Trump's Attorney General Nominee Held Immigrants in 'HIV Prison Camp'

Cruelty must be a requirement...


Trump’s Attorney General Nominee Held Immigrants in ‘HIV Prison Camp’
Under Attorney General William Barr, 310 Haitian immigrants became prisoners of the world’s first detention camp for refugees with HIV. Now, a key Democratic senator wants answers.
Scott Bixby
01.15.19 4:47 AM ET


Decades before President Donald Trump nominated William Barr to retake the reins at the Department of Justice, Barr used the post to indefinitely detain hundreds of HIV-positive asylum-seekers at a Guantanamo Bay detention center, deemed an “HIV prison camp” by a federal judge who ruled the quarantine to be in gross violation of the U.S. Constitution.

That policy, part of a program that at its peak held more than 12,000 Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, helped lay the legal groundwork for the indefinite incarceration of “enemy combatants” in the War on Terror—and institutionalized the detention system that President Trump has made a cornerstone of his immigration policy. Barr has since defended the detention of hundreds of HIV-positive asylum-seekers, some of them children, even though the government’s own lawyers admitted at the time that detainees had inadequate medical care.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings on Barr’s nomination to once again serve as U.S. attorney general, his role in the indefinite unconstitutional detention of immigrants seeking asylum will be a key area of interrogation for Democrats on the committee.