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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
"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," said one rights advocate.
"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!"
In case you weren't already convinced that CISA is a surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill, today, the Senate rejected four separate amendments to the bill that attempted to protect Americans' privacy better. Senator Wyden had an amendment to require the removal of personal information before information could be shared, which was voted down 55 to 41. Senator Heller had an amendment that was a backstop against the Wyden amendment, saying that if the Wyden amendment didn't pass, Homeland Security would be responsible for removing such personal information. That amendment also failed with 49 to 47 votes. Senator Leahy had an amendment that would have removed FOIA exemptions in the bill (making it much less transparent how CISA was used). That amendment was voted down 59 to 37. Senator Franken then had an amendment that would have "tightened" the definition of cybersecurity threats so that the shared information needed to be "reasonably likely" to cause damage, as opposed to the current "may" cause damage. And (you guessed it because you're good at this), it was also voted down by a 60 to 35 vote.
Meanwhile, Marcy Wheeler notes that the revised version of the bill by Senators Burr and Feinstein, which claimed to incorporate greater transparency requirements proposed by Senator Tester, actually takes away a lot of transparency and actually makes it more difficult for Congress to learn whether or not CISA is being used for domestic surveillance:
That Burr and DiFi watered down Tester's measures so much makes two things clear. First, they don't want to count some of the things that will be most important to count to see whether corporations and agencies are abusing this bill. They don't want to count measures that will reveal if this bill does harm.
Most importantly, though, they want to keep this information from Congress. This information would almost certainly not show up to us in unclassified form, it would just be shared with some members of Congress (and on the House side, just be shared with the Intelligence Committee unless someone asks nicely for it).
But Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein want to ensure that Congress doesn't get that information. Which would suggest they know the information would reveal things Congress might not approve of.
Once again, these actions only make sense if CISA is being used to justify warrantless domestic surveillance. This raises the question of why Congress is willing to proceed with such a surveillance bill. We just went through a process showing that the public is uncomfortable with secret laws and interpretations that lead to surveillance. Why would they immediately push for a new secret law that expands surveillance and rejects any attempts to protect the privacy of the American public or any sort of transparency and accountability in how the bill is used?
The bill is positioned as a cybersecurity bill, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a single computer security expert who thinks it is useful or necessary. I've been trying, and so far, I can't find any.
For reasons that remain unclear, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been in possession of the controversial cell phone spying devices known as Stingrays, the Guardianexclusively reported on Monday.
Invoices obtained following a request under the Freedom of Information Act show purchases made in 2009 and 2012 by the federal tax agency with Harris Corporation, one of a number of companies that manufacture the devices.
The ACLU, which has called for stricter oversight of the technology, describes Stingrays--also known as "cell site simulators" or "IMSI catchers"--as "invasive cell phone surveillance devices that mimic cell phone towers and send out signals to trick cell phones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect's cell phone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby."
Stingrays require only a low-level court order called a PEN register to grant permission for their use.
"Immense secrecy has so far surrounded these devices, but a picture is slowly emerging which shows widespread use," write Guardian reporters Nicky Woolf and William Green. "Various revelations by the American Civil Liberties Union and news outlets, including the Guardian, had shown that at least 12 federal agencies are already known to have these devices, including the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The IRS makes 13."
The Guardian adds that the devices are also used by local and, in some cases, state police departments across at least 20 states. The ACLU provides a map here.
Just last week, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Seth M. Stodder explained to a U.S. House subcommittee that the Secret Service, too, can employ Stingrays without a warrant if there's believed to be a nonspecific threat to the president or another protected person.
While no one from the agency responded to a request for comment, a former IRS employee suggested to the Guardian that such widespread adoption across law enforcement agencies may explain why the IRS would find itself utilizing such technology:
[Mark Matthews, a former deputy commissioner for services and enforcement at the agency who now works for the law firm Caplin and Drysdale] said the IRS on its own usually uses gentler investigation tactics. But increasingly, investigating agents from the agency are brought on board for joint operations with the FBI and other agencies when the latter need financial expertise to look at, for example, money laundering from drug organizations.
From these joint operations, he said, "the IRS had moved to drug work and had learned a lot of aggressive techniques in the money laundering and drug world, and these bad habits were leaking over into the tax world, which was supposed to be their real mission."
Nate Wessler, a staff attorney with the speech, privacy, and technology project at the ACLU, told the Guardian: "The info showing that they are using Stingrays is generally consistent with the kinds of investigative tactics that they are engaging in, and it shows the wide proliferation of this very invasive surveillance technology."
"It's used by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of local law enforcement, used by the usual suspects at the federal level," Wessler added, "and if the IRS is using it, it shows just how far these devices have spread."