History of Illegal Aliens at Guantanamo Bay

The first military airplane carrying criminal illegal aliens arrived at Guantanamo Bay this week. President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily house criminal illegal aliens at Gitmo has earned headlines across the media, but the move is not that novel, according to Cully Stimson, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an expert on crime control, immigration, and homeland security. 

Before joining Heritage, Stimson served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Detainee Affairs and advised Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. Stimson also coordinated the Pentagon’s global detention policy and operations, including at Guantanamo Bay.

Stimson, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the history of Gitmo and how the U.S. Naval base is being used in the deportation process of criminal illegal aliens. 

Read the transcript below or watch to the podcast above.

Virginia Allen: I want to start with the history of Guantanamo Bay.

How has it been used in the past, specifically by the U.S.?

Cully Stimson: Most people don’t realize that we entered a lease with the government of Cuba in 1903. And it’s a unique lease because both parties have to agree to end the lease for the lease to end.

And so, in the beginning, when we had this lease, we had to pay the Cuban government every year in gold bullion. And so, every year we would pay them in gold bullion, a small amount, like a couple grand’s worth of gold bullion. And some of the lease terms on our side that we have to comply with is it has to be an operational naval station, it has to have, at the time, it was coal and then oil and then gas refining capabilities to allow ships to come and go. It has to be in use at all times. So, we can’t just sort of have the base, put it on mothballs, and walk away, and then come back ten years later, and a couple other terms.

… And by the way, it was used as a training ground for ships in the run up to World War I. It was used by the Atlantic Fleet out of Norfolk, Virginia, and Florida as training grounds and live fire exercises in the run up and during World War II. It was used during the Vietnam and Korean War and in between the wars as a military and intelligence gathering platform. 

It’s been used prior to 9/11 for counter drug operations. Coast Guard cutters come in there all the time. They’re intelligence gathering apparati there that allow us to do stuff within Central and South America. And then, in the ’90s actually, in the late ’80s, at the end of the Reagan administration, then through the George H.W. Bush administration, and then into the Clinton administration, it was used as a temporary migrant facility for mainly Haitians who put out to sea. 

Allen: So, you’re telling me it’s been used to house illegal aliens and migrants before? This isn’t new? 

Stimson: Correct. Yeah, and so even though people may be aghast or shocked that this administration would consider using a military naval base in the middle of the Caribbean, they shouldn’t be because past is prologue.

And during the Mariel boatlift and Haitian immigrants were picked up in the high seas. They were housed at Guantanamo Bay in a tent city, a very large tent city. Some of them, Virginia, were HIV positive. They sued in federal district court here saying that you can’t send us back to Haiti because it would be a death sentence.

That litigation produced some precedent saying that if you’re from another country and you have no right to be in our country, you don’t have access to our courts. Ironically, you remember those orange jumpsuits when the war on terror started and the images from Guantanamo and you had the Camp X-Ray that sounded really scary?

Guess which president established Camp X-Ray? Bill Clinton. 

And the reason it was called Camp X-Ray is in the military, A is Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie, X is X-Ray. And so they had a map of the base, and this is a little book that we produced at Guantanamo Bay a long time ago about the base, and as the base planners were looking at the base, they wanted to put a little temporary jail facility where criminals who were committing crimes in the camps could be housed temporarily, so they put an X on the map next to the garbage dump.

And X is X-ray in the military, so that’s how the spooky-sounding X-Ray Camp came into being. It wasn’t George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who created Camp X-Ray. It was the Clinton administration that created Camp X-Ray to hold criminals who were perpetrating crimes against their own folks at Guantanamo in the nineties when they were held.

And so ever since then, and this is the interesting part, the CO, the Commanding Officer of Naval Station, U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, wears two hats. He or she is the CO of the base. That’s a small base. It’s a typical Navy base. Has a McDonald’s, has a Navy Exchange, has a movie theater, has a hospital, has some piers, etc. Pretty slow down there. And that person also wears the hat as the head of migrant operations for the Caribbean. And that AOR, that Area of Responsibility, and so they train to that mission. They are equipped for that mission. They have bunkers literally on the base, underneath the ground, that have tents, desalinated water, medical supplies, food, MREs, meals ready to eat, etc.

The one limiting factor about Guantanamo is because when [Fidel] Castro came to power in ’58, He accepted the first check we gave him because we went from cold gold bullions to checks and after that he stopped cashing our checks. But we keep sending him the checks and he cut off water to the base. So, we have a desalinization plant.

Right there at Guantanamo. It can only desalinate so much water, so many gazillion gallons a day. I don’t know how many it is. I can’t remember anymore. And so we can only produce fresh water at a certain level. And so when a secretary of Defense in the past, and this current secretary of Defense, says we can house up to about 30,000 migrants, that’s about the number, and it’s capped by the amount of water, fresh water we can produce. It’s not the footprint. 

And some people are thinking, well, they’re not terrorists. No, they’re not terrorists. They’re migrants. They’re illegal aliens who’ve been convicted of crimes. And they’re going to temporarily house them at Guantanamo, not permanently, not like war on terror detainees until they find a home that’s willing to take them.

And so, I think there’ll be a revolving door down there. There’s only 15 terrorist detainees down there now. Remember, there used to be, at its peak, 779. Now we’re down to 15. And those 15 dudes are on the other side of the base. OK. This base is almost the exact same size, mileage wise, as D.C. It’s 45 square miles.

It’s 45 square miles and if, and if the terrorist detainees are here everything else is over here. The hospital, the movie theater, the housing complex, etc., the grocery store, et cetera. And so, so the tent bases, the tents. And you can see these online. The tent city for the migrants in the ’90s was on the old, there’s two runways there.

One is the brand newish runway made in the last 20, 25 years on one side of Guantanamo Bay. And the other runway is the World War II runway on the other side of Guantanamo Bay. Because there’s a bay that splits the base in half, and … tents were on the runway and then they were on the golf course.

And so, I don’t know where they’re putting up these tents, but they have plenty of room for migrants.

Allen: Do we have any sense of where these folks might be sent after? Because, obviously, some of them are coming from countries that don’t want them back.

Stimson: Right. Right. So, we have an international law obligation not to send people back to countries where it’s more likely than not that they would be tortured or abused. It’s a principle called non-refoulement. So obviously we will comply with that law, but you know, just because they don’t want to go back doesn’t mean that.

We can’t send them back if the country will treat them inhumanely. And so, the first priority is to send them back to their home country, to repatriate them to their home country. And then if their home country, for whatever reason, can’t take them, we’ll find another country that will take them. So, I do not anticipate that this will be a permanent place for them.

Guantanamo’s never been a permanent place for anybody, except for the U.S. lease there since 1903. So, this will be a temporary way station for these criminal illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes and so, you know on what in one sense, what’s the difference between them being in Beaumont, Texas or some other temporary holding facility?

In CONUS, the Continental United States, versus at Guantanamo, not much, frankly, and they’re probably closer to their home country in Central, South America. 

Allen: OK, well, that touches on the legal side of this. Because there are arguments being made that what the Trump administration is doing here is not legal to put these folks on planes and fly them to Guantanamo Bay. You’re a lawyer. You’re a legal expert. You spent time at Guantanamo Bay. Your response to that? 

Stimson: So you have to draw a line down your legal pad in your head between terrorist detainees who the Left would say we sent them to Guantanamo because it was a law-free zone even though we were in a state of armed conflict and we still are, by the way, versus a base that has been used for migrant operations in the past there’s no legal prohibition from sending people who have final orders of deportation to a U.S. Navy base in CONUS or outside of CONUS once they’ve been ordered removed from the country, and so this is consistent with the law. Will lawyers challenge this? Of course. All these Trump actions are the Lawyer Full Employment Act. We know that. All right? Whether they have a legal basis or not, that will be decided by the courts.

But, you know, when you have a final order of removal from this country and you’ve exhausted your appeals, you’re done. You’re just waiting for a ride. Right now, most of them aren’t waiting. They’re hoping they don’t get the ride. And Trump is providing them the ride. And the voters decided in November, these people need to go.

And so, I don’t know what particular people they’re sending in there. I’ve heard that the first flight only had a handful of folks. And so, I suspect they’re being very surgical in picking the right people who have final orders of removal. And if they do that, they’re on very, very solid ground.

And these, again, temporary way station until they go back to their home country or third country. 

Allen: What is the message that the Trump administration is sending to other criminal illegal aliens through this action? 

Stimson: Don’t come into the country illegally and if you’re here illegally leave. And I think that’s a message that has been the opposite messages that have been sent during the Biden-Harris administration. It’s basically been open borders, come here and we’ll pay you and we’ll give you all sorts of benefits. The American people have had enough of that.

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