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NOTE: Please see the important postscript at the end of this article, about Trump’s revival of flights just after it was published. The struggle continues.

On Thursday (February 20), the Trump administration’s short-lived attempt to turn the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba into a migrant detention facility holding up to 30,000 migrants — a plan announced via an executive order on January 29, and which, as it developed, involved, with astonishing illegality, co-opting a block in the long-established “war on terror” military prison to hold the majority of these men — seemed to stunningly collapse as all but one of the 178 migrants flown there since February 4, all Venuzuelans, were deported back to Venezuela via Honduras. The one man not repatriated was brought back to the US mainland.

It will be difficult for the Trump administration to spin this as anything other than an abject humiliation, and a powerful reminder that a president doesn’t rule by executive order, or with unfettered executive authority; he — or she, if that day ever comes — has to work with Congress, which passes laws and appropriates funding, and has to operate within the constraints of US law, as interpreted through the judiciary.

Trump’s Guantánamo plan openly showed contempt for all of the above. It was never clear that any authority existed to hold migrants seized on the US mainland at the naval base, where a Migrant Operations Center, in operation since the early 1990s, had only ever been used for Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea, to prevent them from landing on the US mainland and claiming the rights to legal assistance that entailed.

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