Jeffrey Kahn

And so they end up opening up a camp at Guantanamo Bay to detain and to screen for asylum characteristics the Haitians that they stopped at sea. At its peak in the 1991-1992 period, you have over 12,000 Haitians being detained in these camps. So it's a vast, tense city. It's crowded. It's miserable. And it's also confusing.

The Haitians who are there are not exactly sure what their fate is going to be. They're not exactly sure how these immigration screenings operate. They don't have access to attorneys to inform them about the particularities of U.S. immigration and refugee law. And there's a feeling like they're in a state of limbo and they're not in control of their destiny.

It's not an ideal situation to be in. You know, maybe you've spent a couple weeks at sea, maybe shorter, depends, but you've gone through some sort of a difficult voyage. The Coast Guard picks you up. takes you to Guantanamo. Sometimes it may take a while for you to get to Guantanamo. So you're crowded onto these, the deck of a Coast Guard cutter exposed to the elements.

And then when you arrive, you have to undergo what's called a credible fear screening. to find out if you have a credible fear of persecution, which is supposed to be lower than the well-founded fear of persecution standard that governs asylum claims within the United States.

Now, what happens at the time is the United States was hoping to resettle some of these Haitian asylum seekers who had passed their credible fear interviews in third countries other than the United States. But those third countries, according to the government, had asked that the Haitians be screened to determine whether or not they were HIV positive.

So what the government does is they screen Haitians who have been shown to meet this credible fear standard for HIV. And then if they test positive, they're not brought to the United States. And they're put in a separate HIV camp on the base. And according to the Haitians who were there, told that they may be required to stay there indefinitely.

Later on, what happens is the government plans to hold full-blown asylum hearings for these HIV-positive Haitians at the base without attorneys. So the folks in the HIV camp faced pretty rough conditions. The camp itself was in a remote part of the base, which now houses a lot of the war on terror detention facilities. But at the time, it was sequestered from the populated areas of the base.

And the Haitians really felt that. They're out in the middle of nowhere. They're isolated. They're told that... They may have to stay here forever. And the conditions are poor. They had to take sheets of plastic and put them up on the windows of the shelters in which they lived to keep the rain out. They complained of infestations of rats. They complained of abuses on the part of the military.

When they formed protests, They were met with a draconian response, including pre-dawn raids by hundreds of military police with police dogs. And this prolonged sense of limbo ended up creating really difficult conditions and a very traumatic experience for the Haitians who were held there.

And so when I've conducted interviews with folks who were held in the HIV camp, and, you know, it almost always brings them to tears when they remember their experiences being held in this HIV prison camp at Guantanamo. At the time that the HIV camp was shut down, the US was not sending any Haitians to Guantanamo any longer.

Now, when Clinton came into office, Guantanamo was reopened again, and Haitians were sent to Guantanamo in 1994.

Cubans started taking to the sea in makeshift rafts, and the U.S. decided to send them to Guantanamo as well. And so you had this period in 1994 and 1995 where you had tens of thousands of Haitians and tens of thousands of Cubans at Guantanamo at the same time. So since 1991, effectively, there has been a migrant detention operation at Guantanamo.

In 2002, the creation of the Migrant Operations Center paved the way for small numbers of asylum seekers to be held at the base. And there's a specific process that governs the detention there. And the idea is to send a message to people fleeing their home countries in the Caribbean, that if they attempt to reach the United States by sea, they will be picked up.

And in very rare circumstances, if they pass their credible fear interview, they'll be sent to Guantanamo, but they will never reach the United States.

No immigrants have ever been sent to Guantanamo from the United States. This is the first time that has ever happened, right? This is... From my perspective, in large part, political theater. The Trump administration has been hammering this idea that the crisis at the border is an invasion. And an invasion requires a military response. And so what better way...

to equate immigrants with an invading army than to send them to Guantanamo, which is this place that in the public imagination is associated with the war on terror, with a war footing, kind of exceptional reaction, exceptional powers. The use of Guantanamo to detain immigrants currently in the United States is doing a lot of symbolic work for the Trump administration.

7,500 violent illegals have been captured by ICE in the last nine days. God bless them.

The messaging in some ways is very old. But the use of Guantanamo in this way is intended to cement in the public imagination this equation between immigrants and an invading army of criminal aliens.

The history of Guantanamo as a site for detaining asylum seekers has a really fascinating and also tragic history that goes back to the 1970s. So in 1972, Haitian asylum seekers start fleeing the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti and arriving on the shores of South Florida.

Others actually end up at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, and that's largely by accident. But what happens is the Haitians who end up at Guantanamo are sent back to Haiti. Now, at the same time, the folks who are ending up in South Florida, the U.S. Immigration Naturalization Service is also trying to send them back to Haiti, but they get access to attorneys.

And a large number of those Haitians, close to all of them, actually end up getting some sort of legal status eventually in the United States. In 1980, there's the Marielle boatlift. Over 125,000 Cubans arrive in the United States.

During that next year, about 20,000 Haitians arrive in the United States as well. And when President Reagan comes into office, he attempts to deal with this issue of asylum seekers arriving directly on U.S. soil.

So from 1981 to 1989, Haitians who were stopped at sea are ostensibly screened for asylum characteristics on Coast Guard cutters. And only six out of 21,461 who are screened get to come to the U.S. to pursue their asylum claims.

Then in 1991, the first democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is overthrown and thousands of Haitians take to the sea in an attempt to reach the United States to seek refuge. So the U.S. government says, all right, what are we going to do now? We have thousands of Haitians piling up on these Coast Guard vessels in the northern Caribbean.

Should we bring them to the United States? Well, if we do, then they're going to get access to U.S. courts and we're going to have to deal with the U.S. court system scrutinizing how we're handling these claims. The other option is, well, let's send them to Guantanamo. And so that's what they do.