The American Council of Immigration does not approve or oppose candidates for elected offices. We aim to provide an analysis of the impact of elections on the US immigration system.
Last week, President Trump ordered the Secretary of Homeland Security to expand immigration detention at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay Navy Bureau, holding up to 30,000 people. Since then, US Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has transferred at least two migrant flights from the United States to detention facilities.
Immigration detention in Guantanamo Bay is nothing new. However, this is the first time the US has used Guantanamo Bay to retain the thousands of migrants already at its border. In doing so, President Trump is launching a new era of scale and scope that promises to violate the expansion of non-citizen rights.
Historic immigration detention in Guantanamo Bay
The US president has detained immigrants in Guantanamo Bay for most of the past half century. In the 1970s, Presidents Ford and Carter held dozens of Haitians awaiting interviews about their exile at the base. The rough waters urged Haitian ships to be made unrealistic and to seek support from the base rather than continuing their journey to Florida.
In the 1980s, on-site immigration detention was significantly suspended. President Reagan ordered the U.S. Coast Guard to stop Haitians and other immigrants to prevent invasions into the United States. He then moved their asylum lawsuit to the Coast Guard Cutter deck.
Detention resumed in 1991. A violent military coup in Haiti encouraged an escape that overwhelmed the Coast Guard’s ability to detain Haitians while claims of exile were pending. So President Bush transferred around 12,500 Haitians, including women and children, from Coast Guard ships to a grumpy tent camp at the station. President Clinton has emptied the camp by removing Haitians from asylum and banishing them to Haiti for years to come. Clinton then reopened camp in 1994, accommodating tens of thousands of Cubans and Haitians without proper food, water and sanitation.
Modern immigrant detention in Guantanamo Bay
Before last week’s Trump declaration, the ICE detention facility (MOC) at Guantanamo Bay Navy Station only embraced Cubans and Haitian immigrants who intervened in the sea before entering the United States. The report shows the average of 20 migrants per day in 2022, but detention at 120 beds of MOC has not been made public.
Under the first stopping scheme since the early 1990s, the US government no longer considers immigrants who were intervened at sea due to asylum. But it resettles those who are feared enough to return to their homeland in a third country like Canada.
To promote resettlement, the Coast Guard will relocate immigrants entangled in the custody of the Ice in Guantanamo Bay if they fear returning to both the Coast Guard and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). . In Guantanamo, USCIS reassess the fear of these migrants’ return. ICE sends back those who have failed this reevaluation to their home countries and forwards those who are passed to state custody elsewhere at the naval base for resettlement abroad.
Trump is planning Guantanamo Bay
Detaining up to 30,000 non-citizens in Guantanamo Bay is a costly and abusive shift in immigration detention. It imposes its own costs and threats to immigrant rights without any benefits to the US government other than its harm to non-citizens. But this time, the harm can be addressed in court.
An expansion of immigrant detention in Guantanamo Bay would Quintuple the average immigrant detention bed cost of $57,378 a year. As of August 2024, ICE will pay a private prison company about $32.68 million a year to provide 120 detention beds to the MOC. That would cost $272,409 per bed. The Department of Defense Detention Facility in Guantanamo Bay costs around $13.5 million per story per storey each year.
Traditionally, Guantanamo Bay offers a unique US appeal to keep immigrants who have not yet reached the US. It allows the government to bind such immigrants without accruing legal and constitutional rights that exist in US territory. But for US immigrants who have the right to file a lawsuit seeking asylum before an immigrant judge under US law, Guantanamo Bay is an abused detention facility on military bases that are inaccessible overseas. There is a huge amount of logistics that ensure that those who have moved from the US to Guantanamo retain access to legal due process rights and are subject to humane treatment, and this is probably a feature, not a bug.
Guantanamo’s extended detainees for human rights abuses. However, the Trump administration will face lawsuits for these violations. Unlike non-citizens who were detained in Guantanamo by past administrations, those who are moved there now have rights under US law.
Submitted below: Cuba, Trump administration
