Gung ho for Gitmo

AMERICAN presidents have moved, for decades, to close Guantanamo Bay.

But with the stroke of a pen on January 29, Donald Trump ended that manoeuvre, directing authorities to keep and expand the notorious facility. He wants to put 30,000 people there. Joe Biden left 15.

“This memorandum is issued in order to halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels, and restore national sovereignty,” claims the edict signed by Mr Trump.

According to that document, the purpose of the expansion is also “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the US, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs.”

This is a fancy way of describing what will be, effectively, a ghetto.

It is not the fulfilment of an election promise to seal the borders. It is the continuation of the Trumpian agenda of dehumanising a certain migrant.

Outside the jurisdiction of US courts, inaccessible to lawyers and human rights advocates, away from prying eyes and effective oversight, will be the 45-square-mile piece of land in southern Cuba into which Mr Trump plans to drop people.

It is a place associated, since 9/11, with the extrajudicial imprisonment of alleged terrorists. At its height, 800 people were, controversially, held there. Think Gitmo, and we think torture, rendition, indefinite detention.

Migrants, we are told, are destined for a separate, smaller area.

But this will have to be expanded at a cost of millions. And how sanitation, food, potable water and medical care will be supplied appear to be afterthoughts. As is the fact that America will have to increase personnel, doctors, nurses, translators and janitors significantly.

Which points to a supreme irony: the US president seeks to protect American sovereignty, but proposes to do so by deepening the occupation of Cuban territory.

In this regard, there are echoes of the infamous “Rwanda plan” espoused by UK politicians between 2022 and 2024. In that unlawful, cockamamie, colonialist scheme, migrants and asylum seekers were to be “relocated” to Kigali for “processing.”

As with Mr Trump’s design, the purpose was not to solve any problem. The purpose was deliberate cruelty.

The recently signed Laken Riley Act, which arguably encourages racial profiling of immigrants under the guise of dealing with crime, will capture throngs of people merely charged with, not guilty of, an offence.

Some may well end up in Gitmo, be forever tarred as “the worst of the worst,” and never again see the light of day.

For all Mr Trump’s rhetoric, it is his perverse plan that poses the true danger, promising, as it does, the continued far-right radicalisation of law and order and the dissolving of all sense of decency.

A ghetto today could be a gulag tomorrow.