Trump just issued an Executive Order titled “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity.” (1) When searching online for news reports on the order, this one from AP News (2) was one of the few top results that didn’t echo the White House’s use of “migrants.”
Watch for the use of “migrants” going forward. In the US, “migrants” typically has generally referred to migrant laborers, mostly seasonal farmworkers. And not exclusively non-citizens. In fact, “The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history.” (my emphasis) (3) That would be the mass movement of farmers and farm laborers (mostly but not exclusively white, native-born Americans) from drought-stricken Oklahoma and Texas and other parts of the Great Plains hit hard by the drought of 1930-36.
European ethnonationalists like those of the far-right German party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have for years referred to refugees as “migrants” to detract from the urgency of the situations that drove them to make the hazardous trip from places like Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iran to the European Union. “Migrants” in that context makes it sound like they just wandered into Europe somehow.
Sometimes, it’s a little hard not to be thankful for a bit of hypocrisy. In this case, I haven’t yet noticed xenophobes using the disparaging label “migrants” for Ukrainian war refugees, the largest number of whom landed in Poland. That’s in no small part due to the moment of good sense the EU had in creating arrangements that made it easy for Ukrainians to legally come to the EU and to integrate into the host countries, which included given them the legal definition of “displaced persons,” which so far has no acquired the stigma attached by xenophobes to “refugees” and “migrants.”
Just recently, in the last few months, one sign of the increasing embrace of far-right extremism by the AfD was that they began using the term “remigration,” a word previously popularized by the even more far-right “identitarians” to describe expelling people from a country. It’s a euphemism for forced deportation.
The infamous history of “Guantanamo” as a danger to the rule of law in the US
The Cheney-Bush Administration began using Guantanamo Bay facilities - controlled by the US on a long-term lease arrangement with pre-Communist Cuba - to indefinitely detain and torture prisoners taken in the still-continuing War on Terror as part of the forever wars. The facts were extensively investigated and reported. (4)
It was always a criminal scandal that in itself should have resulted in George W. Bush’s impeachment and the prosecution of him and other senior officials who were involved for war crimes.
It was the duty of Bush’s Justice Department to prosecute those crimes. Of course it didn’t. It was also the duty of the Obama Administration to do so. I’ve always thought of that failure as the single most damaging dereliction of duty of Obama and his Administration. He and the Wall Street lawyer he selected as Attorney General, Eric Holder, instead preferred to “look forward, not backward,” a convenient concession not routinely granted to perpetrators of serious felonies.
Yes, there were many things about Obama’s Administration that were positive. But those also do not excuse his dereliction of duty on the torture crimes. He gave the torturers of the Cheney-Bush Administration what they couldn’t give themselves: a subsequent Administration headed by the other party that granted them de facto immunity.
Within the context of democratic governance and the rule of law – and the rule of law is an essential feature of democracy (5) – this shouldn’t be a left/right or liberal/conservative divide on whether criminal acts of torture by members or agents of the US government should be prosecuted for their crimes.
The Trump idea of a Guantanamo concentration camp for those rounded up in immigration-enforcement sweeps is a genuine state terror measure. And it’s intended to gin up enthusiasm among the MAGA bases for violence and deliberate, lawless cruelty against Latinos and the other many types of people they hate.
As a reminder, even white all-American “migrants” during the Dust Bowl were not always treated with decency or generosity, as this Woody Guthrie classic reminds us. (6)
The Trump II era will bring more flashbacks to the kinds of issues on which Woody’s songs often focused.
Notes:
(1) Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity. White House 01/29/2025. <https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/expanding-migrant-operations-center-at-naval-station-guantanamo-bay-to-full-capacity/> (Accessed: 2025-30-01).
(2) Trump says he’ll send the ‘worst’ criminal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay. AP News YouTube channel 01/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/Jc71v5ve10Q?si=NmAKfeQOk22cji16> (Accessed: 2025-30-01).
(3) Mass Exodus From the Plains. PBS American Experience, n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/surviving-the-dust-bowl-mass-exodus-plains/> (Accessed: 2025-30-01).
(4) Ashkenas, Jeremy, et. al. (2014): Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report. New York Times 12/09/2014. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-key-points.html> (Accessed: 2025-30-01).
Brown, Widney (2015): The Shamefully Unfinished Story of the CIA Torture Program. ACLU 12/09/2015. <https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/shamefully-unfinished-story-cia-torture-program> (Accessed: 2025-30-01).
Mayer, Jane (2008): The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. New York: Doubleday.
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