In August, the Biden administration finally and quietly signed a $163.4 million contract to maintain a migrant detention center at Guantánamo Bay. The deal had been in the works since 2021, giving the impression that the White House was greenlighting the reopening of the Guantánamo-based facility for detaining migrants found at sea, mostly from Haiti. President Joe Biden has come under fire from advocates for his immigration policies, including expanding detention center contracts and undermining the asylum process.
Between December 2021 and December 2022, the Migrant Operation Center (MOC) at Guantánamo Bay held an average of at least 20 migrants per day, according to a document reviewed by Drop Site News. DHS and ICE hold migrants intercepted in the Caribbean Sea by the U.S. Coast Guard in the MOC before either repatriating them to their home countries or granting them refugee status in a third nation.
For some, the MOC has been lucrative. The Biden administration’s new contract to run the MOC, which could run up to five years, went to Akima Infrastructure Protection, a government contractor that runs other ICE facilities.
As part of the contracting process, ICE required private contractors Akima and MVM to guarantee that they could expand capacity at the Guantánamo MOC with 48 hours’ notice, for up to 400 migrants, in case of a “surge” of Haitian migrants. The expansion would be a “tent city” next to the facility’s solitary confinement unit. Akima recently posted a job listing for a “program manager” at Guantánamo. It is unclear what the division of labor is, or will be, between the two private prison companies at Guantánamo.
MVM’s current Guantánamo contract will run through October of this year. However, the company recently posted listings for what appear to be security operations positions at Guantánamo. While the location is not named, the posting requests “unarmed security and custody officers” who speak Haitian Creole to be based at an “overseas naval base” while working with migrants.
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