Drop Site News: Biden Likely Built the Groundwork for Trump's GITMO Migrant Camp Expansion
Prior administrations have been housing and processing migrants at Guantanamo Bay Naval base for decades.
Last Wednesday, Trump made headlines by announcing he would be signing an executive order (later revealed to actually be a presidential memorandum, or a less formal means of directing executive agencies) instructing the Pentagon to prepare a 30,000-capacity migrant detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base, the infamous outpost of U.S. imperialism down in Cuba which has gained notoriety for imprisoning and torturing innocents over the last few decades. This spurned a chorus of dissident voices understandably dismayed by a promise of what could reasonably be compared to a concentration camp.
However, according to a recent article from Drop Site News and their own reporting from back in September, not only does the facility barely have the capacity to support 400 people, let alone 30,000, but that expansion efforts have been made possible thanks primarily to the Biden administration, who awarded a new $163.4 million dollar contract to GEO Group, a massive private prison firm, to continue operating the facility rather than close it down, despite Biden's previous lip service to the latter. Documents obtained by the publication detailed some of the cruel conditions that migrants have endured at the facility over the last few decades, including blind-folding, handcuffs, and separation from the outside world. Expert testimony cited in the more recent article suggests that Trump’s 30,000 figure represents a vapid threat intended to evoke the base’s draconian reputation amongst potential and existing undocumented migrants, though at one point, around 12,000 Haitan and Cuban migrants were housed there in deplorable conditions.
But this story seems to represent yet another case study in a prominent political theme of the past few years. Activists and purported humanitarians both in political circles and in culture more broadly seem to have a habit of going to sleep when Democrats, the ostensible vanguard of those aforementioned cohorts in our limited and myopic American political context, hold power. While Trump’s particular acumen for weaponizing incendiary language, his and the GOP’s forthright enmity towards these groups, and their willingness to shift policies to more extreme ends all matter here, it’s important to be ideologically consistent and hold politicians equally to account if they transgress against one’s stated values. Otherwise, without grassroots pressure, you enable Democrats, in a political context where bribery is increasingly legalized paired with an economic system which is concentrating greater wealth into fewer hands over time, to be beholden to the very same interests as the Republicans and cede ideological ground to them over time. We see evidence of this time and time again. Off the heels of calls for criminal justice reform during the 2020 protests spurned by the killing of George Floyd and the rebuke of a presidency partially characterized by inhumane treatment of migrants, the Democrats won a mandate (even though they had propped up perhaps the most geriatric and conservative amongst their presidential primary candidates in Biden), and then proceeded to govern by expanding police budgets, continuing many of Trump’s border policies, and even trying to implement Republican border priorities. It’s probably not a coincidence that interest and broader public discourse around these issues largely went quiet during Biden’s term.
In the controversial words of former Ohio state senator and activist Nina Turner, when presented with the choice between a “bowl of shit” and “half a bowl of shit”, those interested in human rights and equitable economic reform must be willing to take up the same sort of militant, organized opposition when “half a bowl of shit” is not meeting the moment. Otherwise, all bowls are just going to get shittier.