Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, explains to Vox the lack of precedent for one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders to ramp up immigration detention capacity at Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility on the island of Cuba.
However, the people Trump is trying to send to Guantánamo are not those captured on the battlefield outside the US, but people previously held in the US.
“That puts it in a different legal paradigm,” said Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law. “That sets up a whole new system that they’re going to have to create and it remains to be seen how any of these laws that would protect migrants would apply.” There’s no precedent for this legal situation.
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The Trump administration has done little to clear up the confusion around what laws or protections might apply to detainees sent to Guantánamo. DHS did not respond to a request for comment on what legal authorities apply and which agency has custody over Guantánamo detainees.
If the post-9/11 era is any precedent, officials might not publicly offer any such clarification. The legal justifications for detaining terror suspects at Guantánamo in the 2000s were made in confidential memos from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, many of which only came to light years later.
Greenberg said that the Trump administration is being “intentionally vague.” But it might also just be incompetence.
Read “Is Guantánamo a black hole for immigrants?” on Vox.
This article was picked up by MSN.