The Pentagon's Rush to Staff Trump’s Guantanamo Migrant Prison Camp Should Terrify Us All
An 'urgent' internal request shows how quickly American institutions are implementing Trump’s drastic plan to detain migrants at the notorious island prison.
As intern-age DOGE engineers gut federal agencies, leading to mass firings and confusion, new job offers of a much higher degree of reckless bloat and excess are quietly cropping up elsewhere. One “opportunity,” as the Pentagon bills it, involves helping build up migrant prison camps at a detention facility synonymous with human rights abuses.
An internal army bulletin was flagged to me earlier this week. “We are in urgent need of certain skill sets to support our Service Members recently deployed to Guantanamo,” the blurb read. Essentially, the Pentagon is urging civilian officers to enlist for a six-month deployment to construct and manage Donald Trump’s migrant prison camps. Civilian officers would begin the deployment in March and assist the Joint Task Force Southern Guard – a spanning unit made up of the Department of Homeland Security, Army, military intelligence, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and more – with building up the prison to detain migrants.
The all-hands effort underscores how fast institutional machinery is churning to obediently implement the Musk-Trump-Vance administration’s brash plot to mass detain migrants, raising not only legal questions but also widespread concerns about how migrants will be treated at an island prison notorious for human rights violations.
After all, it was only two weeks ago that Trump said he wanted to capture and hold tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the widely criticized detention facility. Since then, tents have gone up, dozens of migrants have been flown in, and several branches of the military have come together to make it all happen. Little fanfare, little pushback – cogs falling into place, gears whirring into motion. Morals, Congress, the Constitution be damned.
And transparency? What’s that? Even the officials tasked with carrying out the plan seem confused. “Nobody really knows what’s going on, between DOD, ICE, and CBP. We’ve got everybody pointing fingers, saying, ‘They’re in charge,’ ‘They’re paying for this,’ ‘They’re providing security.’ No one actually knows,” one source told CNN.
When I tried to talk to someone at the government about the effort, I got the runaround. The Pentagon referred me to the US Southern Command, which then referred me back to the Pentagon. The Army Corps of Engineers also referred me to the Pentagon. DHS simply didn’t respond…And the Pentagon never answered any questions.
“30,000 beds”
Putting the fast-paced nature of this situation and the lack of transparency aside, there are several alarming concerns about Trump’s plan.
First, Guantanamo itself.