Immigration detention in Guantanamo Bay (not going anywhere anytime soon)

The detention facilities at the United States’ Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, 45 square miles (120 km2) of land located at the south-eastern corner of the island of Cuba, gained global notoriety since the ‘War on Terror’ began in 2002. It is not so widely known, however, that since 1991 the base has been extensively used as an immigration detention facility for asylum seekers and refugees. This paper is concerned with the ‘Migrant Operations Center’ (MOC), which is the immigration detention facility operating at the base under a cloak of relative secrecy. It places the Guantánamo Base in its historical and geographic context. It shows that the very particular imperial geography of Guantanamo Bay anticipated its use as a detention facility for ‘aliens’. This paper argues that it is problematic for the US to continue the decades old policy of interdicting and detaining refugees at Guantánamo, despite its alleged, though empirically unfounded, role as a deterrence mechanism for others considering a boat journey to US shores.