On January 29, President Donald Trump signed an enforcement memorandum directing the government to expand its detention capacity at the Immigration Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay. Speaking before signing, Trump argued that the proposed 30,000 beds are “necessary to eradicate the tragedy of immigrant crime,” and “trusts on “the worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.” If not, or if it does not return, you will be deported.
This requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain arrested non-US citizens amid onslaught of anti-immigrant executive orders, including the Laken Riley Act, but not necessarily guilty. robbery, theft, theft, or shoplifting, demanding that many people be denied by doing so. Immigrant access to legitimate processes.
These policies are extreme and, if they appear to represent the present authoritarian moments, they are not inherent to Trump or the United States. Furthermore, there is no historical precedent.
For decades, the US, the UK and Australia have experimented with offshore detention abroad, increasing the crime of home immigration. Tracking how these policies evolved, spreading and coming and going to all three countries favorably means what the roots of this current authoritarian moment in world politics are, what states, parties, and Or reveal whether it will be deeper than a political perspective. Rather, their roots lie in racialized physical violence that is continuously recycled and amplified through national borders.
The US experiment on offshore detention began in the 1980s when detention centers were opened at Fort Allen in Puerto Rico, where asylum seekers in mostly Haitian “blockers” were intercepted at sea to prevent them from reaching. “The introduction of the policy has been introduced. US. In the 1990s, these policies were expanded at a naval base in Guantanamo Bay, which was used to detain 36,000 Haitians and 20,000 Cubans seeking asylum between 1991 and 1996. I did.
Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Australian government introduced the so-called Pacific Solutions. This incorporated the islands of Nauru and Manus in Papua New Guinea into the elaborate architecture of offshore detention. These centres were undermined by extensive reporting of human rights abuses and abuse and cruelty, but Pacific solutions continue to this day and were considered models emulated by the British government.
Previous conservative cabinets were directly drawn from Australia’s offshore policy and designed plans to deport those seeking asylum in Rwanda. The plan was shelved when Keir Starmer’s Labor Party came to power in 2024, but he also turned to Italian offshoring in Albania as a potential model to emulate.
In all these countries, even when political fluctuations decide to leave offshore incarceration, the offshore infrastructure and associated deterrence logic persists. Therefore, in Australia, when the first iteration of Pacific Solutions ended in 2007, the offshoring physical space and legal framework remained intact, and in 2012, Pacific Solution 2.0 was able to easily reinvigorate this policy. , I was able to strengthen it.
When the Australian government moved the last person out of the Nauru detention centre in 2023, they never ended their corporate contracts and were able to replicate the centre to those seeking asylum just a few months later.
One of the main consequences of offshore detention is the exclusion of detainees from territorial and therefore legally normal rights and protections, and isolation from the support of communities and advocacy networks. This is reflected domestically by an increase in immigrant crime.
By creating new immigration-related crimes, requiring the detention and deportation of criminally convicted non-citizens, and eliminating the means of appeal or representation, the state will create an increasingly illegal population without rights. It was built. At the same time, they eliminated migration and crime in public debate.
This sets a scene in which politicians compete with each other, especially during election campaigns, by providing deterrence through expanding detention as the only possible solution.
The US example of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Liability Act of 1996 clearly illustrates this. Having passed the preparatory election preparations, Iirira expanded the definition of “advanced felons” and the scope (retrospectively) of deportable non-citizens. The law establishes close cooperation between immigration enforcement and local police, significantly increasing the number of detainees and deportees, and militarizing the US-Mexico border.
Today, Trump’s executive orders and advocacy against “aggression” by “illegal criminal aliens” are a reinforcement of this existing system and the racialized logic of its deterrence.
This system of criminalising and imprisoning those seeking a revival of dignified lives between land and offshore incarnations within this country and across the country. This criminalization intensifies during the election cycle where borders become a sight of political strength, and beyond political divisions, political parties use the narrative of migration to govern the nation, and health services, housing, welfare , intensifies to prove their ability to distract attention from mistakes such as employment.
The past 12 months are no exception, with elections in the UK and the US, and now it’s an imminent election in Australia. Each of these elections has been pivoted around policy proposals for offshore detention, deportation of a large group of people, and the expansion of our international protection regime being damaged, if not death.
As the transition continues to politicize, the goalpost of what is considered an acceptable move to the right will lead to policies that provide greater restrictions on rights and promise more harm.
This sight of cruelty distracts you from another mistake. The very failure of these restrictive policies and the deep absence of political leadership on migration. What research has shown again and again is that these policies do not stop people from arriving, but further harm those who are already marginalized in our society.
Harm and waiver are fundamental to the international system of immigration detention and are not accidental by-products generated by surveillance or the lack of unauthorized individuals or businesses. Harm and abandonment are “by design.” These are necessary features of the forced detention and deportation system promoted by political and financial interests built on this harm.
However, breach of detention and injustice are constantly being resisted. Around the world, protests, strikes, riots and prison escapes by detained people have been met with solidarity from civil rights activists, grassroots activists, faith groups, community organizers, lawyers, family and friends.
Conditions, abuse, judgments and laws are challenged, raids, raids, bond posting, sanctuary policies have been passed, border enforcement agencies have been repaid, detention sites have been shut down, and at risk of detention A local network was built to help people.
This resistance and solidarity were demonstrated in a 23-day protest led by a man imprisoned in Manus Island Detention Center. This was followed by the announcement of the 2017 closure that Papua New Guinea was deemed unconstitutional. Despite intensification by security forces and blocking access to food, water and electricity, men fight peacefully for freedom instead of re-income on new sites, and the local Manucia A light letter to their international audience, drawing out and communicating relationships between the community and Australian advocates.
The documented treatment of people held on offshore sites speaks to the authoritarianism of immigrant governance. This promises to affect citizens and non-citizens alike. As Behrouz Boochani, a poet, journalist and former prisoner at the Manus Immigration Detention Centre in Australia, explains only freedom in his book freedom: “Refugees are the 21st century dictatorship that emerged. and identified and exposed the face of fascism: dictatorship and fascism that one day creep into Australian society and the homes of people like cancer.”
In the United States, like elsewhere, the grassroots coalition between people whose detention experiences lived and organizers of abolitionists who have built decades of struggle, resisted under Trump 1.0 Form the foundation of, they do so again. Because they are the ones who are bear the brunt of the attacks of the Khalsal state, not the corporate liberalism of mainstream “left” parties, which bring the strongest opposition and alternative to our current authoritarian moments.
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.