Decree could send 30K ‘criminal aliens’ to Cuba.
By P.C. Staff
Following President Trump’s Jan. 29 issuance of the executive order titled Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity, the Japanese American Citizens League issued a statement denouncing the action.
The executive order directed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to “take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
In its statement, the organization said, “JACL demands that we not repeat the inhumanity of mass incarceration that has become part of our community’s experienced trauma. As so many Japanese Americans understand, the inhumanity and cruelty of what happened during WWII, enforced by our own government, should never be repeated again.”
The decree could translate to, according to JACL, putting “as many as 30,000 deported migrants” into the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, operated by the Navy in Cuba.
Guantanamo, popularly also known as Gitmo, was used after the 9/11 terror attacks to hold suspected terrorists, in some cases for several years, with about 15 such detainees still incarcerated. Guantanamo already has a separate facility for migrants.
Referring to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II by the federal government under the heading of “military necessity” — later discredited — JACL described the “expansion of Guantanamo to hold tens of thousands of detainees” as “eerily evocative of a previous time in our nation’s history.”
To read the entirety of JACL’s statement, visit tinyurl.com/yc3c6zuk.
