gang ties to Guantánamo.
Under Trump’s plans, most immigrants will not be held at the notorious terror suspects prison. Instead, they’ll be put in immigration detention facilities nearby.
But those facilities have their own sordid history, and critics argue that Trump’s plan will violate immigrants’ human rights. And while the Trump administration has tried to wave away those concerns, history is on the critics’ side.
Both Republican and Democratic administrations have a record of detaining — and mistreating — immigrants at Guantánamo, mostly Cubans and Haitians traveling in boats intercepted at sea. The most egregious abuses occurred in the early 1990s amid a refugee crisis in which the US kept Haitians in inhumane conditions at Guantánamo rather than allow them to reach American shores.
Trump is trying something new: He is now planning to send people arrested in the US to the American naval base on a large scale. But just as in the 1990s, his plans raise concerns about inhumane detention conditions, especially given his first administration’s lack of oversight — even in US facilities on the mainland.
“Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Friday.
The history of immigration detention at Guantánamo
Trump’s Guantánamo efforts resemble dark episodes in the country’s past. During the 1990s, Haitians were detained there by the thousands in horrific conditions with little oversight. Guantánamo’s remote location, outside the bounds of the mainland US or Cuban jurisdiction, has long shielded US operations there from public scrutiny.
“Out of sight, out of mind, is kind of the whole intention with Guantánamo,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director for Detention Watch Network, a coalition of immigrant advocates focused on immigration detention.
The Reagan administration began the practice of interdicting boats of Haitians. The Haitians were fleeing the repressive regimes of François Duvalier and his son, but Reagan’s team denied them political asylum and sent them back to the oppressive regime.
But it wasn’t until 1991 — when Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a military coup and his supporters brutally hunted down — that the US began detaining Haitian emigrants in large numbers at Guantánamo.
Blocked by the courts from resuming automatic repatriations of Haitians who would face certain danger back home, US President George H.W. Bush established a refugee camp at the naval base. At its peak, more than 12,000 Haitians were held there.
The conditions were “like hell” and detainees were “treated like animals,” as one witness recounts in Jonathan Hansen’s Guantánamo: An American History. They were served food that had maggots in it and sometimes made to sleep on the ground, the book says.
“The latrines were brimming over. There was never any cool water to drink, to wet our lips. There was only water in a cistern, boiling in the hot sun. When you drank it, it gave you diarrhea. … Rats crawled over us at night. … When we saw all these things, we thought, it’s not possible, it can’t go on like this. We’re humans, just like everybody else,” said one detainee Hansen cites.
The US government denied the emigrants access to legal counsel on the basis that Guantánamo was outside American constitutional jurisdiction. And despite court rulings, the Bush administration still sought to repatriate Haitians who did not qualify for asylum. They faced an almost impossibly high bar to qualify, in part because American officials downplayed the crisis in Haiti. The officials argued that they were not returning Haitians to life-threatening conditions, which is prohibited by US and international asylum law.
Several hundred Haitian detainees at Guantánamo who had tested positive for HIV were also denied adequate medical care and isolated in separate spaces, cordoned off with barbed wire. Congress in 1987 had voted to bar HIV-positive individuals from entering the US. So even though many such Haitians had qualified for asylum, they were told that they would have to remain at Guantánamo for 10 to 20 years until a cure for AIDS was found.
President Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 on the promise that he would end Haitian repatriations and detentions, but instead, his administration continued the Bush-era policies. Eventually, in 1993, a US federal court ruled that the detention of HIV-positive Haitian asylees was unconstitutional. It was only after the ruling that the Clinton administration changed its policies, and the Guantánamo detention camps were mostly cleared out.
Will this dark history repeat during Trump’s administration?
The US risks reliving past abuses at Guantánamo under Trump. The president has offered little assurance that his plans to revive Guantánamo as a site for large-scale immigration detention will meet humane standards.
More than a dozen organizations, including the ACLU, signed a letter to the Trump administration Friday demanding access to detainees there. Immigration attorneys for the three Venezuelans subject to Sunday’s federal court ruling have also argued that “the mere uncertainty the government has created surrounding the availability of legal process and counsel access” at Guantánamo is enough to justify blocking further transfers.
“There’s a very long, documented, clear history of how abusive detention conditions are across facilities, wherever they are,” said Ghandehari, the immigrant advocate. “It does take things to another level to be somewhere like Guantánamo, that’s so far away, that’s a military base, that has a really sordid history of being a site of abuse and torture.”
But it’s not just the history of immigration detention at Guantánamo that should raise concerns about Trump’s efforts to expand capacity there. Trump’s first term offers plenty of warning signs.
During Trump’s first term, the administration routinely failed to respond to abuses in mainland US immigration detention facilities unless pressured by the public or the courts.
On Trump’s watch, a rogue doctor gave detained immigrant women medically unnecessary hysterectomies without their consent. Immigrants were kept in freezing cold US Customs and Border Protection cells known as “hieleras” with only mylar blankets to keep them warm. Children were separated from their parents, in some cases permanently, and kept in cages. Immigrants were deprived of basic hygiene products and provided with spoiled food. Immigration detention guards were accused of sexually assaulting and harassing detainees at one facility in Texas on a systemic basis.
In most of those cases, the administration only intervened following widespread public outcry or a court order.
The problem is that it’s much harder to have a window into conditions at Guantánamo than it was for any of those facilities exposed during the first Trump administration. That’s a key concern for immigrant advocates, who already struggle to deliver adequate access to counsel and oversight at mainland facilities, said Faisal Al-Juburi, a spokesperson for the immigrant legal defense organization RAICES.
Trump has also recently fired a slew of inspectors general, including one at the Department of Health and Human Services, who is in part responsible for overseeing detention conditions along with one at DHS.
“It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing,” Gelernt said.
