Shades of Guantanamo Bay: Krome Detention Center
By Lidia Perez
Many Americans have heard of Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military base run by the CIA and located in Cuba. It has detained alleged terrorists since January of 2002; its controversial creation prompted by the terrorist attacks of September Eleventh, 2001. People tend to be less familiar with another facility run by the U.S. government, which additionally holds a long history of those detained being abused, held indefinitely without trial, and in general denied their basic human rights.
I’m referring to Krome processing center, an immigration detention facility located on the outskirts of Miami, Florida. Founded in 1980 in response to a mass exodus of Haitian and Cuban immigrants arriving in Florida, this ICE facility has since evolved into something more comparable to a prison, holding immigrants awaiting asylum or deportation trials.
The U.S. government, particularly the Bush administration, has rarely hidden its goal to treat those detained in Guantanamo as less than human. After 9/11, Americans were left in a state of shock and fear, because as the Center for Foreign Relations points out, “Never had any hostile actor-foreign power or non-state group targeted and killed so many civilians on U.S. soil.”
Perhaps this is why at the time of its founding, the vast majority of the public didn’t question Bush’s narrative that all those being subjected to the conditions at Guantanamo were “the worst of the worst.” Bush alleged that everyone being detained at the U.S. military base was affiliated with Al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, and therefore was a threat to U.S. national security. Their prolonged detainment, without trial and without the human rights protections of the articles of the Geneva conventions, was justified to the public as a means of keeping it from ever again experiencing the trauma of another terrorist attack.
This narrative, along with the military base’s off-shore location, beyond the bounds of U.S. law, allowed Bush and his secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld to get away with “Enhanced Interrogation Tactics,” or EITs. These tactics included stress positions, physical abuse, use of specific phobias, waterboarding, and forced sleep deprivation.
Lidia Perez
Contrarily, Krome has attempted to present itself as a safe haven for immigrants, particularly those facing mental illnesses. This positive reputation has been supported by members of the media who’ve gone on official ICE tours, some immigration lawyers, and ICE spokespeople.
However, allegations from people detained at Krome themselves consistently contradict this narrative. Many immigrants have alleged abuse from guards. One incident reported by the Miami Times Involved a mentally unwell man taking a staff golf cart and driving it twenty feet away. After catching up to him and effectively stopping him, six guards beat him up. It was brutal enough to leave him with swollen lips, colored nearly black, and a bulging eye several days later according to a peer of his, Noel Covarrubia.
Patterns of abuse have been met with resistance by those detained at Krome, including ten individuals who organized and launched a hunger strike. Rather than addressing the abusive environment prompting this form of protest, a federal judge ordered the use of painful force feeding tubes on the protesters. This tactic is frequently used on those being detained in Guantanamo who are hunger striking the inhumane conditions there. “We came here to escape violence and danger in our country,” said Mahmudul Hasan, one of the Krome hunger strikers, “But it seems like this place is like Guantanamo.”
Hasan is right in many regards; however there are key differences between the hostile experiences of those detained in Guantanamo and Krome. In Guantanamo, abuse has been both physical and psychological, and used in an attempt to torture information out of the alleged terrorists it detains. At Krome, abuse is primarily physical and verbal, and much more random. It’s exercised with a vague intention of keeping the immigrants in line. In both circumstances, it’s largely ineffective. Being threatened, ridiculed and beaten by guards leaves immigrants all the more traumatized and mentally fragile, which is counterproductive in Krome’s asserted mission of treating mental illness and mental health issues of those it detains. As for Guantanamo, a 2008 report from the U.S. Senate claimed, “The abuse of detainees damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority,” meaning the Senate itself asserts that the torture inflicted upon those detained in Guantanamo was counterproductive in furthering the camp’s asserted mission of protecting national security.
One similarity that may have contributed to the successfully persistent abuse at both Guantanamo Bay and Krome is their isolation from American society. This is most evident with Guantanamo Bay, as its location was specifically chosen to be beyond the bounds of U.S. law, meaning in a different country entirely. While Krome is still within our borders, it is located off a major highway, at the end of an unmarked road, bordering the everglades. Aside from a resort and a mall, no markers of civilization are nearby. As both these facilities are beyond public view, it’s left to the media and human rights organizations to investigate and solicit public outcry in order to hold the U.S. government accountable.
When it comes to Krome, there hasn’t really been sufficient media coverage. Files of “Disturbing allegations of physical abuse” at Krome from 2012 and 2013 were obtained by the New Times. Additionally, The New Republic published an expose in 2019 containing narratives from the first unsupervised interviews of Krome detainees. Florida publications have also written about Krome. However, there hasn’t been consistent, national media pressure on the government to look closer at circumstances in the detention center, leaving ICE’s narrative of Krome as a progressive place made to hold and treat mentally ill immigrants largely unchallenged.
Guantanamo Bay, on the other hand, has received continual media coverage since its founding in 2002. Public opposition and progress in securing more human rights for those imprisoned eventually followed. In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v Rumsfeld that, contrary to the Bush Administration’s claims, the Articles of the Geneva Convention do apply to conflicts with Al Qaeda, halting much of Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ torture and abuse. Additionally, the Military Commissions Act of 2009 banned military commissions from using prisoners’ statements that were acquired via cruel treatment.
The majority of those detained have since received due process and been transferred to federal prisons or repatriated, causing the population at Guantanamo to drop from its peak of 656 in 2003 to just 36 as of 2022. However, Abdul Latif Nasser, one man imprisoned in Guantanamo, said in February of 2020, “You might say things are better here in Guantanamo than they used to be. I am no longer kept in solitary confinement in a freezing, empty cell, as I was for the first four years…but the mental anguish, the pain and humiliation of being shackled for no reason-that never changes.”
Krome detention center and Guantanamo Bay are different facilities — they have different histories, they’re run by different U.S. governmental agencies, and they’ve made varying amounts of progress. However, both are examples of terrible human rights abuses occurring at the hands of our government. Public attention at Guantanamo has resulted in at least some positive change. However, we must continue to stay informed on the conditions of both facilities, and do our best to hold the U.S. government to the standard of treating all people as people, including those from foreign countries. Fear of immigrants or foreigners does not justify inflicting physical, emotional, and psychological pain on people awaiting trial.
