It took 23 years for the [Guantanamo] prison population to go from 780, down to 15 men – all of whom have varying legal statuses in an entirely arbitrary and concocted military judicial system, writes Asim Qureshi. [GETTY]
Marty McFly: “What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?”
I thought of this iconic line from the 1985 movie Back to the Future as we received news that US President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January 2025 that he would send 30,000 migrants to be detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Since 2003, my organisation CAGE International has been lobbying, campaigning, and providing legal assistance to the 780 Muslim political prisoners that were detained without charge or trial after 9/11 – working with and alongside hundreds of lawyers and NGOs to end the mockery of justice there. It took 23 years for the prison population to go from 780, down to 15 men – all of whom have varying legal statuses in an entirely arbitrary and concocted military judicial system.
Many mistakes were made, but there was also much to be proud of in that time, but always against the seemingly ubiquitous machinery of racist and xenophobic US military violence.
This latest order sets us back, but not in a way that makes the US administration ‘assholes’ in the future, but rather, it sends us right back to when the US government used the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay to house refugees and asylum seekers.
Although ostensibly a part of Cuba, the backdrop of American military presence on the island can be traced to the Spanish-American War of 1898, resulting in a series of treaties and agreements that effectively made Guantanamo Bay a perpetual lease for the US government. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the US has continued to send the $4,000 cheque for lease of the Bay, although since Castro, it has never been banked. To this day, they continue their military presence regardless of protests from the Cuban government that their sovereignty is being violated.
It was not until 1991 that America’s neo-imperial proxy wars and interventions in Central and South America resulted in military base being turned into detention camps – at that time to house as many as 12,000 Haitian refugees – a policy that was enacted by President George HW Bush.
Bush senior was perhaps most famous for the first Gulf War, but what is often missed, is the role the US played in undermining Haiti’s democracy after a CIA backed coup that supported Emmanuel Constant and his paramilitary group FRAPH violently targeting the supporters of the democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide, a former Catholic priest, attempted to break Haiti from a cycle of elite control and military repression, only for the CIA to have trained and funded the Haitian Armed Forces who led the coup. Until President Clinton intervened in 1994 to restore Aristide to power under neoliberal economic conditions that were favourable to the US, the repression under the Constant military rule resulted in a massive political refugee crisis – one of American making.
In the 2017 PBS documentary Forever Prison, the conditions of confinement for Haitian refugees during the 90s were just as awful as they would go on to be for the Muslim prisoners that would be later detained there. They were held indefinitely without clear legal status or due process, constitutional protections did not apply due to being outside of US territory, and immigration officials would screen asylum applications, but regularly refuse them.
The conditions of confinement for the prisoners were appalling, without any form of proper housing or sanitation. Featured in the documentary is Harold Koh, who famously provided legal cover for President Obama’s targeted assassination programme through drone strikes. Koh describes how video tapes he reviewed of military policing showed: “This scene where the US military came into the camp and suppressed an uprising among the Haitians by physically mauling them, dragging them around.”
Such scenes would become common place a decade later when the son of George WH Bush, George W Bush, would send almost eight hundred Muslim prisoners to be detained and tortured at the prison camps – to be housed in chicken wire cages at the notorious Camp X-Ray. Those cages would become symbolic of the rendition, detention and torture programme that impacted thousands of Muslim prisoners across the world – a purpose built system of abuse and injustice to sit outside of the law.
Much is being made of Donald Trump’s executive order to house migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Guantanamo Bay, but it didn’t just hearken back to the history of the base, nor is it an entirely new idea – it was rooted in an attempt by the Biden administration.
In 2021, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought contract bids from private companies to house at Guantanamo Bay the more than 10,000 Haitian migrants being held in a makeshift detention camp under a Texas bridge. From that time, there exists the Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay – the very outfit for which the Department for Homeland Security was soliciting unarmed contractors. If President Trump has initiated the executive order for their movement to the detention camps on the island, it only sits within an architecture of what was made possible by successive presidential administrations.
On 4 February 2025, the first ‘high threat’ undocumented migrants were sent to be detained at Guantanamo – heralding a new era in the already bleak history of the detention camps. As with the Muslim men who were once detained there, they are being referred to as the “worst of the worst” a true return to the logic of legal exception.
According to the White House, those sent were members of the Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang, which the claim will be designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization – the scaffolding of the global War on Terror now being built on in ways that were predictable, and equally chilling.
Civil society organisations and the international community have been consistent in their calls for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, but what we face instead, is a back to the future moment, where none of the lessons of the past the direction of things. Instead, we reset the clock, as we prepare ourselves to once again make the arguments that detaining vast numbers of human beings outside of the protection of the law, only serves to harm our collective understanding of human dignity and rights in this world.
Dr Asim Qureshi is the Research Director of the advocacy group CAGE and has authored a number of books detailing the impact of the global War on Terror.
Follow him on Twitter: @AsimCP
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
