On Jan. 29, President Trump ordered the Defense and Homeland Security Departments to prepare Guantanamo Bay to receive up to 30,000 illegal migrants. Trump has outwardly expressed that migrants being held at Guantanamo Bay will be “high threat” individuals.
For those unaware, Guantánamo Bay is a U.S. naval base located in Southeastern Cuba, leased from Cuba under a 1903 agreement following the Spanish-American war. After 9/11, it became a detention facility to hold suspected terrorists outside the reach of U.S. courts. Over the years, it has become infamous for indefinite detentions, and reports of torture– sparking global human rights concerns.
I have no problem with the placement of terrorists and high threat level illegal immigrants in Guantanamo Bay. The facility is an unfortunate necessity in a world where we simply have no time to wait for fully democratic processes. If a terrorist is being held at Guantanamo Bay and they have information on a future planned terrorist attack, enhanced interrogation techniques are justified. The same applies to an illegal immigrant who has brutally
massacred countless individuals to strengthen the cartel’s reign of terror. These people aren’t any normal criminals. They are the embodiment of human evil in its most horrific form, and they have intelligence that could save lives or disband horrific criminal organizations, factors together make them undeserving of our democratic processes.
With all this being said, I want to highlight that this treatment should exclusively apply to the “worst of the worst” criminals. Trump has promised to bring 30,000 illegal immigrants. That number concerns me. I am skeptical that there are truly 30,000 illegal immigrants who fit into the criteria I previously described. Maybe there are. We’ll find out with time. I would like to believe
Trump and ICE Director Tom Homan have deeply vetted the illegal immigrants being sent to the
“legal blackhole” of Guantanamo Bay, ensuring that each and every one of those 30,000 are truly
pressing threats to society.
On Feb. 19, ABC News reported that it had spoken with the families of two migrants who claim their relatives are being detained at Guantánamo Bay despite having no criminal record. This should be an extreme statistical outlier of the detainee population, a rare mistake rather than a systemic issue. If errors have been made, they must be swiftly corrected with great urgency and transparency to ensure Guantánamo remains reserved for the most dangerous threats to society. With little democratic processes and it being a “legal blackhole” where due process is often suspended, there is a risk that the system could be abused.
With the current political and cultural climate, where immigrants have become largely scapegoated, there is a very real threat for undeserving human rights violations. Guantanamo Bay be transformed from what is meant to be a strictly controlled detention facility into a tool for arbitrary detentions.
This is a situation to absolutely monitor and be conscious of. As this situation unfolds, it is imperative that policymakers, oversight bodies and the media vigilantly stay alert. However, we must not jump to any drastic conclusions. This will only blur the line between fact and emotion for the general public who is relatively unaware of the political happenings of the world. We are only in the preliminary phase of this plan being implemented, and its future impact remains largely uncertain.
