During the election, Donald Trump promised the “mass deportation” of illegal immigrants. We’re just beginning to see what that means, as he orders the construction of a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay for 30,000 people.
Seizing people off the streets requires an archipelago of detention camps while they await transport “home”. For how long, nobody knows.
The US naval base, where this facility will be, also includes the high-security military prison housing just 15 remnants of the “war on terror”, including the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
What began as a temporary holding pen on a US outpost in Cuba turned for nearly two decades into a terrible oubliette, housing hundreds of the supposed “worst of the worst” Al Qaeda terrorists.
Some were; many weren’t. In 2003, I was one of the first journalists in the world to enter Camp Iguana, a tiny prison compound within the complex for three boys aged 13 to 15. These “juvenile enemy combatants” could watch Disney videos but could not see the sea. No prisoner could as they rotted away, deliberately far from justice and the law.
Many islands in Latin America have served as penal colonies. Honduras is preparing the construction of the first new one in the West on an uninhabited nature reserve. Trump is not just thinking about Guantanamo. He admires the brutal treatment being meted out to tens of thousands of gang members in El Salvador. There, prisoners are being locked up in mass incarceration camps in horribly overcrowded cells and sleep on metal cots without mattresses. Some are serving 200-year sentences.
Days before Trump spoke to Sir Keir Starmer by phone, the US leader rang president Nayib Bukele last week to discuss “working together to stop illegal immigration and crack down on transnational gangs like Tren de Aragua”, according to a White House statement. As Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, has confirmed, Trump views all undocumented immigrants as criminals because they entered the US illegally.
Marco Rubio is about to head to El Salvador as part of a swing through Latin America on his first trip abroad as secretary of state. Top of his agenda will be a so-called “safe third party” agreement for Bukele to take non-Salvadorian detainees.
Europe has its own grim record on islands like Lesbos in Greece, where migrants are housed in Moria, an official camp that looks like a prison. The squatter camp next door is even worse. I’ve been there. It’s terrible. But the refugees are sustained by the hope of a better future. If Trump presses ahead with mass deportations, the US is about to embark on a terrible experiment that will stain the nation.
Locking people up and throwing away the key sounds tough, but the reality is dehumanising, not just for the prisoners but their jailers. Americans grew ashamed of the “forever wars” launched after 9/11, with the ghastly images of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq staining their self-image as liberators.
One person, though, seems immune from shame: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s new defence secretary. His former alcoholism and alleged mistreatment of women was thoroughly covered during his Senate confirmation hearing, but far less attention was paid to his views on alleged war criminals.
Hegseth, a former national guardsman, argued US soldiers were up against jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq who “fight like savages” and were too hampered by regulations. As a Fox News contributor, he campaigned for pardons for three convicted US soldiers, which Trump granted as president in 2019. Two of the pardons sought by Hegseth were opposed by the US military.
Hegseth also served in Guantanamo and knows it well. “Guantanamo Bay… is a perfect spot,” Hegseth told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “We don’t want illegal criminals in the United States, not a minute longer than they have to be. Move them off to Guantanamo Bay where they can be safely maintained until they are deported to their final location.”
The “final location” for the new prisoners is uncertain. Venezuela is refusing to take any of its citizens back and a few military flights a day to unwilling hosts like Columbia and Brazil won’t be enough to satisfy Trump.
With Hegseth in charge of deploying the military under emergency powers to assistant immigration officials, the US is in danger of creating a Latin American gulag.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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