Guantanamo Bay has been receiving flights carrying undocumented immigrants from the United States. Guantanamo Bay has always been used for immigration enforcement, according to the authorities, who have described the action as a common practice.
“We’ll be able to carry on doing what we’ve always done there.” There have always been detained illegal immigrants present there. We’re just building out some capacity”, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on February 2 on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Two days after visiting the Guantanamo Bay facility, Noem claimed something the same way on CNN’s State of the Union on February 9.
The US has indeed previously used a Guantanamo Bay camp to detain certain migrants, but Trump’s use is different, immigration experts have said.
Trump authorized the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to “acquiesce to the detention of high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States” in a memo signed on January 29.
The administration has conflicting information regarding the locations, conditions, and length of the migrants’ stays in Guantanamo Bay.
Based on available information, there are key differences between the naval centre’s previous immigration operations and the Trump administration’s approach:
- Historically, the US has used Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants stopped at sea. Trump is currently delivering detained Americans to his country.
- Previously, migrants were held at the Migrant Operations Center, a different part of the base from the prisons where suspects accused of “terrorism” are detained. Under Trump, the first group of immigrants to arrive at Guantanamo Bay were detained in the detention facilities where such suspects were held.
- The Migrant Operations Center has fewer immigrants and fewer employees in recent years. Trump says he plans to detain 30, 000 people. That many people haven’t been detained at Guantanamo Bay since the 1990s.
When Guantanamo Bay was held by the US for Cubans and Haitians.
The Guantanamo Bay naval base is better known as a high-security prison for foreign “terrorism” suspects following the September 11, 2001, attacks. However, the US had used a portion of it as a migrant detention facility ten years prior.
Haitians and Cubans were held by the US Coast Guard at Guantanamo Bay when they were intercepted at sea. In September 1994, 12, 000 Haitians and 33, 000 Cubans were held in Guantanamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center, the Congressional Research Service found. Razor wire-encircled tent-like structures were used to encircle people.
According to Yale law professor Harold Koh, those detained in Guantanamo Bay, they were unable to hire attorneys to assist them with their asylum applications. Koh sued the US government for Guantanamo Bay’s treatment of Haitians.
Few people received asylum while some Haitians and Cubans were granted it. According to a report released in 2021, the National Immigrant Justice Center, an organization for immigrant advocacy, many Haitians who the government determined could apply for asylum were prohibited from entering the US because of their HIV status.
In 1996, the migrant camp was shut down. However, Guantanamo Bay held migrants for a while before that.
How the practice was restarted
According to the Global Detention Project, an international organization that records immigration detention around the world, the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center, which is separate from the detention facility where terrorism suspects are kept, can hold about 130 people.
Before Trump’s order, the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to PolitiFact’s query regarding the number of migrants at Guantanamo Bay. But in September 2024, The New York Times , reported the centre had held 37 people from 2020 to 2023, and four people as of February 2024. The US Coast Guard intercepted those who were being held there at sea.
In a report from September 2024, the International Refugee Assistance Project stated that people who were intercepted at sea and sent to Guantanamo cannot seek asylum in the US. Instead of waiting for a third nation to accept them in Guantanamo Bay, they must choose between returning to the nation they’re fleeing and accepting them.
Migrants at Guantanamo Bay lack “access to basic human necessities, appropriate medical care, education, and potable water”, the refugee project said in its report. According to the report, migrants are unable to directly discuss the state of the naval base’s conditions and receive unrestricted calls from lawyers.
Depending on how long are people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.  , The New York Times reported in 2024 , that families have been there for more than six months. But in one case, someone was held for nearly four years.
What’s different about the Trump administration’s approach?
Trump’s unprecedented proposal raises legal questions.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank for foreign policy, the US has never sent people who were detained or arrested in the country to Guantanamo.
According to Hannah Flamm, interim senior policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project, people in the US who are accused of violating the law have more rights than those who have been intercepted at sea, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project.
People who have been on US soil “have rights and protections, even if they are sent to Guantanamo. Whether these rights will be respected is another question”, she said.
It’s not clear how due process for migrants will be followed, as Noem assured.
According to Flamm, “the US government purposefully uses Guantanamo in an effort to avoid scrutiny and the public eye, which makes the place ripe for abuse.”
On February 7, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote a letter to the Trump administration requesting access to the migrants who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay so that “advocates and the public can understand the circumstances under which the government is detaining them.”
In her February 9 CNN interview, Noem said she and Trump were “comfortable” that it is legal to bring migrants who were already on US soil to the island.
According to Trump’s plan, how long the migrants will remain at Guantanamo Bay is unknown.
Noem and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, have stated that while migrants are awaiting deportation, their time in custody at Guantanamo Bay will be temporary. On CNN, Noem said, “My goal is that people are not in these facilities for weeks and months”, though she wouldn’t rule out longer stays if other countries don’t accept them.
Trump stated on January 29 that he wanted Guantanamo Bay to house “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” We don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them to return. Some of them are so bad.
If the government attempts to detain migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay indefinitely, it’s unclear what will happen.
According to the US Supreme Court in 2001, people cannot be imprisoned in immigration detention for an indefinite period. Therefore, immigrants who cannot be deported are typically released after their home countries have rejected deportation flights.
The location where migrants will be detained under Trump’s administration is a significant change from the previous location of Guantanamo Bay for immigration detention.
Hegseth claimed that Guantanamo Bay’s migrants would be detained separately from the camp where terrorism suspects are kept. They would be held in the Migrant Operations Center, he declared.
The 10 migrants who took the first flight from the US to Guantanamo Bay were taken to a detention facility in the Migrant Operations Center rather than the US. According to the Defense Department, the building where the migrants are staying differs from the one in which the remaining 15 wartime detainees are residing.
Source: Aljazeera
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