Imagine this: You’re sitting in your living room when an earthquake hits. You snatch up your children and dash into the street. Seconds later, the building collapses. You’re alive but are now homeless. The kids’ school is also destroyed, as well as your jobsite. Reconstruction in Port-au-Prince will take years, if it ever happens at all. The only option is to leave.
You cram your children into a boat with dozens of other Haitians and set off toward Florida. But before you see land, the US Coast Guard catches the boat. Somewhere in the detention process, you’re blindfolded. When it’s taken off again, you are not in the United States but Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Such a scenario could become commonplace. Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order to indefinitely detain as many as 30,000 migrants in Guantanamo. It is a horrifying prospect, a brazen and shameless attempt to symbolically conflate the act of migration with terrorism.
But you’d be wrong to think this is merely one more nightmare on the fascist horizon. In reality, this scenario has already played out before under both George Bush Sr and Bill Clinton, who each detained tens of thousands of Haitian migrants at the military base in the 1990s. During his presidency, Joe Biden also used Guantanamo to imprison migrants, granting a private prison company a $163 million contract to run the facility, even though as vice president he and Barack Obama promised to close the detention and torture facility.
While uproar over Trump’s executive order is certainly warranted, if one is able to set his inflammatory rhetoric aside and instead focus on the material evolution of US immigration policy, it soon becomes clear that Obama, Trump, and Biden aren’t as radically distinct from…
Auteur: Levi Vonk
