Over the last two weeks, ICE conducted several raids across the country, and have reportedly detained 8,000 immigrants. While NBC News reports that some of those immigrants have since been released, others remain in ICE detention facilities, which are quickly reaching capacity. The Trump administration has long floated the idea of establishing an expanded facility to hold detained immigrants at Guantanamo Bay. More and more, that campaign promise is looking like reality: this morning flights began transporting some detained migrants to Guantanamo Bay, where the Trump administration has ordered construction of camp-like facilities they expect will eventually hold up to 30,000 detainees.
Established in 2002, Guantanamo Bay detention camp was originally established in Cuba by President George W. Bush following the September 11th attacks as facility to house suspected terrorists. Since then, it has held nearly 800 people, including 9 prisoners who died while in custody. Guantanamo Bay has long been criticized for poor and inhumane conditions, as well as the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against detainees. Both President Biden and President Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay, although neither administration successfully did so before either president left office.
Last week, President Trump issued a presidential memo expanding the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center, a small facility at Guantanamo built in the 1990’s with a capacity of ~130 detainees and that has historically been used to house Haitian and Cuban migrants who were rescued by the Coast Guard at sea. Pentagon officials are reportedly “shocked” by the Trump administration’s orders to expand the facility to house up to 30,000 civilian migrants that will be flown from the US mainland for detention at the military facility in Guantanamo Bay. Last week, Trump described the migrants who will be housed at Guantanamo as “the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people”. However, Department Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly repeatedly refused to rule out the possibility that detainees might also include women and children.
Military.com, a 3rd party site that provides news related to the US military, reports that military personnel have been sent to Guantanamo Bay over the weekend to support the expansion efforts. Several infantrymen reportedly spent the weekend installing tents and cots, as well as other “holding area logistics” to house migrant detainees.
Students of American history might be troubled by these details, as they may be a stark reminder of 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which led to the forcible internment of over 100,000 Japanese and Japanese American civilians at hastily-built relocation centers and concentration camps, where they lived and worked under constant military oversight. While Japanese nationals and Japanese American citizens were initially detained in converted fairgrounds and horse stables, they were soon transferred to military-run camps located in desolate areas of the country and surrounded by barbed wire fencing. There, entire families were housed in single-room “tar paper-covered barracks… without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind”, according to a report by the 1943 War Relocation Authority.
I’ve had several opportunities to visit reconstructed Japanese American internment camp facilities, both at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC and at the Japanese American National Museum in LA. There are really no words to describe the heartbreaking conditions families were forced to endure.
In his TED Talk, actor and activist George Takei describes growing up at Tule Lake internment camp, which had among the harshest conditions of any camp of its time.
History simply cannot be allowed to repeat itself.
