Investigating a possible link between the cold murder cases in the Antelope Valley of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Jonathan Aujay Sprawling poppy fields, aerospace, and secret military bases, California’s Antelope Valley is known for these landmarks. Over the past decades, the Antelope Valley became more than a significant geographical […]
The post Under the Bright Poppy Fields a Valley of Darkness first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.
Inspired by his late golden retriever, Ridge, Jared Darlington got the idea to create a dog-shaped bench. And he had the skills to see it through: before moving to Santa Barbara in 2018, he spent most of his career in Boulder, Colo., as a carpenter, contractor, and woodworker. So he came up with the design—dogs on each end, with a bench in between and a shelf in back that, from certain angles, looks like it’s being held in the dogs’ mouths—and researched how to make it comfortable. “I must’ve sat on 20 to 40 benches around town to get the right configuration,” he says. “The one at Sylvan Park was the best.”
The first bench, made entirely made of wood, didn’t hold up well. He switched to concrete, hiring Kenney Construction to cast the sides. The question, then, was where to put it. One of his neighbors on the Riviera is Kim Cantin, who lost her husband and son in the 2018 debris flow; she suggested Casa Dorinda, as a tribute to the dogs and handlers of Santa Barbara County Search and Rescue.
Darlington’s business card includes “bench whisperer” among his titles, but he’s more of a guerrilla artist, placing benches where he thinks they add value. (The benches weigh around 250 pounds, so his gardeners help out.) You might have spotted them at Butterfly Beach; McKenzie Park dog run; two on Alameda Padre Serra (one near Santa Barbara Middle School, the other at the old streetcar shelter); next to the Old Mission Santa Barbara; at Santa Barbara Humane in Goleta; and in the circle at Paterna Road and Lasuen Road on the Riviera, where the bench is dedicated to Louise and Eli Levine, Darlington’s late sister and brother-in-law.
And more are on the way: the city’s Parks & Recreation department has commissioned him to make five, with four destined for the Douglas Family Preserve. There are strict rules about what can be installed where, and by whom, but the staff found a workaround to allow for the dog benches at parks (as long as they don’t have plaques).
Darlington is 75 and lively as hell—just ask him about his adventures kayaking out to the oil rigs. Every Sunday morning, he rides his bike around town to check up on the benches. I recently joined him at Casa Dorinda and Butterfly Beach, where he cleaned up the litter around the benches and made a note of anything that needed to be fixed. Generally, people treat the benches with respect. “The Casa Dorinda one is the only one to have a problem,” he says. “Someone tore an ear off, so I made a new one and clamped it on. They came back and stole the new ear and the clamp.”
It’s not an inexpensive hobby: $5,000 for the mold, $800 to cast each pair of dogs, more in materials and time. He says he doesn’t want to make money from the endeavor, that he views it as a gift he’s giving. Part of the fun is getting to see them in use. At Butterfly Beach, a young boy named Graham and his father approached the bench, and there was a conversation about what to name the dog. (Darlington suggested Parsons.)
Even if Darlington were to entertain private commissions, he’s hard to reach: he doesn’t email or text. Likewise, an e-bike is out of the question. “I have three rules!” he says. “No e-bike, no pickleball, and no Viagra!” And then, after a pause: “But I may change my mind about that.”
P.S. Don’t be surprised if you see a bench show up at the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge….
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Hossam Shabat is dead. I am beyond rage and despair as I write these words. The Israeli military bombed his car this morning as he was traveling in Beit Lahia. Videos fill my screen of his body lying on the street, carried to the hospital, grieved by his colleagues and loved ones. These are the kinds of tragic scenes Hossam himself would so often document for the world. He was an exemplary journalist: brave, tireless, and dedicated to telling the story of Palestinians in Gaza.
Hossam was one of a handful of reporters who remained in northern Gaza through Israel’s genocidal war. His ability to cover one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history was almost beyond comprehension. He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for seventeen months. He was displaced over twenty times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense. Israel obliterates the present.
When I contacted Hossam in November to ask him to write for Drop Site News, he was enthusiastic. “Greetings habibi. May God keep you. I am very happy to have this opportunity,” he wrote. “There are so many ideas, scenes, stories.”
His first dispatch for Drop Site was a searing account of a vicious mass expulsion campaign by the Israeli military in Beit Lahia that forced thousands of Palestinian families to flee one of the last remaining shelters in the besieged town:
Some of the wounded fell on the road with no hope of getting treatment. "I was walking with my sister in the street,” said Rahaf, 16. She and her sister were the sole survivors in their family of an earlier airstrike that killed 70 people. “Suddenly my sister fell due to the bombing. I saw blood pouring from her, but I couldn't do anything. I left her in the street, and no one pulled her out. I was screaming, but no one heard me."
His writing was lyrical and arresting. I struggled to translate and edit his pieces—to do them justice, to convey his emotive use of Arabic into something relatable in English. In the typical editorial see-saw back and forth of finalizing a piece, I would often return to him with clarifications and questions, asking him for additional details and direct quotes. He was always quick to respond despite his extraordinary circumstances.
In January, Hossam filed a piece about the three days between when the “ceasefire” deal was announced and when it was scheduled to be implemented, a period when Israel escalated its bombing campaign across Gaza:
They targeted the al-Falah school; they bombed an entire residential block in Jabaliya; they killed families, like the Alloush family, whose bodies have not yet been recovered and still lie under and over the rubble. The children I saw that night appeared happy but they were no longer living, their faces frozen in a mix of smiles and blood.
In early December, when writing a preamble to one of his articles, I asked him to confirm his age. “Hahaha. I’m young. 24,” he wrote. Then moments later he clarified: “Actually, I haven’t turned 24 yet. I’m 23.” I told him he was young in age only, but in experience he was old (it sounds better in Arabic). “I'm really tired,” he responded. “I swear I have no strength left. I can't find a place to sleep. I've been displaced 20 times.” He continued: “Did you know that I am the only one in my family who lives alone in the north?” Last month, during the “ceasefire,” he was reunited with his mother for the first time in 492 days.
In October, the Israeli military placed Hossam and five other Palestinian journalists on a hit list. At the time, he said it felt like he was “hunted.” He called on people to speak out using the hashtag #ProtectTheJournalists: “I plead everyone to share the reality about Journalists in order to spread awareness about the real plans of the Israeli occupation to target journalists in order to impose a media blackout. Spread the hashtag and talk about us!”
In December, after the Israeli military killed five journalists in an airstrike on their vehicle, I messaged to check in on him.
“Our job is only to die,” he responded. “I hate the whole world. No one is doing anything. I swear I've come to hate this job.” About his surviving colleagues he wrote, “We've started saying to each other: "Ok, whose turn is it?…Our families consider us already martyred.”
When Israel resumed its scorched earth bombing last week, I messaged again to check in on him. He responded with one word: “Death.”
Throughout it all, Hossam would message with ideas for stories, or just to relay what was happening in the north. In his messages and voice notes, he often somehow still managed to be warm and funny—a kind of rebellion against the death all around him.
After the “ceasefire” went into effect, he returned to his hometown of Beit Hanoun on the northeastern edge of Gaza. Hardly a structure was left standing, but he was determined to stay and document the destruction.
He messaged me late Sunday night, just hours before he was killed. He had been forced to leave his hometown of Beit Hanoun on the day of Israel’s renewed assault last week and was forcibly displaced yet again—this time to Jabaliya. We had agreed on him writing a piece about the attack last week and what he had witnessed.
“Habibi,” he wrote. “I miss you.” I asked him what the situation was like in Jabaliya. “Difficult,” he said.
He sent his piece, and I read through it, sent my follow-up questions. He only answered one before going offline. I messaged him again as soon as I woke up this morning. I didn’t yet know that he had been killed.
What you are about to read is Hossam’s last article. I translated it through tears.
—Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Read Drop Site's statement on Israel’s murder of our colleague Hossam Shabat
Story by Hossam Shabat
BEIT HANOUN, GAZA—The night was dark and cautiously quiet. Everyone fell into an anxious sleep. But the tranquility was quickly shattered by deafening screams. As the bombs rained down, the wails of neighbors announced the first moments of the resumption of Israel’s military campaign. Beit Hanoun was plunged into panic and terror. Cries of distress rose amid the screech of the shells in a scene that reflected the magnitude of the disaster engulfing the city. This was only the beginning. The massacre of entire families quickly followed. Columns of smoke rose everywhere. The bombing did not cease for a moment, drowning everything in a relentless hail of fire and suffering.
The Israeli attack is continuing. The occupation is practicing its brutality with unprecedented bombardment leaving behind horrific scenes of destruction and bloodshed. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the number of martyrs over the past six days has topped 700, reflecting the degree of such immense human suffering. OCHA also reports how Gaza is suffering from a severe shortage of medicines and medical aid, exacerbating an already dire situation.
In the first six days of this renewed military operation, northern Gaza witnessed four bloody massacres. The most notable was the Mubarak family massacre, which took place as the family was gathering in mourning to offer their condolences to Dr. Salim Mubarak. In an instant, their collective grieving was turned into a sea of blood and body parts. The entire family was killed: Dr. Salim, his wife, his children, his parents. No one survived. One eyewitness summed it up plainly: “They were all killed.” The victims were not on a battlefield but in a house of mourning. It was a crime in every sense of the word.
This massacre was not the only one—it was followed by successive attacks on other families, including the Abu Nasr family, then the Abu Halim family—bringing to mind the vicious bombardment in the very beginning of the war after October 7. The aggression is ongoing, relentless, targeting innocent civilians indiscriminately, leaving behind only destruction and death.
When I arrived on the scene, I wasn’t ready for the horror before my eyes. The streets were filled with the dead. Under every stone lay a martyr. Dozens were crying for help from underneath the rubble of their homes but there was no one to respond. Screams filled the air while everyone stood helpless. My tears didn’t stop. The scenes were more than any human being could bear. The ambulances were filled with corpses, their bodies and limbs piled on top and intertwined with one another. We could no longer distinguish between children and men, between the injured and the dead.
At Al-Andalus hospital the scene was even more painful. The hospital was filled with martyrs. Mothers bid silent farewells to their children. Medical staff worked in horrific conditions, trying to treat the injured with only the most basic means available. It was an impossible situation with massive numbers of dead and wounded being brought in at a terrifying rate.
Israel’s aggression continues. Massacre after massacre, leaving only the screams of mothers in its wake and the dreams of children that have turned to ash. There is no justification for this. Everything is being crushed: the lives of innocent people, their dignity, and their hopes for a better future.
* Translation by Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.
I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Read it while you still can. Seriously.
These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.
Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.
“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book. “Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.
As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.
The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.
The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.
The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.
Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.
When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.
Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.
Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.
The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.
Our tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.
“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview. “You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”
These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.
The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.
Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.
They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power”:
Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “expand” a migrant detention center located within the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Prior to the release of the executive order, the administration announced that 30,000 migrants would be detained at Guantánamo.
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately,” Trump said.
But according to Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site News, the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility — at least not immediately. Documents show the Guantánamo migrant detention center only has the capacity to expand to hold 400 people, far below the announced tens of thousands.
Although it is unclear whether, or how, Trump might expand migrant detention at Guantánamo, administration officials have already received a head start from someone else: former president Joe Biden.
For years now, both Democratic and Republican administrations have used a little-known section of the Guantánamo Bay Naval base to detain migrants, primarily from the Caribbean. And due to the secrecy of the facility, known as the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center (MOC), conditions at the facility are generally unknown.
In the fall, Drop Site News published previously unreported details of the treatment of migrants at the MOC, the bureaucratic process of how migrants are detained, and the private prison companies profiting from the detention center. In August 2024, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.
"For decades, the Guantanamo migrant detention center has been the hallmark of the most inhumane, racist, and brutal U.S. policies against people seeking refuge," said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center. "The Biden administration could have shut down the facility but tragically renewed and entered into new contracts to keep it up and running."
Drop Site News revealed that the MOC can detain single adults, families, and unaccompanied children. Because the MOC is inside of a military base, migrants awaiting processing are transported in black out vans “with hand restraints and black out goggles to obscure their vision,” according to the documents obtained by Drop Site. Migrants also have limited communication with the outside world, with their few phone calls monitored for “restricted information,” including information about the navy base, the documents showed.
“The idea that the Trump administration is going to send 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard all week. It’s utterly absurd,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents detainees at the Guantánamo military prison and frequently visits the base. “It’s purely performative. President Trump is trying to use the image of Guantánamo to project toughness towards refugees and asylum seekers.”
The Guantánamo Naval Base was first used to detain migrants in the early 1990s, after Haiti’s military coup in 1991 forced thousands to flee. The U.S. converted a section of the military base to “screen” those taken in by the U.S. Coast Guard. Reports from the 1990s describe horrific conditions at the refugee camp and in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the closure of the migrant camp.
But in 1994, the Clinton administration resumed migrant detention at Guantánamo, primarily for Haitians and Cubans. In 1996, the number of people detained finally went back down.
In 2002, President George W. Bush began using the Guantánamo Bay naval base to imprison War on Terror detainees, held under the custody of the military. In the years following, the War on Terror detainees denounced torture and mistreatment by military and intelligence officers. That same year, Bush signed an executive order to, once again, begin sending migrants intercepted at sea to the Guantánamo MOC.
Migrants detained at the MOC are divided into two camps. Those deemed to be refugees and slated to be resettled in third countries fall under custody of the State Department and the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. Migrants who are of “undetermined” status, meaning they have yet to be interviewed by immigration officials and those who are not found to have a valid case for refugee resettlement are under the custody of ICE.
From December 2021 to December 2022, the MOC held an average monthly population of 14 “undetermined” migrants. During that time, there was also an average population of 20 refugees per day, according to records reviewed by Drop Site.
“The MOC is a dilapidated dormitory,” said Dixon, who has seen the facility during his visits to the base. Dixon has also interacted with refugees under State Department custody, who are granted work opportunities at the military base, while waiting to be resettled in a third country.
Thanks to MOC operations contracts, private prison companies have raked in millions of dollars. Since 2003, three different companies have received contracts to operate the immigration detention facility, including the GEO Group and defense contractor MVM.
Last year, the Biden administration granted a multi-million dollar contract to Akima Infrastructure Protection, a government contractor that runs other immigration jails in the mainland U.S.
Akima continues to search for staff to work at Guantánamo. According to a job posting on its website, part of the work requires the guards to escort migrants “using proper security measures with blackout goggles and in vehicles with black out windows for overall facility security and to ensure inability to identify protected migrants.”
“There’s no way there’s 30,000 beds anymore,” a U.S. official told CNN on Wednesday, commenting on Trump’s desire to expand the use of the detention center. The MOC’s operators “would need a lot more staff to manage them. They couldn’t do it with what they’ve got now, no way.”
It is unclear what the process of expanding the Guantánamo facility will look like. Currently, the facility can hold 120 people. And according to government contracting documents reviewed by Drop Site, whoever operates the MOC must have the ability to build a “tent city” and detain up to 400 people in preparation for a possible “surge” in migrant detention. Even at its peak in the early 1990s when Haitian asylum seekers were detained en masse, the center only had the capacity to detain 12,500 people, according to court records from 1993.
A report from the National Immigrant Justice Center describes conditions at the facility when it was at full capacity in the 1990s: “Asylum seekers were housed in tents covered in garbage bags, which barely protected them from the rain, and enclosed by barbed wire fencing,” the report reads. “They were forced to eat spoiled and sometimes maggot-filled food in extreme heat.”
“The numbers that Trump is speaking about now would mean mass horrors worse than what we witnessed in the 1990s,” said Franzblau.
Because of the secrecy of the Guantanamo naval base, little is known about the migrant detention center’s conditions. Congress mandates government inspections for ICE detention centers throughout the country. Those reports, although oftentimes limited, are publicly shared. But no public inspection reports or audits for the Guantanamo migrant facility appear to exist.
“The Migrant Operation Center on Guantánamo is such a black box that advocacy organizations do not get to visit nor to communicate with migrants there, including recognized refugees, potentially families with children,” Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, told Drop Site last September.
Following the publication of Drop Site’s story on the MOC, The New York Times reported on the existence of an internal DHS document from 2023 detailing the treatment of migrants at the facility, confirming Drop Site’s reporting on the use of “black-out goggles.”
The International Refugee Assistance Project also released a report about the facility. Drawing on interviews with migrants previously detained at Guantanamo, the report said the migrants complained of “toilets spewing sewage,” “fungi growing on ceilings,” and “rats running around in the room.” A separate document obtained by Drop Site said that in 2022 officials found “critical physical and logistical complications at the site.”
In December, a coalition of human rights organizations submitted a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. In their report, they said the U.S. government “forcibly disappears migrants” at the Guantanamo facility.
On Wednesday, Trump signed the Laken Riley bill into law, a bipartisan bill that will increase immigration detention throughout the country.
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