Trump Has Begun Deportation Flights to Feared 'American Gulag' at Gitmo

"America can and must be better than this," said U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal Tuesday as the Trump administration announced it had begun operating deportation flights bound for Cuba, where President Donald Trump has said he wants to detain undocumented immigrants at the notorious Guantánamo Bay naval base and prison.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the first flights authorized last week by Trump were underway, with the Department of Defense having deployed Marines to the U.S. base in Cuba on Sunday to begin expanding detention facilities.

Trump has called for the prison to be expanded to hold 30,000 people.

The flights announced Tuesday are the latest step in Trump's militarized anti-immigration operations, with 1,500 soldiers and Marines deployed to the southern U.S. border and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducting major immigration raids across the country.

According to reports, roughly half of the people arrested in cities such as New York and Chicago have had no criminal records and were guilty only of overstaying a visa or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without going through a port of entry—civil violations of U.S. immigration laws rather than criminal offenses.

Last week, Leavitt said all undocumented immigrants, not just those who have committed violent crimes—whose arrests Trump had previously said would be prioritized—were criminals who had "invaded our nation's borders."

At Slate on Sunday, Pedro Gerson noted that Trump's "entire political rise is tethered to the idea that immigrants are invading the country and that only he can fix it."

"Trump intends to build in Guantánamo purposely to reify the same message that propelled him to power: Immigrants are criminals and they are here to hurt you," wrote Gerson. "But now Trump is going further: Some of these immigrants are not only criminals, they are equivalent to terrorists. Frighteningly, this move may also be Trump signaling an intent to strip undocumented immigrants of even more rights and treat them under similarly abusive conditions as recent Guantánamo Bay detainees have experienced."

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was vague in an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday about who exactly would be sent to Guantánamo Bay, commonly known as Gitmo, via military planes.

When host Kristen Welker asked whether "women, children, and families" would be imprisoned there, Noem reverted back to the administration's previous claim that it is "targeting the worst of the worst" and detaining people who "are making our streets more dangerous."

"After that, we have final removal orders on many individuals in this country. They are the next priority," said Noem. "We're going to use the facilities that we have."

"Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."

The mass detention facility was built by the Clinton administration to hold 12,500 inmates, and became infamous during President George W. Bush's administration for its detention of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror." Detainees have been held without charges in violation of the U.S. Constitution and have been subjected to torture. Fifteen detainees remain at the prison following the Biden administration's transfer of 11 people to Oman last month.

Trump's planned expansion of Gitmo's prison would result in "a detention facility of unprecedented size in the American context," wrote Gerson at Slate. "The Tule Lake Japanese internment camp, for example, had a capacity of around 18,000. If the Trump administration actually builds the detention camp in Guantanamo, it'll double in size Auschwitz-Birkenau's original design and be bigger than Dachau and Treblinka combined."

As Yael Schacher, director for the Americans and Europe at Refugees International, said in a statement, the U.S. prison was also used to "inhumanely [detain] Cuban and Haitian asylum-seekers in the 1990s."

"The Trump administration's use of military planes to send immigrants to detention at Guantánamo Bay epitomizes the administration's gratuitously cruel, illegal, expensive, and burdensome approach to immigration policy," said Schacher. "Guantánamo's Migrant Operations Center, which the Trump administration is sending Marines to expand, is truly a black box that no nongovernmental organization has been allowed to visit."

"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," Schacher added. "Members of Congress should investigate the move as a misuse of military assets. Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."

Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, warned that mass deportation to Gitmo will "cut people off from lawyers, family, and support systems, throwing them into a black hole so the U.S. government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight."

"Sending immigrants to Guantánamo is a profoundly cruel, costly move," she said. "Shut Gitmo down now and forever!"