In late December and early January, the Trump administration transferred roughly 50 Cuban men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in the United States to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These men had been held in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, and Department of Homeland Security officials stated that the group included people who had “criminal histories.” At least some of these men had decided to “self-deport” and return to Cuba rather than continue suffering in ICE facilities. According to New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, many thought they were returning to Havana. Instead, they landed at Guantanamo Bay. Due to “an undisclosed maintenance problem” in other facilities on the base, the U.S. government housed them in a prison that once held al Qaeda suspects. Then, in early February, the Department of Homeland Security abruptly transferred these Cuban men to an ICE detention center in Mississippi.
It seems like a cruel irony that Cuban migrants in the United States were jailed at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay. After 9/11, the base became synonymous with the excesses of the “war on terror,” torture, unchecked executive power and the violation of rights. More than 20 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. is weaponizing the legal and political apparatus it forged during the war on terror as part of its campaign against migrants in the United States.
In January 2002, the U.S. transferred 20 men it had captured in the war in Afghanistan and flew them all the way to Guantanamo Bay in the Caribbean. The men were photographed shackled, dressed in bright orange jumpsuits and kneeling abjectly behind barbed-wire fences. Alleging that they were dangerous al Qaeda and Taliban members, the U.S. classified them as “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war to get around Geneva Convention protections. From the earliest days, human rights attorneys and activists called Guantanamo Bay a “legal black hole.”
The base’s legal ambiguity goes back to its 19th-century origins and U.S. imperial ambitions. U.S. Marines landed in Guantanamo Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Spain’s subsequent defeat signaled the rise of U.S. military power. The United States gained control over Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam through the Treaty of Paris. Rather than independence, the Cubans found themselves under U.S. military occupation. Before the U.S. would withdraw and allow Cuban independence, it required Cubans to accept the Platt Amendment, which greatly restricted Cuban sovereignty and included a naval station. Under U.S. political pressure and duress, the Cuban government acquiesced. In 1902, the U.S. ended its occupation of the island, but the Cuban government also agreed to lease territory in eastern Cuba for a U.S. naval station in 1903.