WASHINGTON, DC – The American Civil Liberties Union, and a coalition of immigrant rights and various legal aid groups, are suing the Trump Administration for the deportation of immigrants to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to NPR.
This lawsuit follows complaints that the administration is failing to give migrants access to lawyers or allowing detainees any kind of communication.
NPR details the Trump administration’s decision to send migrants to the remote location of Guantánamo Bay where they have been held “incommunicado, without access to attorneys, family, or the outside world” and that “this isolation is no coincidence” considering the remote location of Guantánamo Bay makes it even harder for those being held to know their legal rights.
ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, in NPR’s story, said, “One has to wonder if they’re doing it so they don’t have access to counsel, so that they can be held without rights, and so that the government can have these photo ops.”
Gelernt, noted NPR, is referencing photos shared by the administration showing men in shackles loading up into and off of military planes in preparation for and after being deported.
NPR emphasized the nature of the lawsuit, and how migrant families have been alerted to the situation, by seeing their family members in pictures being deported to Guantánamo Bay, which were shared widely by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
Those who were pictured are many of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the ACLU stated.
The NPR story discusses the details of the complaint—the lawsuit requests at the very minimum migrants be allowed to communicate with their attorneys through video conferences and email due to the challenges of traveling to Guant á namo Bay.
The ACLU charges in the NPR piece that those who have been held at Guantanamo Bay for terrorism crimes have had access to lawyers, and, with this in mind, migrants being held now at the detention center are the only ones who have endured this kind of isolation from legal counseling.
In a statement to NPR, Tricia McLaughlin, DHS spokesperson, claimed there is “a system for phone utilization to reach lawyers’ but provided no additional detail, and the U.S. government has not released the names of those sent to Guantánamo.
Those who have reason to believe their family members are being held in Guantánamo Bay have attempted to contact them through repeated calls to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ask about the status of their relatives, but told NPR no information is available.
The NPR article states that an estimate made by the ACLU notes 50 people have been sent to Guantanamo Bay by the US government. Information that has been given about those who are being held in the detention center suggests some of them are members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua, which the U.S. has labeled a transnational criminal organization.
The Trump administration calls the deported en “high-threat illegal aliens,” added NPR, noting the administration has plans to create space for 30,000 migrants, which will face legal, financial, political, and other logistical issues.
NPR writes that “migrants will be held at Guantánamo temporarily until it can find other countries to take them. It also said they would be housed in a detention facility that for decades has been used to house migrants intercepted at sea, but most or all of the migrants sent to Guantánamo so far are being held in a military prison that once housed foreign terrorism suspects like al-Qaida.”
The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and ACLU of the District of Columbia, on behalf of detained migrants and their family members, as well as other legal aid groups, including Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, American Gateways and Americans for Immigrant Justice.
According to NPR, the organizations listed above tried to communicate with the government by letter but have resorted to litigation to request immediate access to migrants.
Deepa Alagesan, a senior supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Program, said, “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, 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.”
