Refugees International Condemns Use of Guantanamo to Detain Immigrants

Statement by Refugees International Director for the Americas and Europe Yael Schacher: 

“The Trump administration’s use of military planes to send immigrants to detention at Guantanamo Bay epitomizes the administration’s gratuitously cruel, illegal, expensive, and burdensome approach to immigration policy. 

Guantanamo Bay, an off-shore U.S. military base, is the notorious site where the United States inhumanely detained Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers in the 1990s, tortured prisoners in the early 2000s, and continues to detain people without charge or trial. 

Guantanamo’s Migrant Operations Center, which the Trump administration is sending marines to expand, is truly a black box that no non-governmental organization has been allowed to visit. Over the past decade, a small number of interdicted asylum seekers have been brought to Guantanamo, determined to be refugees, held indefinitely under poor conditions, and barred from resettlement in the United States. It has never been used to hold immigrants who were present in the United States.

The administration’s claim that there is a migrant “invasion” is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as “terrorists” is diversionary – and neither makes offshore detention lawful. Members of Congress should investigate the move as a misuse of military assets. 

Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history.”

For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact Etant Dupain at edupain@refugeesinternational.org.