Middle East Eye reports on the current U.S. régime’s plan to create capacity to house 30,000 deportees at Guantanamo Bay, the infamous product of American empire-building and colonialism.

In spite of officials’ insistence that this would be “temporary” lodging for especially dangerous detainees, ProPublica’s research indicates that of the few detainees whose names we know, exactly none are guilty of anything that would qualify as especially violent or heinous crimes. Jose Daniel Simancras, a construction worker who came to the U.S. hoping for better opportunities, and Mayfreed Duran, a barber, are two of the detainees we know of, and the only note on their record is the accusation that they crossed into the U.S. illegally.

Whether the detainees are accused of a crime is beside the point for several reasons, one being that in line with Gitmo’s history, the detainees are effectively being cut off from legal representation. To quote Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney leading a lawsuit on behalf of Guantanamo detainees, “Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantanamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world… It is difficult to think of anything so flagrantly at odds with the fundamental principles on which our country was built.”

The MEE article points out that a lot of this is about narrative, about associating immigrants and refugees with terrorists and resurrecting Bush-era “war on terror” rhetoric only to remold it to make us fear our neighbors who have come to the U.S. seeking a better life. Just in case you doubt that this is true, at the time of writing the news broke of the DHS’ plan to spend $200 million on an ad campaign that will be “hyper-targeted” at undocumented immigrants, in which Kristi Noem tells the camera “we will find you and we will deport you.” Cartoon villain, much?

With vulnerable human lives hanging in the balance, this is all part of a narrative constructed to make you associate immigrants with terrorism. We’ve seen this many times before in the history of fascist régimes. Don’t fall for it.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)