The Trump administration appears to be laying the groundwork for a global gulag for expelled immigrants.

In addition to using longtime U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Trump administration is seeking more far-flung locales to hold deported people, regardless of their countries of origin.

The U.S. is already using the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, and has its sights set on numerous other countries, including many that the State Department has excoriated for human rights abuses. The U.S. has reportedly explored, sought, or struck deals with at least 19 countries: Angola, Benin, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

“These are the plans of an authoritarian regime. They want to spend likely billions of taxpayer dollars to send asylum-seekers into war zones or to countries rife with human rights abuses,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept.

“It’s truly alarming that this administration doesn’t view people fleeing persecution or torture as human and that the United States government is even discussing this obviously illegal proposal. It’s deeply un-American, will make all Americans less safe, and will, without a doubt, result in the loss of human life,” Murphy said.

“It’s deeply un-American, will make all Americans less safe, and will, without a doubt, result in the loss of human life,”

The State Department refused to provide a complete list of countries with which the U.S. has made agreements to accept deportees from other countries — often referred to as third-country nationals — citing the sensitivity of diplomatic communications. But the Trump administration is planning a major increase in deportation flights in coming weeks to destinations across the globe, according to a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as well as published reports.

In remarks outside the White House on Friday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered a glimpse of the global scope of deportations. “We send planes to Iraq. We send planes to Yemen. We send planes to Haiti. We send planes to Angola,” he said. “I mean, ICE is sending planes all over the world all the time. Anyone who came here illegally, we’re finding them and we’re getting them out.”

The White House did not respond to a request for clarification about which countries are receiving third-country nationals.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration created a worldwide network of secret prisons and torture sites as part of its global war on terror. Its crown jewel, the Guantánamo Bay detention center, was established in January 2002 as a place for the United States to hold so-called enemy combatants.

The U.S. government chose the U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay because it was seeking a site where neither U.S. nor international law applied — a legal black hole where they could disappear people indefinitely. Over time, Guantánamo became emblematic of gross human rights abuses. “Forever prisoners” of the war on terror are still being held there today. Others caught up in America’s counterterrorism dragnet were detained at torture prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq or kidnapped and “rendered” to CIA black sites — secret prisons in at least eight countries around the world.

As the Trump administration has expanded the Bush and Obama-era terrorism paradigm to cast immigrants and refugees as terrorists and gang members, it has reconceptualized rendition and even pressed Guantánamo Bay into service as a way station for Venezuelan men expelled to El Salvador.

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“In many ways, this is a retread of some of the practices of the second Bush administration in terms of extraordinary rendition abroad; the RDI program, rendition, detention, and interrogation — the formal name for their torture program,” said Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the Department........

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