McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — Migrant advocates on Thursday were speaking out against plans by President Donald Trump to revamp Guantánamo Bay to detain and hold thousands of undocumented immigrants sent from the United States.
“We denounce Trump’s plans to more than double the capacity of the immigration detention system in the U.S. and detain some 30,000 immigrants at Guantánamo Bay, a site of horrific abuse and torture that should have been shut down a long time ago,” Stacy Suh, program director for the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, said on a call with reporters Thursday.
“There are already nearly 40,000 people locked up in immigration detention. With these recent announcements, the Trump administration is proposing to hold an additional 84,000 people at any given time, which would bring the number of people detained for immigration to over 120,000 people — roughly the number of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in detention camps in the U.S. during World War II,” Suh said.
Trump on Wednesday announced an executive order instructing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing a facility to house up to 30,000 migrants at the U.S. Guantánamo Bay military base in Cuba.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who served as an officer at Guantánamo Bay while on active-duty National Guard deployment from 2004 to 2005, said it’s the “perfect place” to safely detain migrants, according to the Department of Defense.
“This is not the camps,” Hegseth said in a DOD article Wednesday. “This is a temporary transit which is already the mission of Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, where we can plus-up thousands — and tens of thousands, if necessary — to humanely move illegals out of our country where they do not belong [and] back to the countries where they came from in proper process.”
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights are decrying the plans, of which they note there is currently not a lot of information. But they say if migrants are sent to the U.S. military base on Cuba that they will file legal challenges.
“It’s clear that the Trump administration’s announced plans for expanding immigration detention — both at private prisons and jails, on the Buckley Military Base (in Aurora, Colorado) and then and at Guantánamo would be a dangerous mistake,” Eunice Cho, a senior attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project said. “The use of military facilities and detention at Guantánamo’s migrant detention center, which of course, is distinct from its military prison, raise serious legal concerns.”
Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the there are many questions about the feasibility of yesterday’s order
“The wisdom of it, its costs, and many other practical issues, but in its message, yesterday’s order was intentional and it was painful. It was meant to be. The U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has a decades-long history of indefinite detention that we should not be proud of,” she said.
Kebriaei said she had a high-school age Muslim client who was held there for an extended period and put in solitary confinement after 9/11. “He attempted to hurt himself on multiple occasions,” she said.
Cho says those held in ICE detention must be treated with certain humane guidelines. She says any deviation will be challenged in court.
“We would assume that people who are in immigration detention custody, no matter their location, are in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and so there are clear guidelines and standards for which people in immigration detention must be treated,” Cho said. “So those standards would apply to people in detention custody no matter their location.”
However, she fears that abuses might not be properly documented if lawyers, media and public officials do not have access to the facilities. She says historically, Guantánamo has been one of those facilities that most people cannot access.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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