What is Trump’s legal basis for holding migrants at Guantánamo?

As the first migrants arrive at Guantánamo, questions mount about the legality of the entire rendition and imprisonment operation.

Following up on my post last week, Trump’s vile plan to hold 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo Bay, which I wrote after Donald Trump issued his horrible executive order approving the expansion of an existing migrant detention facility at Guantánamo to hold 30,000 migrants, I’ve written a detailed article about this particular aspect of Trump’s shameful and disgraceful “war on migrants” on my website — To Hold 30,000 Migrants in Prison at Guantánamo, How Does Trump Propose to Redefine Them So They’re Beyond the Reach of the Law?

I hope you have time to read it, as it is, I believe, one of the most detailed accounts of what’s happening, and what might happen.

I look at how Trump drew on the use of the facility to hold, at one point, 25,000 Haitian and Cuban migrants in the 1990s, and also at how he is using the proximity of the nearby "war on terror" prison to suggest that the migrants are "terrorists", who should be held without rights, and how officials in his administration have reinforced this notion by describing those to be sent to the facility as "the worst of the worst."

I also examine the deeply troubling legal basis — or the lack of it — when it comes to holding migrants at Guantánamo, which has long been used by the US government as a "law-free zone", and question who it is intended for, when Trump has already massively expanded the use of "expedited removal" to allow immigration enforcement agents in the US to remove undocumented migrants and send them back to their home countries without being able to meet with a lawyer or have any kind of immigration hearing.

This is especially troubling as reports emerge of the first arrivals at the migrant facility, and I wonder, in particular, if Trump will, as I describe it, seek to create "a new law that would explicitly endorse holding undocumented migrants at Guantánamo indefinitely on the basis that they pose a direct threat to the US and its security as 'invaders' or 'terrorists.'"

In breaking news today, the first migrants arrived at Guantánamo, where, reinforcing my fears, they were described by the Department of National Security (which released photos, including the one at the top of this post) as members of Tren de Aragua, a gang that originated in Venezuela’s prisons.

On his first day in office, Trump designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of a directive targeting gangs and cartels, and in light of my fears about Trump wishing to hold his own “terrorists” indefinitely at Guantanamo (in addition to those in the “war on terror” prison), this seems particularly relevant.

Thanks for reading, and I will, of course, be posting more on this story as it develops.