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On January 29, the United States President Donald Trump signed an executive memorandum, which instructed his government to expand the detention capacity at the Guantánamo Bay operating center. Speaking Before the Signing, Trump Claimed The Proposed 30,000 Beds Were Necessary for “eradicating the Scourge of Migrant Crie “Trust” Would not Seek to Return IF deported.
This came amid an onslaught of anti-Migrant Executive orders, Including the Laken Riley Act, Requiring The Department of Homeland Security to Detain Nationals, Found Guel Found Found Larceny or Shoplifting, Thereby Denying Many Access to migrants to a proper process.
As extreme as these policies may be, and even if they seem indicative of the current authority, they are not unique to Trump or the United States. They are neither without a historical precedent.
For decades of decades, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have been experimenting with offshore detention abroad and increasing the criminalization of migrants at home. Tracking how these policies have evolved together, distributed in the three countries, entering and out of the benefit, reveals how the roots of this current authoritarian moment in world politics go deeper than any country, party or political perspective. Rather, their roots are found in rationalized cardiac violence, which is constantly recycled and enhanced across national borders.
The American experiment with offshore detention began in the 1980s, with the opening of a Fort Alan Retention Center, Puerto Rico and the introduction of “interdition” policies that seek to reach and return mostly Haitian asylum seekers in The sea to prevent them from reaching and reaching them the United States. In the 1990s, these policies were expanded with the Naval Base located in the Guantanamo Bay, used to detain 36,000 Haitian and 20,000 Cuban people seeking asylum between 1991 and 1996.
Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Australian government introduced the so -called Pacific decision, which saw Nauru and Manus in Papua New Guinea, included in the complex architecture of offshore detention. These centers have become obscured by reports of human rights violations and extensive evidence of abuse and cruelty, but the Pacific decision continues to this day and is regarded as a model of imitation of British governments.
The previous conservative cabinet is drawn directly from Australia's offshore policy to design a plan to deport people seeking asylum in Rwanda. Although the plan was delayed when the Labor Party of Kir Starmer came to power in 2024, he also strives for offshoring in Albania as a possible role model.
In all these countries, offshore infrastructure and related logic continue to exist, even when political vicissitudes dictate deviation from prisoners in offshore. Thus, in Australia, when the first iteration of the Pacific decision was terminated in 2007, the physical spaces and the legal framework of offshoring remained intact, allowing this policy to be easily reinforced and solidified with Pacific Solution 2.0 in 2012.
When the Australian government moved the last man from Nauru's detention center in 2023, they have never terminated their corporate contracts, allowing the center to be overpopulated with people who seek asylum only months later.
One of the main effects of offshore detention is to exclude the retained territorial and therefore legally from ordinary rights and protection, as well as to isolate them from the support of the community and intercessor networks. This is reflected internally by the increasing criminalization of migrants.
By creating new migration crimes, the imposition of detention and deportation of non-citizens with criminal sentences and the removal of roads for appeal or representation, the states have built an increasingly illegal population without rights. At the same time, they have erupted migration and crime in the public debate.
This creates the scene of politicians to compete with each other by offering deterrence through a constantly expanding detention as the only possible solution, especially during election campaigns.
The example of the US law on illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility of 1996 shows this clearly. Back to the presidential election, Irri has expanded the definition of an “aggravated criminal” and the scope of deportable non -citizens (including rearly). The law establishes close cooperation between immigration and local police implementation, enhancing the detention and deportation and militarization of the US -Mexico border and militarization.
Today, Trump's executive orders and claims to defense against “invasion” from “criminal illegal aliens” are enhancing this existing system and its racked logic of deterrence.
Like a carperal boomerang, this system for criminalizing and imprisonment people seeking a dignified life between its and offshore incarnations in the countries, as well as between the countries. This criminalization intensifies during election cycles when borders become spectacles of political force, with parties in political divisions using difficult for migration stories to prove their ability to manage the nation and to be distracted by failures in health services, housing, well -being , employment and others.
The last 12 months have been no exception, such as elections in the UK and the United States and now the upcoming elections in Australia. Each of these elections is directed to the rough expansion of political proposals for offshore detention, deportation of large parts of people and undermining, if not death, our regime of international protection.
As the politicization of migration continues, the goals of what is considered to be an acceptable move to law, which leads to policies that offer more rights to rights and promise more harm.
This performance of cruelty is also distracted by another failure – the very failure of these restrictive policies and the deep absence of political leadership against migration. What research shows over and over is how these policies do not deter people to arrive, but instead harm people who are already marginalized in our societies.
Damage and abandonment are essential for international immigration retention systems rather than random by -products produced by a lack of monitoring or fraudulent persons or corporations. The harm and abandonment are “design”. They are necessary characteristics of forced detention and deportation systems fueled by political and Financial Profits built on this harm.
Yet, the violations and injustice of detention are constantly resistant. Throughout the world, protests, strikes, riots and jailbikes from detained people have been greeted with solidarity by civil rights campaigns, local sites activists, faith groups, community organizers, lawyers, families and friends.
There are conditions, abuses, court decisions and laws, they are contested, raids resisted, published bonds, the policies of the sanctuary adopted, the border agencies for the application of the borders, and the local networks are built to exclude places for detention and assistance to people at risk by detention.
This resistance and solidarity were demonstrated in a 23-day protest, led by men closed at the Manus Island Center, after announcing its closure in 2017, when Papua New Guinea ruled it unconstitutional. Despite the intimidation of the security forces, by increasing their access to food, water and electricity, the men have been fighting for freedom at the place of re -activation in new sites, taking advantage of their relationships with local Manusian communities and Australian defenders, At the same time, they communicate their difficult situation to an international audience.
The documented treatment of those who are kept in offshore sites speaks of authoritarianism in the management of migration, which promises to affect citizens and the non -iconic ones. As Behrouz Boochani, a poet, journalist and former Center for Retention of Immigration Prisoners in Australia in Manus, describes in his book freedom, only freedom: “Refugees have identified and exposed the face of the twenty -first -century dictatorship and fascism, AA dictatorship and fascism, which one day will penetrate the Australian society and into the homes of people as Cancer. “
In the US, as well as other places, the coalitions of locals between people with live experience in detention and the organizers of cancellation, built over the decades of fighting, are at the heart of Trump 1.0 resistance and they will do so again. Because it is those who carry the weight of the attacks of the cancerous state not the corporate liberalism of the mass “left” parties that present the strongest opposition and alternative to our current authoritarian moment.
The anger expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazee's editorial position.
