Washington, DC — Today, Trump announced he will sign an executive order to detain 30,000 people at Guantánamo Bay, a military base in Cuba. The announcement comes as part of the administration’s plan to more than double Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) detention capacity, including opening four new 10,000 bed detention facilities, as well as 14 smaller sites with space for 700 to 1,000 people.The use of Guantánamo Bay for ICE detention will likely require a mass influx of resources to erect temporary large-scale detention facilities, as it was previously reported that the existing facility on Guantánamo Bay has the capacity to hold 120 people.
In immigration detention, people are isolated from their loved ones, cut off from support networks, and imprisoned in unsafe conditions while facing a potential life-altering deportation. Temporary, large-scale detention facilities exacerbate the well-documented abuse inherent to the detention system, including unsanitary conditions and medical neglect, given the sheer number of people in ICE custody paired with a complete lack of oversight and transparency on military bases. Since 2013 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has called for Guantánamo Bay’s closure citing its well-documented record of abuse and indefinite detention.
Detention Watch Network, a national coalition of organizations working to end immigration detention and the Center for Constitutional Rights that has led the legal battle over Guantánamo for 23 years, issued the following statements:
Stacy Suh, Program Director of Detention Watch Network, said:
“Use of Guantánamo Bay to detain people is the latest in a shocking plan to expand the immigration detention system. Guantánamo Bay’s abusive history speaks for itself and in no uncertain terms will put people’s physical and mental health in jeopardy. If realized, Trump’s immigration detention expansion will tear apart families, put people’s lives in danger, and cost taxpayers greatly. It will also increase the targeting and racial profiling of people within their communities based on what they look like, the language they speak, and where they work, while further expanding the detention system that is rife with abuse. This moment demands a national outcry — our elected officials cannot afford to remain silent on Trump’s excessive cruelty. Rather, they must vocally oppose Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda by denying Trump the resources he needs to carry out his agenda, including by cutting funds to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said:
“President Trump’s decision to use Guantánamo – global symbol and site of lawlessness, torture, and racism – to house immigrants should horrify us all. Like many of Trump’s authoritarian attacks on human rights, this one has shameful precedents in U.S. history. Long before the second Bush administration used the facility to hold and abuse nearly 800 Muslim men and boys as part of its “war on terror,” the first Bush administration held Haitian refugees there to try to deny them their rights under international law. The order – directing the DOD and DHS prepare to hold 30,000 people – sends a clear message: migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supports. The Center for Constitutional Rights has challenged the U.S. government’s use of Guantánamo in all its incarnations, and we, along with our partners, will do so again.”
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