As Trump Holds 72 Migrants at Guantánamo From 26 Countries Including the UK, What Is His Long-Term Plan?

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In a shocking development reported two days ago by CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security has revealed that it is currently holding 72 migrants at Guantánamo from 26 countries.

At least one of these migrants is a UK national, while the other countries whose nationals are held are Brazil, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Russia, Somalia, St. Kitts-Nevis, Venezuela and Vietnam.

A month ago, shockwaves reverberated around the world when, as I discussed here, Politico reported that the Trump administration was planning to send at least 9,000 migrants to Guantánamo from a variety of countries, including 800 from Europe.

I speculated that the news had been leaked from inside the administration to try to prevent severe damage to the US’s diplomatic standing, with Politico reporting that the inclusion of the Europeans in these plans “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.

A follow-up article in the Washington Post added that, although it was recognized that the individuals 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.”

Although the leaked plan was described as “fake news” by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, I suggested that it was actually a real plan, and that, when its leak provoked outrage from the governments of numerous countries, particularly in Europe, it seemed reasonable to assume that it had been quietly shelved.

The new announcement, however, indicates that my presumption was premature, and that, although the arrival of 9,000 migrants might never happen, if for no other reason than that the available facilities — Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison and the Migrant Operations Center used since the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea — can hold less than 200 migrants at a time, the administration has indeed taken its first steps towards reviving Guantánamo as a location for holding migrants.

Since Donald Trump called for a massive expansion of facilities at Guantánamo for holding migrants at the end of January, 663 men in total have been held there, although after the initial shock, when 178 Venezuelans were sent there in a two-week period in February, concerns that its migrant population would expand relentlessly have noticeably receded.

Facing legal challenges, condemnation by Democratic lawmakers regarding the extraordinary costs of the operation, and media reports establishing systemic abuse at the prison and confirmation that the majority of the men held were not gang members, as the Trump administration alleged, the Venezuelans were repatriated on February 20, and, for the last four months, the administration has much more quietly held migrants in smaller numbers, sometimes repatriating them, sometimes sending them back to the US mainland, and in a handful of cases sending them, contentiously, to CECOT, a mega-Guantánamo in El Salvador, to add to the 238 other Venezuelans sent there from the US mainland in March after Trump’s outrageous invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, an anachronistic piece of ancient wartime legislation from 1798.

On June 23, Carol Rosenberg reported that, at the time, just eleven migrants were being held, but by July 1 the expansion plans had evidently already began, although no one but CBS News noticed.

The recent resumption of migrant transfers to Guantánamo, amidst claims of criminal convictions

As immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez explained on July 1, a defense official told him that the migrant population had risen to 54, and that those held were from countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean, with named countries including “nationals of China, Jamaica, Liberia and the United Kingdom, according to the federal documents” seen by CBS News.

While it’s somewhat surprising that more than a week has gone by without any British media outlet noticing that at least one British national is being held at Guantánamo — the first time that any Briton has been held at Guantánamo for nearly ten years, since the long-term British resident Shaker Aamer was freed from the “war on terror” prison in October 2015 — yesterday’s update raises uncomfortable questions about the detention of all of the 72 migrants currently held, and what the administration’s intentions are for them in the long-term.

Over the last few months, in court challenges, the administration has conceded that those held at Guantánamo, although separated into “high-risk” detainees held in Camp 6, and “low-risk” detainees held in the MOC, were all being detained temporarily, prior to their final deportation either to their home countries, or to a third country.

Those concessions have, to some extent, alleviated concerns that the administration might have been intending to replicate the lawless horrors of the “war on terror” by holding migrants indefinitely at Guantánamo.

The latest news, however, once more brings those doubts to the surface. As CBS News explained, according to the officials who spoke to them anonymously, 58 of the migrants are classified as “high-risk”, while 14 are “low-risk.” The DHS officials shared “the names and criminal histories of more than two dozen detainees”, according to CBS News, which included “convictions for homicide; sexual offenses, including against children; child pornography; assault with a weapon; kidnapping; drug smuggling; and robbery.” DHS officials also indicated that all of the migrants “have final deportation orders.”

The DHS then posted a list of 26 of the men, all apparently convicted of serious crimes, accompanied by a statement by Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, who said, “We’re arresting criminal illegal aliens and getting them off America’s streets. Guantánamo Bay is holding the worst of the worst including child predators, rapists and murderers. Whether it is CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz [the new facility in the Florida Everglades], Guantánamo Bay or another detention facility, these dangerous criminals will not be allowed to terrorize US citizens. President Trump and Secretary Noem are using every tool available to get criminal illegal aliens off our streets and out of our country. Our message is clear: Criminals are not welcome in the United States.”

Whether the DHS’s list is even accurate or not ought to be a question that the US media is asking, although no one seems to be interested in doing so. I undertook a quick online search of the names, but almost no information turned up, and, when it did, the stories didn’t tally. A Venezuelan named Larry Medina, allegedly a member of the Tren de Aragua gang, was arrested last July after reportedly menacing someone with a firearm, but the DHS lists him as having been convicted of sexual assault. The British national, Nigel Tomlinson, has allegedly been convicted of child sexual abuse, but the only similar name that turned up in connection with child sexual abuse was Peter Tomlinson, a businessman from the Isle of Wight, who was imprisoned in the UK for 18 years in 2021 for watching live-streamed abuse from the Philippines.

How the Trump administration’s hysteria has been persistently undermined over the last six months

For nearly six months now, Trump administration officials — including Trump himself, the noxious Stephen Miller, and the crazed Kristi Noem and Karoline Leavitt — have proven adept at relentlessly pumping out vile black propaganda suggesting that the more than ten million undocumented migrants in the US are the most depraved criminal individuals to have ever set foot on US soil.

That may play well with the most rabid elements of Trump’s base, but in general the US public are becoming increasingly concerned that what is actually taking place is a devious and unprincipled assault on vast numbers of individuals whose only “crime” is to have sought to get into the US to work, and, in particular, to take on essential but underpaid jobs that no one else wants to do.

In polling last week, 54% of respondents described actions by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in enforcing immigration laws as having “gone too far”, while another poll in June found that 64% of respondents said that they would “prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status” rather than being deported. Other polling has shown a majority of respondents opposed to deporting people “who have a job”, who came to the US as children, the parents of children who are US citizens, and undocumented immigrants who married US citizens. While sympathy is low for anyone with any prior convictions, there is also clearly unease about migrants being swept up who have no criminal records, and only the most hardcore Trump supporters would argue that, in and of itself, entering the country illegally is a “crime” deserving instant deportation.

The administration’s track record to date has also evidently alienated many people — from the faked hysteria about detaining gang members, when those decisions are largely, if not entirely based solely on their tattoos, to the “extraordinary rendition” of patently innocent Venezuelans to the CECOT prison, and the administration’s sickening refusal to accept the “administrative error” that led to the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, and its subsequent and truly shameful efforts, after they were required by the courts to bring him back to the US, to prosecute him as a criminal who should have been deported in the first place on risible charges involving people smuggling.

Most troubling, however, is the shocking everyday reality of armed and masked operatives roaming US streets and kidnapping people in scenes that are startlingly reminiscent of the abductions of individuals in brutal dictatorships, and the regular raids on workplaces and farms. All of the above is noticeably undermining the administration’s hysterical rhetoric about it being engaged in a legitimate “war” against vast numbers of violent criminals on the loose on US soil.

Nevertheless, as the administration obsessively refuses to back down, the fear is that, at Guantánamo, having “rendered” men there from 26 countries, and including a lurid list of the convictions of 26 of these men for serious crimes, the use of the naval base’s detention facilities as a “transit camp” might morph into efforts to permanently detain them without charge or trial if their home countries refuse to take them back.

The other option is that the administration will send them to third countries in defiance of domestic and international laws and treaties that are meant to prevent any individuals, whatever their alleged crimes, from being sent to countries where they are at risk of torture or even death.

Just three days ago, despite numerous legal challenges, the administration succeeded in sending eight men — all, allegedly, also with convictions for serious crimes — not to their home countries, but to South Sudan, a notoriously war-wracked and unstable country, where there is no guarantee whatsoever that they will be safe. Only one of the eight is from South Sudan, while the rest are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Korea and Vietnam.

The Trump administration’s obsessive efforts to persuade 58 countries worldwide to take in deported migrants who are not their own nationals

Alarmingly, as the New York Times reported in a detailed investigation on June 26, since spring officials have been approaching 29 countries around the world — including war-torn disaster areas and/or those run by notorious rights-abusing regimes — in an effort to get them to take in deported migrants whose home countries won’t accept them, according to the US, or who the administration, punitively, wants to send to third countries to prove quite how depraved its mass deportation program is.

As well as El Salvador, the Times identified six other countries that have, to some extent or another, agreed to US demands — Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kosovo, Mexico, Panama and Rwanda — with South Sudan having now joined them. Another 29 countries have yet to be approached.

With the exception of El Salvador, many of these stories have received little media attention. In February, there was a flurry of reports about the deportations to Panama and Costa Rica. As the Times explained, “about 300 deportees from Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere” were flown to Panama, and “were first held in a hotel.” As the Times added, “Those who refused to board deportation flights to their home countries were then taken to a jungle camp” but “were released after lawyers sued Panama’s government.”

Costa Rica, meanwhile, “took 200 deportees, including citizens of China, India and Nepal, as well as a Yemeni family of three, according to State Department cables.” When the Times article was published, “107 had returned to their countries of origin.”

As for Guatemala, foreign minister Carlos Ramiro Martínez told the Times that Guatemala “would accept deportees who are citizens of other Central American nations but would move quickly to send them home overland.”

Further afield, Rwanda “appears eager”, according to the Times. In April, “the Trump administration paid the country $100,000 to accept an Iraqi citizen”, and “the Rwandan government agreed to take 10 more deportees”, according to a US cable.

In addition, in May, officials in Kosovo said that they would take up to 50 migrants, but told the US that they had “not come easily” to the decision, given government difficulties and the “potential political fallout,” according to a US cable. The Times reported that Kosovan officials “said they preferred women and children”, and also “suggested Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, needed something in return”, explaining that “they wanted the United States to continue to lobby other nations to recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state”, according to a diplomatic note obtained by the Times.

The horse-trading regarding sending migrants to third countries is appallingly reminiscent of the efforts, primarily during the Obama administration, but also under Biden, to locate third countries willing to take in prisoners held at Guantánamo who had been approved for release, but who couldn’t be repatriated, primarily because of provisions in the annual National Defense Authorization Act proscribing repatriation to various countries regarded as unsafe, of which Yemen was the most notable example.

Although some of these resettlements were successful, others were not. To cite just the most shocking examples, men sent to the UAE were imprisoned, despite having been promised help rebuilding their lives, and were then forcibly repatriated, two Libyans sent to Senegal were subsequently repatriated despite it being unsafe to do so, and men resettled in Kazakhstan have found themselves stranded and persecuted without any fundamental rights whatsoever.

In the case of Guantánamo, the resettlement problem was one created by the Bush administration through its hysterical and lawless overreach following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; in Trump’s “war on migrants”, however, there is no foundational error.

Disgracefully, Trump’s “war” is entirely imagined, an “invasion” by “millions of illegal aliens”, who, according to one of Trump’s deranged proclamations, “present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”

This type of hysteria would be laughable if its impact wasn’t so shockingly severe.

As UN rapporteurs warn that they are “alarmed by [the] resumption of US deportations to third countries”, and urge the authorities to “assess [the] risks of torture” before doing so, and as the list of countries urged to accept foreign migrants includes some of the most unstable and/or notorious rights-abusing regimes imaginable, it is imperative that the entire policy is throughly discredited and shut down.

It’s obvious that recent efforts by the administration to highlight the alleged criminal convictions of the migrants deported to South Sudan, as well as the recent arrivals at Guantánamo, is meant to lend credence to officials’ hysterical and generally unsubstantiated claims that everyone it intends to deport is a criminal.

However, most of the evidence to date indicates that this is merely a cynical smokescreen, behind which the vast majority of those targeted have no criminal records whatsoever, and are only guilty of having believed that, despite numerous institutional obstacles, it was worth trying to get to the US because of the work opportunities available.

Whether through a planned epidemic of “extraordinary renditions” to third countries, or, less probably, through a revival of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo (because the law, at least to some extent, extends to Guantánamo for those previously held on the US mainland), the Trump administration’s obsession with replicating “war on terror” tactics on migrants is a hammer blow to the law, and to all notions that, at most, the authorities have the right to detain and repatriate undocumented migrants to their home countries.

Hysterical declarations of “war”, sweeping efforts to portray all undocumented migrants as “terrorists”, and determined efforts to deport them all to lawless foreign prisons or to torture or death in some of the world’s most unstable regimes is so far removed from what is acceptable that it lays bare two brutal but essential truths about Donald Trump and his administration that must be recognized and resisted.

The first is that these are grotesquely racist and genuinely sadistic individuals; and the second is that these are fundamentally essential attributes for individuals who want to replace a system of justice and checks and balances with fascism.

This is a conclusion only reinforced by the provision, in the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by a supine Congress last week, of $175 billion in funding for immigrant enforcement, making ICE, with all its anonymous, unidentifiable hit squads (who may or may not even be official ICE employees), the biggest law enforcement agency in US history, and raising the prospect that, as well as pressing ahead with “renditions” of hapless migrants to third countries, Trump will also preside over an ever-increasing expansion of unaccountable gulags on US soil, akin to the “Alligator Alcatraz” facility that opened last week in the Florida Everglades, where “horrifying conditions” are already being reported.

Resistance is necessary, by all means available.

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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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