83 years ago—on February 19, 1942—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which became the basis for the forced displacement and incarceration of over 120,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII. They were rounded up, taken to processing centers, and interned in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. Interned individuals were allowed to bring with them only what they could carry, leading to the tragic loss of homes and businesses. About two-thirds were U.S. citizens. In too many cases, families were separated.
The annual Day of Remembrance observed across the United States on February 19, allows all of us to recall the horrors of forced removal and incarceration experience of those affected by Executive Order 9066. We remember this stain on the national soul so that it may never, ever be repeated. We gather in dialogue and discussion to educate and inform the public about the repercussions of governmental overreach and injustice to keep it from happening again.
This Day of Remembrance, 2025, is an urgent and poignant moment because history is indeed repeating itself, most notably at Cuba’s Guantámo’s Bay. But also in immigration prisons around the country, 80% of which are operated for profit.
Like our 120,000 Japanese-origin brothers and sisters, more recent newcomers to the US are being painted with the brush of criminality and ruthlessly interned by the US government or being expelled without due process to uncertain fates. We must stop it.
Here are the facts from the real world:
Trump & Co are right now making moves to triple the size, even quadruple the size, of the US immigration detention system, which is already way too big and way too costly. We’re talking imprisonment under ICE—US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A quasi-military law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security that knows no transparency and suffers little accountability, and whose abysmal human rights record is already well established and well documented.
As of this recording, Congress provides ICE funds to imprison 41,500 people on any given day, the majority of whom are not violent criminals but people seeking safety and a life free from persecution in the United States of America. Eighty percent of those hard-earned taxpayer dollars are passed onto prison profiteers such as CoreCivic and GEO Group each of which brings in annual revenues in excess of $2 billion and runs between them running more than 200 immigration detention facilities in the US already.
As I explained in a recent podcast episode entitled, Who Are The Real Criminals In Trump 2.0's Mass Deportation Story?, these and other prison profiteers are more interested in their bottom line than in the health and well-being of the people they routinely rob of their freedom and dignity in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As with the xenophobic WWII internment of Japanese-Americans, this is modern enslavement. And the routine human rights abuses committed by for-profit prison contractors make us all complicit to their crimes against humanity because we’re paying for it.
Now Trump & Co 2.0 want to expand the already rotten system to three times its current size.
Even as they tear apart the US Department of Education, blow up the soft power of USAID, and attack what’s left of the social safety net in the US — itself already picked apart since the Reagan era — they are making moves to drastically expand the abusive detention-to-deportation pipeline by negotiating new contracts with private prison companies; by deputizing local and state law enforcement entities to conduct ICE raids for them; and building more black sites on military bases, the most notorious of which is Guantánamo Bay.
Again, with history as our guide, any use of Guantánamo Bay is never good.
Otherwise known as Gitmo, Guantánamo Bay is synonymous with US state-sponsored torture during the Bush 43 administration, following September 11, 2001, against individuals alleged to have links to Al Qaeda.
But perhaps less well known are the atrocities his father, Bush 41 permitted at Gitmo, 10 years before, that time against Haitians fleeing unspeakable violence in their homeland.
Bush 41 turned Gitmo into an open-air jail, greenlighting the now worldwide phenomenon copied by Australia, Israel, the UK, and the EU called “border externalization.”
It was his administration’s way of making an end-run around both the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1980 US Refugee Act, which state that anyone can request protection anywhere once inside the territorial boundaries of that nation no matter their means of arrival.
Through the winter of 1991–1992, nearly forty thousand Haitians took to the Caribbean Sea in dinghies and fishing boats, fleeing rape, repression, and extrajudicial massacres; forced disappearances and the violent plundering of entire neighborhoods by the Haitian military and para-military goon squad, called the Tonton Macoute, that operated under the brutal thirty-year father-son Duvalier dictatorship.
The preceding February, Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been sworn in as president of Haiti after winning 67% of the vote in what was heralded as the island nation’s first democratic election. A Salesian priest and liberation theologian, he promised to put food on the tables of Haiti’s slum dwellers and rural poor; and to redistribute property concentrated in the hands of the few wealthy landowners. But first, he had to dismantle the para-military and military forces that had for so long terrorized the Haitian people. Naturally, the goons didn’t think much of that plan, so they drove the former priest into exile just seven months after he took up residence in the presidential palace.
The US government did very little to stop the coup.
Then, by ordering the US Coast Guard to divert the boats of Haitian asylum seekers away from US shores and toward Guantánamo Bay, Bush 41 prevented folks in search of safety from stepping foot on US soil where they could exercise their legal right to request protection under international and US law. By caging the refugees indefinitely at Guantánamo, the US government under Bush the Elder effectively “offshored” the asylum process.
“You don’t take your life into your own hands like that unless it’s more dangerous to stay,” states Guerline Jozef, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Guerline is a celebrated humanitarian and human rights defender. Among the many well-deserved accolades she received was being named one of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2024. She is also one of my 100 collaborators and mentors whose stories are centered in my 2024 exposé of the human costs of the broken US immigration system, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands.
As I write in chapter 18 of my book, in the winter of 1991-92, the Windward Passage, like the sandy Sonoran Desert, became a migrant graveyard. Many of Guerline’s Haitian brothers and sisters perished then, buried at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
Like his presidential predecessor, Ronald Reagan, with regard to Central American refugees seeking safety in the US, Bush 41 refused to acknowledge that Haitians were indeed fleeing a “well-founded fear of persecution.” He labeled them “economic migrants” rather than “refugees” and instructed the US Coast Guard to interdict them outside US territorial waters and “push” them to the US naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay.
There, everyone—even children—was held in a vast cage encircled in chain link and coils and coils of barbed wire. The Defense Department called the Guantánamo detention center a “humanitarian mission.” But the refugees were subjected to deplorable conditions.
Professor
, author of The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration, states in a recent interview with Andrew Free on his Substack, that the depths of the atrocities that happened at Guantánamo Bay in the ‘90s are not fully understood even now. What we do know is that asylum-seeking Haitian men, women, and children were made to sleep without privacy in rows of military-style canvas cots in barracks with a leaky tarpaulin roof and garbage bags taped over windows to stop the screaming ocean winds. They were given inedible, spoiled, often maggot-infested food. The medical care was, at best, ineffective and, at worst, abusive, with treatments sometimes denied; sometimes performed without informed consent.For most of us, the injustices of our government were out of sight, and out of mind. To justify warehousing Haitians in need of safety at the Guantanamo Bay black site, the Bush administration also harnessed a trope common to authoritarians and dehumanizers dating to the dawn of time: this time, rather than labeling everyone a “criminal” as Trump & Co are doing, they whipped up a moral panic to convince the US public that all Haitians were potential carriers of HIV-Aids.
The AIDS epidemic had been with us for a decade then. We knew it was passed through blood, saliva, and semen. It was ludicrous to claim that an entire nation group was a vector. Indeed, fewer than three hundred Gitmo detainees ever tested positive for the virus. And yet this group was tarred as “diseased” and vilified by the US public, which bought into Bush & Co’s lies hook, line, and sinker.
Those who knew better sued the Bush 41 administration for denying the refugees due process under the law. So Bush & Co brought immigration judges to them. They cycled the refugees through the asylum review process at rocket speed right there at Gitmo, denying them access to legal representation as well as the time and resources, like telephones and fax machines, to gather evidence in support of their claims. Despite horrifying tale upon horrifying tale, most were deemed to be coming to the US to work, even orphaned children, and deported—dropped right back into a country the US government knew to be embroiled in a military and paramilitary reign of terror against civilians.
When the Guantánamo facilities began to groan under the weight of the increasing refugee numbers, Bush 41 just ordered the US Coast Guard to push everyone back to Haiti, regardless of whether they had a credible fear of return or not.
Twenty thousand Haitians came to be trapped at Gitmo under Bush 41. To put that number in perspective, Trump & Co are promising to make room there for 30,000 people they are tarring with the trope of “criminality” even though after only three weeks the preponderance of evidence already suggests this is fake news.
Another big difference between the Bush and Trump concentration camps at Gitmo: Bush was intent on keeping people out of the US. Trump aims to expel people who are already in the country, many of whom have been in our communities long enough to have put down roots, married US-citizen spouses, and brought up US-citizen children—just like the thousands of Japanese Americans jailed during WWII.
Many of Trump & Co’s targets have filed for asylum and are waiting for their claims to make their slow way through the beleaguered immigration court system. Some of those already detained and even deported have been US citizens. Others should be protected from deportation by such legal processes as DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that this regime appears intent on ignoring or fully flouting.
No sooner had I exposed the mendacity of ICE top brass, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump Border Czar Tom Homan’s statements they are only removing hardened criminals—“the worst of the worst”—than White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt alarmingly confirmed that, indeed, both administration and agency are lying through their teeth. Under the Trump Administration, according to Leavitt, every person without the proper documentation is a target.
If Trump & Co’s multi-pronged detention expansion plan is realized…
…it could triple or even quadruple the immigration detention system’s current capacity, bringing the number of people detained at any given time in the US and at Gitmo to well over 120,000—roughly the number of Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps as a result of FDR’s Executive Order No. 9066, signed 83 years ago.
Understand that Gitmo is not exceptional. The injustices that all those incarcerated there will likely confront will be on steroids. But it is not the only immigration detention black site, where peace-seeking people are warehoused for profit by the US government, out of sight, and out of mind, off-limits to their families, attorneys, advocates, and friends. This is happening right now—and has been for decades—in over 200 prisons spanning the continental US.
Trump & Co’s plans to detain thousands of people, potentially tens of thousands of people—whether in county jails, federal prisons, on military bases like Guantánamo Bay, or in El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s notorious torture chambers—take us back to some of the most shameful times in human history. Not the least of which is Family Separation.
In effect, we’re back where we were in 2018, under Trump 1.0, with billions of taxpayer dollars being spent to tear families as well as communities apart while simultaneously cutting funding for programs and services that help all of us every day. The only winners in this scenario are the private prison profiteers willing to make bank off the backs of people who’ve been locked up despite having committed no crime other than entering the US without inspection as a means to pursue protection under asylum conventions.
The other “winners,” maybe, are the local economies that for too long have become dependent on a single job creator: prisons.
On this Day of Remembrance for the 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent wrongly and ruthlessly imprisoned during WWII, I urge you not to sit idly by.
Trump’s violent crusade against immigrants is a distraction from the real work needed to create safe, secure, and thriving communities across the United States and the world.
While Trump & Co whip up a moral panic about the so-called criminals walking among us with one hand, they are picking our pockets with the other. They are scapegoating the outsider for the benefit of demagogues, profiteers, Broligarchs, and Kleptocrats.
The moment demands a national outcry. Call your Members of Congress today. Tell them to oppose Trump & Co’s cruelty. Insist that they boldly deny Trump & Co the resources they need to carry out their un-American and unconstitutional intentions.
Tell them that if it’s government waste they are after, they should start by cutting funding to ICE and any other Department of Homeland Security agencies that are right now being harnessed to carry out terrorizing raids, mass detention, and mass deportations. They are the enemy within.
Remind them that the vast majority of their constituents oppose the use of their taxpayer dollars to fund a violent and destructive crusade. According to polls, 72% oppose using military funds for immigration enforcement. Even among Republicans, 58% reject the use of the US military to enact deportations.
In 1983, a report commissioned by the Carter administration, called Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty during WWII. It concluded that the internment of 120,000 people had been the product of racism only. It recommended that the US government pay reparations to those who had been needlessly and unjustly detained.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which officially apologized and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to roughly $52,000 today) to all those who had been incarcerated during the infamous Japanese internment and were still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that the government's actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
We cannot, we must not let these atrocities happen again.
RESIST! The only way through this is together.
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Image Information: A painting by the artist “Michelet,” a Haitian interned on the U.S. Naval Base from late 1991 to June 1993, depicts a brutal crackdown at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Bulkeley. This image can be found in this December 12, 2018, Haiti Liberté article by Kim Ives. Credit: Carol Halebian.
UPDATE: Feb 21, 10:00 am ET. While I was driving this post to publication, my eye momentarily off the chaos, Trump & Co reversed Biden’s extension of Temporary Protected Status protections for 521,000 Haitian refugees to the US. The regime announced yesterday that protections from deportation and currently approved work permits for these mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, and grandparents will expire in August 2024, leaving another half million people under threat of forced removal by this government!
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