On February 4, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released photos of the first “criminal aliens” to be flown to Guantánamo Bay. The migrants, shackled and wearing uniform grey sweatsuits, are guarded by masked troops as they prepare to board a C-17 jet. The images are dramatic, and that’s the point: “President Trump is not messing around,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared, “and he is no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world.”
Trump described the first group of prisoners at Guantánamo—177 men from Venezuela—as the “worst of the worst,” while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they were “high threat” criminals. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem asserted that, in addition to being affiliated with the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, the men were wanted for “murders and rapes, assaults, gun purchases, [and] drug trafficking.” But that is not accurate: CBS reports that at least some of the prisoners either have convictions for nonviolent felonies or no criminal record at all.
Even for “the worst of the worst,” the conditions at the prison constitute a moral and human-rights catastrophe. Detainees are unable to contact anyone outside the prison, including lawyers. (This is illegal, and the ACLU and other groups have filed lawsuits.) Previous reports on the conditions of the prison and migrant detention center at Guantánamo revealed unsafe living conditions: vermin, inadequate food and water, mold, and a lack of sanitation facilities. Despite these conditions, Trump signed a memorandum directing the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services to prepare thirty thousand beds to house deportees before they are returned to their countries of origin. It’s unclear whether Congress will allocate money for such an expansion; Guantánamo’s existing migrant detention facility has room for only 120 people. The military scrambled to set up tents, but abruptly halted their construction over concerns about safety standards. Administration officials insist that detention at Guantánamo will be temporary until detainees can be moved, but have not set specific time limits to such detention. The first group of 177 men was officially deported on February 20—flown to Honduras, where they were picked up by Venezuela. But on Sunday, February 23, another flight carrying seventeen more deportees arrived at Guantánamo Bay.
The administration has not provided much evidence of actual wrongdoing by the migrants they deport. The New York Times reported on the case of Luis Alberto Castillo, a twenty-nine-year-old Venezuelan man who was in the United States for only sixteen days before he was lumped in with other supposed “gang members” and put on a plane to Cuba. Castillo’s sister, who saw the DHS photos on TikTok and recognized her brother, insists that he is not in a gang; government officials interviewed him and likewise determined he was not a member of Tren de Aragua. When asked about Castillo’s case, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin replied that Castillo “may very well be a member of this vicious gang. He may not be.”
The message is that it doesn’t really matter. The Trump administration is unconcerned with truth, and has again and again shown itself more inclined to stage dehumanizing “performance art,” as Steve Vladeck, professor of law at Georgetown University, calls it. That’s not to minimize the real harm Trump’s immigration policies have done and will continue to do, but to emphasize their real goal: to make certain kinds of people disappear, and to assert that the administration has the power to get rid of them. Hence the symbolism of Guantánamo Bay, a place associated, since the War on Terror, with state-sanctioned torture, the suspension of due process, and all manner of human-rights violations. Trump and his allies are betting that the press and American public will forget about the people it has summarily disappeared into the “legal black hole” of Guantánamo and the lies it told to move them there. It’s up to the press and the public to prove them wrong.
This article appears in the March issue of Commonweal and has been updated to reflect recent developments.
