The Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay’s Migrant Operations Center was instructed by US President Donald Trump in an executive memorandum on January 29. Trump asserted before the signing that the 30, 000 beds needed to “eradicate the scourge of migrant crime” and that the US did not “trust” them and that they would not seek to repatriate them if deported.
This came amid an onslaught of anti-migrant executive orders, including the Laken Riley Act, requiring the Department of Homeland Security to detain non-US nationals arrested, but not necessarily found guilty, for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting, thereby denying many migrants access to due process.
These policies are extreme, and they do not apply to Trump or the US, despite their apparent depiction of the current authoritarian era. Nor are they without historical precedent.
The US, the UK, and Australia have been conducting extensive research into offshore detention and the expansion of domestic immigration. Tracing how these policies have evolved together, circulated across all three countries, coming in and out of favour, reveals how the roots of this current authoritarian moment in world politics go deeper than any one state, party, or political perspective. Instead, their roots are in racist, carceral violence that is perpetuated across nation-state lines.
With the establishment of a detention facility in Fort Allen, Puerto Rico and the introduction of “interdiction” laws to stop mostly Haitian asylum seekers from entering the US at sea, the US experimented with offshore detention started in the 1980s. In the 1990s, these policies were expanded with the naval base situated on Guantánamo Bay, used to detain 36, 000 Haitian and 20, 000 Cuban people seeking asylum between 1991 and 1996.
The Australian government introduced the so-called Pacific Solution in 2001, which included Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru into a sophisticated offshore detention structure. The Pacific Solution continues to exist today and was widely accepted by British governments as a model to follow. However, these centers became tarred by reports of human rights violations and extensive evidence of abuse and cruelty.
In order to create a plan to deport people seeking asylum in Rwanda, the previous Conservative cabinet drew directly from Australia’s offshore policy. Although Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the 2024 election, he has also looked to Italy’s offshoring in Albania as a potential model.
Even when political upheavals demand a shift away from incarcerating people offshore, the offshore infrastructure and related deterrent logic persist in all of these nations. Thus, when the Pacific Solution’s initial iteration was ended in 2007, physical spaces and the legal framework of offshoring remained intact, enabling a policy that could be easily revived and strengthened with the Pacific Solution 2.0 in 2012.
The Australian government never terminated their corporate contracts when the Nauru detention center was evacuated in 2023, allowing the facility to be repopulated with people seeking asylum only months later.
Detainees are excluded from regular rights and protections by law and, as a result, are largely protected from the support of community and advocacy networks. The growing criminalization of migrants reflects this on a national level.
By creating new migration-related crimes, mandating the detention and deportation of noncitizens with criminal convictions, and removing avenues for appeal or representation, states have constructed an increasingly illegalised population without rights. In addition, they debate migration and criminality in public discourse.
This makes politicians and one another in a political conflict by promoting deterrence through ever-expanding detention as the only practical option, especially during election campaigns.
This is clearly demonstrated by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in the US. Passed in the run-up to a presidential election, IIRIRA expanded the definition of “aggravated felon” and the scope of deportable noncitizens (including retroactively). The Act significantly increased detention and deportation rates, as well as the militarisation of the US-Mexico border, and established a close collaboration between immigration enforcement and local police.
Today, Trump’s executive orders, and claims of defending against an “invasion” by “criminal illegal aliens”, are an intensification of this existing system and its racialised logics of deterrence.
This system of criminalizing and incarcerating people who are seeking a dignified life ricochets between its onshore and offshore incarnations within and between nations. Parties across political divides use tough on migration narratives to discredit their ability to govern the country and distract from failures in housing, employment, housing, and other areas of the country. This criminalization also increases during election cycles when borders turn into spectacles of political strength.
The past 12 months have been no exception, with elections in the UK and the US and now an impending election in Australia. Each of these elections has pivoted around a gross expansion of policy proposals for offshoring detention, the deportation of large swaths of people, and the undermining, if not death, of our international protection regime.
The goalposts of what is deemed acceptable continue to orient themselves toward the right, leading to policies that place more restrictions on rights and promise to harm.
Another failure is also obscured by this cruelty-seeking display, which is the profound lack of political leadership in immigration. Research consistently demonstrates how these policies continue to harm those who are already socially excluded but instead instead deter people from arriving.
The international immigration detention systems are fundamental to preventing harm and abandonment, not to mention rogue individuals or businesses that are the result of inadvertent byproducts. Harm and abandonment are “by design”. They are essential components of coercive detention and deportation systems, which are supported by political and financial gains from this harm.
Yet, the violences and injustices of detention are constantly resisted. Around the world, protests, strikes, riots, and jailbreaks by detained people have been met with solidarity by civil rights campaigners, grassroots activists, faith groups, community organisers, lawyers, families and friends.
Conditions, abuses, judgements, and laws have been challenged, raids resisted, bonds posted, sanctuary policies passed, border enforcement agencies defunded, and local networks built to shut down detention sites and support people at risk of detention.
Following the announcement of its closure in 2017, when Papua New Guinea declared it unconstitutional, men incarcerated in the Manus Island detention center staged a 23-day demonstration to demonstrate this unity and resistance. The men peacefully fought for freedom in place of re-incarceration in new locations, drawing on their ties to local Manusian communities and Australian advocates, while exposing their plight to a global audience and exposing the security forces’ increasing level of intimidation and preventing their access to food, water, and electricity.
The fact that those held in offshore locations have their own documentation demonstrates an authoritarian mindset in immigration policy that will affect both citizens and non-citizens. As Behrouz Boochani, poet, journalist, and former prisoner of Australia’s immigration detention centre in Manus, describes in his book Freedom, Only Freedom: “The refugees have identified and exposed the face of an emerging twenty-first-century dictatorship and fascism, a dictatorship and fascism that will one day creep into Australian society and into people’s homes like a cancer”.
Under Trump 1.0, grassroots coalitions between people who have lived through detention and abolitionist organizers formed the foundation of resistance, and they will do so once more. The most powerful opposition and alternative to our current authoritarian situation are those who bear the brunt of the carceral state’s attacks, not the corporate liberalism of mainstream “left-wing” parties.
Source: Aljazeera
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