Soon after Trump signed his Guantánamo directive, he ended Temporary Protected Status for more than three hundred thousand Venezuelans and half a million Haitians, making them eligible for deportation in the coming months. The Administration is considering other detention sites in the U.S. and elsewhere, including in El Salvador, where, according to Human Rights Watch, even minors are subject to torture and abuse while incarcerated. In mid-February, a group of detainees including Iranian, Indian, Afghan, and Chinese immigrants were deported from the United States to Panama. They were confined to a hotel for several days. Most agreed to go back to their home countries, but more than a hundred expressed fear of returning and were moved to a preëxisting camp on the edge of the Darién Gap. A group of lawyers recently filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on their behalf and plans to file a complaint against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. On Friday, Panama announced it would release them, granting temporary passes to remain in the country for between thirty and ninety days.
Unlike the detainees at Guantánamo in the nineteen-nineties, a few today have access to phones and are able to sporadically communicate with reporters and photographers. Some of the men who were deported from Guantánamo to Venezuela have told a familiar tale of being beaten by guards, strip-searched, and put into solitary confinement, and of suicide attempts as well as hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions. As for the detainees by the Darién Gap, one Iranian held there, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, told the Times, “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages.” Unfortunately, as many of the old photos of Haitians in Guantánamo remind us, that’s exactly the point.
