The first 20 prisoners arrived at the Guantánamo naval base 12 years ago, on 11 January 2002. In total, 779 prisoners would be brought to the Cuban facility for detention as “enemy combatants”. Only one has ever been charged in an ordinary criminal court. For the rest, detention was at the Pentagon’s caprice.

Yet releases did happen – in surprisingly bipartisan stream. Between January 2002 and December 2008, the Bush administration released about 520 detainees – two-thirds of the overall detainee population. At the end of the Obama administration, only 41 men remained. Five of them were also cleared for release.

They still are. The last departures from Guantánamo happened almost a year ago on President Obama’s watch. Refusing to make a single release, the Trump administration has broken from a bipartisan policy of drawing down the Guantánamo population. Instead, he has even taken the startling move of suggesting that he would start sending some arrested in the US mainland there.

There is no formal policy explaining this dramatic change. The Trump administration floated an executive order directing the Pentagon to “maintain and continue to use” the prison on Cuban soil. But this order was never published. And the recently released national security strategy makes no mention of detention.

Even without explicit explanation the standstill at Guantánamo fits snugly within the Trump administration’s approach to terrorism and violence. Across the board, the administration has shifted from a policy of targeting the risk of violence to a policy of targeting religions that are presumed to be violent.

The shift from risk to religion is manifest across a wide range of policies. Both as candidate and as president, Trump has loudly advanced a false and derogatory view that Muslims are intrinsically prone to violence.

This ugly stereotype most obviously infuses his September 2017 travel ban. This exercise in “extreme vetting” almost entirely burdens Muslim travelers. Its minimal coverage of Venezuelans and North Koreans – groups unlikely to reach the US in great numbers – is just enough to allow government lawyers to deny discriminatory intent with a straight face.

The different roles of risk and religion are also plain to see in Trump’s responses to mass killings in Las Vegas and New York City. When the perpetrator is not Muslim, the White House actively resists calls for reform. When the perpetrator is Muslim, Trump is quick to blame a “lax immigration system” and to promise even more “extreme vetting”.

The religious identity of supposed terrorist, across these cases, explains policy better than any plausible assessment of risk.

The same is true for Guantánamo.

Under both Bush and Obama, the Pentagon engaged in individualized evaluations of each detainee based on their own statements and intelligence from many sources. Documents released by WikiLeaks reveal that each detainee was scored on a four-point scale based on their risk and intelligence values.

Detainee assessments contained many errors, and reached unconscionably erroneous conclusions in many cases. But having carefully studied these assessments, and analyzed empirically the determinants of release, it’s clear to me that there was an effort to rank and release the detainees by risk.

There is a world between this approach, however flawed, and a decision to scrap any and all efforts to look beyond a person’s religious background. It is one thing to try to evaluate individuals, and then make mistakes. It is another thing entirely to treat individuals as dangerous because of their faith.

In categorically refusing to move on any of the remaining 41 detainees at the base – including the five cleared for release – the Trump administration has thus changed quite fundamentally the basis of their detention: it is now a faith-based prison, not one grounded on facts about individuals, however flawed.

Of course, racialized stereotypes of swarthy “bad guys” have propelled public antipathy to the Guantánamo detainees since 2002. But, whatever their manifold faults, neither the Bush nor the Obama administration took those stereotypes as the formal touchstone for release policy.



By taking that step, even if implicitly, the Trump administration has fulfilled its promise to return America to an era of past “greatness” – the great injustice of the race-based incarceration of Japanese-Americans during the second world war.