President Donald Trump is implementing a plan to detain up dangerous illegal immigrants at Guantanamo Bay while they’re awaiting deportation to their home country — one that will cause a massive stir in the mainstream media and among Democratic Party leaders.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said.
The newspaper headlines will be wild. MSNBC talking heads will howl and gnash their teeth. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., will weep in a parking lot.
But there’s just one problem: Trump’s plan is actually a recreation of former President Bill Clinton’s own illegal immigration policy.
The Democrats and their media allies will ignore that facts, but they don’t lie.
During his first administration, Clinton’s administration intercepted and detained tens of thousands of Haitian illegal immigrants at the U.S. naval base before having them deported back home.
“It was massive, a massive camp, and it was fenced with razor wire,” Marie Genard, who was detained at Guantanamo for over a year under the Clinton administration, recently told Frontline. “We didn’t have no rights because, technically, we’re not in the U.S. So it felt like you were in prison. I mean, that’s what it was to us, it was being in prison.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the new detentions would be “temporary” and separate from the current military prison, focusing on “high-priority criminal” illegal immigrants being processed for deportation.
Clinton’s policy led to the long-term detention of over 12,000 Haitian refugees attempting to get to the U.S. mainland after a 1991 coup in their home country. U.S. Coast Guard vessels intercepted over 37,000 Haitians in international waters during the coup’s first year, sending most straight home and while bringing thousands to Guantanamo for asylum processing. Almost all of them were later deported back to Haiti.
Indeed, the Clinton-era detentions created legal precedent the George W. Bush administration later used to argue Guantanamo existed outside U.S. mainland law for terror suspects after 9/11.
Rights groups have announced plans to challenge Trump’s order. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which previously fought the Haitian detentions, vowed legal action against the policy’s revival.
Remember this when the media headlines are trumpeting the heartlessness of the Trump administration.
This is simply Democratic Party policy, being implemented less than 3o years later.