This coming Wednesday, the monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — the “First Wednesday” vigils, which have been taking place for the last two years — return for the first time under Donald Trump as president.
The vigils are taking place not only with 15 men still held at the notorious ”war on terror” prison, all of whom are held in varying states of lawlessness, but also with the threat now hanging over undocumented migrants in the US that, if Trump gets his way, up to 30,000 of them will end up at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in an expanded “migrant prison” that he authorized just three days ago, in an Executive Order entitled, “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity.”
The vigils this Wednesday will be highlighting this proposal as well as the plight of the 15 prisoners still held in the “war on terror” prison, as noted on the poster, and we hope to attract additional support as a result.
Trump is taking advantage of the fact that a migrant detention facility has existed at Guantánamo since the early 1990s, when it was used to seize Haitians and Cubans fleeing on boats to the US mainland to prevent them from claiming asylum on US soil. At its peak, thousands were detained in abhorrent conditions described by the National Immigrant Justice Center as follows: “Asylum seekers were housed in tents covered in garbage bags, which barely protected them from the rain, and enclosed by barbed wire fencing. They were forced to eat spoiled and sometimes maggot-filled food in extreme heat.”
Despite the backlash against conditions at the migrant center under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, its use has continued ever since, under every president from George W. Bush to Joe Biden, although its operations have involved very small numbers of would-be asylum seekers. Conditions, however, have continued to be deplorable, and have included, via the migrant center’s private contractors, stark echoes of the dehumanization of prisoners at Guantánamo, with reports that the work there requires the guards to escort migrants “using proper security measures with blackout goggles and in vehicles with black-out windows for overall facility security and to ensure inability to identify protected migrants.”
Analogies with the “war on terror” prison are being deliberately promoted by the Trump administration, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem telling CNN that the new migrant detention center could be used to detain people she described as “the worst of the worst” echoing Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious — and false — description of the men held in Bush’s “war on terror” prison when it opened in 2002.
Trump, meanwhile, announcing his executive order, claimed that the expanded migrant center would be used to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
It’s early days yet for this proposal, and I’ll be looking soon into who exactly Trump thinks will be held there, if he can secure funding from Congress, given that most of his energies right now are on expanding the “expedited removal” of undocumented migrants from border areas to the entire US mainland, so that, if seized by immigration enforcement officers, no undocumented immigrant is safe from being sent back to their home countries, within a day, and without any access to the US legal system to challenge their removal under any circumstances.