United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order that seeks to repurpose Guantanamo Bay, a US prison in Cuba, into a detention centre for unauthorised immigrants.
About 11 million such immigrants live in the US, where the total population is 341 million, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center.
Debates about immigration have dominated US politics in recent years and formed a crucial part of the recent presidential election campaign. Trump has promised to carry out “the largest deportation in American history”.
Yet, until now, the facility has been used to house only those whom the US describes as “illegal enemy combatants” – not undocumented migrants.
Here is more about Trump’s plans for Guantanamo Bay, a notorious camp where US military officials have previously been accused of using torture tactics against inmates:
What has Trump said about Guantanamo Bay?
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order titled, “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity”.
This order directs the US secretaries of defence and homeland security to work on expanding Guantanamo Bay “to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States”.
Trump has said that 30,000 beds will be available to house “the worst” undocumented immigrants, meaning those with criminal records, saying his administration “didn’t trust” their countries of origin to hold them.
The order additionally states: “This memorandum is issued in order to halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels, and restore national sovereignty.”
Trump announced this action while signing the first piece of legislation of his second presidential term, the Laken Riley Act, which also seeks to expel unauthorised immigrants.
He said: “Today’s signings bring us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.”
This is one of many instances in which Trump has linked unauthorised migrants with crime in the US. However, a 2023 study by economists at US universities analysed incarceration rates and census data from 1870 to 2020 and found that immigrants were consistently less likely to be imprisoned than people born in the US.
What is the Laken Riley Act?
The Laken Riley Act is a bill that was passed by the Republican-majority Congress and signed into law on Wednesday by Trump, also a Republican.
The bill requires the Department of Homeland Security to “detain certain non-US nationals (aliens under federal law) who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting”.
The act is named after a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered on the University of Georgia campus in February. An undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was found guilty of her killing.
Ibarra had previously been arrested for shoplifting. He waived his right to a jury trial and was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole in November.
Some Democrats opposed the legislation.
“In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they would be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted by The Associated Press news agency as saying.
However, some Democrats voted for the bill – mostly representatives from battleground states where elections can potentially be won by either Democrats or Republicans.
In the House of Representatives, the bill passed 263-156 with the support of 46 Democrats. In the Senate, the bill passed 64-35 with 12 Democrats voting in favour. Democrats approving the bill were from the states of Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Hampshire, Georgia, Michigan and Virginia.
“Anyone who commits a crime should be held accountable. That’s why I voted to pass the Laken Riley Act,” Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, wrote on X on January 20.
Where is Guantanamo Bay located?
The detention centre is on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the eastern tip of Cuba. It is about 800km (500 miles) southeast of Florida.
What is the history of the detention centre?
In November 2001, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, then-US President George W Bush signed a military order allowing the US to detain foreign nationals without charge indefinitely as part of the US “war on terror”.
The prison that held them was within the Guantanamo base. It opened on January 11, 2002, and the first 20 prisoners – mostly from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Kuwait and the United Kingdom – were brought in.
Over the past two decades, 780 men and teenage boys (at least 15 prisoners classed as “juveniles”) have been held there, many without charge.
“Bush said his Guantanamo scheme would help end terrorism, and it did precisely the opposite. Trump’s scheme will likewise make the US less safe, rather than more,” Clive Stafford Smith, one of the first human rights lawyers to gain entry to the prison after it opened and whose clients include Guantanamo inmates, told Al Jazeera.
In December 2002, then-US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld greenlit a series of interrogation techniques in the prison, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions and the use of dogs to “induce stress”.
In 2009, Democratic former President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the prison. However, it stayed open as Obama faced bipartisan opposition over security concerns and Congress passed a law blocking the closure. Obama’s order was ultimately reversed by an executive order signed by Trump in 2018 during his first term. Democratic President Joe Biden restarted the Obama administration’s bid to close the prison, but the prison remains open after Congress again opposed prisoner transfers.
As of January 6, 15 prisoners remained in Guantanamo Bay after most people in the prison were released, having never been charged with any crime, and repatriated to their home countries or third countries over the years.
According to a 2023 report by rights group Amnesty International, only seven inmates of Guantanamo have ever been convicted of terror offences, including five as a result of pre-trial agreements under which they pleaded guilty in return for the possibility of release from the base.
In the same report, Amnesty said: “The facilities at Guantanamo have become emblematic of the gross human rights abuses and torture perpetrated by the US government in the name of counterterrorism.”
Amnesty referred to another 2023 report by the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism which, it said, “details 21 years of indefinite detention for 780 Muslim men and boys, and the myriad human rights violations against them”.
Is Trump’s plan to hold undocumented immigrants in Guantanamo viable?
Stafford Smith said that Trump “has the raw power to take people there, just as President Bush did with the detainees in January 2002”.
He pointed out that the difference now is that, unlike prisoners taken from foreign countries to Guantanamo Bay, unauthorised immigrants will be taken from the US to the prison.
This means “they will have all the legal rights of [US] residents there, including the entire Constitution and the right to a proper court”, he said. He added that in this case, Guantanamo Bay will function as “merely a different detention centre” for immigrants who would otherwise be held in the US.
“Thus they will have the same rights as any refugee – more, in fact, as Trump has already unwisely said he can’t send them home, which means there will be a strong case that they cannot be held indefinitely,” Stafford Smith said. He explained that a refugee would be allowed to have family visits, unlike the prisoners currently detained at Guantanamo.
Stafford Smith, who has visited Guantanamo Bay to meet with clients on many occasions, said there are only 500 cells and a few other spaces for people in the prison, but even if Trump detained 30,000 people, it would be a very small percentage of the total number of immigrants he has promised to deport, making his action “totally inconsequential in the grand scheme”.
Will there be legal action to stop this?
Stafford Smith predicted legal action would be taken to halt Trump’s recent action and, because the prisoners will have legal rights, “it will be much easier for us as lawyers” compared with earlier legal cases against the Guantanamo prison system.
He cited the example of a case filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy group, in 2002 on behalf of four men held at Guantanamo Bay. The case argued against the prison indefinitely detaining their clients without a lawful hearing. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the detainees. By that time, two of the men had already been released. The other two were released after the judgement.
Stafford Smith deemed Trump’s new action “a populist charade meant to show the US people that he is doing something”.