The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with a slew of US-based rights organisations, is suing the Trump administration for preventing migrants transferred to Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba from speaking to lawyers.
“Our Constitution does not allow the government to hold people incommunicado, without any ability to speak to counsel or the outside world,” Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said in a statement shared with Middle East Eye.
US President Donald Trump had ordered the military to prepare at least 30,000 beds at the US-run facility to accommodate the number of deportees that he said are “violent criminals” who entered the country illegally and do not hold an immigration status.
“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo,” the president said.
But many say their family members who have not committed a crime have been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
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One of them is Eucaris Carolina Gomez Lugo, a plaintiff in the ACLU case, who was shocked to see a photograph of her brother being held at Guantanamo, according to the lawsuit. The Trump administration has published several images of men in handcuffs being led onto military planes for deportation to the island prison.
Lugo learned that the government was alleging that he and other men being detained were Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members, and she is now very concerned about his safety.
Aside from setting a quota for ICE agents to round up between 1,200-1,400 people daily, the Trump administration has provided virtually no information about those newly moved to Guantanamo, “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,” the ACLU said in a statement.
“Detaining immigrants at Guantanamo 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,” Rebecca Lightsey, co-executive director of American Gateways, said, according to the ACLU statement.
Rights groups also believe the Trump administration is putting on a very public show of force to placate its most hardline anti-immigration base and that it sets a dangerous precedent for the country.
“Guantanamo is a breeding ground for violence, abuse, and neglect. Our government is targeting [migrants] and unnecessarily moving them to a notoriously difficult-to-access offshore site for no reason other than political theatre,” Jennifer Babaie, director of advocacy and legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, said.
As of 2019, there were at least 11 million undocumented immigrants known to be in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Experts believe that figure has risen to some 14 million since.
According to NBC, in order to fulfil Trump’s pledge that “millions and millions” of migrants will be deported, ICE would have to ship out over 2,700 people every single day to reach the one million mark in a year.
Trump vs Biden
So far, about 11,000 people have been deported in less than three weeks of the Trump administration being sworn in, whether it’s to Guantanamo Bay or back to their countries of origin.
The crackdown appears to have deterred illegal border crossings.
“Illegal migrant encounters between the ports of entry are down nearly 87 percent,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week.
But according to figures from the Department of Homeland Security, no presidents have ever deported as many people as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both Democrats whose time in office preceded the Trump administration.
More than four and a half million people were removed from the US during Biden’s four-year term, when immigrant crossings surged as his party sought to distance itself from hawkish Republican rhetoric toward immigrants.
During Obama’s two terms, 5.3 million people were removed, earning him the label “Deporter-in-Chief.”
In Trump’s first term, just over two million migrants were removed.
History
Migrants have been held at Guantanamo Bay before.
But according to Politifact, historically, the US has used the facility to hold migrants stopped at sea – mostly Haitians, and also Cubans in the 1990s.
The difference is that now, Trump is sending people who were detained on US soil.
The US has had rights over what is now its military base in Cuba since a treaty was signed between the two countries in 1903. It can be voided only by mutual agreement.
Guantanamo Bay is widely known for housing the detention centre which was set up in 2002 by former President George W Bush during the “war on terror” and was used to hold more than 800 Muslim men accused of being linked to militant groups like al-Qaeda.
There are 15 detainees remaining in the prison after the majority were released without charge.
Former President Barack Obama vowed to close the prison when he came into office, as did Joe Biden. However, the two Democratic presidents only managed to reduce the prison’s population.
Trump has repeatedly vowed to keep the prison open. The prison became a symbol of American human rights abuses during the US-led “war on terror”, with detainees being subject to a range of torture techniques, including waterboarding and sexual torture, according to rights groups.
