Background: The Office of Military Commissions building at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba (ABC News/YouTube). Inset: President-elect Donald Trump speaks at an election night watch party, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
The Trump administration is transferring migrants from the United States to Guantanamo Bay “without statutory authority” — violating the Fifth Amendment and multiple laws in place that bar such transfers — for “punitive, illegitimate reasons,” a lawsuit from immigrants’ rights advocates says.
“Never before has the federal government moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to Guantanamo,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other advocates allege in a complaint filed Saturday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Nor is there any legitimate reason to do so now.”‘
The ACLU is joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project in representing noncitizens at risk of being transferred to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, which is home to “one of the world’s most notorious prisons, used when the U.S. government has attempted to operate in secret, without accountability,” the groups say.
The coalition is not challenging the government’s authority to send migrants back to their home country or another “statutorily authorized country,” according to the suit, just the “unprecedented and unlawful decision” to transfer the plaintiffs to Guantanamo from detention centers in Arizona, Texas and Virginia.
The groups filed a lawsuit last month on behalf of detainees’ family members and legal service providers seeking access to immigrants who have already been transferred from the United States to Guantanamo and are being held there.
This new suit filed Saturday — against the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and leaders at both agencies — is looking to block the transfers of 10 men from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Venezuela who are “at risk” of being sent over and detained “without any legal authority, in violation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution,” according to their complaint, which insists that there is no reason to be sending the migrants to Cuba. Doing so, the rights groups say, is a violation of the Fifth Amendment, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
“The government has ample detention capacity inside the United States, which is far less costly and poses none of the logistical hurdles attendant to detaining people on Guantanamo,” the complaint says. The government is devoting massive military and immigration enforcement resources to move detainees to an offshore base that does not have the infrastructure to accommodate these individuals — let alone the 30,000 people that the administration aspires to detain there. The reason for doing so is solely to try and instill fear in the immigrant population.”
Lee Gelernt, lead counsel and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, was joined by leaders with the other civil rights groups in blasting the Trump administration’s efforts in statements Saturday
“Sending inmates to a remote abusive prison is not only illegal and unprecedented, but illogical given the additional cost and logistical complications,” Gelernt said.
“Ultimately this is about theatrics,” he added.
Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said: “As we know from decades of challenging indefinite detention there, Guantanamo has no purpose other than to project lawlessness, domination, and cruelty. The courts, as they have before, must again today reject the Trump administration’s latest unlawful power grab and put a stop to their plans for another island detention camp.”
Nearly 200 Venezuelan immigrants that were detained at Guantanamo Bay were sent back to the South American country last month after President Nicolás Maduro said his government “requested the repatriation of a group” of Venezuelans “who were unjustly taken” to the U.S. naval base and being held there, according to the Associated Press, which put the official number at 177.
“The Trump administration is exploiting this sordid history to send the message that no cruelty is off limits in its assault on the rights and humanity of immigrants,” said Kimberly Grano, staff attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, in a statement Saturday. “This lawless project to take people from U.S. soil and detain them at this notorious offshore prison must be stopped.”
Attempts by Law&Crime and other outlets to reach the Department of Homeland Security and White House for comment Sunday were not immediately successful. The new lawsuit comes as immigrants and civil rights groups continue to try and fight Trump in court over the ongoing deportation crusade that the president kicked off after taking office.
Late last month, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting eight asylum-seekers who said they were fleeing horrors in their home countries of Afghanistan, Ecuador and Egypt. The stay was part of a lawsuit filed earlier this month by a group of noncitizens currently in U.S. custody, who face imminent removal under Trump’s Inauguration Day Proclamation that declared an “invasion” by noncitizens at the U.S.-Mexico border and forbids noncitizens from invoking their right to apply for asylum in the U.S.
That lawsuit argues that Trump ignored federal laws that require people who have “credible fear” of persecution and violence in their home countries to be given a chance to seek shelter in the U.S. legally.
Jason Kandel contributed to this report.
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