On May 10 last year, while Trump was running for President, I published a piece entitled The Rise of the Fourth Reich on this platform. Since then, Trump has been elected to a second term and much of what I predicted in that piece is coming true.
We are less than one month since his inauguration, and during that time he has announced a massive roundup and deportation of migrants who are in this country. In order to accomplish this task Trump has ordered the construction of a 30,000-bed detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. This facility would add to the 40,000-detention capacity currently maintained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is far larger than any existing detention facility administered by ICE.[1]
the United States has operated the military base in Guantánamo Bay pursuant to a lease with Cuba for more than a century. It is currently best-known for the facility detaining terror suspects following the September 11, 2001, attacks. It currently has a small separate facility that has housed migrants from Cuba and Haiti who were rescued at sea.[2] Trump has wasted no time in utilizing the facility at Guantánamo Bay and 10 migrants recently sent there are occupying prison cells in the facility formerly occupied by terrorism suspects. The Trump administration has justified this form of detention by claiming the ten migrants are part of a Venezuelan gang.[3] Like most claims made by the Trump administration this one remains unverified. In addition to building the massive detention camp at Guantánamo, Trump has expressed interest in sending convicted criminals, including Americans, to prison facilities in El Salvador.[4]
In 1934 Nazi Germany opened its first large-scale detention camp at Dachau to detain Communists, Socialists, and other opponents of the Nazi regime. Over time Dachau evolved into a concentration camp, a slave labor camp and ultimately a camp dedicated to the extermination of Jews and other select groups held there.[5]
Like Trump and Tom Homan, Trump’s Borders Czar, the Nazis were very vocal about the consequences the Jews would face if they failed to leave Germany and its occupied countries. Adolf Eichmann, the architect, and executor of the ultimate extermination warned the Jewish populations that they would be confined to the camps if they failed to self deport, while at the same time obstructing their ability to leave.[6]
At this early stage it is impossible to predict how all of this will turn out. The United States has leased Guantánamo from Cuba for over a century. Cuba opposes the lease and has rejected all of the United States lease payments in the past. Cuban Government officials are on record criticizing and opposing the decision to imprison migrants at Guantánamo.[7]
Ironically, Trump has invoked unspecified treaty violations with Panama in support of his claim for the return of the Panama Canal.[8] The ultimate irony might be that Cuba seeks to evict the United States and terminate its lease for what appears to be Human Rights violations by imprisoning the migrants at Guantánamo.
It is crystal clear that this policy is motivated by racism. Trump’s long history of racism need not be recounted here. The vast majority of migrants being rounded up and imprisoned are from Latin American countries and Haiti. At the same time, Trump is trying to wrest control of Greenland whose population is overwhelmingly white. Trump has most recently sanctioned South Africa claiming that white South Africans are oppressed and that their property is being unlawfully expropriated. While Black and Latin American migrants are being rounded up for shipment to Guantánamo, Trump has offered to resettle white South Africans in the United States. To their credit the Afrikaners have refused this offer.[9]
Simultaneously, Trump has proposed that the United States seize control of Gaza and permanently remove the entire Palestinian population and turn it into ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.”[10] The Palestinians have categorically rejected this proposal.[11] Trumps Gaza Plan is ethnic cleansing in its purest form.
Ethnic cleansing is considered a crime against humanity punishable in the international criminal Court. Likewise, the mass deportation of migrants pursuant to Trumps plan violates the United States Refugee Act of 1980 which incorporated the 1967 Protocol in the 1951 Convention of the Status of Refugees into our law.
American leaders that implement these plans and world leaders who are complicit in it may find themselves in the dock at a future Nuremberg Trial.
[1] “Trump Plans to Build Mass Detention Camp for Deportees at Guantanamo Bay,” by Nick Miroff and Dan Limoff, Washington Post, January 29, 2025.
[2] “What to Know About Guantánamo Bay, The Base Where Trump Will Send ‘Criminal Aliens,’” by Tim Sullivan, Associated Press, January 29, 2025
[3] “US Is Hlding Migrants in Cells That Once held Al Qaeda Suspects,” by Hamed Aleaziz, Eric Schmitt and Carol Rosenberg, New York Times, February 5, 2025.
[4] “Trump Sys He Would Jail Americans in El Salvador ‘In a Heartbeat.” By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, New York Times, February 4, 2025.
[5] Kogon, Eugene, The Theory and Practice of Hell, Berkley Publishing Corporation, New York, New York (1958).
[6] Evans, Richard J. Hitler’s People: The faces of the Third Reich, Penguin Press, (New York, NY 2024) p.379.
[7] FN2.
[8] “Why the US is Claiming China’s Presence Violates the Panama Neutrality Treaty,” by Marianna Parraga and Elifa Moreno, Reuters, January 21, 2025.
[9] “Trump Says Some White South Africans are Oppressed and Could be Resettled in the US. They say No Thanks. By Gerald Imray, Associated Press, February 8, 2025.
[10] “Trump Proposes US Takeover of Gaza and Says all Palestinians Should Leave,” by Michael D Shear, Peter Baker and Isabel Kershner, New York Times February 4, 2025, updated February 5, 2025.
[11] “I Won’t Leave. ‘Put that in your brain.’ Palestinians Reject Trump’s Call to Expel Them From Gaza,” by Waffa Shurafa, Samy Magdy and Juia Frankel, Associated Press, February 5, 2025.