Its decades-long legacy? A secret detention site for the war on terror, the rounding up of asylum seekers and migrants (including HIV-positive Haitians), trash bag shelters, and maggot-infested food.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | | | | | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more |
| | | If you’re new to The Border Chronicle—welcome! We are Todd Miller and Melissa del Bosque, two longtime independent border journalists based in Tucson, Arizona. We founded this news outlet in 2021 because the U.S.-Mexico border is the most talked about, yet least understood region in North America. We bring you on-the-ground reporting, and analysis with context on the issues that matter at the U.S.-Mexico border to bolster democracy and dispel the rampant disinformation about the border. A Long History of Migrant Detention at Guantánamo: A Q&A with Jenna Loyd Its decades-long legacy? A secret detention site for the war on terror, the rounding up of asylum seekers and migrants (including HIV-positive Haitians), trash bag shelters, and maggot-infested food. | | | Todd Miller | | | | Feb 21 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | READ IN APP | | | | | | Upgrade to paid | | | | U.S. military sets up tent detention camps for undocumented migrants at the Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on February 9. (Photo by Petty Officer Jennifer Newsome) Share On February 17, U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem released a video meant to warn anyone considering coming to the United States without proper documents: “If you come here and break our laws, we will hunt you down.” This was only a few days after she was at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where she oversaw the third deportation flight under President Donald Trump’s directive that the United States will expand its detention of migrants to “full capacity” at the U.S. naval base, which means 30,000 people. Noem described the people that the U.S. government would incarcerate at Guantánamo as the “worst of the worst,” using the language of the Trump administration, which calls future detainees “high-priority criminal aliens.” So far this has been a dubious claim, as reported by The Washington Post and the Substack publication Migrant Insider, which published a detailed a story about a Venezuelan barber who ended up at Guantánamo, even though he has no criminal record (though he does have four tattoos). | | | | Jenna Loyd On February 18, there were 170 migrants held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Reports today, however, indicate that the United States transported all detainees to Honduras as part of a deportation to Venezuela. As of now, it is unclear what this means going forward. All in all, this is far from the first time that migrants have been held at the Naval Base Guantanamo Bay. Today we have feminist geographer Jenna Loyd, who, along with fellow geographer Alison Mountz, cowrote the 2018 book Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States to give us the broader historical context of immigrant detention at Guantánamo, what it means as part of the larger picture, the conditions of the detention camps, and what is and isn’t unique about this moment under Trump. Loyd also coedited the 2012 book Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. | | | | What did you think when the White House released the directive to expand a migrant detention camp in Guantánamo Bay? I think this announcement came as shock to many who had been watching news reports that Guantánamo was in the process of closure. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (NSGB, also known as GTMO) is a 45-mile space that the United States leased from Cuba in 1903 following U.S. invasion of the island during the Spanish American War. On that base is a prison complex that George W. Bush opened in 2002 as part of what’s become known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The CIA “black site” operations on the base were initially secret. In the more than two decades of its existence, the Department of Defense–run prison has held over 780 people whom it labeled “enemy combatants” or terrorism suspects. Has Guantánamo also been a part of U.S. immigration and border enforcement? Has it been used before to round up and detain people? Yes. Elsewhere on the same naval base is a facility run by ICE called Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC). The facility going by this name was also authorized in 2002 by George W. Bush to “house and provide for the needs” of people attempting to migrate to the U.S., but who were interdicted or intercepted at sea. But this was not the first time that the U.S. had used the naval base to confine migrants. Ronald Reagan first authorized the interdiction of boats by U.S. Coast Guard and the subsequent George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations each used the base to confine asylum seekers and migrants. Each of these administrations confined tens of thousands of people fleeing from Haiti and Cuba in tent camps to deter future migration. The view of the U.S. government was that the vast majority of Haitians did not have credible claims to asylum. The most infamous episode came on the heels of Haitians fleeing persecution following the coup of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in which a group of Haitians, who had been recognized as refugees entitled to entry to the U.S. mainland, were held in a segregated camp due to their HIV-positive status. Street demonstrations and litigation eventually resulted in the federal government complying with law and admitting these individuals to the mainland. However, the U.S. has continued to treat the space as an exception to refugee and migration law. | | | | A photo by Sgt. David Kirkland from the 1990s. Kirkland writes: “For a temporary time, GTMO was home to tens of thousands of refugees from throughout the Caribbean who had fled left their homes looking for a brighter future.” Could you give us a wider view of how the Caribbean has been used for border and immigration enforcement? The correlation between the “empire of military bases,” as you put it in Boats, Borders, and Bases, and a shift to immigration detention? One of Marco Rubio’s first trips as secretary of state included traveling to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic to talk in part about “cooperation on migration.” This is part of a much longer history of the U.S. forging agreements with countries in the Caribbean and Central America to stem human mobility. A good example is from the mid-1990s. Amid political turmoil, Fidel Castro opened the ports, leading tens of thousands of Cubans to try to make their way to the U.S., where they had largely been welcomed as refugees of Communism. But Bill Clinton carried on the deterrent precedent for Haitians established by Reagan and Bush and used it to detain Cubans on Guantánamo. Meanwhile, the U.S. still controlled the Panama Canal Zone and still operated military bases in Panama, so when Guantánamo became overcrowded, the U.S. negotiated with the Panamanian government to confine Cubans on U.S. bases and in the Canal Zone. The sense of betrayal felt by the Cubans toward the U.S. fueled an uprising that the U.S. military moved to suppress. What are the conditions like at Guantánamo and other detention sites in the Caribbean? “Poor” is an understatement of the conditions. Rights organizations have alleged that the conditions have been tantamount to human rights violations. The deplorable conditions and uncertainty have resulted in rioting, suicides, suicide attempts, and legal challenges. In the 1990s, some tents on Guantanamo had only trash bags to shield inhabitants from the rain, and people held there reported maggots in their food. Lawyers suing for the release of Haitians also found video evidence of military officials’ attacks on the people confined there. More recently, rights organizations have condemned dilapidated housing, mold, lack of potable water, insufficient medical care, and child imprisonment. The difficulty of civilians gaining access to these spaces and publicizing their conditions contributes to the impunity. | | | | U.S. military with migrants arriving to Naval Base Guantanamo Bay on February 6. (Photo by Staff Sgt. ShaTyra Cox) Is the prevention-through-deterrence strategy—which we see in effect on the U.S. border with Mexico—also used in the Caribbean? You’ve reported extensively about the harmful consequences of prevention through deterrence as it’s been implemented in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As the Trump administration resumes the use of Guantánamo, it’s important to recognize the Caribbean as another border space where U.S. Coast Guard interceptions and detention on military bases I described earlier formed explicit iterations of deterrence. Presidents Obama and Biden expanded on deterrence efforts in the region using euphemistic language like “safe third country agreements” or “funds to address root causes of migration” in exchange for “cooperation” on migration, as brokered in the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. What is unique about Trump’s use of Guantánamo now in 2025? Trump in this moment is both unique and not. As in the first Trump presidency, his administration’s migration policing, detention, and deportation actions are purposefully mediated to create spectacular displays of force, which sow terror and fear. Using military planes to deport people and the military prisons on Guantánamo to detain immigrants are a new part of that state terrorism. At the same time, the apparent unlawfulness of the military detaining immigrants extends the unlawfulness of military prisons in the GWOT. The second thing that I regard as unique is that the bilateral agreements that have been brokered in the region to “cooperate” in deterring migration to the U.S. have now been transformed so that these countries act as “bridges” for deportation or extraterritorial sites of detention. Rubio’s visit to Panama was soon followed by disturbing reports of migrants from at least 10 countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China, being deported from the U.S. to Panama and confined in hotels. This adds to the spectacle of might. But this action likely could not have transpired so quickly unless Biden had not brokered this deal with Panama in 2024, a piece of border work that got little to no attention at the time. So, Trump can take credit for this cruelty, but Republican and Democratic administrations alike have built this transnational network of migration deterrence and deportation. Video put together by Jack Sapoch. He explains: “Satellite imagery shows recent changes around Guantanamo Bay's Migrant Operations Center consistent with a large scale constructions of tents This is likely to house incoming troops, but potentially as well new migrants being flown to the island by the Trump administration.” | | -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#35326): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/35326 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/111301275/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
