THE SET-UP: Here’s a sobering reminder from recent US history:
Today marks the 83rd anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast to inland concentration camps in 1942. My mother was a child survivor of imprisonment at the hands of the federal government in a World War II U.S. concentration camp. As her son, I am extremely alarmed at what I see unfolding today.
The son’s name is Mike Ishii and he’s the co-founder and executive director of Tsuru for Solidarity Their mission statement couldn’t be clearer:
We stand on the moral authority of Japanese Americans who suffered the atrocities and legacy of U.S. concentration camps during WWII and we say, “Stop Repeating History!”
To that end, Ishii penned a scathing indictment of the Trump Administration’s use of Guantanamo Bay (GITMO) to house “the worst of the worst” criminal migrants they are currently trying to track down and deport. I say “trying” because reporting indicates Trump is unhappy with the slow pace of deportations … so much so, that two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were recently demoted.
But that’s not stopping them from shipping people to GITMO. And, as you’ll see, they are not limiting themselves to the “worst of the worst.” It’s a slippery slope. Perhaps that’s why this all looks ominously familiar to Ishii: …
The expansion of detention at GITMO establishes an emerging partnership between ICE and the Department of Defense, two agencies with countless documented harms and rights violations. GITMO itself has a history of crimes against humanity, with no oversight or outside accountability. This is a recipe for an impending human tragedy on a monumental scale. Both agencies have routinely perpetrated physical, sexual, and medical abuses and torture upon those in their custody, including children.
As with so much we’ve seen, Ishii believes cruelty is the point. The Intercept’s Natasha Lennard saw it in a 40-second video of shackled deportees posted on X by the White House. It featured “the sounds of the plane engine and the jangle of handcuffs and chains,” and “a macabre caption: ‘ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.’” Lennard explains the reference:
ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the pleasurable tingling some people experience in response to certain stimuli, often sound. There are millions of social media videos dedicated to the genre.
For the Trump administration, that pleasure is derived from the sounds of human bondage and racist exclusion.
And here we are on the anniversary of just one of many of this nation’s racist exclusions.
It’s been eighty-three years to the day, but it could’ve been yesterday.
Alas, it will still be with us tomorrow. - jp
TITLE: Migrants, Deported to Panama Under Trump Plan, Detained in Remote Jungle Camp
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/world/americas/us-migrants-panama-jungle-camp.html
EXCERPTS: Nearly 100 migrants, recently deported by the United States to Panama where they had been locked in a hotel, were loaded onto buses Tuesday night and moved to a detention camp on the outskirts of the jungle, several of the migrants said.
It is unclear how long the group, which was deported under the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to expel unauthorized migrants, will be detained at the jungle camp.
Conditions at the site are primitive, the detainees said. Diseases, including dengue are endemic to the region, and the government has denied access to journalists and aid organizations.
The group includes eight children, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to speak on the record. Lawyers have said it is illegal to detain people in Panama for more than 24 hours without a court order.
The Panamanian government has not made an official announcement about the transfer to the jungle camp.
In a broadcast interview on Wednesday with the local news program Panamá En Directo, the country’s security minister, Frank Ábrego, did not discuss the move. But he said that migrants were being held by Panama “for their own protection” and because officials “need to verify who they are.”
The transfer is the latest move in a weeklong saga for a group of about 300 migrants who arrived in the United States hoping to to seek asylum. The group was sent to Panama, which has agreed to aid President Trump in his plan to deport millions of undocumented migrants.
The agreement is part of a larger strategy by the Trump administration to export some of its most difficult migration challenges to other nations. The United States, for varying reasons, cannot easily deport people to countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China, but by applying intense pressure it has managed to convince Panama to take some of them.
After being sent to Panama, the deported migrants are no longer subject to United States law.
Upon arrival in Panama City last week, the 300 or so migrants were taken to a downtown hotel, called the Decapolis, and barred from leaving, several of them told The New York Times in calls and text messages. A lawyer seeking to represent many of them, Jenny Soto Fernández, was blocked at least four times from visiting them in the hotel, she said.
At the hotel, the United Nations International Organization for Migration has been speaking with migrants about their options, according to the government, and offering flights to their home countries to those who want them.
Some, including a group of Iranian Christians and a man from China, told The New York Times that they risk reprisals if returned to their native countries, and have refused to sign documents that would pave the way for their repatriation.
Under to Iranian law, converting from Islam is considered apostasy and is a crime punishable by death.
On Tuesday morning, an article published by The Times attracted enormous attention to the migrants’ situation, and members of the Panamanian news media began surrounding the hotel.
That night, guards at the hotel told people to pack their bags, said Ms. Ghasemzadeh, one of the Christian converts from Iran. Several buses arrived and guards led them aboard, as witnessed by a reporter working for The New York Times. Then the bus traveled out of Panama City, east and then farther east, to the province of Darién.
Two migrants used their cellphones to share their real-time location with The Times, allowing reporters to track their movements.
On the bus, at least one woman cried, according to a photograph sent by a person on the bus.
The camp where the 100 or so migrants will stay is called San Vicente, and sits at the end of a jungle, also called the Darién, which links Panama to Colombia. The camp was built years ago as a stopover point for migrants coming north from Colombia through the Darién jungle and into Panama, a harrowing part of the journey north to the United States.
Now, the Panamanian government is using it for deportees.
TITLE: What We Know About the Secretive Migrant Mission at Guantánamo Bay
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/migrant-mission-guantanamo-bay.html
EXCERPTS: The Trump administration has moved more than 175 men from an immigration holding site in Texas to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay. All have been described as Venezuelans who have been issued final deportation orders. But it is not known why these men in particular were sent there.
Waves of migrants, including thousands of Haitians and Cubans, have been housed at the base over the years. But it is better known as a prison for wartime detainees captured after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Because of that legacy, Guantánamo Bay sometimes evokes the idea of indefinite detention without charge, a legal black hole with no way out.
Here are some of the things we have learned about the migrant mission so far.
On Jan. 29, President Trump ordered the Defense and Homeland Security Departments to prepare the base to receive up to 30,000 migrants.
Satellite imagery shows that tents have been going up near a building that was used for migrant operations in the past.
As of Tuesday, the military said there were about 850 troops and civilians assigned to migrant operations, more than 700 of them in the U.S. military.
With support from the Coast Guard, the military has been guarding and managing the Venezuelans in two separate buildings: the 120-bed Migrant Operations Center near the tents and a 176-cell military prison on the other side of the base for men the Trump administration has profiled as potentially dangerous or more dangerous. As of Wednesday, there were about 175 held there, 127 of whom were considered “high-threat illegal aliens,” according to a Defense Department official, who was not authorized to discuss the operation and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Until now, the Migrant Operations Center has been the exclusive domain of the Department of Homeland Security, which has hired contractors to run it. As of last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of D.H.S. had 10 officers on temporary assignment for the entire migrant mission and plans to send 50 “contract security personnel,” homeland security representatives told Congress.
To expand it to a capacity in the tens of thousands, the administration will need to add more personnel. A military blueprint for the migrant operation shows plans to house more than 3,500 U.S. forces near tent encampments for more than 11,000 migrants.
That may depend on whether the Trump administration can make arrangements for the Venezuelan government or another country to receive them.
U.S. officials have described the migrant mission at Guantánamo as a temporary holding site for people with final deportation orders. Complications could include whether individuals have claims to make that they should not be sent home, for example if they made asylum requests that were not fully adjudicated.
Even as Venezuelans arrive at Guantánamo, others have been sent back to Venezuela. On Feb. 10, Venezuela sent two planes to El Paso and picked up about 190 of its citizens, who were also under deportation orders. On the same day, a U.S. military cargo plane transported 15 men to Guantánamo Bay. Those men were put in the 120-bed dormitory.
As for Guantánamo’s terrorism-related detention mission, 780 Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were sent there from 2002 to 2008. Today, only 15 remain. They are held as military prisoners under the president’s war powers authority and are awaiting trial.
The law that created the military commissions system specifically limits its use to war crimes trials of foreign citizens who are members of Al Qaeda or their associates, specifically men held as detainees in the war against terrorism, an international armed conflict.
By U.S. law, the Qaeda prisoners at Guantánamo Bay cannot set foot on American soil.
The Venezuelans at Guantánamo are civilian, domestic prisoners who were taken into custody in the United States or at the southwest border, in a time of peace, and are technically in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security. They, like the war prisoners, may be able to challenge their detention in federal court.
Also, some of the migrants are held in what could be called double military custody on the hard-to-reach base, whose access is controlled by its Navy commander.
Men who have been profiled as “high-threat illegal aliens” are held in a prison building that until recently held Qaeda suspects. That building is inside a special security zone for wartime detention operations, whose access is controlled by an Army colonel who answers to the U.S. Southern Command.
Prison and court functions for [Gitmo’s] war on terrorism operation have cost billions of dollars since 2002. That worked out to $13 million per prisoner per year, according to a 2019 study, including court costs.
But that operation has more fixed costs, with troops arriving on scheduled rotations on charter aircraft and housed in a barrack built for the prison guards.
Now the Pentagon has stepped up air missions to the base using C-17s and other costly Air Force cargo planes, and will need to mobilize, house and train more forces for the new mission.
The tents and cots were already in storage at Guantánamo, in case of a humanitarian crisis in the Caribbean. But most of the provisions, including pallets of drinking water, will have to be airlifted to the base.
TITLE: Trump said Guantanamo would hold 'high threat' migrants -- but others have ended up there
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-guantanamo-hold-high-threat-migrants-ended/story?id=118927927
EXCERPTS: Most Americans agree that real criminals in the country illegally are bad and should be deported.
Where the administration has outrun the public is in the matter of who is considered a criminal. When Trump’s term began, they said the focus was on “public safety threats and national security threats”—the most serious risks. But a week later, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said all undocumented immigrants swept up in raids qualified because they “illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.”
By the letter of the law, merely being in the country as an undocumented immigrant is not a crime.
The issue has returned to the center of public attention thanks to a controversial new effort to send Venezuelans illegally in America to Guantánamo Bay.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared the initial group of men flown to the military base on Cuba during the first week of February to be “the worst of the worst”; U.S. officials claimed all were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, whose notoriety the Trump administration has worked hard to inflate.
But a review by the Washington Post of the records of six of the men found that three did not have criminal histories beyond illegal entry. ProPublica identified another detainee without a criminal record. And the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has now sued the government on behalf of plaintiffs who include the sister of one of the detainees.
“Taking immigrants off U.S. soil and sending them to Guantánamo is a stunning development, even for this administration,” Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told The Bulwark. “We must have access to them.”
The situation at Gitmo is a microcosm of the larger immigration debate in Washington, in which a chaotic scramble to mass deport those in the country illegally means the administration is painting people in far different situations with an overly broad brush. Much of this haziness and controversy is captured in the story one of the detainees now in Guantánamo: Mayfreed Durán-Arape.
Durán-Arape, 21, was detained more than eighteen months ago after trying to cross the border from Mexico into the United States twice. Since then, he has spoken to his mother nearly every day, she told The Bulwark.
Doris Arape, who lives in the United States with her husband, was careful with the personal information she divulged to avoid reprisal from the Trump administration. She said her son was taken into custody July 7, 2023 and had been in El Paso, Texas since then. During the first week of February, she said, she noticed a change: He became less hopeful—and then, openly suicidal—because of the way he was being treated.
During the first week of February, she received a call from one of his friends who said he had been taken in the middle of the night. She checked his location in ICE’s online locator and saw he had been sent to Florida, which fit the pattern of the men ultimately taken to Guantánamo.
Doris Arape shared a screenshot showing her son’s movement with The Bulwark, and Durán-Arape’s name later appeared on a list published by the New York Times of the men sent to Gitmo. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin confirmed his presence there to The Bulwark. “This individual remains in high level custody in Guantanamo due to a November 7, 2024 felony criminal conviction for aggravated assault,” McLaughlin said. A later Washington Post report added that he was charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding an officer during a riot at a detention center.”
But Doris Arape says the circumstances of her son’s arrest are not nearly as cut and dried as the administration claims. She claims that her son intervened to stop an officer from repeatedly hitting a friend during an altercation, and that this, in turn, led to his own criminal charge.
On December 19, a month after the incident, a judge gave a removal order for Durán-Arape. But instead of being deported from the country, he sat in detention in El Paso before ultimately being sent to Guantánamo. Durán-Arape’s lawyer during his time in El Paso did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But other attorneys in the field raised questions as to what benefit was gained by not simply deporting Durán-Arape as initially determined.
“This goes to why are you keeping someone that can be deported, why is he in Guantanamo?” asked Atlanta-based immigration lawyer Charles Kuck. “Why waste money flying him $4,000 a person on the [C-17s]?”
Kuck was referring to the military planes being used for deportation flights, which Reuters reported likely cost at least $4,675 per migrant to send to Gitmo.
“If he’s not a criminal and has nothing more than a regrettable confrontation with law enforcement, are those sufficient grounds to have someone detained in Guantánamo?” asked Leopoldo Martínez Nucete, a former member of congress in Venezuela, who co-founded the Venezuelan American Caucus. “How many people are going to be labeled as gang members under situations similar to this just to give the government a pretext to continue advancing this inhumane and xenophobic policy?”
The Trump administration, for its part, has shown no hesitation around its new Gitmo directive, going so far as to triumphantly blast out videos of law enforcement officials putting detainees in chains and boarding them on planes.
But a former DHS official noted that while it’s often difficult to parse the facts in what amounts to a ‘he said, she said’ situation for those being sent to Cuba, Durán-Arape’s case is telling. “The fact that they’re having to go to people who don’t have more hardened records speaks to the reality of the issue,” the former official said. “There isn’t capacity to deport enough people, so they’re going into gray areas now.”
Kuck said the use of Guantánamo Bay makes little sense as a logistical matter: There is still detention bed space available stateside. He suspects that the administration’s decision to send detained migrants there is mainly about demonstrating force, but also a willingness to go further than past administrations to make life hard for undocumented people. Conveying that message is in line with an old standby policy on the right.
“This isn’t, ‘We need more beds.’ This is ‘Let’s show people how mean we can be, and maybe we can scare people into leaving,’” Kuck said.
On Monday—just thirteen days after DHS touted images of Venezuelans being sent to Guantánamo—the agency announced a new ad campaign centered on the theme of self-deportation. A “nationwide and international multimillion-dollar” spot “warning illegal aliens to leave our country now.”
“If you are here illegally, we will find you and deport you. You will never return,” Noem said in the release. “But if you leave now, you may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream.”