With all the ongoing chaos, it’s hard to sort the new president’s serious proposals from his tough-guy performances. Donald Trump, for instance, rattled financial markets with his plan to impose 25-percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but things calmed down after he paused those ill-thought-out actions.
Likewise, his plan to expand the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba might also fizzle when reality hits, but we’re taking his promise seriously and literally. In an executive order, Trump ordered the “Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to … expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity.”
That would mean doubling the migrant facility – separate from the military prison that houses terrorist suspects – to house “high-priority criminal aliens.” As Reuters reports, that migrant portion typically houses fleeing Cubans and Haitians apprehended at sea. No one opposes the removal of what the Trump team calls the “worst of the worst,” but expanding GITMO is fraught with problems.
For starters, the administration’s promise offers poor optics. “(T)he symbolic association between the military detention center and the migrant camp … is likely to further stigmatize migrants,” CNN reported. We have never liked the idea of detailing people offshore where the feds use it as “an outpost outside the reach of US law,” as the network added.
Trump supporters assure us the feds will treat accused immigrant appropriately, but this administration has, to put it gently, not seem particularly bound by norms or constitutional restraints.
Even during the height of that anti-terror frenzy, this Editorial Board urged the federal government to shutter the facility. Some detainees had been locked up for years, with allegations against them never proven and due process never provided. The feds have operated the facility for 23 years, with 39 men still indefinitely detained – most of whom have never been charged with a crime. The only bright side is Trump’s plan might focus attention again on that travesty.
In our 2009 editorial penned after President Barack Obama promised to close the base, our late colleague Alan Bock made this point: “The detainee center has become an international symbol of the practice of skirting U.S. and international law, and torture. Whether the torture allegations are valid – and we’re inclined to believe that outright torture has been rare – keeping detainees at Guantanamo no longer serves any purpose, and closing it can’t help but improve the U.S. image, both abroad and at home.”
Based on the tariff debacle, the new president might not be too concerned about our nation’s image anywhere, but the rest of us should be. The beauty of the United States is not its power to evict illegal immigrants and bully smaller nations over trade practices, but its role as a beacon of freedom and human rights. By all means, remove adjudicated criminal aliens – but we should do so in keeping with our nation’s laws and highest principles.
Sadly, Obama’s announcement didn’t mean the facility’s closure, although the number of detainees has fallen. As late as last year, these pages were still publishing articles pointing to GITMO as an affront to human rights. Instead of finding new excuses to expand its use, let’s use the principles embodied in our Constitution to shut it down permanently.