The Wages of Leaving Guantanamo Open Have Arrived

It was always going to be a matter of time until someone filled it up again. Know your rights

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING IRON MAN FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PUT IT ON YOUR PULL LIST AT A COMIC STORE (AN ONGOING SUBSCRIPTION WHERE THE STORE RESERVES EACH ISSUE FOR YOU), I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! EMAIL SOME KIND OF RECEIPT TO FOREVERWARS.BULLPEN@GMAIL.COM AND THE SWAG WILL BE YOURS! 

FOR MOST OF MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE, AND ESPECIALLY SINCE 2016, I've been writing that unless the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was closed, it was a matter of time before someone filled it back up again, and not only with the sort of people George W. Bush put there when he made it the premiere no-man's-land of the War on Terror. The second-ever edition of FOREVER WARS was devoted to this warning. 

Now Donald Trump has issued an executive order expanding the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay, to "full capacity." The order is vague, but this expanded migrant-detention facility will be jointly operated by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security as a deportation way-station. It will apparently not be a part of the already-existing forever-prison, but as we'll see in a moment, keeping the forever-prison-ness out of this massive new camp will be something of an official fiction. This marks a full-circle turn for Guantanamo Bay, since the very first terrorism-detention camp, the open-air chain-link cages of Camp X-Ray, began as a camp for Haitian and Cuban migrants.

According to Trump's remarks on Wednesday, "full capacity" means up to 30,000 people. That will require a massive construction boom at Guantanamo, which means enormous contractor payouts. As of September, there were a grand total of four people held at the Migrant Operations Center. The high-water mark for "terrorism" detainees at Guantanamo Bay was 800 people. 

The Migrant Operations Center is not run by Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, the military command that controls the 23-year old detention complex currently holding 15 people. The Pentagon didn't respond to my questions, so I don't know whether JTF-GTMO will be left alone or repurposed. But the easiest thing to do with the first wave of DHS-deported migrants, from the perspective of military logistics, is to put them in the many open beds at the wartime-detention complex.

But to some degree, drawing such distinctions between the Migrant Operations Center and the Detention Facility at Guantanamo is to miss the forest for the bureaucratic trees. When Hamed Aleaziz of the Times, one of the best immigration reporters there is, reported on the Migrant Operations Center in September—another thing multiple presidents up to and including Joe Biden opted not to close—he found several conditions we associate with post-9/11 Guantanamo. They included "allegations that migrants have been forced to wear blackout goggles during transport through the base; that their calls with lawyers are monitored; and that some areas are unfit for habitation, with rats and overflowing toilets." 

The entire point of doing this at Guantanamo is to apply the machinery of the post-9/11 state to this latest version of the Enemy. It is to entrench in the public mind a conflation of migration and terrorism. Those who held up MASS DEPORTATION NOW! signs want a deportation waystation to where impunity reigns, and will cheer it when they get one, often while simultaneously denying that what's going on there is impunity. That has been how the right, in the main, has responded to Guantanamo since the camps opened in January 2002. 

Readers of REIGN OF TERROR know that the migration-terrorism conflation has been part of the nativist catechism since the very first month after the 9/11 attacks. Now, the patterns, practices and habits of indefinite and severe detention are entrenched at Guantanamo, waiting to be applied.

THE THING TO UNDERSTAND—the thing that can be difficult to convey to people who've never been to Guantanamo—is that abuse at Guantanamo is guaranteed. 

Guantanamo is a black hole. It is difficult for the outside world to get to Guantanamo, even more than most U.S. military bases. You can't fly to a civilian airport nearby, rent a car, and, if base access wasn't already arranged in advance, wait at a nearby motel while your request gets worked out. There is no civilian airport or seaport nearby, only Cuban territory. Just travelling to Guantanamo requires pre-approval from the Pentagon. 

Accordingly, there will be very few outside monitors as the cages fill back up. What happens inside will take a long time to filter out. The command atmosphere, it seems obvious, will not be one that rewards treating the people inside as human beings. Everyone who reported from Guantanamo can tell you that the military controls information at Guantanamo very tightly—I was much freer to report on military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan than I ever was at Guantanamo—and I expect that to be a feature of the migrant camps. When the gut-wrenching stories eventually emerge from Gitmo, they will be vigorously denied by the Pentagon and DHS. 

And as time goes on, fewer and fewer journalists, NGOs, lawyers and so forth will even try to go to Guantanamo. Imagine Nauru Island with the tools and the culture of the War on Terror. The people inside Guantanamo are out of sight, out of mind. This is why Mansoor Adayfi titled his book Don't Forget Us Here.  

There will be extreme confusion in the weeks and months ahead around how migrants detained there will access their legal counsel and due process more broadly. (Will there be immigration hearings set up at Guantanamo? With what judges? etc.) The safe bet is there will be as minimal access as the courts will let the Trump administration get away with. At risk of understatement, due process cuts against the point of Guantanamo. That was how the Bush administration operated the terrorism-detention facility until the intervention of the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court is more aligned with the political prerogatives of the White House than the 2000s era one was. 

Over the past two-plus days, following ICE raids in New York, identified so far in Highbridge, Washington Heights and Morris Heights, there is an atmosphere among people I've talked to that can only be described as terror. People I know with green cards are not confident that being in the country legally will stop ICE from deporting them, nor the NYPD from handing them to ICE. I have heard second-hand stories about the NYPD knocking on doors in people's buildings only to find ICE present when they comply. People are staying home rather than risk being raided at work, or even on public transportation, based on how an ICE agent or their NYPD buddy presumes an "illegal alien" to look and sound. The City reported Bronx residents being afraid to even be outside. And remember: Homeland Security Task Forces are coming.

Indicted Mayor Eric Adams defended partnering with ICE on the pretext of removing "violent criminals." But, as has been obvious since Trump descended the gilded escalator in 2015, the roundups will not discriminate. NBC reported that out of 1200 people ICE arrested in a single day, Sunday, 566 of them had nothing resembling a criminal record. Now, with the passage of the Laken Riley Act, just being undocumented and arrested on suspicion of crimes like "burglary, theft, larceny, [or] shoplifting"—not even convicted, just arrested—may well mean a ticket to Guantanamo. Those people will not know when they will be released for deportation until it happens. There is already impunity at ICE detention centers. There will be much, much more at Guantanamo. 

They will call the people sent to Guantanamo the worst of the worst. Some of them will indeed turn out to be frightening, violent people. But all of them, the innocent and guilty alike, will experience inhumanity, degradation and the anxiety of being caged for unknown periods of time. Many of them will certainly be children. Most of them will have wanted nothing more than to live in a rich, safe country, rather than somewhere likely destabilized in some fashion and in recent memory by the United States. More of them will keep coming as climate change intensifies, and so the Guantanamo migrant cages will expand and expand. 

Being in this country "illegally" is a civil and not a criminal offense. Now, fulfilling a promise of 9/11, the U.S. government will well and truly treat it like terrorism, with the due-process limitations and guard-force aggression that implies. Donald Trump is to blame for this, but so is Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Lindsey Graham, Rahm Emanuel, Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They are the most important officials who transformed Guantanamo into what it is today; fought to keep it open; and compromised to let it persist and normalize. They should instead have closed the detention facility, razing it to the ground, and returning the entire naval station to its rightful Cuban owners. But none of them wanted to risk the political fallout—that is, the attacks that McConnell and Graham intensified on Obama—and deterred themselves, the liberals among them convincing themselves they had a better path to a closure that never arrived. 

If there's any doubt about what is to come, Tom Homan, the former ICE official turned White House Mass Deportation czar, went on TV this week and removed it.  Bemoaning the circulation of guidance to protect people from deportation, Homan said, "They call it ‘know your rights.' I call it how to escape arrest ... how to hide from ICE." Such people, whose official functions obscure their lawlessness, will be in charge at Guantanamo. Joe Strummer tried to tell you that your rights are conditional in their eyes. But you must know them anyway, and let your neighbors know them, as you keep one another safe from the deportation force. 

Breathing new life into Guantanamo Bay is like seeing a nightmare I've had for years manifest before my eyes. And yet knowing something would happen provides no emotional insulation when it happens. When news of the imminent executive order broke yesterday, I happened to be drafting the part of my next book where Majid Khan gets sent to Guantanamo. 

U.S. ENVOY STEVE WITKOFF went to Gaza after going to Saudi Arabia. And like Sami al-Arian predicted to me, Saudi-Israel normalization is back on the table. 

FINALLY, JUST SO WE'RE NOT ENDING ON A PURELY BLEAK NOTE, Jason Koebler at 404 Media absolutely fillets the charlatanism of OpenAI as exposed by DeepSeek: 

OpenAI and Microsoft are essentially now whining about being beaten at its own game by DeepSeek. But additionally, part of OpenAI’s argument in the New York Times case is that the only way to make a generalist large language model that performs well is by sucking up gigantic amounts of data. It tells the court that it needs a huge amount of data to make a generalist language model, meaning any one source of data is not that important. This is funny, because DeepSeek managed to make a large language model that rivals and outpaces OpenAI’s own without falling into the more data = better model trap. Instead, DeepSeek used a reinforcement learning strategy that its paper claims is far more efficient than we’ve seen other AI companies do.

DO YOU WANT SIGNED COPIES of my IRON MAN issues? The place to get those signed copies—of each issue, any issue, and all issues—is Bulletproof Comics on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn! You can order each of them from Flatbush's Finest right here! They also still have a few signed WALLER VS. WILDSTORMs left! And if you'd want some nonfiction books of mine without pictures, check out the critically-acclaimed REIGN OF TERROR—and, soon to be available for pre-order, THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN!