‘America’s gulag’: Trump’s Guantánamo ploy tars migrants as terrorists

It has been denounced as “America’s gulag”: a secretive, abuse-ridden Caribbean prison camp for terror suspects that Donald Rumsfeld once said contained “the worst of the worst”.

“All of us have scars in our souls, deformities, from living at Guantánamo,” a former Yemeni inmate recalled of his time at the notorious military detention facility in south-east Cuba.

Even Donald Trump once balked at the “crazy” amount of money being spent confining prisoners in orange jumpsuits to Guantánamo’s concertina-wired cages.

This week the US president changed his tune, announcing plans to send tens of thousands of “criminal illegal aliens” to the US naval base that houses the Guantánamo Bay jail as part of his “mass deportation” campaign.

“It’s a tough place to get out of,” Trump noted sarcastically after revealing that he had instructed the heads of the defense and homeland security departments to prepare a “30,000-person migrant facility” on the island.

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” said Trump, who claimed the move would help eradicate “the scourge of migrant crime in our communities, once and for all”.

The announcement delighted Trumpists. “The president is 100% correct to use Guantánamo,” the Texas Republican Chip Roy told Fox News, with the channel’s reporter celebrating Trump’s “creative” and “innovative” idea.

But it also sparked anger and revulsion, in the US and around the world. Many interpreted Trump’s move as an attempt to further demonize undocumented migrants by conflating them with the terror suspects who were imprisoned at Guantánamo’s detention centre after the then secretary of defense Rumsfeld opened it for “enemy combatants” three months after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

“This is political theater and part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to paint immigrants as threats in the United States … and fan anti-immigrant sentiment,” said Eleanor Acer, the senior director for refugee protection at the advocacy group Human Rights First.

Vincent Warren, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights legal advocacy group, said: “Trump’s order [sends] a clear message … Migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supporters”.

There was even stronger condemnation in Latin America, from where many of the migrants expected to end up in Trump’s camp hail. An editorial in Mexico’s leftwing newspaper La Jornada called the move “institutionalized sadism” and a Trumpian “spectacle of violence” designed to excite hardcore supporters. “The reopening of an international symbol of human rights abuses is a signal to Trumpists who believe the workers of the global south deserve the same punishment as supposed members of al-Qaida and the Islamic State,” it said.

“What Trump is doing in sending migrants to Guantánamo – a place of torture and death – makes me think that the author of the book about Trump being the antichrist is on to something,” tweeted the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff.

Adam Isacson, a migration expert from the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank, said Trump’s headline-grabbing initiative was “absolutely part of the narrative” that a military response was needed to tackle the supposed threat from migrants, whom the recently installed US president has repeatedly cast as dangerous “animals” and “trash”.

“And the idea is to just scare the hell out of immigrant communities all around the United States too,” Isacson added. “They’re just trying to scare people and maybe scare people into just making their own arrangements and leaving the country on their own. This is all shock and awe.”

Trump’s decision to create a massive migrant facility at Guantánamo would not be the first time it has been used to house those seeking a new life in the US.

In the 1990s, during the presidencies of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans were held there in open-air camps after being picked up while making the perilous sea journey to Florida.

More recently, a far smaller number of migrants have reportedly been held there after being intercepted by the US Coast Guard. Those migrants have been held in a separate part of the base from alleged terrorists, 15 of whom are now imprisoned there, compared with hundreds after al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks. The most notorious is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Pakistani mastermind of that plot.

It remains uncertain precisely whom Trump might send to his expanded Guantánamo camp and whether it will be used to hold migrants accused or convicted of crimes or simply anyone lacking documents.

Acer said the “outrageously vague and incredibly sweeping language” in Trump’s memorandum ordering Guantánamo’s expansion meant it was unclear who would be targeted. The three-paragraph directive calls for “all appropriate actions” to be taken to expand the facility in order to “address attendant immigration enforcement needs”.

However, the activist called the president’s comment that the base was “tough” to escape “a disturbing signal that the Trump administration may be planning to hold people there indefinitely”.

During George W Bush’s “war on terror”, “the US chose to hold people on the Guantánamo base because they believed that it would be removed from legal scrutiny,” Acer recalled.

Now she suspected Trump also planned to treat it “as a sort of rights-free zone”. “The whole thing is just absurd … Guantánamo is essentially designed to prevent outside scrutiny. Human rights abuses will be hidden,” Acer warned, adding: “The Trump administration is thumbing its nose at the law and the rule of law.”