On May 11, 1995, 430 miles south of Miami, a group of Haitian migrant children detained at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base launched a desperate attempt at freedom. The youth gathered rocks and oranges left over from that morning’s breakfast and hurled them at US military officials. They set fire to tents, torching some of their few remaining possessions. Many of the children were weak from several days of a hunger strike, and US officials swiftly regained control of the camp. They handcuffed over two dozen young people and dragged them away from Camp Nine, the site designated since June 1994 for unaccompanied minors.
In their nearly one-year detention at the base, the children had seen thousands of Cuban migrants hauled by the US Coast Guard to Guantánamo and eventually paroled into the US. The NAACP called the Camp Nine youth the “ghosts of Guantánamo:” yet another episode in the US’ “pattern of institutionalized historical discrimination” against Black migrants. The children at Guantánamo ranged in age from newborns to teenagers; they had boarded fragile rafts on the shores of Haiti, fleeing political violence at home and hoping for asylum in the United States. Instead, they found themselves behind rings of razor wire, at the same location that President Donald Trump recently promised to reopen as a mega-site of detention for 30,000 so-called “criminal aliens.”
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Days before the 1995 uprising, President Bill Clinton received a letter from the children at Camp Nine. “As a father, we think you’ll be able to understand our situation,” the children pled. “We cannot hold on any longer.”
In just a few weeks in office, the Trump administration’s threat of mass deportation has run up against an age-old problem: The US only has a limited number of detention beds. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has signed contracts with local officials to detain migrants in county jails, while private prison executives have salivated at the prospect of lucrative new detention center deals. But opening Guantánamo, Trump has suggested, could effectively double detention capacity overnight. The plan has already run into legal challenges: This week, a federal judge in New Mexico blocked the transfer of three Venezuelan migrants to the island detention site.
Though the US maintains around 750 military bases throughout the world, Guantánamo is an anomaly: a base in a sovereign nation whose government has described US presence as an “illegal military occupation.” In the wake of Spain’s defeat in the 1898 Spanish American War, the US promised Cuba its freedom; it came with heavy caveats, including access to the 45-square-mile military base. From a stretch of land on Cuba’s southernmost coast, the US spent the next century surveilling its hemispheric neighbors, plotting overseas coups, and torturing hundreds of “War on Terror” suspects.
Yet far less remembered is Guantánamo’s history as a center of migrant detention. At its peak in 1994, the US held more than 45,000 Cuban and Haitian migrants at the naval base. Policymakers hoped that the prospect of prolonged incarceration would deter Caribbean asylum seekers. It was an extension of a strategy the US refined throughout the 1980s in establishing new migrant detention sites in remote, rural locations: Hide the migrants, hide the abuse. For presidents of both parties, Guantánamo’s liminal legal status made it “an ideal place to commit human rights abuses,” as historian Miriam Pensack describes.
At the time of the 1995 uprising, over 300 unaccompanied minors were trapped at Camp Nine. Some children had lost parents on the trip. Others made the journey unsupervised, shepherding younger siblings onto boats and across oceans. Nearly all Haitians were returned to Haiti, labeled “economic migrants” rather than political refugees, while the vast majority of Cubans received admission into the US. Though Haitians fled a military coup and years of well-documented human rights violations, they were not escaping communism, the most clear-cut path to US refugee status. “When I heard that the US was going to let 15,000 Cubans into the country and leave 450 Haitians in Guantánamo, I felt like someone had stuck me with a knife,” a 17-year-old boy said following the uprising. “This is a very cruel situation.”
Nearly all of the migrants detained at Guantánamo had been intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, a strategy designed to move asylum hearings far from the interventions of attorneys and concerned citizens. These encounters could be deadly. In July 1994, a Haitian woman named R.E. boarded a crowded raft with her three children. The Coast Guard apprehended the 66 rafters just miles off the Florida coast. Exhausted from days at sea, R.E. fell asleep on the Coast Guard ship. When she woke up, she discovered her two-year-old had fallen overboard — the Coast Guard searched the dark waters with flashlights to no avail.
At Guantánamo, few officials spoke to R.E. about the loss of her child: “It was like a dog died and it just didn’t matter to them,” she testified. Her son’s funeral program now sits in a university archive, bearing the child’s name, the location of Guantánamo Naval Base, and a scripture in Creole.
As Haitian migrants arrived at Guantánamo, military personnel housed them in shoddy tent cities, ill-suited for months of detention. When storms swept across the island, the metal poles of the tents collapsed and the camps flooded with water. Through the wire gates of Camp Nine, Haitian children could see military officials building wood cabins for Cuban migrants — yet another indication that the two groups would not be treated equally under US law.
One of the most consistent elements of children’s narratives from the camp was their unsparing descriptions of violence. Resistance and protest were met with punishment. Children reported being sent to a makeshift children’s jail for days if they got into fights, and being physically hit and pinned down by military personnel. Aid workers described the children in the jail as “put in pajamas and drugged.” Sexual violence was all too common. Suicide attempts occurred with a frequency that stunned relief workers. In legal affidavits, migrant children described the fraying mental state of themselves and their siblings: “She would cry uncontrollably.” “She does not behave like the sister I know.” “I try to be strong, but at times, I’m ready to break.”
The US argued that keeping unaccompanied youth at Guantánamo was necessary as they searched for family members; critics argued the military was making little effort to locate American relatives, instead trying to repatriate children to Haiti at whatever cost. After Precilio Jeannot’s 18th birthday, officials swiftly returned him to Port-au-Prince with $15, a pack of saltine crackers, and an orange drink. In other cases, relief workers at Guantánamo speculated that officials were changing birthdays on children’s case files, aging them up to expel them from custody more quickly.
The history of Guantánamo reflects the racism at the heart of US immigration and refugee policy, a system that has treated Black migrants with tremendous suspicion and has subjected them to rampant immigration law enforcement abuse. Though Black migrants make up just 6% of all people in ICE custody, they constitute about 28% of all abuse-related reports and 24% of migrants in solitary confinement, according to a 2022 report from Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit working to end migrant incarceration. “We don’t believe the little Cuban children are given so much misery,” Camp Nine residents wrote in a 1995 petition. “It is that we are Black? Haven’t they heard our voices, are we kids also?”
In the past, as well as in the present, incarcerating migrants at Guantánamo has been catastrophic. It has led to shocking abuse (some of it malicious; some of it through utter incompetence), it has forced the military to operate refugee camps with minimal training for the task, and it has caused unspeakable suffering “with little to no transparency or accountability,” in the words of a recent International Refugee Assistance Project report. Even if the current administration claims Guantánamo will only be used for adults, or only for people with a criminal record, history shows that this is unlikely to restrain them for long. Guantánamo’s power comes in its flexibility — it can be easily, quietly repurposed for whatever “problem” the US wants to make disappear. This includes migrant children and families.
