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'Moral Crisis for This Nation': Trump Sued Over Access to Gitmo Prisoners Held 'Illegally' Offshore
“Our Constitution does not allow the government to hold people incommunicado, without any ability to speak to counsel or the outside world."
Feb 13, 2025
A coalition of civil liberties and immigrant rights groups have sued the Trump administration for detaining migrants incommunicado at the offshore prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after they were initially taken into custody in the United States.
The lawsuit—filed Wednesday in federal court by the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), and ACLU of the District of Columbia—was brought on behalf of several plaintiffs, including the sister of a Venezuelan man being held at the facility. It demands that all those being detained have immediate access to legal assistance.
According to the groups, the 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."
“Our country must not create a shadow system of indefinite detention, stripping noncitizens of their legal protections simply by transferring them offshore."
After pictures emerged last week of the first batch of prisoners shipped to the island and a large tent city that has been erected at Gitmo since President Donald Trump took office less than four weeks ago, fears over what the administration has in store for the facility have only grown.
On Sunday, a federal judge blocked the transfer of three men, currently held in New Mexico, to the island prison complex, but that order only pertained to those specific individuals. The individuals already transferred to Gitmo have yet to be identified by the administration, according to the right groups, or given access to outside legal assistance.
"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," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a Wednesday statement announcing the lawsuit.
Deepa Alagesan, senior supervising attorney at IRAP, 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."
In an interview with the New York Times published Tuesday, Yajaira Castillo, who lives in Colombia, said she only realized her brother, Luis Alberto Castillo of Venezuela, was among those detained at Gitmo because she spotted him in photos posted on social media by Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who visited the island Friday.
"My brother is not a criminal," said Castillo. “This is all discrimination and xenophobia, just because he's Venezuelan.”
Eucaris Carolina Gomez Lugo, a plaintiff in the suit filed Wednesday, has a similar story: she only discovered her brother was in detention after photos of him in shackles were spotted.
While the administration has claimed those migrants sent to Gitmo are the "worst of the worst," they have presented no evidence to back up these claims, and the relatives of those who have come forward, like Castillo, say they are completely fraudulent. Castillo shared details and documentation about her brother's asylum claim efforts with the Times.
"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."
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Trump Has Begun Deportation Flights to Feared 'American Gulag' at Gitmo
"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," said one rights advocate.
Feb 04, 2025
"America can and must be better than this," said U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal Tuesday as the Trump administration announced it had begun operating deportation flights bound for Cuba, where President Donald Trump has said he wants to detain undocumented immigrants at the notorious Guantánamo Bay naval base and prison.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the first flights authorized last week by Trump were underway, with the Department of Defense having deployed Marines to the U.S. base in Cuba on Sunday to begin expanding detention facilities.
Trump has called for the prison to be expanded to hold 30,000 people.
The flights announced Tuesday are the latest step in Trump's militarized anti-immigration operations, with 1,500 soldiers and Marines deployed to the southern U.S. border and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducting major immigration raids across the country.
According to reports, roughly half of the people arrested in cities such as New York and Chicago have had no criminal records and were guilty only of overstaying a visa or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without going through a port of entry—civil violations of U.S. immigration laws rather than criminal offenses.
Last week, Leavitt said all undocumented immigrants, not just those who have committed violent crimes—whose arrests Trump had previously said would be prioritized—were criminals who had "invaded our nation's borders."
At Slate on Sunday, Pedro Gerson noted that Trump's "entire political rise is tethered to the idea that immigrants are invading the country and that only he can fix it."
"Trump intends to build in Guantánamo purposely to reify the same message that propelled him to power: Immigrants are criminals and they are here to hurt you," wrote Gerson. "But now Trump is going further: Some of these immigrants are not only criminals, they are equivalent to terrorists. Frighteningly, this move may also be Trump signaling an intent to strip undocumented immigrants of even more rights and treat them under similarly abusive conditions as recent Guantánamo Bay detainees have experienced."
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was vague in an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday about who exactly would be sent to Guantánamo Bay, commonly known as Gitmo, via military planes.
When host Kristen Welker asked whether "women, children, and families" would be imprisoned there, Noem reverted back to the administration's previous claim that it is "targeting the worst of the worst" and detaining people who "are making our streets more dangerous."
"After that, we have final removal orders on many individuals in this country. They are the next priority," said Noem. "We're going to use the facilities that we have."
"Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."
The mass detention facility was built by the Clinton administration to hold 12,500 inmates, and became infamous during President George W. Bush's administration for its detention of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror." Detainees have been held without charges in violation of the U.S. Constitution and have been subjected to torture. Fifteen detainees remain at the prison following the Biden administration's transfer of 11 people to Oman last month.
Trump's planned expansion of Gitmo's prison would result in "a detention facility of unprecedented size in the American context," wrote Gerson at Slate. "The Tule Lake Japanese internment camp, for example, had a capacity of around 18,000. If the Trump administration actually builds the detention camp in Guantanamo, it'll double in size Auschwitz-Birkenau's original design and be bigger than Dachau and Treblinka combined."
As Yael Schacher, director for the Americans and Europe at Refugees International, said in a statement, the U.S. prison was also used to "inhumanely [detain] Cuban and Haitian asylum-seekers in the 1990s."
"The Trump administration's use of military planes to send immigrants to detention at Guantánamo Bay epitomizes the administration's gratuitously cruel, illegal, expensive, and burdensome approach to immigration policy," said Schacher. "Guantánamo's Migrant Operations Center, which the Trump administration is sending Marines to expand, is truly a black box that no nongovernmental organization has been allowed to visit."
"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," Schacher added. "Members of Congress should investigate the move as a misuse of military assets. Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."
Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, warned that mass deportation to Gitmo will "cut people off from lawyers, family, and support systems, throwing them into a black hole so the U.S. government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight."
"Sending immigrants to Guantánamo is a profoundly cruel, costly move," she said. "Shut Gitmo down now and forever!"
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Trump Plan for Migrant Prison Camp at Gitmo Should 'Horrify Us All'
"Guantánamo has long been a stain on America's human rights record. Using it to detain migrants would be a dangerous escalation of anti-immigrant policies," wrote one immigrant advocate.
Jan 31, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement Wednesday that he is ordering officials to prepare the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to house tens of thousands of migrants was met with swift condemnation from rights groups this week.
"Guantánamo has long been a stain on America's human rights record. Using it to detain migrants would be a dangerous escalation of anti-immigrant policies," wrote Guerline Jozef, executive director at Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant advocacy group, in a statement on Friday.
Trump announced the plan during a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, legislation that strips due process rights from millions of undocumented immigrants, saying, "we have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people."
A presidential action published by the White House that same day called on the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security "to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens." The memorandum did not state how many migrants are expected to be detained there.
Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, called the move a decision that "should horrify us all."
"The order... sends a clear message: migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supports," Warren continued.
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) said in a Thursday statement that he is "deeply troubled" by the plan, arguing that it raises "serious human rights concerns, risks significant abuses, and would impose unnecessary costs on taxpayers." Amnesty International has also decried the announcement.
Guantánamo Bay's military prison has become associated with the repression and violence carried out by the United States during the "War on Terror" that launched after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It has been used to hold hundreds of foreign terrorism suspects, many without charge, since it opened in 2002.
Facilities at Guantánamo Bay facilities have also been used to detain asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees for decades, but not in the manner that Trump is now suggesting.
Both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton processed Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay, but those were people taken into custody at sea, not brought from the U.S. mainland. And while the Biden administration last year considered processing Haitian migrants there as well, it never followed through with the policy.
Looking ahead, Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights also vowed to fight back, saying his group "has challenged the U.S. government's use of Guantánamo in all its incarnations, and we, along with our partners, will do so again."
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