America’s War on Terror may have officially ended, but its brutal legacy has been resurrected by Donald Trump. His return to power is already marked by a grotesque escalation of U.S. immigration policy: the use of Guantánamo Bay to detain migrants. Long associated with torture and indefinite detention, the infamous prison camp is now being repurposed1 to hold up to 30,000 migrants, many of whom are fleeing economic collapse and political turmoil, not committing crimes. Trump will insist these detainees are “criminal aliens.” But early reports suggest most are asylum seekers. The reality? This is not about crime, it’s about control.
Capitalism’s Migrant Scapegoats
The capitalist state thrives on dividing the working class, using migration as a tool to pit workers against each other. Guantánamo allows the U.S. dominant class to criminalise migrants en masse while fuelling xenophobic narratives that shift attention away from the system’s own failures. Locking up migrants does more than instil fear, it suppresses labour. The threat of detention and deportation keeps undocumented workers vulnerable and exploitable, ensuring cheap labour for industries that rely on their precarious status. The U.S. economy needs migrant labour, but capitalists don’t want to grant them rights. The state’s solution? Criminalisation and containment.
Expanding the Carceral State
Using Guantánamo for migrants also feeds the ever-growing U.S. carceral state. It normalises the mass detention of vulnerable populations while expanding the reach of state repression. This isn’t about border security, it’s about state power. If they can do this to migrants, they can do it to anyone deemed a “threat.”
The irony couldn’t be starker. Trump is also looking at outsourcing U.S. prisoners to El Salvador, a country where many migrants are fleeing from gang violence, state repression, and economic collapse. At the same time, he is sending migrants to Guantánamo, a site infamous for U.S. torture, forced confessions, and the legal black hole created to justify human rights abuses. Many of these migrants are escaping precisely the kind of brutality that Guantánamo once represented, only to be locked up in the very same place. The cruelty is deliberate.
The lesson is clear, immigration control isn’t about protecting workers, it’s about protecting profits. Trump’s latest policy is a grim reminder that, under capitalism, borders are weapons wielded by the dominant class to discipline labour. And as long as capital needs a desperate, disposable workforce, the criminalisation of migration will continue. The fight against this brutality isn’t just about migrant rights, it’s about dismantling the entire system that profits from their suffering.
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- and renamed as the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Centre (GMOC) ↩︎
