ACLU and other advocates sue for access to migrants moved to Guantánamo Bay

A coalition of immigrant rights and legal aid groups, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, has sued the Trump administration, demanding that migrants flown by the government to a U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, be given access to lawyers.

Wednesday’s lawsuit says the Trump administration, after sending dozens of migrants to the remote Caribbean outpost in recent weeks, is now “holding them incommunicado, without access to attorneys, family, or the outside world.” The suit alleges that “this isolation is no coincidence,” since the distant location makes it especially difficult for migrants to communicate with attorneys who could explain their legal rights and challenge their detention.

“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 opps,” the lead attorney in the lawsuit, ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, said in an NPR interview, referring to images of shackled men being loaded onto and off of military planes.

According to the lawsuit, some of the migrants’ family members learned their relatives had been sent to Guantánamo upon seeing those photos, which were circulated publicly by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Several of those family members are plaintiffs in the case.

Since traveling to Guantánamo will be onerous for lawyers, the lawsuit requests that, “at a minimum,” attorneys be allowed to communicate with the migrants via phone calls, video conferences or email.

Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, noted that suspected foreign terrorists who have been imprisoned for years at Guantánamo have access to lawyers, meaning that “these immigrant detainees are now being held in a situation with less rights than even the alleged enemy combatants.”

In a statement to NPR, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said there is “a system for phone utilization to reach lawyers” but provided no additional detail. The government has not released the identities of the migrants sent to Guantánamo, and several of their family members say they have made repeated calls to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to inquire about their relatives, to no avail.

McLaughlin’s statement also said: “If the AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union cares more about highly dangerous criminal aliens including murderers & vicious gang members than they do about American citizens — they should change their name.”

So far, the U.S. government has sent several planeloads of migrants to Guantánamo, totaling at least 50 people, the ACLU estimates. The government says at least 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 men “high-threat illegal aliens” and says it wants to create space at Guantánamo for 30,000 migrants, although its plan will face numerous legal, financial, political and logistical hurdles.

The administration says the 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 terror suspects like al-Qaida.

In preparation for the arrival of more migrants, several hundred U.S. military service members have been deployed to Guantánamo and more than a hundred green Army tents have been erected in fields near an airstrip there.

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 several detained migrants’ family members, as well as four legal aid groups that want to meet with the detainees: Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, American Gateways, and Americans for Immigrant Justice.

The organizations said they resorted to litigation when the government failed to respond to a letter sent last week to the secretaries of Defense, State and Homeland Security requesting immediate access to the migrants.

“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,” Deepa Alagesan, a senior supervising attorney at IRAP, said in a statement. “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.”

NPR ‘s Ximena Bustillo contributed to this report.