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'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
"There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
Feb 09, 2025
Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are an ominous sign of what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faces immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress.
After the first pictures emerged Saturday of still unidentified persons transferred to the island from the U.S. mainland by immigration officials, progressive journalist Nathan Robinson was among those raising the alarm, accusing Trump of "building a concentration camp and deliberately putting it where it is hardest to monitor or enforce the law."
The New York Times, alongside pictures of newly-erected tents taken by photojournalist Doug Mills, reported Saturday that the administration had already "moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants." Mills was traveling Friday with Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, as she made her first visit to the offshore site.
According to the outlet:
Ms. Noem visited the nascent tent camp, where the administration has suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of migrants who pose lesser threats could be housed. She watched Marines rehearse how to move migrants to the future tent city, and she was shown a tent with cots and a display of basic items to be provided each new arrival — T-shirt, shorts, underwear and a towel — and then got an aerial view of the mission from a Chinook helicopter.
"The Trump administration," the Times reported, "has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost."
According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
On Friday, a coalition of more than a dozen rights groups—including the ACLU, National Immigration Law Center, and others—sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), and the U.S. State Department demanding Trump officials provide immediate access to those who have been transferred out of the country to the offshore facility.
In addition, the groups demanded to know:
- The immigration status of the ten noncitizens detained there
- Who does the government intend to transfer to and detain at Guantánamo, including what criteria, legal or otherwise, the administration is or will be using to decide who to transfer and detain at Guantánamo
- Which government agency has custody of the transferred noncitizens at Guantánamo
- What authority is the government invoking to transfer noncitizens from the United States to Guantánamo and what authority is the government invoking to hold them at Guantánamo
- The length of time that the government will be holding these noncitizens at Guantánamo and plans for them after
"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that the expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."
While previous administrations have exploited the land seized by the U.S. in Cuba to detain and process asylum seekers and migrants in the past, those were individuals interdicted at sea or before having ever set foot on American soil. The facilities have not been used to hold noncitizens deported from the U.S. mainland.
Last week, Slate's Mary Harris interviewed journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," who acknowledged that while many immediately think of Nazi Germany's death camps under Adolf Hitler when they hear the term "concentration camp," it is not wrong to describe the U.S. prison facilities at Guantánamo that way and for important reasons.
In her questioning, Harris posed to Pitzer how the existence of Guantánamo "doesn’t mean it’s going to become Auschwitz" necessarily, but that it does make "the road to Auschwitz more possible."
And Pitzer responded:
That's exactly right. And so what it means is even to do the most horrible things that humans have done takes time. It takes sort of a space and imagination and tools and resources. And the more of those kinds of tools and resources we line up in one place, the more room there is for the obscene or the perverted imagination to work. And even Auschwitz—keep in mind that it was 1933 when Hitler came to power and they started with concentration camps right out of the gate. So within the first weeks, Dakau is opened, though not quite in its final form, but it is already a camp and it takes almost a decade to get to even this final solution. And so, yes, absolutely, the Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand.
"And right now," Pitzer said of Gitmo's legacy and the new purpose that Trump is giving it, "we have a place where there has been torture, we have a place where there has been riots, we have a place where there have been people held without trial for more than 20 years. And those are some of the most dangerous seeds that humanity can plant."
"The Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand."
In a weekend column, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch warned that even as much of the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants and refugees thus far should be seen as a "propaganda" exercise designed to titillate his base and antagonize his liberal opponents, the danger present by the Gitmo policy and others are very real.
"The bigger worry, " writes Bunch, "is that just because the cruelty of mass deportation is largely performative doesn’t mean these performances won’t scale up dramatically in the months ahead. Trump reportedly is already badgering his border czar, Tom Homan, and ICE to meet ambitious arrest targets, which would probably require crueler and more legally dubious measures that would fill those empty tents at Gitmo. If the president needs his phony war against a nonexistent border invasion to distract the American heartland from the coming evisceration of government services, the cruelty will become a bigger and bigger point."
Referencing the great Russian playwright's famous quote about the introduction of a gun onstage, Bunch opined that Trump's performative brand of governance does not mean the threat isn't real.
"You don't need Anton Chekhov," noted Bunch, "to understand that you don't build empty tents at Gitmo in Act One of your presidency unless you plan to fill them in Act Three."
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ACLU Plans Lawsuit Over Biden's Trumpian Attack on Asylum Rights
"It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now."
Jun 04, 2024
The ACLU on Tuesday vowed to launch a legal challenge to U.S. President Joe Biden's executive order barring migrants who cross the southern border without authorization from receiving asylum.
Biden's executive action invokes Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act—previously used by the administration of former Republican President Donald Trump to deny migrants asylum—"when the southern border is overwhelmed."
Under the policy, asylum requests will be shut down when the average number of daily migrant encounters between ports of entry hits 2,500. Border entry points would reopen to asylum-seekers when that number dips below 1,500.
The president said he was acting, in part, because "Republicans in Congress chose to put partisan politics ahead of our national security, twice voting against the toughest and fairest set of reforms in decades."
On Tuesday, the ACLU said Biden's policy will "rush vulnerable people through already fast-tracked deportation proceedings, sending people in need of protection to their deaths."
"We intend to challenge this order in court," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a statement. "It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now."
In July 2020 a federal judge in Washington, D.C. struck down the Trump administration's ban on most Central Americans and migrants from other countries.
ACLU chief political and advocacy officer Deirdre Schifeling said that "we need solutions to address the challenges at the border, but the administration's planned executive actions will put thousands of lives at risk."
"They will not meet the needs at the border, nor will they fix our broken immigration system," Schifeling added. "We urge the administration to uphold its campaign promise to restore asylum and mobilize the necessary resources to address the challenges at the border. It's not just the morally sound thing to do—it's good politics."
The ACLU pointed to polling showing that "voters nationwide and in battleground states largely reject enforcement-only policies that put vulnerable people in danger."
The group is advocating "balanced and humane solutions" including "improving processing at ports of entry and addressing the immigration case backlog by investing in immigration court judges and legal representation."
This isn't the first time that Biden's immigration policies have been likened to those of Trump, who is the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee despite having recently been convicted on 34 felony counts and facing 54 other federal and state charges across three cases.
One year ago, critics accused Biden of "finishing Trump's job" by implementing a crackdown on asylum-seekers upon the expiration of Title 42—a provision first invoked during the previous administration at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and continued by Biden to expel more than 1 million migrants under the pretext of public health.
The international medical charity Doctors Without Borders—which has deployed aid teams along migration routes—warned Tuesday that Biden's new order will put vulnerable people who endure treacherous, sometimes deadly, risks trying to reach the United States "at even greater risk."
"In signing this executive order, President Biden has betrayed his promise to build a fair, safe, and humane immigration system," Doctors Without Borders USA CEO Avril Benoît said in a statement. "This order is not only counter to U.S. law and international law, it puts people's lives and health at risk."
"Today's decision will trap vulnerable people, including young families, in insecure cities in Mexico and put them in grave danger," Benoît added. "The Biden administration continues to prioritize optics and political expediency at the expense of thousands of people who are attempting to exercise their legal right to seek asylum."
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center and the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund, said Tuesday that "President Biden's craven embrace of failed Republican policies is a mistake that will only lead to more harm and dysfunction at the U.S.-Mexico border."
"There is a better way," she stressed. "Rather than playing politics with people's lives, the president should pursue practical solutions that increase our capacity to welcome immigrants humanely. These solutions include timely and fair processing of asylum applications, expanding legal pathways, and supporting cities that are welcoming our new neighbors."
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'A Death Sentence for Many': Rights Groups Implore Congress to Reject Border Deal
"If this bill passes, it will mark a complete abdication of the United States' legal and moral commitments to refugees," said one advocacy organization.
Feb 05, 2024
Immigrant rights groups are urging Congress to reject bipartisan Senate legislation released Sunday that would severely weaken asylum protections, expand migrant detention capacity, and give the president the authority to effectively shut down U.S.-Mexico border crossings under certain conditions—power that President Joe Biden vowed to use immediately if the bill reaches his desk.
Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director, said lawmakers must ensure it never does, warning that the bill's enactment "would eviscerate longstanding asylum protections" and institute "variations of Stephen Miller's playbook"—a reference to the xenophobic White House adviser to former president Donald Trump.
"Deportation without due process was the Trump administration's disastrous experiment which should never be repeated, let alone used as a model for permanent border policy," said Romero. "This deal would force the government to summarily expel people from the border without due process, restricting legal pathways for the people who need them most."
"Eliminating longstanding, core due process protections like court review of asylum cases and doubling down on harmful deterrence and detention policies are not going to get cities and states the support they need, nor are they a substitute for policies that would improve border management and address the immigration case backlog," he added. "This deal also fails to deliver on years of promises to enact reforms providing pathways to citizenship for Dreamers and other longtime residents."
As The Washington Postnoted, the past several months of border-related talks "have been unusual, given that past efforts at bipartisan immigration reform included discussions of providing pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already living in the country demanded by Democrats, in addition to tightening border restrictions."
A pathway to citizenship was never on the table during negotiations over the new package. Instead, as The Intercept's Ryan Grim pointed out, Senate Democrats granted some of the GOP's anti-immigrant demands in exchange for military aid for Ukraine.
The 370-page bill includes more than $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine and around $14 billion for Israel.
Immigration policy analyst Adam Isacson observed in a brief analysis of the legislation that it includes "a lot of the controversial limits on access to asylum that had already been reported in media."
The bill, he observed, would require asylum seekers placed in the "expedited removal" process to "meet a much higher standard of 'credible fear' in screening interviews with asylum officers," raising the possibility that many people would be sent back into life-threatening circumstances.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the bill's lead GOP negotiator, called the measure's asylum changes "dramatic."
The new bill would also "allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to impose a Title 42-like expulsion authority, 'summarily removing' asylum seekers from the United States (except for hard-to-prove Convention Against Torture appeals), when unauthorized migrant encounters reach a daily threshold," Isacson added.
In addition to the new discretionary authority, the bill would require DHS to mostly shut down the asylum process if an average of 5,000 people or more reach the southern border per day over a seven-day period.
"While Donald Trump abhorrently says, 'Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,' congressional Republicans continue to openly admit they'd prefer the politics of a broken immigration system to a functional, just process."
Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement that the legislation "is not worth the incredible price it would exact—more families separated, more children detained, and more people sent back to face persecution, torture, and even death."
"Instead of enacting draconian policies that create more chaos," Matos continued, "we urge the White House and Senate Democrats to change course, reject this framework, and recommit to building an orderly, humane, and functioning immigration system."
The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS) similarly implored members of Congress to oppose the agreement, calling it "a shameful attempt at political posturing that treats refugees' lives as expendable."
"If this bill passes, it will mark a complete abdication of the United States' legal and moral commitments to refugees and a stunning betrayal of President Biden's promise to restore our 'historic role as a safe haven' for those escaping persecution," said CGRS legal director Blaine Bookey. "It will amount to a death sentence for many people seeking refuge in the United States. We implore the Biden administration to reverse course, and we urge lawmakers to oppose this deal."
The legislation also faced immediate backlash from progressive lawmakers.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the roughly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the bill "includes poison pill provisions such as new Title 42-like expulsion authority that will close the border and turn away asylum seekers without due process, a boon to cartels who prey on migrants."
"While Donald Trump abhorrently says, 'Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,' congressional Republicans continue to openly admit they'd prefer the politics of a broken immigration system to a functional, just process," Jayapal continued. "Democrats have given in to these extremist views over and over again for 30 years. By refusing to make the structural changes in the Senate needed to pass true reforms, allowing MAGA Republicans to lie to the American public, and declining to stand up and defend immigrant communities, it appears that President Biden and Senate Democrats have fallen into the same trap again."
While the White House and top Republican and Democratic senators have lined up behind the bill, its prospects remain highly uncertain in both the upper chamber and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. In a social media post late Sunday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) said the bill is "dead on arrival" if it reaches the lower chamber.
Even if the bill ultimately doesn't become law, observers warned that the Senate deal could do lasting damage to efforts to create a humane immigration system.
"I think the House Republicans mean what they say on not passing this border bill, but this is the end of comprehensive immigration reform because Democrats just showed that they don't need a path to citizenship to make a deal," wroteThe American Prospect's David Dayen.
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