This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
It's rare for me to say that I could see it coming. Still, on Donald Trump's decision to use the U.S. military base at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, in his mad campaign to take the very words "immigrant" and "immigration" out of the American lexicon, I must admit that I did exactly that. When TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, who has followed Guanta'namo's now-infamous offshore prison of injustice since the early years of the Global War on Terror, sent in her latest update on the subject (just as the second Trump presidency was about to begin), I had a sudden thought. I must have had a vague memory that, once upon a time, long, long ago that military base had indeed been used to hold Haitians trying to emigrate to the United States. And somehow it instantly occurred to me that this president might indeed use it again in just that way (or in a far worse fashion).
I began looking into the possibility and noted that, as far back as 2019, he had reportedly suggested that migrants to this country might be designated "enemy combatants," which, I wrote, "would indeed prepare the way for sending them to Guanta'namo." Then I added:
"And here's a (grim) thought to put with that: Donald Trump has sworn to deport nothing less than 'millions' of immigrants now in the United States and has already threatened to visit economic devastation on countries that might refuse to take them back. But count on one thing: all of this won't be faintly as easy as he imagines and it won't surprise me at all if, at some point in his own war not on but of terror, he starts sending some immigrants to" yes, Guanta'namo!"
I posted that piece about a week later on January 28th at TomDispatch and, lo and behold (!), within a day or so it was being reported that President Trump was indeed preparing to use that base for up to 30,000 immigrants. And indeed (again!), he's already sent the first few hundred (Venezuelan) deportees there, before dispatching many of them back to their country on (very expensive) military flights. Meanwhile, ominously enough, Secretary of Offensiveness (oh, sorry, Defense) Pete Hegseth only recently visited the facility (where he was actually stationed as an Army lieutenant in 2004-2005) with Fox News's Laura Ingraham. Imagine that!
And now, let TomDispatch regular Michael Gould-Wartofsky take you deep into what he terms "an all-American nightmare" at Guanta'namo and, all too sadly, elsewhere across this country. Tom
An All-American Nightmare
How to Build a Deportation Machine in the Age of Trump
"Flights to Guanta'namo Bay have begun. The worst of the worst have no place in our homeland."
With those words the U.S. government announced the fate awaiting "criminal aliens" in its custody.
On a military base in El Paso, Texas, masked men in combat fatigues paraded a group of young Venezuelan immigrants, their hands cuffed and their ankles shackled, in front of the cameras, before loading them onto a waiting Air Force C-17, which was to deliver its human cargo to Naval Station Guanta'namo Bay overnight.
Once there, they were to be incarcerated in the infamous Camp 6, held incommunicado in the same cells where al-Qaeda suspects were once held in indefinite detention, and guarded by the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. Meanwhile, a tent city, which could ultimately house as many as 30,000 detainees, rises around the prison.
Though most of those immigrants have since been returned to Venezuela, the Pentagon has pledged to continue using the base for the "temporary detention of illegal aliens who are pending return."
Back on the mainland, the Department of Defense (DoD) is deploying thousands of troops to "seal the borders"; the Department of Justice (DoJ) is deputizing its agents to round up undocumented immigrants; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is mobilizing to meet its daily quota of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests, armed with target lists, surveillance technology, and "less-lethal" weapons; and immigration detention facilities are to be built on military bases across the country.
And that's not all either. Entire families are set to be detained, and the grim family-separation policy of the first Trump administration revived. Humanitarian parole is to be revoked, refugees rejected, and asylum seekers returned. And cities, counties, and states that dare to defy the deportation regime are to be punished.
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