WASHINGTON — Immigrants’ rights advocates sued the Trump administration today for access to immigrants transferred from the United States to detention at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba under President Trump’s recent order.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), and ACLU of the District of Columbia filed the lawsuit on behalf of several plaintiffs, including the sister of one of the men being detained at Guantánamo, as well as four legal service providers — Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), American Gateways, and Americans for Immigrant Justice — seeking to meet with the people being detained in order to provide them with legal assistance.
The Trump administration has provided virtually no information about immigrants newly detained at Guantánamo, including how long they will be held there, under what authority and conditions, subject to what legal processes, or whether they will have any means of communicating with their families and attorneys.
“By hurrying immigrants off to a remote island cut off from lawyers, family, and the rest of the world, the Trump administration is sending its clearest signal yet that the rule of law means nothing to it. It will now be up to the courts to ensure that immigrants cannot be warehoused on offshore islands,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
The lawsuit notes that Guantánamo is home to one of the most notorious prisons in the world, used when the U.S. government has attempted to operate in secret, without accountability.
“It is appalling but not surprising that the Trump administration is exploiting and expanding the 21st century's greatest symbol of lawlessness and torture: Guantánamo. The Center for Constitutional Rights has been challenging incommunicado detention and torture at Guantánamo since the early 1990s, and we see Trump's actions for what they are — performative cruelty mixed with another authoritarian power grab. The courts, once again, must act to ensure the immigrants Trump seeks to detain there have access to lawyers and thus the law, and are free from the cruelty and terror inherent in the project of Guantánamo,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“The Trump administration cannot be allowed to build upon Guantánamo’s sordid past with these latest cruel, secretive, and illegal maneuvers,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “Our Constitution does not allow the government to hold people incommunicado, without any ability to speak to counsel or the outside world.”
While the Trump administration has widely publicized images of people it now detains at Guantánamo, it has also cut off any means of communication with them. Plaintiff Eucaris Carolina Gomez Lugo was shocked to see a photograph of her brother being held there, according to the lawsuit, and to learn that the government was alleging that he and other men being detained were Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members. She is gravely concerned about his safety and wants to make sure he can communicate with legal counsel regarding his detention at Guantánamo.
“Guantánamo is a breeding ground for violence, abuse, and neglect. Our government is targeting Venezuelans and other people and unnecessarily moving them to a notoriously difficult-to-access offshore site for no reason other than political theater,” said Jennifer Babaie, director of advocacy and legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, New Mexico and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. “Many of these men have already been subjected to countless human rights abuses and due process violations in Otero and other detention centers in the U.S. Keeping them in Guantánamo without regular access to lawyers and loved ones while at the same time spreading unfounded accusations against them all on the basis of what they look like and where they come from, is dangerous, violent, and completely unacceptable.”
“Secretly transferring people from the United States to Guantánamo without access to legal representation or the outside world is not only illegal, it is a moral crisis for this nation,” said Deepa Alagesan, senior supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “IRAP previously represented a refugee family detained at Guantánamo and had to fight for months to receive one confidential phone call with our clients. Now, the Trump administration is escalating its attempts to criminalize, demonize, and harm immigrants with zero regard for their humanity or the law. We will not stand by as the United States government tries to use Guantánamo as a legal black box to deny immigrants their basic rights to counsel and due process.”
The Trump administration has announced its goal of sending tens of thousands of immigrants to Guantánamo. The complaint notes that, without the court’s intervention, even more immigrants will be transferred to this legal black hole without access to counsel or any means of vindicating their rights.
“Immigration detention at Guantánamo threatens to create a dangerous precedent where the U.S. government can systematically transfer people seeking asylum to offshore facilities, isolating them from legal service providers and placing them in a void where they cannot meaningfully assert their rights,” said Javier Hidalgo, legal director at RAICES. “At RAICES, we are deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s opacity and lack of procedural safeguards, which effectively nullify our ability to challenge unlawful detention, ensure due process, and advocate for the rights of immigrants, and we will leverage every legal tool available to hold this administration accountable to fundamental humanitarian protections that should never be up for debate.”
“Detaining immigrants at Guantánamo Bay without access to legal counsel or basic due process protections is a grave violation of their rights and an alarming abuse of government power,” said Rebecca Lightsey, co-executive director of American Gateways. “Our country must not create a shadow system of indefinite detention, stripping noncitizens of their legal protections simply by transferring them offshore.”
“The dramatic expansion of immigrant detention at Guantánamo and act of transferring immigrants from detention within the borders of the United States to Guantánamo will cause irreparable harm to our immigrant community and create barriers that conflict with Americans for Immigrant Justice’s core organizational objectives,” said Paul Chavez, litigation director at Americans for Immigrant Justice. “It will not only limit our ability to serve as a watchdog on immigration detention practices and policies but will also deny our attorneys access to those held at Guantánamo — many of whom AI Justice would likely have represented had they been detained in Florida. We believe immigrants should not be forced to navigate our complex immigration system alone and demand that our attorneys be granted access to communicate with detained immigrants at Guantánamo, so that we may continue to fulfill our mission of safeguarding the rights of detained immigrants in Florida.”
A coalition of immigrants’ rights and legal groups sent a letter to the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Homeland Security last week expressing their serious concern about the transfer and detention of immigrants from the United States to Guantánamo and requesting immediate access to them. The government failed to respond, prompting today’s legal action.
“If the Trump administration thinks they can strip immigrant detainees of their rights by shipping them to Guantánamo, they’re wrong,” said Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at the ACLU of the District of Columbia. “The Bush administration also tried to deny detainees their rights at Guantánamo, and the courts stepped in to remind the president that the Constitution applies to people imprisoned there.”
Complaint: https://www.aclu.org/documents/gitmo-lawsuit-filing