Attorneys who represented hundreds of men who were incarcerated for years at the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba are appalled by President Donald Trump’s vague plan to detain tens of thousands of immigrants at a naval base associated with some the nation’s darkest human rights abuses in modern times.
Earlier this week, Trump issued a brief memo directing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to “expand migrant operations” at Guantánamo Bay. The president insisted without evidence that the migrant detention facility at the naval base has the capacity to hold up to 30,000 people undergoing deportation.
The military prison and migrant detention center are separate facilities, but both are located on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Human rights groups have accused multiple successive administrations of using Guantánamo Bay to conceal torture and abuse while dodging public oversight and federal law.
Pardiss Kebriaei is a staff attorney at Center for Constitutional Rights, a group that coordinated legal representation for hundreds of Muslim men who were incarcerated indefinitely and secretly tortured for years at the Guantánamo Bay military prison as part of the so-called “war on terror.” Today, only 15 detainees remain at the military prison out of the 780 men and boys originally arrested in a global dragnet. Hundreds were released after years of incarceration and byzantine military trials. The organization has decried Trump’s directive, and Kebriaei said Guantánamo Bay remains a globally recognized symbol of lawlessness and torture.
“We should all be disturbed by the use of Guantanamo to send a chill down people’s spines … I can’t think of another infamous prison where a leader of country would capitalize on brutality and torture in that way, as a threat,” Kebriaei said in an interview.
Trump’s memo asks for additional detention space for “high-priority criminal aliens” at Guantánamo Bay, but anyone who is living in the U.S. or crosses the border without papers is criminalized under the president’s anti-immigrant policies. Trump further commented on the plan as he signed the Laken Riley Act into law this week, which requires federal authorities to detain and jail undocumented immigrants accused of even minor crimes without bond. Critics say the law wrongly stigmatizes immigrants as scapegoats for crime and will cause chaos in the federal court system.
Trump’s plan for Guantánamo Bay is short on details, and it remains unclear whether the facility is capable of safely detaining 30,000 people. The migrant detention center at the naval base has traditionally been used to detain small numbers of refugees from Haiti and other Caribbean nations who are intercepted at sea, but administration officials have suggested the expanded facility could hold people deported from the U.S. when detention camps and immigration jails on the mainland become overwhelmed by the number of people arrested in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Kebriaei said the proposal is a “logistical nightmare.”
“As a practical matter, holding people at Gitmo at mass creates issues of space, hygiene, water, weather, heat, hurricanes — these are all things that have been problems before, and they will be problems again, so the idea of humane conditions with mass detention is a fiction,” Kebriaei said.
Kebriaei said migrant rights groups have long described the migrant detention facility as a “black box” known for poor conditions and a lack of oversight. Colleagues and former detainees have described the site as a dilapidated building with mold and sewer issues where only a small number of refugees are detained at a time, including parents with children. Last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project called on the U.S. to shut down the migrant detention center and investigate alleged human rights abuses.
Protests erupted at Guantánamo Bay over indefinite detention and abysmal conditions in the early 1990s when President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton each authorized the detention of thousands of migrants fleeing a violent coup in Haiti. At one point, 12,000 asylum seekers were stuck at a makeshift camp as officials raced to process claims and anti-migrant backlash grew within the United States.
The vast majority of asylum claims were denied, and by June 1992 only 300 people remained at the camp. Many remaining refugees, including mothers and children, tested positive for HIV. Under federal asylum laws, the U.S. could not send the refugees back to Haiti due to ongoing violence. But because a misguided law denied foreigners who tested positive for HIV entry to the U.S., the refugees were held indefinitely at Guantánamo, which one federal judge referred to as an “HIV prison camp.” Caught between these two policies, the refugees attempted to protest their indefinite detention but were met with military police armed with tanks and guns.
“They were held for no reason besides testing positive for HIV, they protested, and the response was a crackdown,” Kebriaei said. “So, this idea that you can have humane conditions of mass detention at Guantánamo is a fiction, it hasn’t happened. The long-term history demonstrates this.”
Kebriaei expects protests to erupt again if the Trump administration attempts to rehabilitate the migrant detention center and to detain thousands of people facing deportation, but unlike detention camps on U.S. soil, such protests would occur at a secure military base hundreds of miles from TV news cameras and human rights observers.
“Whatever this ends of up looking like, the remoteness, the offshore nature of Gitmo, the fact that it is a military base, that is why it has been appealing to U.S. administrations historically, and presumably why it is appealing now,” Kebriaei said.
Human rights attorneys have argued for years that people detained at Guantánamo Bay are protected by the same constitutional rights they would have on U.S. soil, but Kebriaei said Trump’s plan to send deportees there is a signal that his administration is making room for legal maneuvers in anticipation of court challenges in the courts to the immigration crackdown.
“Anyone brought there from the United States would have legal and constitutional rights for sure, but the administration would argue they don’t, or that they have fewer rights than they do have,” Kebriaei said. “The offshore nature of Guantánamo Bay opens up the ability for the administration to even entertain those arguments.”
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