WASHINGTON—Trying to reverse one of the most-heartless actions of a hateful administration, the ACLU, its D.C. affiliate, and several other organizations marched into federal court on February 12 to force the Republican Trump regime to allow access to lawyers to represent the undocumented migrants Trump flew to the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
It’s outrageous enough that, against the will of the Cuban government and its people, that the U.S. even maintains a military base there but now it intends to use that base to literally imprison immigrants to the U.S., giving them no access to even the most basic of human rights.
The 39-page filing in U.S. District Court in D.C. describes how a set of migrants—the first were Jose G. Miranda, Tilso Ramon Gomez Lugo and Yoiker David Sequera—were flown to Miami, then held incommunicado even before they were shipped to the base. Relatives identified all three from a vindictive video which Trump regime Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted.
At Guantanamo, unlike on the U.S. mainland, the migrants will be held in camps, isolated behind barbed wire, imprisoned and have no access to lawyers, family or anyone else. The suit seeks a temporary restraining order to let the imprisoned migrants see lawyers, who would have to fly to Guantanamo for the meetings.
Trump treats the migrants, some of whom are seeking asylum here and others who have lived in the U.S. for years, as equivalent to the alleged al-Qaeda attackers who brought down the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center in 2001.
“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 the rule of law means nothing to it,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
“It will now be up to the courts to ensure immigrants cannot be warehoused on offshore islands.”
A political symbol
Trump, like the rest of the GOP, uses Guantanamo as a political symbol for the Cuban-American community of South Florida. Many of those Cubans are either upper-class people who fled when Fidel Castro defeated the imperialist and U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista regime in 1959, or their descendants.
Congressional Republicans use the 9/11 detainees at Guantanamo as yet another “social issue.” In the decades since, they’ve wrapped themselves in a rhetorical flag, fulminating against transferring the alleged al-Qaeda members to the mainland or allowing them legal counsel, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling mandating that.
Instead, the GOP successfully kept the captives there in Cuba, in one of the last relics of U.S. colonial control, the base.
“It is appalling but not surprising the Trump administration is exploiting and expanding the 21st century’s greatest symbol of lawlessness and torture: Guantánamo,” said another group that joined the lawsuit, the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The center says it’s “been challenging incommunicado detention and torture at Guantánamo since the early 1990s, and we see Trump’s actions for what they are—performative cruelty mixed with another authoritarian power grab.
“The courts, once again, must act to ensure the immigrants Trump seeks to detain there have access to lawyers and thus the law, and are free from the cruelty and terror inherent in the project of Guantánamo,” said Baher Azmy, the center’s legal director.
The suit itself paints an appalling picture of how the Trump regime, in its zeal to round up people who are brown—citizen, migrant or not, with or without papers—and mistreats them.
“Until very recently, the government never held at Guantánamo immigrants who were originally apprehended and detained in the United States. That changed on February 4, when the government sent a flight carrying ten immigrant detainees from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Guantánamo,” the suit says.
On January 29, it added, Trump ordered Hegseth and the Homeland Security Secretary “to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center” at Guantanamo Bay. He wants to ship 30,000 migrants there, the suit adds.
“These transfers began even while government lawyers were reportedly still reviewing the legality of transferring noncitizens from immigration detention facilities in the United States to Guantánamo, and debating which government agency would have custody of those noncitizens there.
“The government circulated multiple photographs and a video of the first ten individuals—showing their faces—as they were transferred via military aircraft. Aside from representing the immigrants were of Venezuelan nationality and alleging they were members of a gang, the government provided no other information regarding their identities, immigration statuses or what crimes they actually committed.”
Instead, Hegseth, a former Fox “News” commentator, said upon taking the Defense Secretary’s job that “whatever is needed will be provided” by the military to deport migrants. He then posted the video of the first migrants. Almost two dozen more arrived soon after the initial flight of ten, on other military flights from Miami, the suit says.
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