Even when Guantánamo was housing only a small population, officials from the International Refugee Assistance Project found in 2023 that detainees were still being “held in dilapidated facilities with faulty plumbing, rodents, and a lack of potable water,” according to Henrike Dessaules, the group’s the senior director of communications.
“This administration’s attempt to send thousands of people from the United States there all but guarantees that conditions will be even worse,” she told Salon.
While many prisons run by the United States have faced scrutiny for mistreating its prisoners, Guantánamo, a “legal black hole” where people disappear without normal due process and evoking images of blindfolded prisoners prostrate before heavily armed guards or being threatened with snarling dogs, has an especially dreadful reputation.
The cruelty, Dixon told Salon, is exactly the point.
What possible reason could there be for storing people at Guantanamo other than to disappear them? That’s what it is made for.
Yeah, I’m honestly afraid a real, Holocaust-style concentration camp is already going on. This bullshit about shipping them to Guantanamo and then El Salvador just taking an unlimited number afterwards ???
What an obvious lie. But you kill them in Guantanamo and “ship them to El Salvador” while their government takes some bribes to rubber stamp your paper trail? That I can believe.
Often the game, if you want to kill deportees, is to deport them to some wilderness without facilities for life. That was the original pre-death-camp plan by the Nazis, to deport all the Jews to Madagascar under the assumption that they would die off since they had no food or shelter or civilization.
That is happening, or just about to, with deportations to Panama right now. I suspect they are trying to test the boundaries of what the US military is willing to go along with. Another possibility is to house prisoners in conditions so difficult, and unequipped with life facilities, that they will die “accidentally”, and whether that was your intended result or just a totally unintended side effect of the neglectful conditions can be debated until it doesn’t matter any more because none are left. That was also happening in migrant camps under Trump 1.
It seems unlikely to me that they are running a literal in-house death camp right now. Since it makes no sense to “hold on” to deportees in this particularly expensive and difficult fashion, I suspect that they want to use Guantanamo for political prisoners (high-profile Democrats) that they want to separate very firmly from any possibility of oversight or rescue, once they have primed the pump by running some migrants through it.
