On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration had sent 10 immigrants to Guántanamo Bay, Cuba, for detention — an unprecedented move. And just the beginning.
On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump signed a 128-word memo calling for a 30,000-bed immigrant detention facility to be built at Guantánamo Bay for “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” The memo set in motion a project that, if fully realized, will be a financial disaster while posing a grave threat to immigrants and citizens alike, potentially for decades to come.
The memo set in motion a project that, if fully realized, will be a financial disaster while posing a grave threat to immigrants and citizens alike.
Transporting tens of thousands of people from the U.S. mainland and detaining them at Guantánamo makes no sense financially. The U.S. government will need to construct a massive site for detention — along with medical facilities, food and sanitation services, staffing and security on a remote island with limited, aging infrastructure — with a likely, albeit as yet unknown, cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Defense officials were reportedly shocked by Trump’s order. The island’s existing Migrant Operations Center was designed for people picked up in boats by the Coast Guard — not tens of thousands of longtime U.S. residents, including children. NBC News is reporting that already tent camps are being built to house some of these new detainees, while there are also plans to detain immigrants at the high-security prison built after 9/11.
This expensive project will continue to drain American coffers for years, even decades, especially if Guantánamo becomes a detention site for people who have been ordered deported but whose home countries do not accept deportations.
While the operational feasibility of Trump’s plan is dubious, history suggests that such a move could enable the government to commit human rights abuses and inflict serious neglect on people detained there, far from lawyers, the media and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, that could also be the point.
Our government held hundreds of men without charge at Guantánamo after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and made it a notorious site of torture and cruelty, falsely claiming that international and U.S. law did not apply to people with terrorism allegations. Perhaps less well-known is that Guantánamo also has a sordid history of quasi-hidden migrant detention. In the 1990s, the Coast Guard intercepted at sea tens of thousands of people from Haiti and Cuba fleeing violence and human rights violations.
More than 45,000 people were taken to Guantánamo and held in tent camps plagued by inhumane conditions. Thousands of Haitian nationals were returned to Haiti despite having credible fears of persecution, forcing parents to leave their children behind at Guantánamo.
By 1995 more than 200 unaccompanied kids from Haiti were still languishing on the island despite having relatives and other sponsors in the United States ready to welcome them. At the time, a New York Times columnist wrote that the tents that housed them leaked when it rained, medical attention was inadequate, and children were isolated and fearful — some even contemplated suicide. Fast-forward 30 years, and we are now at risk of entering a new chapter of this shameful history. By design, there is little public information about how the existing migrant facility operates, prompting a federal lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union and the International Refugee Assistance Project in September. Any detention standards, such as they exist, are not public. We do not know what procedures are being used to keep people safe and address their medical conditions or to provide care and educational services to children or religious accommodation or even access to lawyers. Moreover, the U.S. government denies that the people it intercepts and holds at the facility are actually “detained.” Fast-forward 30 years, and we are now at risk of entering a new chapter of this shameful history. The Trump administration has already shown an utter disregard for the rights and dignity of people who are immigrants. Previous reports suggest that migrants who have been detained at Guantánamo have been denied their basic rights to medical care, sanitation and hygiene, as well as access to counsel. Though little is known about how the Trump administration might execute on this unprecedented plan at the scale it proposes, officials cannot simply wave away the rights of immigrants they wish to detain at Guantánamo or the legal barriers to operating what would become essentially the largest detention camp known to the United States. For example, immigrants who are detained have a right to access counsel, but there is no indication that the government has considered how to ensure it in this high-security, remote setting. And in the past, numerous lawsuits were filed over the detention and treatment of Haitian refugees held there. Congress should use upcoming spending and defense bills to prohibit the Trump administration from using taxpayer dollars to build and operate this massive and ill-advised detention site. In doing so, it would deny Trump the opportunity to turn Guantánamo into an island of despair for thousands of our immigrant neighbors and loved ones.
Naureen Shah
Naureen Shah is the deputy director of government affairs, Equality Division, for the ACLU. 
