Did a Leak Stop Trump From Sending 9,000 Migrants to Guantánamo, Including 800 Europeans?

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Yesterday, marking UN Torture Day, I posted my latest article on Close Guantánamo, which I’m cross-posting here, with reflections on torture past and present at the prison, Donald Trump’s shameful and lawless decision to co-opt Guantánamo for his deeply racist “war on migrants” — and the latest news involving Haitian migrants. I also publicized a recent letter to Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth calling for the closure of Guantánamo by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and 14 of her Congressional colleagues, which was, in particular, prompted by alarming reports two weeks ago that the Trump administration was intending to send 9,000 new migrants to Guantanamo, including 800 Europeans. The story was decried as “fake news” by the White House, but I suggested that it was in fact a plan, and that it was leaked by officials within the administration to get it dropped, which seems to have quietly happened after numerous foreign governments expressed outrage about the proposals.

Yesterday, June 26, was the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, first marked in 1998 to commemorate the historic day in 1987 when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into effect, and also to mark the historic day in 1945 when the United Nations Charter, the founding document of the UN, was signed in San Francisco by 50 countries.

Despite the best intentions of those who worked assiduously to create the Torture Convention over many decades, many of its signatories have — either openly or covertly — failed to fulfill their obligations to prevent the use of torture.

Particularly prominent amongst the violators of the Torture Convention is the United States, which, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, outsourced torture to a number of notorious right-abusing regimes in the Middle East, and also implemented a covert global torture program via a number of CIA “black site” torture prisons scattered around the world. I covered much of this story as the lead writer of a UN report about secret detention in 2010, and the CIA’s role was scrutinized and condemned in a torture report undertaken by the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose 500-page unclassified summary was published in December 2014.

The US also shredded its obligation to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners seized in wartime in its occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and, on the grounds of its naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, established, on January 11, 2002, a notorious prison that is still in existence today, where 15 men are still held, out of the 779 men held there in total by the US military over the last 23 years.

In the early years of its existence, a number of torture programs were implemented at Guantánamo by the military, and by a variety of US agencies, and, even now, the 15 men still imprisoned are held indefinitely without charge or trial, or face trials in a judicial system, the military commissions, that is fundamentally broken because it was established to try and sidestep the prohibition on the use of torture, and its corrosive effect on any efforts to successfully prosecute its victims.

Although the most overt brutality at Guantánamo came to an end many years ago, the prison remains a place where, as Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, explained in a scathing report after becoming the first UN Rapporteur to visit the prison in February 2023, the multiple, overlapping violation of numerous fundamental rights “amounts to ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”

President Biden and his administration, having allowed the UN visit, failed to acknowledge any of Ní Aoláin’s concerns, although, eventually, they released 25 of the 40 men still held when Biden took office.

Guantánamo under Trump

Under Donald Trump, however, the fate of the remaining 15 men has been almost entirely overshadowed by Trump’s cynical decision to use Guantánamo as a performative theater of cruelty in the deeply racist “war on migrants” that he declared as soon as he took office on January 20.

On January 29, to everyone’s surprise, he ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to expand an existing Migrant Operations Center (MOC) on the naval base, initially used in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, to hold up to 30,000 migrants, an unfeasibly large number that can only have emerged from Trump’s mind after someone told him that, at peak periods in the 1990s, around 20,000 migrants were held temporarily in the MOC.

As the DHS and DOD scrambled to erect a vast tent city at Guantánamo, the first flights of migrants to Guantánamo, bringing Venezuelans from ICE detention facilities on the US mainland, began on February 4, with Trump illegally co-opting a cell block in the “war on terror” prison to hold some of these men, while holding others in the MOC. The tent city, ironically, was never used, because it didn’t meet legally mandated ICE standards for detention.

As legal challenges mounted, and the eye-watering cost of Trump’s performative cruelty was revealed, Trump’s vision of 30,000 migrants being held at Guantánamo receded. To date, only around 600 migrants have been held, at a cost of around $100,000 a day, compared to the $165 a day that it costs in ICE detention facilities on the mainland.

Those held have, in some cases, been deported to their home countries, and in other cases returned to the US mainland, while a handful were flown to El Salvador, to be imprisoned in CECOT, the vile mega-Guantánamo run by El Salvador’’s dictatorial President Nayib Bukele, which largely supplanted Guantánamo as Trump’s preferred location for the extra-judicial abuse of migrants after the challenges he encountered regarding the use of Guantánamo.

Much of this — given its exorbitant cost and the fact that those sent back to their home countries could have been deported without being held at Guantánamo at all — would seem to confirm that, primarily, the use of Guantánamo to hold migrants is a scare tactic, meant to prevent would-be migrants coming to the US, and to encourage those already in the US to “self-deport.”

The latest use of Guantánamo — for Haitians

Nevertheless, migrant operations at Guantánamo are ongoing. On June 18, the Miami Herald reported that 20 Haitian migrants held there had been deported — eleven “picked up at sea near The Bahamas while reportedly en route to Florida,” and nine others transferred to Guantánamo from ICE detention facilities on the US mainland.

Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the San Diego-based Haitian Bridge Alliance, called the transfer of the Haitians to Guantánamo “covert,” adding that their subsequent deportation from Guantánamo was “not just a humanitarian crisis,” but “a flagrant violation of international human rights and civil liberties.”

Jozef also stated, “Guantánamo is a black site designed for secrecy and exclusion. Haitian immigrants — and asylum seekers — are once again being subjected to the same cruel, barbaric and inhumane treatment they were subjected to in the 1990s, held without access to counsel, without notice to their families or legal advocates and deported under the cover of darkness. These individuals have been stripped of their most basic rights under US and international law.”

Jozef added that she and other advocates were “deeply familiar with Guantánamo protocols,” and explained, “This is not how immigration detention is supposed to work. The decision to disappear Haitians and others into this military pipeline reveals the racialized logic of US immigration enforcement. We cannot allow a system built for indefinite detention and torture to become the new front line of migrant removal. This is a human rights emergency and a moral disgrace.”

On June 23, Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times provided the latest known update on the migrant situation at Guantánamo, noting, in a post on X, that, after the Haitian transfers reduced the migrant population to just two, nine more migrants had just arrived. 

Rosenberg added that, despite Trump’s initial enthusiasm for holding 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo, “Capacity is still limited: Fewer than 200 can be housed here on any day in the two detention sites.” She added, citing comments made by administration officials, that Guantánamo “serves as a way station for people the administration says have final deportation orders.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib and 14 Congressional colleagues call for the closure of Guantánamo after plans leaked for 9,000 migrants to be sent there

On the same day, Representative Rashida Tlaib (MI-12) and 14 colleagues in the US Congress wrote a letter to Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth calling for “an immediate halt to the use of Guantánamo for migrant detention and for the permanent closure of the base’s two detention facilities.”

The signatories joining Rep. Tlaib were Representatives Greg Casar (TX-35), Yvette Clarke (NY-09), Mark DeSaulnier (CA-10), Jesús “Chuy” García (IL-04), Jonathan Jackson (IL-01), Jim McGovern (MA-02), LaMonica McIver (NJ-10), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Delia C. Ramirez (IL-03), Jan Schakowsky (IL-09), Shri Thanedar (MI-13), and Paul Tonko (NY-20).

The lawmakers’ letter was almost entirely ignored in the US mainstream media, with only Yahoo News bothering to pick up on it. This is sadly typical of the media’s widespread indifference towards Guantánamo, although Rep. Tlaib and her fellow lawmakers had been encouraged to write to Secretaries Noem and Hegseth because of a rumor that had briefly lit up the world’s media two weeks ago, when Politico announced that “at least 9,000 people [were] being vetted for transfer” to Guantánamo, of whom 800 were Europeans, including one Austrian, 100 Romanians and 170 Russians.

In a follow-up article, the Washington Post suggested the foreign nationals under consideration were from a range of countries, including “hundreds from friendly European nations, including Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, but also other parts of the world, including many from Haiti.”

The Post also suggested that the administration was “unlikely to inform the foreigners’ home governments about the impending transfers to the infamous military facility, including close US allies such as Britain, Germany and France.”

The news was leaked by officials within the administration, perhaps to try to stop the administration from proceeding with a plan that would serve only to alienate — or further alienate — the dwindling pool of US allies abroad.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately took to X to denounce the leak as “fake news,” but it seems to me that it may well have been an actual plan. The officials who leaked it, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, suggested that it was being proposed because of what the Post described as “a need to free up capacity at domestic detention facilities, which have become overcrowded amid President Donald Trump’s pledge to implement the biggest deportation of undocumented migrants in American history.”

As Politico noted, the discussions were taking place as the White House was pressing ICE for “higher arrest numbers,” with Trump’s ghoulish senior policy adviser Stephen Miller “calling for 3,000 arrests a day.” Politico also noted that ICE was “tight on detention space,” and was “pushing for funding from Congress to hire more agents and expand domestic detention capacity.”

The most pertinent comments suggesting that the leak of the information was designed to provoke international outrage and prevent its implementation came via Politico, and passages in their article mentioning that, in particular, the inclusion of Europeans “alarmed some US diplomats,” who noted that “most European countries are American allies that are cooperative in taking back deportees,” and that there was “no need” to send them to Guantánamo.

Politico added that “State Department officials who deal with Europe” were “trying to persuade DHS to abandon the plan,” with one saying, “The message is to shock and horrify people, to upset people. But we’re allies.”

The Post added that, although officials said that the individuals being vetted for transfer were in the US illegally, many of their home countries had told the US that they were “willing to accept their citizens,” but had “not moved quickly enough in the eyes of the DHS.”

While a thread of contempt by senior Trump administration officials for everyone but themselves runs through these accounts of the mass Guantánamo migrant transfer proposal, it does seem that the leak achieved its intended aim. European ministers, in particular, largely reacted with fury, and the plan has not been mentioned since.

As the Haitian story shows, however, Trump and his administration still haven’t given up on Guantánamo as a location for the expensive abuse of migrants, and, in the meantime, the 15 other men still held — the “war on terror” prisoners — have been almost entirely forgotten. I thank Rashida Tlaib and her colleagues for remembering them, but I deplore the Trump administration’s contempt for them, for the law, and for the requirements of the US Constitution.

While detention facilities exist at Guantánamo, so too will behavior on the part of the government that should shock and appal us all.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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