Trump urged to rule out ‘unlawful’ Cuba takeover and stop using Guantánamo Bay for migrant detention

The departments of defense, state and homeland security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawmakers sent their letter just one month after a group of human rights organizations decryied the administration’s aggression toward Cuba and its desire to establish a migrant “camp” for fleeing Cubans at the US base at Guantánamo Bay.

In March, a top defense department official told Congress that in case of a “humanitarian crisis” in Cuba, the Pentagon would “set up a camp” at the Guantánamo Bay US base to “deal with” migrants. The defense official said they would be assisting the Department of Homeland Security in migrant detention.

“Such a proposal is deeply alarming and unacceptable,” the representatives wrote. “It raises serious concerns about the use of a US military facility with a well-documented record of abuse, while externalizing the consequences of US policy toward Cuba by detaining displaced people rather than addressing the conditions driving migration.”

The Guantánamo Bay base is mostly known for its notorious and secretive military prison for detainees during the so-called “war on terror” following the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001.

The Trump administration began escalating its use of Guantánamo for migrant detention practices last year after the president signed an executive order to expand detention operations there. Some immigrants from the US were flown to Guantánamo and held inside the facility used during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while others were held at a separate migrant detention facility.

The establishment of a migrant or refugee camp, as the defense official mentioned, would not be new. In the 1990s, Guantánamo was used to detain tens of thousands of migrants and refugees from the Caribbean, primarily from Haiti and later Cuba. That migrant camp was shut down after widespread outcry related to its deplorable conditions.

“In light of this record, the proposal to use Guantánamo to detain Cuban migrants is particularly egregious,” the representatives wrote. “It would extend a well-documented pattern of mistreatment toward a population whose displacement is driven significantly by US policy.”