President Donald Trump is looking to significantly expand immigrant detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Trump hopes to ultimately detain up to 30,000 immigrants in Guantanamo, given that the existing immigration detention facilities are designed to accommodate around 120 people.
The Trump administration has already sent dozens of immigrants (are considered high-risk) to Guantanamo. That includes 13 known members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the federal government designated as a “multinarian criminal organization” last year.
Trump's team reportedly plans to increase military flights for at least one person carrying detainees per day, and Homeland Security's Department of Homeland Security Christa Noem visited Guantanamo on Friday to make a website I investigated it. However, these plans could face court obstacles. On Sunday, a federal judge prevented the Trump administration from sending three Venezuelan immigrants accused of gang ties to Guantanamo.
Under Trump's plan, most immigrants will not be detained in prisons for infamous fear suspects. Instead, they are placed in a nearby immigration detention facility.
However, these facilities have their own troubling history, and critics argue that Trump's plans violate immigrants' human rights. And while the Trump administration has tried to ward off those concerns, history is on the side of critics.
Both Republican and Democrat administrations have records of detaining and abusing immigrants in Guantanamo. The most terrible abuse occurred in the early 1990s amid the refugee crisis that kept Haitians in inhumane situations in Guantanamo, rather than reaching the American coast.
Trump is trying something new. He currently plans to send people arrested in the United States to a large-scale US Navy base. But, just like in the 1990s, his plans raise concerns about inhumane conditions of detention, especially given the lack of oversight of his first administration, especially at mainland US facilities.
“Sending immigrants from the US to Guantanamo and embrace them without access to the advisors or the outside world opens a new and shameful chapter in the history of this infamous prison,” says American Civil Liberties. Union, deputy director of the Immigration Rights Project, said in a statement Friday.
History of immigration detention in Guantanamo
Trump's Guantanamo efforts resemble darker episodes of the country's past. In the 1990s, Haitians were not detained there by thousands of people in horrifying circumstances. Guantanamo's remote location has long protected US operations from public scrutiny outside the boundaries of continental US or Cuba jurisdictions.
“What's invisible is a kind of intent with Guantanamo,” said Setaregandehari, advocacy director at Detention Clock Network, a coalition of immigration advocates focused on immigration detention.
The Reagan administration began a practice that was blocked by Haitian boats. The Haitians had fled the repressive regime of François Duvalier and his son, but Reagan's team denied political exile and sent them back to the repressive regime.
However, until 1991, when Haiti's democratically elected President Jean Bertoland Aristide abdicated in a military coup, and his supporters were brutally cornered, the US detained a massive amount of Haitian immigrants in Guantanamo. I've started.
Preventing the court from returning to his hometown and resuming automatic deportation of Haitians facing certain risks, President George H.W. Bush established a refugee camp at a naval base. At that peak, more than 12,000 Haitians were detained there.
The conditions were “hellish” and detainees, as told in Jonathan Hansen, were “treated like animals.” Guantanamo: American History. They were offered food with maggots in it, and sometimes put them to sleep on the ground, the book says.
“The toilet was overflowing. There was never any cold water to wet your lips. There was only water in the reservoir, boiling in the hot sun. When you drank it, it was on you. I gave him diarrhea. …The rats raw us at night. …When we saw all this, we thought it was impossible, it cannot continue like this. We are human, just like everyone else,” said the detainee Hansen quoted.
The US government denied immigrants access to lawyers based on Guantanamo's presence outside the jurisdiction of the US constitution. And despite the court's ruling, the Bush administration was trying to repatriate Haitians who were not eligible for asylum. They qualified for a bar that is almost incredibly high, as part of American officials' downplaying the Haiti crisis. Officials argued that they had not returned Haitians to life-threatening conditions prohibited by US and international asylum laws.
Hundreds of Haitian detainees in Guantanamo who tested positive for HIV were also denied proper medical care, isolated in different spaces and trapped with barbed wire. Congress in 1987 voted to ban HIV-positive individuals from entering the United States. So, although many such Haitians were eligible for asylum, they were told they would have to stay in Guantanamo for 10-20 years before an AIDS treatment was found.
President Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 on a promise to end Haiti's deportation and detention, but instead his administration continued its Bush-era policy. Ultimately, in 1993, a US federal court ruled that hyv-positive Acily in Haiti was unconstitutional. It was only after the verdict that the Clinton administration changed its policies and that the Guantanamo detention camp was largely cleaned up.
Will this dark history repeat itself during Trump's administration?
The US is risking relating past abuses in Guantanamo under Trump. The president has little guaranteed that plans to revive Guantanamo as a site for mass immigration detention will meet humanitarian standards.
More than a dozen organizations, including the ACLU, signed letters to the Trump administration on Friday, demanding access to detainees there. Three Venezuelan immigration lawyers following Sunday's federal court ruling “has created mere uncertainty that the government has created simply surrounding legal proceedings and availability of access to lawyers.” He insisted.
“Where you are, there is a very long and documented, clear history of how abusive abusive detention conditions are across the facility,” said Gandehari, an advocate for immigration. “To be somewhere like Guantanamo, it's far away so far, and it's a military base and a place of abuse and torture, and take another level of what has really meant to be. It's there.”
But it should raise concerns about Trump's efforts to expand his capabilities, not just his history of immigration detention in Guantanamo. Trump's first terminology offers many warning signs.
During Trump's first term, the administration routinely failed to respond to abuse at immigration detention facilities in the continental United States unless pressure was put on public or court.
During Trump's surveillance, the fraudulent doctor gave the detained immigrant women a medically unnecessary hysterectomy without their consent. The immigrants froze into cold US customs and border security cells known as the “Hiera” and only had mylar blankets to keep them warm. Children were sometimes permanently separated from their parents and placed in cages. The immigrants were deprived of basic hygiene products and provided with spoiled food. Immigration detention guards have been accused of systemically sexually assaulting and harassing detainees at one Texas facility.
In most of these cases, the administration intervened following widespread public protests or court orders.
The problem is that it's far more difficult to have a window into Guantanamo's conditions than any of the facilities exposed during the first Trump administration. This is an important concern for immigrant advocates who are already struggling to provide adequate access to lawyers and adequate access to surveillance at immigrant facilities, said Immigration Law Defense Agency Public Relations Office Faisal Al-Juburi, a member of the group, said:
Trump recently fired numerous inspectors, including one in the Department of Health and Human Services department.
“It's illegal for the government to use Guantanamo as a legal black hole, but that's exactly what the Trump administration is doing,” Gellert said.
