Trump's Guantanamo plan invokes 'war on terror' to justify inhumane immigration policies
On 29 January, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the defence and homeland security departments to prepare a facility at Guantanamo Bay to imprison 30,000 migrants.
In his announcement, he declared: "We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them, because we don't want them coming back. So we're going to send them out to Guantanamo."
This move follows his signing of the Laken Riley Act, which enables the detention and deportation of undocumented migrants accused of crimes such as shoplifting and assaulting law enforcement - even without conviction.
The law was introduced in response to the murder of a young nursing student by an undocumented migrant and has been championed by Republicans eager to impose stricter immigration controls.
Less than a week later, 300 service members arrived at Guantanamo to set up a tent city for migrants. And last Tuesday, the first planeload of detainees arrived at the base.
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Administration officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former officer at Guantanamo during his time with the National Guard, touted the base as an ideal detention site. "We want somewhere else to hold them safely in the interim - criminal illegals - Guantanamo Bay... is a perfect place," he said.
Trump's inflammatory rhetoric against migrants, a potent tool he wielded to incite fear during both of his presidential campaigns, has once again become a cornerstone of his administration's immigration policies.
By invoking Guantanamo, he reinforces this racist stance, using the shock value of a site infamous for human rights abuses to frame migrants as a dire threat to national security. It also brings them into the fold of the "war on terror" framework, blurring the line between them and the so-called "terrorists" the prison has long held to justify the denial of their rights.
'Sovereign borders'
To underscore the urgency of sending migrants to Guantanamo, Trump proclaimed: "We need Congress to provide full funding for the complete restoration of our sovereign borders."
While meant to conjure an existential threat, his violent rhetoric is laced with bitter irony: his solution for protecting US sovereignty is to detain migrants on stolen and colonised Cuban land.
American politicians frame immigration as an external threat, positioning the US as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the conditions that force people to flee
The US has occupied Guantanamo since forcing Cuba into a lease agreement under the Platt Amendment of 1903, reaffirmed in 1934. The lease cannot be terminated without mutual consent or US abandonment.
In her essay "Where Is Guantanamo?", American studies scholar Amy Kaplan contextualises its use as a prison within its historical location: "Its legal - or lawless - status has a logic grounded in imperialism, whereby coercive state power has been routinely mobilised beyond the sovereignty of national territory and outside the rule of law."
Trump's invocation of sovereignty is even more absurd given that many migrants at risk of being sent to Guantanamo come from countries the US has destabilised through coups, economic exploitation and support for repressive regimes.
Yet, American politicians frame immigration as an external threat, positioning the US as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the conditions that force people to flee.
Meanwhile, a country supposedly under siege maintains 750 military bases in over 80 countries worldwide.
Why Guantanamo?
Though Guantanamo became infamous post-9/11 for detaining Muslim men and boys, it has long served as a holding pen for those deemed disposable.
A decade before the "war on terror", the US used it to detain thousands of Haitian refugees and Cuban asylum seekers - an extralegal space where detainees were stripped of rights.
This practice continued after 9/11, as Guantanamo was used to hold Muslims under a different set of laws, branding them "enemy combatants" to evade US legal constraints.
In a recent interview with Frontline, Marie Genard, who fled Haiti with her father and was held at Guantanamo for over a year in the early 1990s, described the camp while exposing the calculated intent behind holding people "outside" American jurisdiction.
"It was massive, a massive camp, and it was fenced with razor wire," she recalled. "We didn't [have] rights because, technically, we're not in the US. So, it felt like you were in prison. I mean, that's what it was to us; it was being in a prison."
The Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC) has operated continuously, but as of 2024, it had a capacity of only 130 beds and held just four detainees.
Despite this apparent gap between existing capacity and Trump's planned 30,000-person expansion, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, defended the move: "We've always had a presence of illegal immigrants there that have been detained. We're just building out some capacity."
'Nation at war'
The decision to detain migrants at Guantanamo, however, is not about space; it's about framing migrants as terrorists.
While GMOC is separate from the prison, Trump's rhetoric deliberately blurs the distinction. Americans, conditioned by decades of "war on terror" propaganda, are primed to accept that those sent to Guantanamo must be dangerous.
Linguist Adam Hodges, in The "War on Terror" Narrative, describes how familiar narratives shape public perception.
After 9/11, America's response was framed through a "generic script of a nation at war", creating a ready-made cultural framework that made extraordinary measures seem necessary.
The Trump administration is using the same playbook to justify the use of the base in a way that resonates culturally with Americans, who have been conditioned to accept a certain construction of a "terrorist" that deserves this type of detention.
Thus, Noem has referred to migrants as the "worst of the worst", alleging they are murderers, rapists and drug traffickers. In reality, this framing serves to justify Guantanamo's continued use and expand its function.
As immigration law expert Pedro Gerson writes in Slate:
"Guantanamo today carries a particular political valence. For some, it is a symbol of government abuse, but for others, it is the place where terrorists are held. Trump intends to build in Guantanamo purposely to reify the same message that propelled him to power: Immigrants are criminals, and they are here to hurt you. But now Trump is going further: Some of these immigrants are not only criminals, they are equivalent to terrorists."
Seeking to differentiate the migrant camps from the sections of Guantanamo housing alleged "terrorists", Hegseth insisted: "This is a temporary transit... where we can plus-up thousands - and tens of thousands, if necessary - to humanely move illegals out of our country."
But there is nothing humane about Guantanamo. A September 2024 report by the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) revealed that individuals held there were "indefinitely detained in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world and trapped in a punitive system... with little to no transparency or accountability".
Political theorist Giorgio Agamben, whose seminal work on the state of exception has been a key reference for analysing the abuses of the "war on terror", argues that camps are emblematic of this phenomenon.
He explains that "the camp is the space where the state of exception begins to become the rule". In these spaces, Agamben argues, authority functions while denying those confined any legal protections. This reduces individuals to "bare life", a mere biological existence stripped of political rights or value.
Former Guantanamo detainee Nizar Sassi's description of the prison camp aptly captures this dehumanisation: "You don't even have the right to have rights."
Constructing 'terrorism'
Trump has actively sought to associate terrorism with migrants. On Inauguration Day, he signed an order designating gangs like Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organisations.
On 4 February, DHS released photos of the first group of migrants sent to Guantanamo - all alleged members of the gang.
Further inscribing terrorism on to the bodies of the migrants, the images bear an eerie resemblance to those of Muslim men and boys detained during the "war on terror", with 10 of the migrants housed in Camp 6 – the same facility that once held those prisoners.
The detention of migrants at Guantanamo is not just about physical and carceral violence but also about constructing them as existential terrorist threats
In his influential work, Terrorism: Theirs and Ours, Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad describes key characteristics of terrorism discourse: inconsistency of application, a claimed "omniscient knowledge" and selective moral outrage.
These features not only explain the power of the terrorism label but also highlight how the construction of terrorism depoliticises violence, presenting the state's response as necessary, technical and proportionate.
In parallel, this strategic framing of migrants as terrorists finds support in the manipulation of legal frameworks to legitimise their detention.
In his article "Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law", scholar Matt Jones uses the term "legal subjunctive" to describe how those in power manipulate the law.
Focusing on the case of Khadr - a Muslim child detained and tortured first at Bagram, then Guantanamo, and convicted of war crimes - Jones defines the legal subjunctive as a situation where an actor behaves "as if" their actions were legal, even when aware they will not ultimately be recognised as such. Jones argues that even if a subjunctive claim is denied, individuals or groups can be deprived of their rights while a legal process remains ongoing.
This manipulation of the law to serve strategic objectives is what allowed the George W Bush administration to operate "as if" their actions were legal, knowing that by the time the law caught up, their objectives in Guantanamo would have already been accomplished.
Understood in these terms, the detention of migrants at Guantanamo is not just about physical and carceral violence but also about constructing them as existential terrorist threats - a narrative easily weaponised to justify ongoing abuses.
A staggering cost
Though Trump has enlisted Guantanamo to house additional migrants, he has conveniently ignored its substantial costs.
The operation of the prison has already cost American taxpayers $7bn, covering the detention of 780 men and boys since 2002 as well as the troops stationed at the base. By 2022, with only 36 detainees, the per-person cost had reached an estimated $13m per year.
Trump's executive order could increase the population by more than 800 times, straining resources and driving costs exponentially.
While Guantanamo and GMOC are managed by separate institutions - the former by the Pentagon, the latter by the DHS and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) - housing migrants at such a scale will undoubtedly come with a hefty price tag.
But the real cost is the human toll: those who have already suffered at Guantanamo and those who will face its horrors in the future. As the US continues to utilise Guantanamo for consistently nefarious purposes, the detention of anyone at the base should be challenged and rejected.
The use of Guantanamo to house Muslim men and boys detained in the "war on terror" has long justified and obscured the ongoing abuses at the prison. Now, the influx of migrants to the naval base risks doing the same for the violence at Guantanamo.
We must reject any rationales, rooted in the "war on terror" or otherwise, that leave the door open for the US to continue its wretched violence on Cuban territory.
This should be a call to abolish Guantanamo – not just because of the US presence on the base, but because of what it has long symbolised: a violent site that separates lives deemed disposable from those seen as deserving of rights and protections.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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