Trump’s Cruel, Grubby and Lawless Guantánamo Fantasy

A photo released by the Department of Homeland Security on February 4, as the first migrants were sent to Guantánamo.

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By Andy Worthington, February 25, 2025

Over the last three weeks, the latest consequences of the United States’ decades-long obsession with using its naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as its preferred location for violating international law has been all too apparent, as Donald Trump has chosen to use it as the focal point of his "war on migrants."

Bill Clinton was the first president to use Guantánamo for the lawless imprisonment and dehumanization of various groups of "unpeople," when he established a Migrant Operations Center there in the 1990s, holding Haitians and Cubans intercepted at sea, to prevent them from landing on U.S. soil and claiming asylum. At its height, this operation involved the detention of tens of thousands of migrants, but for the last 30 years, until Trump’s return, it had only ever held a few dozen people at the most at any given time.

Meanwhile, the next group of "unpeople" to be held at Guantánamo — beginning with George W. Bush, and continuing throughout the presidencies of Barack Obama, Trump in his first term, and Joe Biden — were the "enemy combatants" of the "war on terror," spectacularly dehumanized Muslim men and boys, largely rounded up indiscriminately and imprisoned without any fundamental rights whatsoever as human beings.

Of the 779 prisoners held by the U.S. military at Guantánamo over the last 23 years, just 15 remain, although all of them are, to varying degrees, still caught in a rights-shredding regime of such fundamental lawlessness that, just two years ago, a U.N. Special Rapporteur described how conditions at the prison amount to "ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment," which, in certain cases, "may also meet the legal threshold for torture."

As a cynical exercise in dehumanizing 13.3 million people — the estimated number of undocumented migrants in the U.S. — Trump’s "war on migrants" was launched on his first day in office, via an avalanche of executive orders and pompous and hysterical "proclamations" in which he sought to suggest that the U.S. was engaged in a "war" against an "invasion" of "criminal aliens" on its southern border, and that the country itself was overrun with undocumented migrants who "present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans."

On January 29, Trump suddenly brought Guantánamo into the picture, announcing that he had ordered the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to expand the existing Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo to hold up to 30,000 "high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States."

"The worst of the worst"

The week after, the first flights of migrants arrived from Texas. They were all Venezuelans, the latest "unpeople" to be given the offshore lawless treatment, and they were all dutifully described by government spokespeople as "the worst of the worst," deliberately echoing the language used when alleged Al-Qaeda "terrorists" first arrived at the notorious "war on terror" prison in January 2002, even though, as with the "war on terror," the stories that emerged of these men — when they were identified via photos released by the DHS, or through investigations by journalists — revealed that none of them seemed to be "the worst of the worst" at all.

Instead of being the evil gang members the administration sought to portray them as, many had no criminal record whatsoever, and the criminal activities of the rest consisted of little more than having tried to get into the U.S. in search of work in a "hostile environment" determined to criminalize them for seeking a better life.

Reinforcing the invented analogies between the "war on terror" and the "war on migrants," Trump then unexpectedly decided to hold the majority of these men not in the Migrant Operations Center, but in Camp 6, one of the cellblocks of the "war on terror" prison, which, since 2006, has been used for the general population of Guantánamo, "low-level detainees" held without charge or trial.

To be able to move migrants into Camp 6, Trump was able to take advantage of the fact that, before he left office, President Biden, through a number of long-overdue releases, reduced its population from 16 "low-value detainees" to just three — all held for over two decades without charge or trial, and all still held despite having long been approved for release.

These men were obligingly shunted into a neighboring facility, Camp 5, where the other 12 men are held — all "high-value detainees," and including the men charged but still not tried in connection with the 9/11 attacks. This involved overriding protocols in place since the "high-value detainees" first arrived at Guantánamo from CIA "black site" torture prisons in September 2006, which were designed to prevent them, for national security reasons, from ever having any association whatsoever with the prison’s general population.

Even more significantly, moving migrants into the "war on terror" prison was blatantly illegal, because the law establishing the U.S. government’s right to hold prisoners there — the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed the week after the 9/11 attacks — only justifies the military imprisonment of foreigners at Guantánamo who are regarded as having some involvement with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces connected to the 9/11 attacks or other acts of international terrorism.

The law, however, apparently means nothing to Trump, or to the inadequates that he has put in charge of the DoD and the DHS; hence, the escalating number of flights that, as of last Thursday, had delivered 178 Venezuelan migrants to Guantánamo — 127 held in Camp 6, and just 51 in the Migrant Operations Center.

Mounting criticism

Facing mounting criticism, not least via a lawsuit submitted by rights groups including the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, who sought access to the migrants, and pointed out that, because they were detained on the U.S. mainland, they had a constitutional right to legal representation, Trump seemed to accept defeat, putting all but one of these men on a flight back to Venezuela, via Honduras, and sending the other man back to detention on the U.S. mainland.

Two days later, however, another flight arrived from Texas, containing another 17 men who, again, have been imprisoned in Camp 6, on the basis that, as a Trump administration official told the New York Times, "they were in the category of 'high-threat illegal aliens.'" The Times later reported that the 17 men, "aged 23 to 62," were "seven men from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador," according to a document seen by Carol Rosenberg.

How long this dark farce will play out is still unknown. Yesterday, five Democratic Senators sent a letter to Trump to complain about his "illegal and unjustified transfers of noncitizens from the United States to the detention center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay," which they called "unprecedented, unlawful, and harmful to American national security, values, and interests."

The Senators (Dick Durbin, Alex Padilla, Patty Murray, Peter Welch and Chris Murphy) also sought explanations about Trump’s claimed legal authority for his transfers of migrants to Guantánamo, and the source of funding for the operations, and requested a reply by March 10.

Will Trump even deign to reply? No one knows. He and his administration appear to be uniquely contemptuous of any kind of oversight whatsoever — very specifically because those driving the government’s policies (including Trump himself and his Project 2025 backers) seem to believe that there should be no constraints whatsoever on the president’s executive power.

For the sake of the Constitution — and the centrality of the separation of powers, which prevents executive overreach — it is to be hoped that at least some Republicans in Congress, as well as the judiciary, will recognize that anything that looks like a policy in which Congress is either sidelined or ignored completely, and/or which shows contempt for existing laws, is very probably part of a deliberate attempt to further Trump’s Project 2025 agenda, and will respond appropriately, in defense of the Constitution.

The current Guantánamo project — in which hapless migrants dressed up as "the worst of the worst" are imprisoned in a cellblock used for 18 years to hold the last victims of that particularly malignant smear — is a clear case in point.