Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the Trump administration has started sending people it describes as criminal migrants. Noem said that the site will “house the worst of the worst and illegal criminals that are in the United States of America.” President Trump signed an executive memo in January directing the facilities at the naval station to be expanded to full capacity.
Sending undocumented immigrants to Guantanamo Bay is a losing proposition. The move raises serious legal, logistical and human rights issues. It will create more problems than it solves, while doing little to improve our dysfunctional immigration system.
The administration’s move may briefly appear successful in one way: as a short-term PR play. Some Trump supporters have welcomed the idea because they think it sends a message about how tough the administration is on migrants. However, Trump and Noem are about to find out why holding people at Gitmo is terrible policy.
Although Guantanamo is best known as a place where terrorism suspects are held, its facilities have been used to house migrants before. In the early 1990s, thousands of Haitians and Cubans were detained there. But these were people fleeing their home countries who were intercepted at sea. They had never set foot in the U.S., unlike the migrants Trump is sending there now. This distinction is critical because undocumented people who have been in the U.S. are guaranteed certain due process rights under our Constitution. Factor in a Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention, and it’s a recipe for endless legal battles.
The administration is mistaken if it believes that shipping migrants to Gitmo will avoid scrutiny of their treatment. Guantanamo is a high-profile location that Amnesty International once termed “the Gulag of our time.” There are already lawsuits in the works over the holding of migrants at Guantanamo; on Monday a federal court temporarily blocked the transfer of three Venezuelans to the base, a harbinger of more litigation to come.
To be clear, sending migrants to Guantanamo is not the same as deporting them; it does not remove them from the bureaucracy of the U.S. immigration system, nor does it exclude them from civilian jurisdiction and place them under military jurisdiction as was argued for detainees captured abroad as “enemy combatants.” It is simply sending them offshore, where they will be under the full-time care of the U.S. government.
The costs of holding migrants at Guantanamo will be staggering. An enormous investment of funds will be required to expand the base’s capacity, including more money for food, water, staffing, medical facilities, housing and potentially even schools — because Noem has repeatedly dodged the question of whether migrant children will be held in the base’s sweltering tents.
Guantanamo’s remote location means that virtually everything, from building materials to food supplies, will have to be imported. In 2019, a New York Times analysis found that it cost $13 million a year to hold each detainee at Guantanamo, an amount that President Trump then termed “crazy” and “a fortune.” (The average cost per immigration detainee within the U.S. is around $57,000 a year.)
Just imagine how the costs at Gitmo would skyrocket if Trump attempts to fulfill his promise to send 30,000 migrants there. By comparison, there are about 40,000 migrants in detention in the entire U.S.
As of Jan. 6, Gitmo held 15 detainees, housed by the Defense Department. To scale up to anywhere close to 30,000 will be an enormous drain on the Homeland Security budget — at the expense of policy goals that the president’s supporters say they want, such as mass deportations and border security.
The administration wants to hold migrants at Guantanamo until they can be deported back to their countries of origin. Yet there are countries like Cuba and China that refuse to take deportees back, and other nations may cease to accept deportees depending on the state of relations with the U.S. As a result, filling Guantanamo with migrants has the potential to turn it into — once again — a permanent penal colony.
Guantanamo has a notorious reputation today because of abuses that occurred there as part of the post-9/11 “war on terror.” That began more than 20 years ago, and just last year, the International Refugee Assistance Project found conditions at the facility to be inhumane, citing undrinkable water, open sewage and poor medical care.
Holding migrants at Guantanamo could even backfire. In 1993, a federal judge ordered the release of Haitians from the island because of inadequate medical facilities and due process violations.
Sending migrants to Guantanamo Bay is costly, inefficient and cruel. It’s a false solution destined to become a long-term political and humanitarian disaster.
Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and contributor to NBC Latino and CNN Opinion. X: @RaulAReyes; Instagram: @raulareyes1
