Guantanamo deportations: What’s Trump’s plan? Why is it controversial?

A US prison in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay, is the subject of an executive order that seeks to convert it to a detention facility for undocumented immigrants, according to President Donald Trump’s executive order on Wednesday.

According to estimates from the Pew Research Center, there are about 11 million of these immigrants living in the US, which has a population of 341 million.

In recent years, immigration-related debates have dominated US politics, and they have been a key component of the most recent presidential election campaign. Trump has pledged to carry out “the largest deportation in American history.”

Yet, until now, the facility&nbsp, has been used to house only those whom the US describes as “illegal enemy combatants” – not undocumented migrants.

Trump’s plans for Guantanamo Bay, a notorious camp where US military officials have previously been accused of torturing prisoners, are discussed here.

What has Trump said about Guantanamo Bay?

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order titled, “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity”.

The US’s defense and homeland security secretaries are mandated to work toward making Guantanamo Bay “to full capacity” to house high-priority criminal aliens who are unlawfully present in the country.

Trump has said that 30, 000 beds will be available to house “the worst” undocumented immigrants, meaning those with criminal records, saying his administration “didn’t trust” their countries of origin to hold them.

The order additionally states: “This memorandum is issued in order to halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels, and restore national sovereignty”.

Trump made this announcement while signing the Laken Riley Act, the first piece of legislation to pass during his second term in office, which also seeks to deport undocumented immigrants.

He added, “Today’s signings bring us one step closer to ending migrant crime in our communities for all.”

Trump has made a number of connections between illegal immigration and crime in the US. However, an analysis of US universities’ economics in 2023 found that immigrants were consistently less likely than people born in the US to be imprisoned than those who had previously been.

The Laken Riley Act: What Is It?

The Laken Riley Act is a bill that was passed by the Republican-majority Congress and signed into law on Wednesday by Trump, also a Republican.

The bill requires the Department of Homeland Security to “detain certain non-US nationals (aliens under federal law) who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting”.

The act is named in honor of a 22-year-old nursing student who was fatally shot on the University of Georgia campus in February. An undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was found guilty of her killing.

Ibarra had previously been arrested for shoplifting. He pleaded guilty to the offence and received a life sentence without the possibility of parole in November.

Some Democrats opposed the legislation.

According to The Associated Press, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying, “In this bill, if someone is so much as accused of a crime, they would be arrested, put in a private detention camp, and sent out for deportation without a day in court,” according to the New York Representative.

However, some Democrats backed the bill, primarily from representatives from battleground states where Democrats and Republicans could potentially win.

In the House of Representatives, the bill passed 263-156 with the support of 46 Democrats. In the Senate, the bill passed 64-35 with 12 Democrats voting in favour. Democrats approving the bill were from the states of Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Hampshire, Georgia, Michigan and Virginia.

“Anyone who commits a crime should be held accountable. That’s why I voted to pass the Laken Riley Act”, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, wrote on X on January 20.

Where is Guantanamo Bay located?

On the eastern tip of Cuba, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base houses the detention facility. It is about 800km (500 miles) southeast of Florida.

What is the detention facility’s history?

In November 2001, US President George W. Bush signed a military order allowing the US to detain foreign nationals without charge indefinitely as part of the “war on terror” that was intended to end the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.

The Guantanamo base served as the prison where they were kept. It opened on January 11, 2002, and the first 20 prisoners – mostly from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Kuwait and the United Kingdom – were brought in.

Over the past two decades, 780 men and teenage boys (at least 15 prisoners classed as “juveniles”) have been held there, many without charge.

“Bush said his Guantanamo scheme would help end terrorism, and it did precisely the opposite. Trump’s plan “makes the US less safe, rather than more,” according to Clive Stafford Smith, one of the first human rights attorneys to enter the prison after it opened and whose clients include Guantanamo inmates.

In December 2002, then-US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld greenlit a series of interrogation techniques in the prison, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions and the use of dogs to “induce stress”.

Obama, a former president of the Democratic Party, issued an executive order closing the prison in 2009. However, it remained open as a result of Congress’ passing a law preventing the closure despite Obama’s bipartisan opposition. Trump signed an executive order in his first term in 2018 that ultimately reversed Obama’s order. After Congress again opposed prisoner transfers, Democratic President Joe Biden restarted the Obama administration’s effort to close the facility.

After the majority of the prisoners had been released, most of them had never been charged with any crime and had been repatriated to their home or third countries over the years. As of January 6, 15 prisoners had all been left in Guantanamo Bay.

Only seven Guantanamo prisoners have ever been found guilty of a terror offence, five of whom were found guilty in exchange for the possibility of being released from the base, according to a report released in 2023 by the rights organization Amnesty International.

In the same report, Amnesty International stated that Guantanamo’s facilities have become examples of the government’s “cruel human rights abuses and torture” committed in the name of counterterrorism.

The UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the fight against terrorism, which said, “details 21 years of indefinite detention for 780 Muslim men and boys, and the myriad human rights violations against them,” was cited by Amnesty.

Is Trump’s immigration policy effective in Guantanamo?

According to Stafford Smith, “President Bush did with the detainees in January 2002, and now I have the raw power to take them there.”

He noted that the situation has changed since prisoners have been deported from the US to Guantanamo Bay, in contrast.

They will also have the right to a proper court and the full constitutional rights of US citizens there, he claimed. Guantanamo Bay will serve as “merely a different detention center” for immigrants who otherwise would be detained in the US, he added.

They will also enjoy the same rights as any refugee, Stafford Smith said, adding that there will be a compelling case that they cannot be held indefinitely because Trump has already foolishly stated he can’t send them home. He explained that, in contrast to the prisoners currently imprisoned at Guantanamo, refugees would be able to visit their families.

Stafford Smith, who has frequently met with clients, claimed that the prison only has 500 cells and a small number of other spaces for people, but that even if Trump detained 30, 000, that figure would be a tiny fraction of the total number of immigrants he has promised to deport, rendering his action “totally inconsequential in the grand scheme.”

Will this be stopped in legal action?

In contrast to earlier legal proceedings against the Guantanamo prison system, Stafford Smith predicted legal action would be taken to stop Trump’s recent actions and that “it will be much easier for us as lawyers” because prisoners would have legal rights.

He cited a 2002 case by the Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy organization, for four men detained at Guantanamo Bay as an illustration. The case argued that the prison was holding its clients indefinitely without a fair hearing. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the detainees. By that time, two of the men had already been released. The other two were released after the judgement.

Stafford&nbsp, Smith deemed Trump’s new action “a populist charade meant to show the US people that he is doing something”.

Source: Aljazeera