By Claudia Fonseca Sosa on February 12, 2025
Wearing gray uniforms, with their hands handcuffed and escorted by security agents. This is how the first undocumented immigrants deported by Donald Trump’s government arrived at the Guantanamo Naval Base last Tuesday. The White House wants to house some 30,000 immigrants there. “We will no longer allow the United States to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations around the world,” they said.
“In an act of brutality”, as President Miguel Díaz-Canel has defined it, Trump intends to place these people in the base alongside the well-known torture prisons and illegal detention centers that the United States maintains in the enclave, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst illegal foreign criminals who threaten the American people,” said Trump, insisting that these are ‘the worst of the worst’.
“Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them to come back, so we are going to send them to Guantánamo,” Trump added, also warning that this is a ‘hard place to get out of’.
US media report that some 300 members of the military have already arrived in Guantanamo to provide security and to start setting up a new tent city for the migrants. US forces have erected 50 green army tents inside a barbed-wire fenced compound, next to a barracks-style building called the Migrant Operations Center.
Migrant advocates argue that sending them to Guantanamo is unacceptable. “The United States has a deplorable history of illegally detaining different groups of people in Guantanamo to avoid public scrutiny and attention, and this latest episode is no exception,” Hannah Flamm, senior policy director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, said in a statement.
“The Trump administration is putting on a political show to threaten immigrants with detention in one of the most infamous facilities in the world, with serious consequences for people’s fundamental rights and for the American rule of law,” she said.
Once again, the White House tenant is violating international conventions, since according to the United Nations, the detention of migrants should only be applied in exceptional cases and under strict international human rights standards.
On the subject, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, through his spokesman Jeremy Laurence, has emphasized the importance of guaranteeing dignified and respectful treatment for those in an irregular migratory situation. “The detention of migrants should only be used as a last resort and in exceptional circumstances,” Laurence said. He also recalled that all people, regardless of their immigration status, should be treated in accordance with international standards.
As the statement from the Cuban Foreign Ministry categorically rejecting Trump’s decision rightly points out, many of the people he is expelling or intends to expel are victims of Washington’s own predatory policies. They are the ones who meet the labor needs that agriculture, construction, industry, services and various sectors of the US economy have historically had.
Others, says the State Department, entered the United States thanks to border facilities, as a result of selective, politically motivated regulations, which welcome them as refugees and, also, of the socioeconomic damage caused by unilateral coercive measures.
Trumpian xenophobia
In his ten years in politics, Trump has repeatedly described undocumented migrants from Latin America as invaders, criminals, murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, terrorists. In his 2024 White House campaign he repeated that “isolated and tragic cases show that migrants are killing Americans en masse”, and in an election debate he said that “Haitian immigrants kill American pets and eat them”.
In his speeches he has tried to stigmatize migrants as criminals with a hint of savagery and barbarism. “They have bad genes,” he said on one occasion, adding that with the genetically inherited evil and that which they learn in their countries “they bring to the United States crime, drugs and pathogens.”
In his words and actions he reveals, time and time again, the arbitrary, illegal and profoundly xenophobic vocation of the new US administration. How far is he willing to go? What will be the parameter for measuring “dangerousness” according to Trump?
The Republican began his term of office on January 20 with a series of sweeping decrees on migration, including declaring a national emergency on the southern border of the United States, putting an immediate end to the use of the CBP One app and initiating a process to end birthright citizenship, which is expected to lead to a legal battle. He said he wanted Mexicans out of the United States and threatened to impose harsh tariffs as a means of pressuring his neighbor.
The all-out crusade against migrants has been clear from the start. And to top it all off, Guantanamo.
The former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and current “border czar”, Tom Homan, said that ICE would be the agency in charge of managing the migrant detention center in Guantanamo. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, who was stationed at the base during his military service, has described the place as “ideal” for this purpose.
Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, criticized the use of Guantánamo to house migrants.
“Sending immigrants to Guantánamo is a deeply cruel and costly measure. It will isolate them from lawyers, family and support systems, and throw them into a black hole so that the US government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight. Close Guantánamo now and for good!” Fischer said in a statement.
Legal limbo for migrants
Detaining undocumented migrants at the Guantánamo Naval Base is not an idea being considered for the first time in the White House.
In the 1990s, the base became a legal limbo for hundreds of Haitians fleeing their country after the 1991 coup d’état. These people, intercepted at sea, were confined to a detention center in Guantanamo without guarantees of asylum and, in many cases, without access to adequate medical treatment, according to Amnesty International.
The NGO itself has pointed out that among those Haitian migrants, more than 270 were HIV-positive and were trapped in an improvised camp, with no right to enter the United States and with minimal medical resources. At that time, the AIDS epidemic was at its peak, and many of them died before a decision was made on their applications. This happened during the administration of George Bush (senior).
In 1994, Bill Clinton ordered that Haitian and Cuban refugees intercepted at sea be held at the base, increasing the immigrant population there to 45,000 people in a single year.
Since then, human rights organizations have documented the continued use of the military facility to detain asylum seekers in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world. They point out that isolated and with no guarantees of protection or shelter, many of them have remained in confinement for years, waiting for a third country to accept them.
Migrant detention center
Inside the base, administered by the US Navy, the famous cages are still preserved. This is where the first detainees of the war on terror arrived, hooded and handcuffed, in their orange uniforms, before being interned in the military prison Camp Delta. Dozens of reports have denounced the torture and ill-treatment of these prisoners, with harrowing images. Amnesty International described it in 2005 as “an American gulag”, but the Bush Administration responded at the time that it was necessary to intern the worst terrorists.
Now Trump is echoing that same rhetoric, reaffirming that the Guantanamo Naval Base remains an indispensable instrument for US national security.
According to the US press, the migrants will not be held in the military prison, where there is still an unknown number of foreigners suspected of terrorism – including the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – but in a separate area.
The Guantanamo Migration Operations Center (GMOC) is on the opposite side of the bay. According to The New York Times, it has a capacity for about 120 people, although in recent years it has only housed a few dozen. This will change drastically, according to Trump’s plans.
Witnesses speak
Currently, the GMOC occupies a small area of the former barracks. Although little public information is available about the facility, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), a non-profit organization, quoted by the BBC, claimed in a report to have interviewed several people who passed through there.
“These refugees are detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions. They have no access to the outside world and are trapped in a punitive system operated by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security and other private contractors, with little or no transparency or accountability,” the people said in the document.
The migrants who went to IRAP, other detained refugees and former GMOC employees describe the building as “dilapidated, with mold and sewage problems,” according to the BBC.
“Detainees are denied confidential phone calls, even with their lawyers, and are punished if they dare to share accounts of ill-treatment”.
Now Trump echoes that same rhetoric, reaffirming that the Guantanamo Naval Base remains an indispensable instrument for US national security.
According to the US press, the migrants will not be held in the military prison, where there is still an unknown number of foreigners suspected of terrorism – including the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – but in a separate area.
The Guantánamo Migration Operations Center (GMOC) is on the opposite side of the bay. According to The New York Times, it has a capacity for around 120 people, although in recent years it has only housed a few dozen. This will change drastically, according to Trump’s plans.
Illegally occupied territory
“According to the law, when a contract is indefinite it is supposed to end after a hundred years, but this has not been the case,” said the CIPI researcher, commenting that ”for the occupation of the base and for the lease, the United States Government has offered Cuba a payment that it has not collected since 1959 because it considers it illegal. An exhibition in Paris in 2004 displayed several of the checks for $4,085 that the United States annually pays Cuba for that concept.
Maira E. Relova explained to Cubadebate that the base “was used militarily in 1906, 1912 and 1917 against other nations.
Caimanera, photo: Bill Hackwell
“It was an example of economic deformation, corruption, vices and prostitution, especially in the town of Caimanera, where traders developed and where the town’s people acted as a workforce to maintain bars and businesses; others were engaged in fishing, working in the salt flats and searching for sustenance in the midst of a panorama of total poverty. During the Second World War it had a floating population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Profits were made from the scarce drinking water (…)
“The environmental damage is profound where the San Nicolás swamp, to the northwest, which was filled in and turned into a firing range. This affected the hydrology of the area, causing major flooding by obstructing the natural course of the Guantánamo River, as well as the salinization of an agricultural valley.
“The residues of toxic substances in the waters of the bay and the accumulated environmental effects of the explosions in the firing ranges and the mines have had a direct impact on the ecosystem, the biodiversity and the health of the inhabitants of Caimanera and Boquerón.
“The explosion of mines, shells and aircraft bombs had the secondary effects of spreading fires and shaking the caves and caverns, with consequences for biodiversity and impacts on the social order and the psychology of the inhabitants of Caimanera and Boquerón.
“Fishing activity in the bay has also been limited and its structure reduces the entry of marine species, especially migratory ones. Tourism has been affected by the limitations on access to the bay and because the best beaches in the area are concentrated in the occupied territory,” said the researcher.
Maira E. Relova emphasized that for Commander in Chief Fidel Castro the Guantánamo Naval Base was always a major concern, considering that the US presence in that facility could give them a pretext for aggression against our country and constitutes a permanent provocation.
“In 1960, during a discussion with workers in Caimanera, Fidel said: ‘First of all, the government believes it has an obligation to act very carefully in all matters related to the base, as you have all had the opportunity to hear our statements warning that continuously… —we even raised the issue in the United Nations, I imagine some of you were listening too— our concern that they wanted to use the base as a pretext to create conflicts for the Revolutionary Government, and also, even, a point that worried us, as a place where self-provocation could be encouraged’. In the same way, she alluded to the powerful economic interests in the United States that control the life of the nation and that minority characterized by being “unscrupulous people”, the researcher recalled.
“Fidel always pointed out that this issue had to be addressed with the utmost intelligence, as a legal, moral problem, but not a problem of force. He pointed out that at present the base has no use, neither militarily nor strategically; it is just another tool of force, arrogance and hubris against Cuba,” she added.
“The recent statements by President Donald Trump following the signing of the law toughening criminal penalties for deported migrants, whom he criminalizes, and his decision to send them to the Guantánamo Naval Base, recalls the deliberate use of those facilities as a torture center and migrant operations center,” the researcher said.
She added that “in the last quarter of the 20th century, Cuban and Haitian immigrants intercepted on the high seas were held there. However, at the beginning of 2002, a small part of the base was used to house prisoners suspected of links to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban army who were captured in Afghanistan in the X-Ray, Delta and Echo camps, some of whom were even imprisoned without charge.
“In addition to continuing to be an offense to Cuba’s sovereignty, it is a violation of the human rights of people it brands as criminals, who are human beings who deserve a minimum of respect, humanity and adherence to the law. It is said that they will send 30,000, but for how long? What about the family? How will they live? Utter uncertainty.
“Similarly, contradictions are emerging among those who supported Trump and are now calling for leniency for Cubans who were granted parole or given political asylum and who are still without residence and are not criminals, nor are the rest of the Latinos. In the end, these Trump supporters are drinking their own poison and attacking each other.
“Moreover, we will see how this human dispossession is reversed internally for the United States,” he said.
According to the Cuban Foreign Ministry, the irresponsible use of the migrant detention center would generate a scenario of risk and insecurity in that illegal enclave and its surroundings. Furthermore, it would threaten peace, and it would lend itself to errors, accidents, and misinterpretations that could alter stability and cause serious consequences.
Source: Cuba en Resumen