Photograph Source: Geo Swan – Public Domain
On January 29th, newly installed Pres. Donald Trump issued the following Executive Order: “I hereby direct the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs identified by the Department of Defense [DOD] and the Department of Homeland Security [DHS].”
Trump’s Order directed the DOD and DHS to prepare for Guantánamo to hold 30,000 people.
Since Feb. 4, the Trump administration had flown about 178 immigrant detainees to the Guantánamo military base — 127 of whom were considered “high-threat illegal aliens,” according to a Defense Department official.Homeland security chief Kristi Noem claimed the U.S. was shipping “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” to the Cuban naval base.
However, on February 20th, the Trump administration unexpectedly deported all prisoners back to Venezuela.A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that 126 of the deported people had criminal charges or convictions – including 80 allegedly affiliated with Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; 51 had no criminal record.
Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro said those deported “are not criminals, they are not bad people, they were people who emigrated as a result of the [US] sanctions. … in Venezuela we welcome them as a productive force, with a loving embrace.”
As of April 15th, two-thirds of the roughly 260 tents installed as part of the operation had been removed and all detainees held at “Gitmo” were returned them to the U.S.
The current use of Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to detain Venezuelan migrants for deportation is just the latest of a long history of its use as a detention facility. While many may recall Gitmo’s role during the “war on terrorism,” but often overlooked is it role in the detention of some 30,000 Haitian refugees during the 1990s.
It is a history worth remembering.
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The U.S. gained control of Guantánamo Bay as an outcome of the Spanish–American War that took place from April 21 to December 10, 1898; U.S. formally leased Guantánamo in 1903.The war ended Spain’s colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere and secured the position of the U.S. as a Pacific power.As one source argues, the “lease was imposed on Cuba under military pressure” and, after the 1959 revolution, the Cuban government repeatedly sought to revoke the Platt Amendment but to no avail.
For more than a century, Guantánamo has been used as a detention facility.
After being elected president of Haiti in 1957, François Duvalier thwarting a military coup d’état in 1958 and established a dictatorship that he and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, controlled until 1986.With Duvalier’s consolidation of power, thousands of Haitians fled to the U.S., Canada and other countries.
Haitian migrates traveled hundreds of miles on flimsy vessels, sometimes reaching South Florida. They had to make it through the rough Windward Passage is a strait in the Caribbean Sea, between the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, dubbed the “channel of wind” (kanal di van) in Haitian Kreyòl.
In the 1970s, Pres. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter held dozens of Haitians awaiting asylum interviews on the “Gitmo” base.State Department cables reveal that at least 14 vessels carrying hundreds of passengers sailed into Guantánamo between 1972 and 1979.
Under Pres. Ronald Reagan, immigration detention largely stopped.He ordered the Coast Guard to interdict fleeing Haitians and other migrants at sea, processing their asylum requests on Coast Guard ships and prevent them from reaching the U.S. shores.
Detention resumed in 1991. A violent military coup in Haiti prompted an exodus that overwhelmed the Coast Guard’s capacity to detain Haitians while their asylum claims were pending. So, President George H.W. Bush transferred approximately 12,500 Haitians, including women and children, from Coast Guard vessels to a squalid tent camp at the station.
President Clinton emptied this camp over the next few years by stripping interdicted Haitians of their right to asylum and expelling them back to Haiti. Clinton later reopened the camp in 1994 to house tens of thousands of Cubans and Haitians “without adequate food, water and sanitation,” according to the news site Immigration Impact.
Ronald Reagan launched what was initially called Haitian Migrant Interdiction Operations (HMIO). In essence, the program was created to move asylum screening for Haitians offshore in an explicit effort to replicate what had taken place at Guantánamo — rapid and almost across-the-board repatriations — on U.S. Coast Guard vessels. Today the program is known as Alien Migrant Interdiction Operations (AMIO), the name change being the result of a 1989 rebranding designed, presumably, to make the program sound less Haitian-focused
During the first decade of interdiction (1981–1989), 21,461 Haitians were intercepted at sea, but only 6 were brought to U.S. soil to lodge formal requests for asylum the base held the largest numbers of asylum seekers between 1991 and 1995—tens of thousands of Haitians, and, later, a mix of tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans — in December 1990, the Haitian people overwhelmingly elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in the country’s first free and fair elections, only to see the military oust him in September of the following year. When his supporters took to the streets in defiant protest, soldiers slaughtered them by the hundreds. An exodus by sea followed, and the U.S. interdiction program kicked into overdrive in response.
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In response to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush, with backing from Congress, promptly launched the war on terror, which resulted in a wave of al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners arriving at Gitmo in January 2002. A total of 780 alleged prisoners from fifty different countries were detained there from 2002 to 2008.
As of early this year, according to the Department of Defense, “fifteen detainees remain at Guantánamo Bay: Three are eligible for transfer; three are eligible for a Periodic Review Board; seven are involved in the military commissions process; and two detainees have been convicted and sentenced by military commissions.”
A 2009 report from the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded “that the so-called ‘war on terror’ was not an armed conflict justifying indefinite detention under international humanitarian law. Moreover, continued interrogation of the detainees was incompatible with the justifications given by the Government of the United States.”
Many detainees have claimed they were detained unlawfully, denied due process, and subjected to grave physical and psychological abuses. The United Nations’s assessment was confirmed in a 2024 report from Amnesty International that stated:
“Detainees in Guantanamo are held without charges or fair trials, violating the U.S. Constitution and depriving them of their basic human rights. These detainees were subjected to torture or other ill-treatment and have been detained, in some cases, for more than twenty years.”
In 2023, the Biden Administration awarded a $41.3 million contract to Vectrus Systems Corporation to operate the Gitmo base. In August 2024, Akima Infrastructure Protection was awarded a $163.4 million contract to run the migrant detention facility at Gitmo through June 2029.
In October 2024, NBC reported that the Biden Administration might soon divert Haitian migrants and asylum seekers to Guantánamo. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, called the Biden plan “utterly shameful.”
The actions regarding detainees at Guantánamo that have played out repeatedly over the past half-century set the stage for Trump’s Executive Order of January 29. It represents a continuation of one of the most sordid chapters in U.S. history.
