Guantánamo:
A Symbol of U.S. Brutality

Feb 17, 2025

Donald Trump loudly announced plans to send 30,000 migrants to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. So far, the administration has sent about three dozen people, calling them “dangerous criminals,” “the worst of the worst,” and claiming they’re part of a gang based in Venezuela.

But the administration gave no evidence. One of these migrants entered the U.S. on January 19 of this year, surrendering to border patrol agents and applying for asylum. Officials said they suspected him of gang ties simply because he had tattoos, and the administration spokesperson admitted, “He may very well be a member of this vicious gang. He may not be,” before claiming new evidence indicated he was a gang member—evidence she did not share.

Guantánamo is very convenient for Trump exactly because the government can hold people there without providing any evidence. Trump has repeatedly talked up “migrant crime.” But if there was a real migrant crime wave, they wouldn’t need Guantánamo or any other immigrant detention center—anyone convicted of a crime can be held in a regular jail, and the U.S. has plenty of those! The whole point of Guantánamo is to make it seem like the administration is getting tough on this crime wave that they invented, while ignoring the real cause of street crime—this capitalist system that inflicts poverty and hopelessness on so many of its youth.

Using Guantánamo to brutalize people away from U.S. legal protections is nothing new. From 1991 to 1994—under both Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton—the U.S. held thousands of Haitians there who were fleeing a coup in their country. Conditions were atrocious: they were served food that had maggots in it, had to sleep on the ground with rats, and were denied sufficient drinking water.

Then, after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush sent more detainees to the base, where the government tortured them, holding them incommunicado, trying to deny them any legal recourse. Many were discovered to have had no connection to the attacks or any terrorist group at all. Three of the first people held there were British tourists who had traveled to Afghanistan right before the U.S. invaded—they were only released after two years of torture. This didn’t end when Bush left office: despite his promises to close Guantánamo, Obama never did.

Biden himself also kept it open as a detention center for migrants, where a small number were already kept with limited communications with the outside world before Trump took office. In August 2024, the Biden administration even granted a private prison company a 163.4-million-dollar contract to run the facility.

So Trump’s brutality and use of Guantánamo is nothing new for the U.S. state apparatus.

What’s new is how much Trump talks about it and insists that he’s sending people there to protect those born here. He wants to convince working-class people that our real enemies are these migrants, instead of the rich class of thieves that Trump himself represents. But in fact, the brutality the U.S. has carried out on Guantánamo has never protected workers here—just the opposite.