Trump’s Guantanamo -Wandering Plan Earns a Dark History

Cnn
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The US naval base in Guantanamo Bay is getting a new chapter added to its notorious story.

The facility in Cuba has long attracted the honor of human rights groups accusing Washington of using it as an outpost out of the scope of American law to protect against control of alleged abuse of the asylum process and in the war on terror.

Now the base could have another new incarnation – to play a key role in President Donald Trump’s immigration flash.

The United States has maintained a migratory retention facility that has been separated from the notorious prison with high security for foreign terror suspects, including alleged 9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The base could meet two important goals of Trump’s border enforcement program. First, it could offer severely necessary space to detain migrants in front of a potential accommodation crisis if the withholding pace rams.

And just as important, it could make Trump look tough-a important consideration in an operation choreographed to send a message to migrants to stay home and to show Trump’s voters that he honors his campaign lifters.

Trump signed a Memorandum Wednesday that directed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-person facility at Basen-self it is far from clear that it is currently suitable to house a place close to the number of prisoners who Potentially awaiting deportation.

The center, traditionally used to house Haitian and Cuban migrants, captured at sea before reaching the United States, is by its own long history of complaints about the conditions and claims that it is shorting migrants’ access to the asylum process. Nevertheless, the Biden administration was considering using the base last year to treat Haitian migrants.

The symbolism of the location is perfect resonant with the hardline tone in a wandering crash operated by Gruff White House Border Czar Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Christ’s Noem who took up a federal enforcement team on the streets of New York shortly after he was confirmed. She paid tribute to the arrest of an undocumented migrant facing criminal charges on X and said, “Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.”

It was not clear which categories of migrants would be held at the Guantanamo Bay Center, but the message opened the possibility that it could include some prisoners arrested in the interior of the United States and then transported to the Cuban military base. NOEM, for example, told “CNN News Central” that the base could be reserved to withhold what she described as “the worst of the worst.”

Such languages ​​risk raising the proper processes. And the symbolic correlation between the military retention center and the migrant camp – although separately – is likely to be further stigmatizing migrants.

“President Trump’s decision to use Guantánamo – global symbol and place of lawlessness, torture and racism – to house immigrants should horrify us all,” Vince Warren, CEO of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement. “Like many of Trump’s authoritarian attacks on human rights, this shameful precedent has in American history. Long before the second Bush administration used the plant to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of his ‘war on terror’, the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights according to to international law. ‘

Trump announced the Guantanamo initiative at a signing ceremony for the White House for the Lake Riley Act, a new law in memory of a nursing student in Georgia, killed by an undocumented Venezuelan wandering last year. The law – which adopted Congress with democratic support – requires detention of undocumented migrants charged with certain crimes, including theft or burglary.

The president leaned heavily into the theatrics in a restored migrant facility in Guantanamo and spelled out a vision of a terrifying fate for migrants sent there.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to withhold the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries holding them because we don’t want them to come back, ”Trump said. “So we send them out to Guantanamo. This will double our capacity right away, right? And hard. It’s a tough – it’s a tough place to get out of. ”

If the associations with Guantanamo invoke toughness for Republicans, they touch equally intense feelings for many liberals and Democrats.

The war on the terror facility on the base is the imprisonment that refuses to die, defying the efforts of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden to close it. Both managed to only reduce the population of prisoners who were still housing there.

The prison opened in 2002 as a team center for suspects taken by battlefields in South Asia, the Middle East and other places treated outside the justice system and often held for years without trial. The camp became a symbol of human rights violations, and the lack of giving inmates with a proper process made it a spot on the united states’ reputation worldwide.

The case of Mohammed, one of the camp’s most notorious prisoners, remains unresolved and was delayed for years. There was first concerns that evidence obtained through improved interrogation techniques, which critics called torture, may not be assumed for treatment in civilian courts. Then a furor broke beyond fear that trying him in New York, as Obama preferred, could be a terrorist risk. Obama administration eventually decided that Mohammed would go before a military court and accused Congress of passing laws of preventing him and other suspects from being brought to the American mainland. Incredibly, the case is still pulling on, more than 23 years after the attacks on New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people. The Biden administration has been able to set an agreement earlier this month to give the former Al Qaeda Kingpin the opportunity to plead guilty and avoid the risk of execution.

The Biden administration announced its final transfer of Guantanamo Bay on January 6 and sent 11 Yemenier to Oman. It said 15 detainees are back at the facility.

The separate migrant facility in Guantanamo Bay has its own routed civil rights record, and its use will relate to migrant rights groups already raising concern that Trump’s deportation outbreaks are violating access to asylum requirements for undocumented migrants.

In a report late last year International Refugee Assistance Project Cited testimonies from refugees that the conditions of the plant were inhuman and illegal. The report called on the government to close the center and give asylum seekers the same legal rights as migrants detained in the inner United States. It said the conditions were characterized by unexplained water, exposure to open wastewater and poor medical treatment and schooling for children.

But two of Trump’s top immigration advisers told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that immigration and customs enforcement officials would be responsible for the Guantanamo Bay enlargement.

“Ice has the highest retention standards in the industry,” Homan said. “You can’t find another state, federal or local facility that has higher retention standards than ice cream.”

However, an American official told CNN that the facilities may have had 30,000 beds in the 1990s, but was nowhere near such capacity now and that many more staff would be needed to accommodate this number of migrants.

This points to another critical question for the Trump immigration celebration: the need for urgent and significant congressional actions to finance its expansion.

The US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay is on the southeastern coast of Cuba and is permanently rented from the communist government in one of the last and most extraordinary teams from the Cold War.

It has long been a thorn in the side of the Havana government – and since the opening of the military prison has also been a powerful element of Cuba’s propaganda offensive against the United States, which is likely to rise as the new White House adopts A far more hostile tone than the Biden administration.

It didn’t take long for the US base’s newest possible incarnation to draw honor from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who wrote on X: “In a brutality act, the new US government announces jailed at Guantanamo Naval Base, located in illegally occupied territory Cuba , of thousands of migrants, as it is by force, and will place them next to the well -known prisons of torture and illegal detention. ”