Washington, DC — The Trump administration is reportedly planning to fly migrants to Libya to incarcerate them in the country’s detention facilities, which Amnesty International has called a “hellscape,” with documented torture, abuse, and slavery. No details of the plan have been revealed. This is yet another shocking development in Trump’s multi-layered immigration detention expansion plan, which if fully realized will triple the immigration detention system.
Trump’s plans to send immigrants to Libya and Saudi Arabia exemplifies the administration’s active pursuit of offshoring immigration detention, sending people newly arrived and people who have long-been established in the U.S. to countries or military bases they have never been to or known, including Guantánamo Bay, El Salvador, and Rwanda.
Stacy Suh, Program Director at Detention Watch Network, issued the following statement:
“Let me be clear, the use and escalation of offshore penal colonies – from Guantánamo to El Salvador, and now Libya – is a stain on the United States, and a clear tool of propaganda to dehumanize and villainize people while carrying out Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda unchecked. These cruel policies do not make our communities safer; rather, they are simply a new brand of deportation, where Trump is disappearing and exiling people to offshore detention as a part of his unrelenting pursuit of terrorizing and demonizing migrants and immigrants, completely disregarding people's well-being and humanity.
The immigration detention system at its core is inhumane and unnecessary. By offshoring the unjust practice, the administration is putting people’s lives at risk by obscuring transparency, cutting people off from their support networks, denying them due process, and subjecting them to brutal conditions, at times indefinitely. By moving people to remote prisons out of sight and out of mind – the Trump regime is attempting to normalize the offshoring of immigration detention as a new model of incarceration. He is doing this through patchwork agreements with little to no details or oversight, and in defiance of court orders — all the while people languish in limbo.
What we already know from the offshoring of detention in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay is that people and families are suffering, and it is extremely expensive. In just one month, it cost the U.S. an exorbitant $40 million to jail people at Guantánamo. The cost of flying people to Libya, across the Atlantic, would undoubtedly shock American taxpayers. Instead of using billions of taxpayer dollars to carry out Trump’s cruel detention and deportation agenda, communities want investment in education, housing for all income levels, climate resilient infrastructure and health care that will benefit everyone. We need real leaders who aren’t afraid to unite against Trump to stop this cruelty, and advocate for the rights of immigrants – valued and vital members of our communities.”
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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.