On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of Defense to prepare Guantanamo Bay to detain 30,000 of the "worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people." Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student tragically murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant, is now being used for legislation that mandates the federal detention of undocumented immigrants accused — not convicted — of minor crimes. The Laken Riley Act lowers the threshold for federal detention at a mere accusation and exemplifies how Trump uses American tragedy as a political weapon.
Guantanamo Bay, first established in 2002 under the George Bush administration, was designed as a legal gray zone — a place where neither U.S. constitutional protections nor international human rights laws fully applied. This strategic loophole allowed the U.S. government to indefinitely detain individuals labeled as "enemy combatants" without trial, subjecting them to inhumane treatment and torture under the guise of national security.
While the migrant center is separate from the military detention center created by Bush, Trump’s choice to expand Guantanamo raises pressing questions — why choose this facility over any other in the United States, especially when it lacks the capacity to handle such an influx? Guantanamo Bay has only ever held around 800 detainees at once, yet the Trump administration has not disclosed the base’s current capacity to house migrants nor have they clarified how they plan on funding the center’s expansion. Guantanamo Bay is a symbolic choice. Trump’s message? Illegal immigrants are not just undocumented individuals; they are terrorists in disguise, a fundamental danger to American society.
Trump’s Laken Riley Act, while not directly expanding surveillance, seeks to broaden government oversight of illegal immigrants through increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. It echoes Bush’s strategy: justifying sweeping governmental control in the name of security. As Trump’s administration ramps up the criminalization of immigration, the same rhetoric that once led to warrantless wiretapping and racial profiling of Muslims under the Patriot Act now fuels an agenda of expanded detention and unchecked enforcement, inching closer to another era of government intrusion into American privacy.
This rhetoric further carries an eerie sense of deja vu by echoing the justifications once used by Bush who, in 2002, claimed that the War on Terror “ushers in a new paradigm,” one that seemingly excused the denial of basic rights to detainees. What makes the War on Terror so unlawful is that it reverses the inherent principles the American justice system is built on. Instead of presuming innocence until proven guilty, it presumes guilt without an avenue for the accused to prove their innocence. Now, Trump invokes a similar paradigm, but his target is not Al-Qaeda — it is migrants and asylum-seekers.
While the current administration has remained vague on the criteria for determining which migrants will be sent to Guantanamo, the broader intent is unmistakable — Trump’s decision to imprison immigrants in an internationally condemned detention center serves to stoke public fear while simultaneously presenting himself as the solution to that fear.
While the parallels between the two administrations are evident, the differences reflect a concerning escalation in the past two decades. President Bush was responding to one of America’s most deadly terrorist attacks in history while Trump is responding to cherry-picked and isolated events of American tragedy.
While one cannot necessarily compare apples to oranges, what’s concerning is that Trump is reviving a ghost of America’s past in a more hostile and vitriol-driven manner. His reasoning is clear: the value of an American life is greater than that of any other human life. As a result, the U.S. government reserves the right to violate inalienable human rights in the name of “American safety.” Don’t let the name fool you — "the War on Terror" is simply a misnomer for a “war on migrants.”
