Ron DeSantis says illegal aliens will be sent to Gitmo, and Florida can help

DeSantis defends use of "illegal alien" in immigration discussions.

Florida’s Governor spent some time before entering politics at Guantánamo Bay, as a Navy lawyer.

Now, he sees the detention center as being potentially part of the federal solution for the illegal immigration crisis.

“I do think they’re gonna use Guantánamo Bay for (an) illegal alien processing site and then they’ll repatriate from their own country from there. What better state to take advantage of that than the state of Florida,” Gov. Ron DeSantis told podcaster Dave Rubin Tuesday.

DeSantis was on Rubin’s show as part of a media blitz Tuesday messaging against the TRUMP Act, the Legislature’s replacement for a raft of Special Session bills DeSantis wanted that the Governor thinks is insufficient. He is especially critical of the bill moving enforcement provisions into the office of Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson.

Regarding Guantanamo Bay, DeSantis’ military service while stationed there was a point of discussion in his failed presidential campaign against Donald Trump, who DeSantis said wasn’t “in the weeds” in legislative debates and is officially neutral as to whether the legislative or executive visions of immigration reform prevail.

In recent months, the Florida Governor defended his actions at Gitmo during the Global War on Terror, specifically honing in on “interventions” to stop hunger strikes from suspected Al Qaeda captives interred there for years as enemy combatants, and describing Guantanamo Bay as a “professionally-run” operation.

Asked about the actions being “torture” by an Iowa interlocutor when campaigning, the Governor pushed back against the characterization.

“This happens in prisons all the time where people do this and there’s intervention. Yes, there’s been interventions that are done with court approval to keep people alive. So I think that’s just something that a lot of the liberal corporate media has tried to spin up to doing that,” DeSantis said on WOWT.

DeSantis was an officer and Navy lawyer at Gitmo in 2006, when prisoners committed to a mass hunger strike. Guards there ultimately restrained and force-fed many of them using nasal tubes — a practice the United Nations Human Rights Commission deemed a form of torture.

Asked about his time at Gitmo when on an international tour this year, DeSantis forcefully denied claims from an Israeli reporter that he “attended the force-feeding” of Al Qaeda captives while on site as a legal advisor.

“No, no, all that’s BS. Totally. Totally BS,” DeSantis said. “Who said that?”

The London Independent reported in March that a former prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, claimed DeSantis “observed his brutal force-feeding by guards during a hunger strike in 2006.”

“Do you honestly believe that’s credible? So this is 2006, I’m a junior officer. Do you honestly think that they would have remembered me from Adam? Of course not. They’re just trying to get into the news, because they know people like you will consume it, because it fits the pre-ordained narrative that you’re trying to spin.”

“So, I was a junior officer. I didn’t have the authority to authorize anything,” he told Piers Morgan in 2023. “There may have been a commander that would have done feeding if someone was going to die, but that wasn’t something that I would even have had authority to do.”

But DeSantis painted a somewhat different picture of his role in deciding to tube-feed detainees while talking to CBS News Miami investigative reporter Jim DeFede in August 2018, when the Governor was still serving in Congress.

Prompted by DeFede to describe the work he did at Guantánamo, DeSantis said he was a “legal adviser” who helped those running the facility navigate tough choices in dealing with detainees for whom “the jihad was still ongoing.”

Unprompted, the Governor brought up force-feeding, which he said was something a legal adviser there would recommend.

“They would wage jihad any way they can,” he said. “They would do hunger strikes, and you actually had three detainees that committed suicide with hunger strikes.

“So, everything at that time was legal in nature one way or another, so the commander wants to know, ‘Well, how do I combat this?’ So, one of the jobs of the legal adviser (was) to be like, ‘Hey, you actually can force-feed. Here’s what you can do. Here’s kind of the rules of that.”