 "US President Donald Trump. AP")
On Wednesday afternoon, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order asking the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to construct a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. After signing the order, Trump claimed that the detention facility would be able to hold up to 30,000 immigrants who would be deported from the US, The Hill reported. This is seen as Trump’s latest crackdown on illegal immigrants, as he continues to push his anti-immigration rhetoric.
While his allies lauded the move and saw it as him fulfilling his campaign pledge, others raised concerns about the potential human rights violation, insisting how the plan might backfire. Trump did not have a good record when it came to tackling illegal immigrants during his first term in office. While he managed to bring the numbers down, multiple questions were raised about how these migrants were treated in ill-maintained detention centres.
Here’s a look at how the idea of sending struggling migrants to one of the strictest prisons in the world can end up going against Trump.
The early excitement within the Trump administration
While sharing the reason behind signing the executive order, Trump argued: “Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them because we don’t want them coming back." “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately," he furthered. It is pertinent to note that the US naval base outpost in Guantánamo Bay, in south-eastern Cuba, already has a facility which is used to house immigrants who have been picked up at sea.
Soon after the announcement of the executive order, the newly confirmed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth lauded the move. The former Fox News anchor said that Guantánamo Bay is the “perfect spot” to house deported migrants. “Guantánamo Bay, Jesse, is a perfect spot,” Hegseth said in an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Waters.
“We don’t want illegal criminals in the United States and— not a minute longer than they have to be,” he continued. “Move them off to Guantánamo Bay, where they can be safely maintained until they are deported to their final location, their country of origin, where they are headed," he added.
When asked if 30,000 migrants could be accommodated in the complex, Hegesth responded affirmatively, insisting that he had served in the region and had seen the complex. Some of the other Trump allies have also taken a similar stance.
How Trump’s crackdown is souring US’s ties with Latin America
Soon after coming back to the White House, the Trump administration sent a barrage of migrants to Latin American nations. This made several nations uncomfortable as they struggled to deal with the sudden influx of people. Earlier this week, both Mexico and Colombia rejected US military planes carrying migrants. However, following a brief tariff war and war of words, Bogota eventually accepted the deported migrants.
Meanwhile, Cuba condemned the Wednesday order. The foreign minister of the Latin American nation said that Trump’s idea “shows contempt towards the human condition and international law”. “The US government’s decision to imprison migrants at the Guantánamo Naval Base, in an enclave where it created torture centres and indefinite detention," the Cuban diplomat wrote in the post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, called the plan “an act of brutality”. Amid the chaos, Amnesty International also released a statement, emphasising that Guantánamo has been a “site of torture, indefinite detention without charge or trial and other unlawful practices." They insisted that Trump should be using his authority to close the prison and not repurposing it for offshore immigration detention.
While Trump is solving crisis within his border, he is spoiling ties with his neighbouring nations. If Trump engages in tariff wars with some of the Latin American nations, then things will get harsher for Americans since countries like Mexico and Columbia are known for the export of essential and basic items to the United States.
Guantanamo Bay: ‘Gitmo’ and the human rights concerns
The US Naval base in Cuba is best known for the suspects who were imprisoned following the 9/11 attack. Apart from this, the region has a small, separate facility used for decades to hold migrants. The facility called the Migrant Operations Center is used for people intercepted trying to illegally reach the US by boat. Most of the migrants detained there came from Haiti and Cuba.
What is concerning is the fact that the centre only takes up a tiny part of the base, includes just a handful of buildings and has nowhere near the capacity to house the 30,000 people Trump claimed could be sent there. “We’re just going to expand upon that existing migrant centre," Border czar Tom Homan told reporters when the concern was raised.
Apart from the space, there have been concerns about the instances of human rights abuse in the complex. While not much is known about the migration centre, the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project said in a report last year that people are held in “prison-like” conditions. It maintained that the inmates were “trapped in a punitive system” indefinitely, with no accountability for the officials running it. Hence, many argued that while Trump will solve one issue within the country, it will lead to the birth of another one, the one in which his first administration had somewhat of an experience.
How Trump’s past treatment of migrants drew ire
It was May 2019, when the erstwhile Trump administration was forced to confirm that a 10-year-old migrant girl died in its custody. The death of the girl from El Salvador actually happened seven months ago. She was the sixth child to die in the custody of the US Deportation authorities in the past six months.
At that time, the Congressional Democrats for the investigation of these deaths since US border agents temporarily closed the primary migrant processing facility in south Texas due to an outbreak of poor health conditions.
While Trump attempted to solve the migration crisis, during the 2020 election cycle he faced backlash over the treatment of those deported and the half-done wall between the US and Mexico. Hence, there is a possibility that the President might witness a “deja vu” moment.
With inputs from agencies.