Donald Trump, newly elected President of the United States, spoke on January 29 to announce that he is preparing to send 30,000 undocumented migrants to the Guantánamo Bay base in southern Cuba.
The Republican head of state expressed his desire to detain migrants in an irregular situation against their will to keep them under surveillance, justifying himself by stating that "some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries that detain them; we don’t want them coming back."
This statement is part of his new, highly repressive anti-immigration policy, particularly targeting Latin American nationals. "All illegal entries will be immediately stopped, and we will begin deporting millions and millions of criminal foreigners back to where they came from," the Republican president declared forcefully. He seeks to repel, in his words, the disastrous invasion of his country. This is also why he has signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency at the border with Mexico and plans to attack both asylum rights and birthright citizenship.
Last week, Colombians were deported on military planes to their country of origin. In recent days, the asylum request platform set up by the Biden administration has stopped functioning, leaving thousands of undocumented individuals in despair and fear.
A Base Already Used for Years
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel reacted immediately to the announcement, denouncing it as a “brutal act” and firmly opposing the decision. The detainees will, in theory, be placed in an existing migrant detention center that has not yet reached full capacity, as Trump intends.
Indeed, in September, The New York Times published documents confirming the presence of migrants intercepted at sea within the center adjacent to the prison. This revelation outraged human rights organizations, which denounced the mistreatment there, citing testimonies. Detainees were reportedly monitored when calling their lawyers, forced to wear blackout goggles during transfers, and cohabited daily with rats due to poor hygiene conditions.
Guantánamo: America’s Shameful Secret
As a reminder, the Guantánamo prison was opened in 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks, which shocked the United States and left the country seeking revenge. Specially designed to detain individuals suspected of links to terrorist activities, the facility saw a peak in incarcerations in its early years before numbers gradually declined to around fifteen detainees today—people still waiting in limbo, hidden from the rest of the world.
The site is notorious as a center of torture and severe human rights violations and has repeatedly been the subject of major accusations. According to Jeanne Sulzer, head of the International Justice Commission at Amnesty International France, it is a lawless zone: "It is an arbitrary detention center where detainees still do not know the charges against them after ten to twelve years of imprisonment, preceded in most cases by secret detentions in CIA-run facilities," she explains.
In total, around 800 detainees have passed through Guantánamo prison, including 15 minors. Nine people have died there. Many instances of torture have been recorded, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and sexual violence. The CIA later erased numerous pieces of evidence, including recordings and videos of these practices.
Outside Any International Framework
In an executive order, George W. Bush specified that Article 3 of the Geneva Convention—concerning the detention conditions of prisoners—did not apply to members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. He further declared that they would not be treated as prisoners of war but rather as "unlawful combatants."
Thus escaping international law, the U.S. administration justified itself by arguing the necessity of saving thousands of lives and preventing further attacks on American soil. To this day, the former torturers at Guantánamo have never been brought to justice, even in cases where detainees were proven innocent—such as Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was wrongfully accused and whose story was adapted into a film in 2021.
Beyond reviving Guantánamo Bay, Donald Trump has also opposed its closure—a goal previously pursued by former Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
There is little hope, therefore, that former and current prisoners will ever obtain justice for the violence and trauma they have endured, hidden in the shadows of America’s so-called shining democracy.
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