An Ever-Expanding Gulag of Concentration Camps for Immigrants: The US Under Stephen Miller
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When Donald Trump promised, on the campaign trail, to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, even the most observant critics would have been hard-pressed to realize quite what that would actually entail.
In the last year, however, we’ve come to see what it is, and the reality is truly horrific, as it involves nothing less than a concerted effort to turn the entire landmass of the United States into a hunting ground for masked and heavily-armed unaccountable thugs to terrorize entire cities, to abduct anyone who isn’t white, on the merest suspicion that they might be undocumented migrants, and to “disappear” them into increasingly overcrowded detention facilities where even the most basic human requirements — decent food and water, and adequate medical treatment — are routinely denied, where strenuous efforts are made to deny them access to lawyers, despite that being their legal right, and where institutionalized cruelty and violence are rampant.
When Trump’s second presidency began, ICE was holding around 40,000 people in 107 facilities. In just twelve months, those figures have both nearly doubled, with over 70,000 people held in 212 facilities. Most pertinently, despite the administration’s claims that it is only seizing and removing “criminal illegal aliens”, three-quarters of those held — 52,504 out of the 70,766 held as of January 25 — have no criminal record whatsoever, while many of those with convictions “committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”
Fascism in the US, as the Trump Administration Defends Death Squad Executions of US Citizens
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In the space of 17 days, US immigration enforcement agents — members of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Border Patrol — executed two US citizens, in broad daylight, on the streets of Minneapolis, who posed no threat to them.
We know that Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year old mother, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year old ICU nurse with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, were executed, and posed no threat to the agents, because of multiple videos recorded on smartphones at both locations.
Renee Nicole Good, who had just driven her six-year old son to school, was smiling at, and speaking to Jonathan Ross, the agent who executed her, as she began maneuvering her car past him, less than 30 seconds before he shot her, once through her windshield, and twice through the side window, and then called her a “f*cking bitch.”
Alex Pretti, who was monitoring immigration enforcement agents’ actions, as was his right, was filming on his phone, and trying to protect a woman from assault, when he was pepper-sprayed and set upon by officials who, after finding that he was legally carrying a concealed weapon, removed it from him and then, as he was kneeling on the ground, executed him with gunshots to the back of his head. In the space of 30 seconds, he was shot ten times.
Judge Condemns the Trump Administration’s Illegal and “Impermissibly Punitive” Use of Guantánamo to Hold Migrants
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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
The wheels of justice may grind slowly in the US court system, for reasons that involve various forms of inefficiency, but also the requirement to conduct detailed research into legal precedents. Nevertheless, throughout the Republic’s 249-year history, the courts have repeatedly, if, at times, in a glacial manner, performed a key role in ensuring that the checks and balances in the Constitution — the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government — are enforced.
On December 5, ten months after a particularly noxious example of executive overreach began — the detention of migrants with final deportation orders from the US in detention facilities on the grounds of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a judge in the District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s policy of holding migrants at Guantánamo was both “impermissibly punitive”, as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and was also completely unauthorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
The ruling came in a class action lawsuit, Luna Gutierrez v. Noem, that had first been submitted in June by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals who were held at Guantánamo at the time, but also on behalf of every other migrant in “a similarly situated class”; namely, “all immigration detainees originally apprehended and detained in the United States, and who are, or will be held at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”
Profound Alarm at Trump’s Deportation of Migrants to Third Countries Without Protections Against Torture or Even Death
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On the campaign trail on October 27, 2024, just days before November’s Presidential Election, Donald Trump promised, “On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.”
Trump’s target, to follow the logic of his promise, were those amongst the eleven million undocumented migrants in the US, according to estimates published by the Office of Homeland Security Statistics in April 2024, who had been convicted of crimes, which was a fraction of the total (just 4%).
According to Patrick J. Lechleitner, the acting director of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), in a letter to Congress on September 25, 2024, the total number of noncitizens with criminal convictions was, at the time, 435,719, although it’s important to note that a breakdown of the crimes committed demonstrated a wide spectrum from the most minor of offences through to much more significant crimes.
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.
The Alarming Kafkaesque Basis of Trump’s “War on Migrants”
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NOTE: On June 18, I was interviewed by Chris Cook for his weekly, hour-long Gorilla Radio show about this article. You can find the show here, and I’m in the second half, after Dan Kovalik talking about Israel’s war on Iran in the first half.
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On June 4, in a memorable, 69-page memorandum opinion, Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., began a ruling relating to Venezuelan migrants deported by the Trump administration to a mega-prison for alleged terrorists in El Salvador by quoting from Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which the protagonist, Josef K., “awakens to encounter two strange men outside his room,” and “realizes that he is under arrest.” However, “When he asks the strangers why, he receives no answer. ‘We weren’t sent to tell you that,’ one says. ‘Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.’”
As Judge Boasberg added, “Bewildered by these men and distressed by their message, K. tries to comfort himself that he lives in ‘a state governed by law,’ one where ‘all statutes [are] in force.’ He therefore demands again, ‘How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?’ ‘Now there you go again,’ the guard replies. ‘We don’t answer such questions.’ Undeterred, K. offers his ‘papers’ and demands their arrest warrant. ‘Good heavens!’ the man scolds. ‘There’s been no mistake.’ ‘[O]ur department,’ he assures K., is only ‘attracted by guilt’; it ‘doesn’t seek [it] out . . . That’s the Law.’ ‘I don’t know that law,’ K. responds. ‘You’ll feel it eventually,’ the guard says.”
As Judge Boasberg proceeded to explain, “Such was the situation into which Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, and scores of other Venezuelan noncitizens say they were plunged on March 15, 2025. In the early morning hours, Venezuelans held by the Department of Homeland Security at El Valle Detention Facility in Texas were awakened from their cells, taken to a separate room, shackled, and informed that they were being transferred. To where? That they were not told. When asked, some guards reportedly laughed and said that they did not know; others told the detainees, incorrectly, that they were being transferred to another immigration facility or to Mexico or Venezuela.”
Podcast: Guantánamo’s Forgotten Prisoners, Trump’s “War on Migrants” and the Horrors of El Salvador’s CECOT Prison on Due Dissidence
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
This article was originally published on May 27 on the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
Many thanks to Misty Winston for interviewing me two weeks ago for her show on Due Dissidence, a channel that we might call an alt-left alternative to the plague of alt-right streaming channels that dominate so much social media.
Misty and I have spoken many times before, beginning in the days when she was an indefatigable activist for Julian Assange, and, after finding a temporary home on various other platforms, it was great to catch up with her on a channel that, I hope, values her presence.
We spoke for 90 minutes, and the show was live-streamed on Rumble, and also on X, and was subsequently posted in its entirety on Substack.
Updates on Trump’s Deportation Obsession and His Open Warfare on the US Courts, and My Interview on Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook
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Many thanks to Chris Cook in western Canada for having me on his weekly Gorilla Radio show on Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in the horrendous “war on migrants” that Donald Trump initiated when he took office three months ago. The interview is available here, on Gorilla Radio’s Substack, taking up the first half of the hour-long show, with Canadian author Ray McGinnis in the second half.
Chris and I last spoke in February, just after Donald Trump had started using Guantánamo to hold migrants — the majority of whom were Venezuelans, who were accused, without evidence, of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. I wrote about the use of Guantánamo for migrants in a series of articles here, here, here, here, here and here, with a summary on the Close Guantánamo website on March 21.
By that point, Trump had begun shifting his focus to an even more alarming location than Guantánamo, sending 238 Venezuelan migrants and 23 Salvadorians — all, again, accused of being gang members, without any evidence being provided — on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or, in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center) on March 15.
No One Is Safe As Trump Gleefully Deports Migrants to El Salvador’s Mega-Guantánamo Without Evidence, Or Even Via An “Administrative Error”
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
In the sordid, chaotic, belligerent and openly racist “war on migrants” that Donald Trump declared when he took office on January 20, two particular truths about the administration’s intentions have become increasingly evident, and both of them are profoundly disturbing.
The first is that no immigrant to the US from anywhere in the world — but mostly, to date, from countries in Central or South America — is safe from arbitrary detention and deportation, and, in particular, the threat of being deported, not to their home countries, but to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where prisoners are held indefinitely without charge or trial, dehumanized, half-starved and subjected to relentless violence. The CECOT prison, established under El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele, is nothing less than a futuristic, turbo-charged version of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.
The second cause for deep alarm is the Trump administration’s absolute contempt for any legal challenges to what it aggressively claims is its right to detain and deport anyone it feels like detaining and deporting. Primarily, to date, Venezuelans, these men are routinely described as dangerous “high-threat aliens”, gang members and terrorists at war with the US, although the administration has failed to back up its hysterical claims with anything resembling evidence.
Disturbingly, the administration insists that all of its claimed deliberations about who to detain and deport are shielded from any kind of scrutiny or review because of national security concerns, claims that are nothing less than the thinnest of covers for what is actually the the unacceptable and unconstitutional exercise of unfettered executive power.
Trump’s Migrant Deportations: Judge Says Nazis in US in WWII Had More Rights to Contest Their Removal Than Venezuelan Migrants Now
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Last Wednesday (March 26), Judge Patricia Millett, a judge in the appeals court in Washington D.C., delivered a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport 238 Venezuelan migrants — allegedly members of the Tren de Aragua gang — to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security “terrorist” prison, where they are all now imprisoned without charge or trial, for at least a year, and perhaps more, at a cost to the US taxpayer of $6 million, even though no evidence was presented by the Trump administration to confirm that they were gang members, and even though, in some cases, compelling testimony from family members would seem to confirm that they had no involvement whatsoever with Tren de Aragua.
At the hearing on March 26, Judge Millett told the government’s main lawyer, Drew Ensign, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here”, in an exchange relating to whether or not, as the Guardian described it, “Venezuelans targeted for removal under the Alien Enemies Act had time to contest the Trump administration’s assertion that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang before they were put on planes and deported to El Salvador.”
Trump’s disturbing invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in a “proclamation” on March 15, in what appeared to be a nakedly authoritarian attempt to deport Venezuelans alleged to be members of the gang without making any effort to establish whether or not that was the case.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
