The Trump administration is creating a legal justification to send immigrants without criminal records to the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
CBS News obtained a government memo showing an agreement between the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense creating broad discretion about who can be sent to the base. The criteria directly contradicts President Trump’s comments about the Cuba base earlier this year, in which he said only the “worst” migrants should be sent there.
The memo doesn’t even mention criminality, stating that the departments agreed to use the base to detain immigrants with deportation orders who have “a nexus to a transnational criminal organization (TCO) or criminal drug activity.” Having a nexus, as defined by the memo, constitutes being part of a transnational criminal group or paying one “to be smuggled into the United States.”
Many immigrants crossing the southern U.S. border end up having to pay criminal groups to facilitate their journey, meaning this could be used to detain large numbers of people. And even if there’s no proof that they were involved with any criminal organization, the memo allows authorities to assume that they are if they’re from a country “where the preponderance of aliens from that country enter the United States in that fashion.”
The Trump administration has already flown some Venezuelan immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, but flew them back to the U.S. in February. Since then, it has reportedly held immigrants from different countries at the base before returning them to the U.S. or other countries. According to a DoD spokesperson, there are 42 immigrants still held at the base, including 10 “high-threat” detainees.
The fact that the Trump administration is using the Guantánamo base at all in its mass deportation efforts is egregious, considering that the base previously held detainees from the War on Terror as a way to skirt the Geneva Conventions. Its revival suggests that administration officials see a need to dodge basic human rights laws in detaining immigrants.
Coupled with its sending of immigrants to El Salvador, the majority of whom also don’t have criminal records, the Trump administration’s use of Guantánamo Bay to hold immigrants it wants to deport is yet another human rights violation from officials who couldn’t care less.
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