Guantanamo

 This is how impunity works. 

In 2001 the US began incarcerating hundreds of accused terrorists at Guantanamo. 

Why in Cuba, which wasn’t, and isn’t an ally and had, in fact, been designated by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism for over 20 years? So the Department of Justice could claim that, because the camp wasn’t in the United States, there was no right of habeas corpus. In other words, the US had the right to imprison people indefinitely without trial… or any form of due process. 

In some cases the government ignored overwhelming evidence that people had been falsely accused because, it we admitted that, it might have undermined the rationale for the entire offshore prison.

The detainees were routinely abused in ways that violate any norms for holding either prisoners of war or people convicted of crimes. In fact, the government’s lawyers claimed that the people being held there were neither, and therefore had no rights at all. Much of the evidence against some of the detainees was obtained by torturing them. Torture is notorious for yielding false confessions by people who will say whatever they think their abusers want to hear, just to make it stop.

Fast forward twenty-three years. 

Yesterday DJT announced a plan to incarcerate 30,000 migrants at Guantanamo. Why Guantanamo? Because he wants to detain them, not deport them. In his words: “We don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem assures us that they will be the “worst of the worst.” But she has also assured us that the raids of the last few days were “targeted,” not roundups. Anybody paying attention knows that ICE arrest quotas are yielding results like the Puerto Rican family arrested in Milwaukee for speaking Spanish, and the Puerto Rican military veteran arrested in Newark, apparently for being Latino.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that immigrants can be held indefinitely without a hearing. They do not have a right to bail, either. So, when Trump says he wants to detain them indefinitely, there are some legal grounds to think the Court will support him, besides the fact that the majority seems to think he is above the law.

In 1857 the Court ruled that Black people had "no rights that a White man was bound to respect." The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution to take back that monumentally-bad decision. But racial capitalism has been trying to go back to Dred Scott ever since, sometimes successfully. DJT's insistence on ending birthright citizenship is only the latest chapter in that story.

Accused terrorists could be detained indefinitely without trial in 2001; now immigrants can be, too.

If immigrants can be rounded up and sent to camps without hearings, how long do you think it will be before they can do it to you?