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It’s not just the private prison companies (Geo Group, CoreCivic, etc.) that will thrive amidst the Trump Administration’s unprecedented effort to detain and deport undocumented migrants, along with those who’ve committed crimes. This nationwide campaign will see the US resort to overseas prisons on a scale that will dwarf in sheer volume the Global War on Terror’s various prisons and “black sites.”
We are told that Trump 2.0 aims to house/detain/guard/imprison 30,000 migrants in Gitmo’s detention camp alone— a development that symbolically elevates MAGA above the preceding GWOT that made the Guantanamo prison so notorious for its side-stepping of America’s civil judicial system.
What could go wrong? Plenty, but there is history there.
The U.S. detained migrants at Guantanamo in the early 1990s under President George H.W. Bush, when thousands of Haitians fled violence in the wake of a military coup and were picked up at sea by the Coast Guard. The administration refused to accept their claims of political asylum and sent them to a makeshift detention camp on the base on the southeastern tip of Cuba.
This time it’s different:
Trump is proposing something altogether different by sending people who have already been in the United States, including some legally. The move is also sure to invite new legal challenges — as well as some of the same problems that emerged under President George W. Bush in the post-9/11 era, when the U.S. turned the base into a military detention center for people suspected of links to al Qaeda and the Taliban. More than two decades later, that saga is ongoing, with 15 men still held there.
The dangerous pattern, as described by one expert lawyer, resembles a military intervention: the USG sees an easy answer/solution going in, but once in, the lack of an “exit strategy” dooms the endeavor.
The telling quote:
Once we put people there, it’s incredibly difficult to get them out.
As for accommodating an envisioned 30k? The lawyer called this “delusional” in terms of logistics. Those funds are better spent at the actual border.
Then there’s the problem of modeled behavior — something we’ve run into time and again since the GWOT (like with targeted assassinations of citizens overseas — a practice now openly pursued by all manner of great powers).
The lawyer:
And if we create an offshore prison camp, what do we say when Putin creates an offshore prison camp to hold the next generation of his opponents, and then the Chinese decide to create a prison camp to hold Uyghurs from Xinjiang?
When asked about the sheer logistics, the lawyer offered this brutal assessment:
Well, the base was built to be a coaling and refueling station. It wasn’t built to be a prison camp. It is, in fact, very poorly suited to be a prison camp. There aren’t that many buildings. Most of them are temporary. It’s a desert environment, and to put people into tents is extremely unsafe as a public health matter. The water is bad. Hospital facilities are insufficient. The more people you put there, the less capacity you have.
And then, most important, people who are at Guantanamo are in prison. They have no way to spend their time productively. They can’t work. They can’t contribute to the economy. They can’t support themselves. And so they’re entirely dependent on the people who are holding them captive. It’s a way of taking people who may be working legally on work authorizations and making sure that the only way that they can manifest their frustration is by demonstrating, rioting, resisting force. For this, the military on Guantanamo is totally unsuited. The idea that uniform military are now being enlisted for immigration detention on a grand scale is exactly what people didn’t sign up for in a volunteer army. If they wanted to be prison guards, they could sign up to be prison guards, but that’s not what they did.
Perverting the US Military along such lines is depressing to consider, but Trump’s ambitions reflect the strategic reality that the entire world is drifting uncontrollably toward: one in which the majority of interstate tensions will be North-v-South with climate change-driven migrations as the core security issue.
I’m going to have to add another “r” outcome — as in, rendition
The biggest US military deployments since the start of the first Trump administration? To the border.
The tell-tale response by both Mexico and Canada when threatened with tariffs recently? Promising to send military forces to their US borders.
Gitmo, the GWOT eye-sore, now becomes Gitmo the concentration camp for migrants (a 230-fold increase would strike me as concentrating).
This is but a band-aid, however, given the desired scale of deportations.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has made the country’s stark, harsh prisons a trademark of his aggressive fight against crime. Since March 2022, more than 84,000 people have been arrested, many with little to no due process.
Even before the campaign against gangs, El Salvador’s prisons were notoriously violent and overcrowded but the crown jewel of Bukele’s fight is the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, he opened in 2023 …
I remember this layout from WWII history books
Able to hold 40,000 inmates, the CECOT is made up of eight sprawling pavilions. Its cells hold 65 to 70 prisoners each. They do not receive visits. There are no programs preparing them to return to society after their sentences, no workshops or educational programs. They are never allowed outside.
Different detention camps throughout history (US on left, German on right)
Of course, it would be illegal to send actual US citizens there, but you gotta bet certain people will get caught up in the mix. Heck, there are already cases where US authorities have picked up and detained Navajo tribal members by mistake — or sheer over-zealousness due to quota requirements being levied by superiors.
“I mean these are not new concerns,” Justin Ahasteen, the executive director of the Navajo Nation’s Washington, D.C. office, said. “These concerns stem all the way back to World War Two.
“For the longest time there were Native Americans, especially from our tribe, who were confused with being Japanese citizens and we’re not Japanese. As time has evolved that fear has always remained as being treated differently because we may have been mis-profiled.”
Mistakes always being made, but we’re just getting started
Shutting down our foreign aid and setting up overseas prisons — quite the combination for improving regional integration of the sort one might imagine would lead to new stars on Old Glory.
But one imagines an explicit quid pro quo for, say, nations that want to see US foreign aid resumed: give us access to your prisons.
A dark turn in US foreign policy, to be sure.
Always with the Statue of Liberty!
John Carpenter’s Escape from El Salvador … or New York, or Los Angeles, depending on the scenario.
America is already famous for imprisoning a great deal of people per capita and having the world’s largest prison population.
El Salvador, thanks to Bukele, now ranks at just over 1,000 per 100k, so the world leader.
Bukele received the honor of a first-trip-abroad visit by our SECSTATE
Not the way you win a Nobel
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