The Chaos of Trump’s Guantánamo Plan

The military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long occupied a blighted corner of the American legal system. Multiple Administrations have tried, and failed, to close the facility, which opened in 2002 and at one point held nearly eight hundred terrorism suspects, commonly called “the worst of the worst” because of their purported ties to the attacks of 9/11. Many of them spent at least a decade there without facing actual charges or having a trial. All but fifteen had finally been released or transferred when, earlier this month, Donald Trump added a fresh indignity to Guantánamo’s dark history.

Over several days, beginning on February 4th, the government sent a hundred and seventy-eight Venezuelan migrants apprehended on U.S. soil to the site. They were held incommunicado; a hundred and twenty-seven of them were in Camp 6, which was once reserved for alleged Al Qaeda combatants. On February 12th, four legal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit on behalf of three of the Venezuelans. “Remarkably,” the emergency motion noted, “these detainees now have less access to counsel than the military detainees at Guantánamo who have been held under the laws of war in the aftermath of September 11.” This past Thursday, before a judge could issue a ruling, the Trump Administration announced that it had deported nearly all the Venezuelans to an airbase in Honduras. From there, they would be flown back to Venezuela.

The episode featured all the elements of the new political order. Migrants were villainized and treated like an existential threat to the country. There was not even a semblance of transparency or accountability. Amid the chaos, it was easy to overlook the fact that the Venezuelans were being returned to a brutal dictatorship; in 2022, Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, said that deporting people there was “a very real death sentence.”

Guantánamo provided the ideal stage for Trump’s brand of political theatre. His “mass deportation” agenda is premised on the idea that all undocumented immigrants are criminals, and that any differences in the labels used to describe them—whether gang members, terrorists, or, to quote Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, “dirtbags”—are merely semantic. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump said of the Venezuelans sent to Guantánamo. He offered no evidence. Neither did Noem, who said that they were “mainly child pedophiles” who were “trafficking children, trafficking drugs.”

But, owing to the work of journalists and lawyers, information slowly trickled out about the detainees. Then, on Thursday, the government acknowledged that more than fifty of them had no criminal record apart from entering the country unlawfully. One was an asylum seeker who had passed his preliminary screening, but had lost his case while representing himself before an immigration judge. His sister learned that he was in Guantánamo when the Trump Administration posted photos of the first migrants arriving there.

The abruptness of their removal from the facility, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader lack of planning. Trump wants to systematically expand the role of the military in his immigration crackdown. Usually, deportations are carried out by planes chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which can accommodate about a hundred and fifty passengers. But the Administration has taken to using military aircraft. These planes are smaller, carrying roughly eighty people, and, as a Reuters analysis pointed out, the cost per person can be more than five times that of a first-class ticket on a commercial airline. Late last month, Trump signed a memorandum with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security authorizing the transfer of thirty thousand migrants to Guantánamo. The plan continues apace. In a court filing, an ice official said that the base “will temporarily house aliens before they are removed,” and that doing so is “necessary to complete the ongoing removal operations.” Meanwhile, according to the Times, the Administration is making preparations to hold thousands of undocumented immigrants at military sites across the U.S.

There are many logistical impediments to Trump’s agenda. One is tied to foreign policy. Planes need a place to land, and many countries, including Venezuela, have typically refused to receive deportees. The government claims that Guantánamo helps it address this challenge. But, at the end of January, Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, agreed to start accepting deportation flights. Other countries, including Panama, are now receiving migrants from around the world deported by the U.S. Given all that, sending the detainees to Guantánamo seems more like a public-relations stunt than like an operational decision.

Trump, on his first day in office, signed a dozen immigration-related executive orders, in which he described global mass migration as a form of “invasion.” According to one order, the military has a “well-established role” in repelling “unlawful forays by foreign nationals.” Another invokes the Alien Enemies Act, a remnant of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which could allow the Administration to detain and deport immigrants, including those who are here lawfully, if they were born in countries that it considers hostile to the U.S. That order defines a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, Mexican cartels, and the Central American street gang MS-13 as “foreign terrorist organizations.” During Trump’s first term, when the majority of migrants at the border were Central Americans, he turned MS-13 into a byword for migrant crime. Now that Venezuelans are the most visible group, he is focussing on Tren de Aragua. The gang is real, but the gambit is to make it seem as though any Venezuelan in the country might be a member.

The only way to counteract such maneuvers is to call them out—something that the Democrats have yet to do. The President spoke publicly about the Guantánamo plan at a press conference where he signed the first law of his second term: the Laken Riley Act, named for a Georgia nursing student murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant last year. The law, which requires the detention of any undocumented person charged with a misdemeanor, such as shoplifting or minor theft, passed with bipartisan votes. Congressional Democrats and their staffs say privately that, on immigration issues, the voters “have spoken.” Trump’s promise to execute mass deportations may have helped him win, but it’s one thing for Americans to support a slogan and quite another for them to face up to the human consequences. If Democrats don’t look away, maybe the public won’t, either. ♦