‘America’s gulag’: Trump’s Guantánamo ploy tars migrants as terrorists
‘America’s gulag’: Trump’s Guantánamo ploy tars migrants as terrorists
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The president wants to detain thousands of people at a site that is notorious for its secrecy and history of abuse. It has been denounced as “America’s gulag”: a secretive, abuse-ridden Caribbean prison camp for terror suspects that Donald Rumsfeld once said contained “the worst of the worst”.
“All of us have scars in our souls, deformities, from living at Guantánamo,” a former Yemeni inmate recalled of his time at the notorious military detention facility in south-east Cuba. Even Donald Trump once balked at the “crazy” amount of money being spent confining prisoners in orange jumpsuits to Guantánamo’s concertina-wired cages.
This week the US president changed his tune, announcing plans to send tens of thousands of “criminal illegal aliens” to the US naval base that houses the Guantánamo Bay jail as part of his “mass deportation” campaign. “It’s a tough place to get out of,” Trump noted sarcastically after revealing that he had instructed the heads of the defense and homeland security departments to prepare a “30,000-person migrant facility” on the island.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” said Trump, who claimed the move would help eradicate “the scourge of migrant crime in our communities, once and for all”. The announcement delighted Trumpists. “The president is 100% correct to use Guantánamo,” the Texas Republican Chip Roy told Fox News, with the channel’s reporter celebrating Trump’s “creative” and “innovative” idea.
