Last week, the Secretary of National Security, Kristi Noem, visited the US military base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the Trump administration has begun to send people describing as criminal migrants. Noem saying that the site “will house the worst of the worst and illegal criminals found in the United States of America.” President Trump signed An executive note In January, ordering that the facilities at the Naval Station will be extended to full capacity.
Shipment undocumented immigrants To Guantanamo Bay is a losing proposal. The measure raises serious legal, logistics and human rights problems. It will create more problems than you solve, while recently to improve our dysfunctional immigration system.
The administration movement may seem briefly successful in one way: as a short -term public relations play. Some Trump supporters have welcomed the idea because they think that it sends a message about how difficult the administration is in migrants. However, Trump and Noem are about to discover why sustaining people in Gitmo is a terrible policy.
Although Guantanamo is better known as a place When terrorism suspects are performed, their facilities have been used to house migrants before. In the early 1990s, thousands of Haitians and Cubans were arrested there. But these were people who fled from their countries of origin who were intercepted in the sea. They had never set foot in the United States, unlike migrants Trump is Sending there now. This distinction is critical because undocumented people who have been in the United States are guaranteed certain rights of due process under our Constitution. Factor in a ruling of the Supreme Court that the detainees of Guantanamo have the right To challenge your arrest, and it is a recipe for endless legal battles.
The administration is wrong if you believe that the sending of migrants to Gitmo will avoid the scrutiny of its treatment. Guantanamo is a high profile location that Amnesty International Once called “The Gulag of our time.” There is already demands in the works on the celebration of migrants in Guantanamo; on Monday a federal court temporarily blocked The transfer of three Venezuelans to the base, an omen of more litigation to come.
To be clear, sending migrants to Guantanamo is not the same as deporting them; It does not eliminate them from the bureaucracy of the United States immigration system, or exclude them from civil jurisdiction and place them under military jurisdiction, as argued for the detainees captured abroad as “enemy combatants.” Simply send them on the high seas, where they will be under the full time care of the United States government.
The costs of keeping migrants in Guantanamo will be amazing. A huge investment of funds will be required to expand the capacity of the base, including more money for food, water, staff, medical facilities, homes and potentially even schools, because Noem He has repeatedly dodged The question of whether migrant children will be retained In the suffocating tents of the base.
Guantanamo's remote location means that practically everything, from construction materials to food supplies, will have to be imported. In 2019, a New York Times analysis He discovered that it cost $ 13 million a year to keep each detainee in Guantanamo, an amount that President Trump then called “Coco” and “a fortune.” (The average cost per detainee of immigration within the US. Around $ 57,000 a year.
Imagine how gitm costs would shoot if Trump try fulfill your promise To send 30,000 migrants there. In comparison, there It is 40,000 migrants in detention in all the US.
As of January 6, Gitmo held 15 detaineeshoused by the Department of Defense. Climbing anywhere close to 30,000 will be a huge drainage in the national security budget, at the expense of the policy objectives that the president's supporters say they want, as massive deportations and border security.
The administration wants to keep migrants in Guantanamo until they can be deported to their countries of origin. However, there are countries like Cuba and China that refuse To recover the deporteesand other nations can stop accepting deportees depending on the state of relations with the USA. As a result, fill guantanamo with migrants has the potential to turn it into – one more time – A permanent criminal colony.
Guantanamo has a noticeable reputation today due to the abuses that occurred there as part of the “War on terror” after September 11 “. Which began more than 20 years ago, and only last yearThe International Refugee Assistance Project found that the conditions in the installation are inhuman, citing non -reclining water, open wastewater and poor medical care.
Holding migrants in Guantanamo could even be counterproductive. In 1993, a federal judge ordered the launch of the Haitians of the island due to inadequate medical facilities and the violations of due process.
Sending migrants to Guantanamo Bay is expensive, inefficient and cruel. It is a false solution aimed at becoming a long -term political and humanitarian disaster.
Raul A. Reyes is an immigration and taxpayer lawyer to the opinion of NBC Latino and CNN. UNKNOWN: @Raularryes; Instagram: @raulareyes1
