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.”
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”
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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.
Lawsuit Challenges Trump’s “Cruel, Unnecessary and Illegal” Transfers of Migrants to Guantánamo
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In a lawsuit submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on Saturday (March 1), the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) asked the Court to urgently intervene to “put a stop” to what they accurately describe as the Trump administration’s “cruel, unnecessary, and illegal transfers” of migrants to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As the groups explained in a press release, transferring migrants to Guantánamo from the US mainland is a policy “without any legal authority, in violation of federal law and the US Constitution.”
The central premise of the lawsuit is that, although foreign nationals have been held at Guantánamo before — in a Migrant Operations Center established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, and, most notoriously, in the “war on terror” prison established in January 2002, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness — the foreign nationals being sent to Guantánamo by Donald Trump have legal and constitutional rights that cannot be wished away through the traditional subterfuge of pretending that US law doesn’t apply at Guantánamo because, technically, it is only leased from the Cuban government, which has ultimate sovereignty.
In relation to the Migrant Operations Center and the “war on terror” prison, this subterfuge has, shamefully, been largely successful, but, as the rights groups argue compellingly in their lawsuit, because the current migrants have been previously held on the US mainland, even though their asylum claims were ultimately unsuccessful, and they have all been subjected to “final removal” orders, they are still protected by the US Constitution, and by US law; specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Shocking Reports of the Systemic Brutalization and Dehumanization of Migrants Held at Guantánamo
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Huge congratulations to the Washington Post for highlighting the brutality and dehumanization taking place at the migrant detention facility that has been in operation for the last three weeks in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, specifically, through the use of one particular cellblock in the existing “war on terror” prison, Camp 6, where the majority of the more than 200 migrants flown to Guantánamo from the US mainland have been held since detention operations began on February 4.
Washington Post reporters spoke to three of the 178 Venezuelan men held there between February 4 and February 20, when, with one exception, they were all repatriated to Venezuela via Honduras — with that one exception, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, flown back to ongoing detention on the US mainland.
Since then, however, 17 more migrants arrived on February 23 — seven from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by the New York Times — with another nine following on February 24, during a visit by defense secretary Pete Hegseth. All are reportedly being held in Camp 6.
Victory for US Law as Trump Abruptly Empties Guantánamo of All the Migrants He Just Sent There
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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.
Horror at Trump’s Guantánamo: 53 Migrants Now Held Illegally and Incommunicado in the “War on Terror” Prison
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Since Donald Trump issued an executive order on January 29, to expand an existing migrant detention facility on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — the Migrant Operations Center — to hold 30,000 migrants, as part of the “war on migrants” that he cynically and malevolently embarked upon as soon as he took office, eight flights of migrants from immigrant detention facilities in the US — all, apparently, carrying Venezuelans — arrived at Guantánamo between February 5 and 12, containing 98 men in total.
This is alarming enough, because no information has been provided about the legality of these flights, to a naval base that has only previously been used for prisoners seized in the “war on terror”, in what is known as the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility, which opened in 2002, and, via its Migrant Operations Center, first used in the 1990s, for migrants intercepted at sea. The base has never before been used to hold foreign nationals brought from the US mainland, who should have the same rights of access to lawyers and contact with families that they would have had on the US mainland. There is no indication, however, that this is the case.
The administration has also provided no information about who these people are, beyond unverifiable claims about them being gang members, and why it is regarded as so important for them to be sent to Guantánamo when, it would seem, they could just as easily be returned to their home countries. Just as importantly, no information has been provided about why this operation has begun without Congressional approval, or Congressional funding.
Trump is Illegally Holding Migrants Seized in the US in the “War on Terror” Prison at Guantánamo Bay
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In shocking news reported by the New York Times, it has emerged that ten Venezuelan migrants “with suspected gang affiliations” — not confirmed, just “suspected” — who were flown to Guantánamo on Wednesday (February 5) have been moved into one of two prison blocks that, until their arrival, had been used to house prisoners seized in the “war on terror”, as part of the larger Military Detention Center — the notorious Guantánamo prison — that opened in January 2002.
The Pentagon claimed that the ten men, described as “high-threat illegal aliens”, were “too dangerous for the migrant site” at the opposite end of the naval base from the “war on terror” prison, which had previously been described as the destination for the migrants, where an existing 120-bed Migrant Operations Center has existed since the early 1990s.
The Pentagon stated that the ten men “are currently being housed in vacant detention facilities”, and claimed that “US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is taking this measure to ensure the safe and secure detention of these individuals until they can be transported to their country of origin or other appropriate destination.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
