As President Trump signed an executive order to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay to "full capacity" on Wednesday, it was "like seeing a nightmare I've had for years manifest before my eyes," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman, who's attended military tribunals at Guantanamo, writes that up to 30,000 people, "the innocent and guilty alike, will experience inhumanity, degradation and the anxiety of being caged for unknown periods of time." And "many of them will certainly be children," he writes at his Forever Wars website.
"Being in this country 'illegally' is a civil and not a criminal offense," yet "the US government will well and truly treat it like terrorism, with the due-process limitations and guard-force aggression that implies," he writes, adding that even undocumented immigrants arrested on suspicion of crimes including shoplifting or theft could be sent to Guantanamo under the Laken Riley Act. For Ackerman, it's a full-circle moment since Guantanamo's first terrorism-detention camp, Camp X-ray, "began as a camp for Haitian and Cuban migrants." "The safe bet is there will be as minimal access as the courts will let the Trump administration get away with," he writes. "The thing to understand—the thing that can be difficult to convey to people who've never been to Guantanamo—is that abuse at Guantanamo is guaranteed." Read the full piece here. (More Guantanamo Bay stories.)
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