Outsourcing Atrocities

Bad policy begets worse.

May 7, 2025

The New York Times reports today that the Administration is preparing to send a flight of deportees to Libya, a frequent bottleneck point for migrants and refugees fleeing north to cross the Mediterranean, a place where conditions of migrant detention are bleak and rife with abuse, bad enough perhaps to make the perilous sea journey, where so many thousands have died, a bit more attractive.

There have been earlier reports that the Administration was in talks with Rwanda to take deportees. This choice may have been motivated as well by cruelty and a desire for unaccountability – Rwanda is not Libya or El Salvador, but it has authoritarian leanings and a spotty human rights record. But more likely, I would guess, the country has the incipient infrastructure for the job, as the UK had earlier negotiated with the country to send asylum seekers there for “offshore processing.”

This would follow on an active program by the Australian government to house migrants seeking entry on the island of Nauru, in the South Pacific. The Nauru Regional Processing Center has been opened, closed and reopened twice, and has been in service again since September 2021. Human rights groups have criticized the arrangement, which amounts to imprisonment without charge for hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers at any given time. Once described as a place of “indefinite despair,” many interned there have little hope of finding their way to Australia, or even out of Nauru. Anna Neistat of Amnesty International wrote, back in 2016: “Few other countries go to such lengths to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom.”

Nine years later, the U.S. has more than given Australia a run for its money. The detentions of hundreds of Venezuelans at the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center is at least triply cruel: it deprives deportees of anything at all they might call home, it imprisons them without a criminal conviction or the opportunity to have their day in court, and it exposes them to harsh and abusive conditions in a prison notorious for its disregard for human rights.

Libya, potentially, would be much worse. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights alleged in a 2021 complaint to the ICC that “imprisonment, enslavement, murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, sexual violence, persecution, and other inhumane acts have been and are being committed against migrants and refugees in Libya” rising to the level of a crime against humanity. The State Department endorsed the report of a UN fact-finding mission in 2023, asserting a litany of serious abuses in Libya including “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary.”

It seems clear that for the Administration, this is a selling point: cruelty and degradation fit the President’s image of toughness, and for more policy-minded underlings, they serve as a deterrent to others who would come to the United States. Perhaps Libya emerged as an alternative to Rwanda for the worse conditions it had to offer.

There is a lesson to be learned here: the problem with introducing bad policy ideas (when it’s the moral sense of “bad”) is not just that they are bad ideas, but rather that they open up space for even worse ones. After Putin introduced his “foreign agent” law in 2012, dozens of others followed suit, and like some viruses, the laws became more malignant as they spread. When Australia began “offshore processing” migrants, the UK copied the idea; Trump did not merely copy it, he made it vastly more heinous.

But it would be unfair to blame Australia for originating the policy of confining immigrants indefinitely in extraterritorial arrangements designed to keep the hordes at bay. In the 1990s, as political violence in Haiti spiraled in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Duvalier regime, thousands fled the country, many in small boats aimed for the U.S. These refugees were interdicted by Coast Guard ships. The Bush and Clinton Administrations struggled to process and integrate these arrivals, and there was one lingering concern in the back of policy discussions: AIDS. Operating on the belief that HIV was endemic in the island nation, our government sought to keep infected individuals out of the country, so as not to inflame our own public health crisis. So, they built a processing center offshore, and those who were cleared were admitted, while the rest were left to languish in place, confined and unable to seek other safe havens.

That place was Guantanamo Bay.