AUDIO: Migrants Are Being Shipped to Guantánamo Bay…Is That Wrong?
I called up an old source who seemed perfectly positioned to answer this question. Mike Lehnert is a retired major general of the U.S. Marine Corps. He was the guy who got the call to build the first detention cells at Guantánamo Bay "in 96 hours," which would soon house terror suspects in outdoor cages called Camp X-Ray. But several years before that call, Lehnert ran the migrant camps at Gitmo, which held as many as 25,000 Cubans and Haitians under the Clinton administration.
Despite the recent uproar in response to President Trump's directive, this isn't the first time an American president has called for immigrants to be held at Guantánamo Bay.
A few highlights from my conversation with Lehnert:
- He said that a number of the migrants being shipped to Gitmo won't be quickly relocated to their home country, they'll become "forever migrants," the way we now have "forever prisoners."
- Lehnert explained why holding immigrants at Gitmo is far more expensive than detaining them in the U.S.
- He gave a compelling response to why President Trump is doing this and answered my main question... Is it wrong?
- ...he also dished on a chat he had with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld soon after 9/11.
Update: Since recording this interview, nearly 200 Venezuelan migrants have been repatriated from Guantánamo Bay.
