SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — U.S. immigration and military authorities say they have transferred exclusively Venezuelan immigrants who are subject to final deportation orders to the U.S. naval station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where nearly 180 new arrivals are being held in tents and high-security facilities, according to court documents published Thursday.
The court filing by U.S. Justice Department attorneys provides the most thorough official accounting to date about who is being held at the remote military complex and why.
President Donald Trump in January said he wanted to expand immigrant detention facilities at Guantanamo to hold as many as 30,000 people, although current capacity at Guantanamo’s low-security migrant operations center is roughly 2,500.
The naval base is best known for housing suspects taken in after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but it also has been used for holding people caught trying to illegally reach the U.S. by boat and to coordinate the resettlement of immigrants in the U.S.
Authorities initiated on Feb. 4 near-daily flights from a U.S. Army base in West Texas to Guantanamo. Fifty-one of the newly arrived immigrants are being held in low-security tent facilities, while 127 more are confined to a high-security area.
The Departments of Homeland Security and Defense argued in Thursday’s court filing that the detainees do not have a right to legal counsel because they all are subject to final orders of removal to Venezuela, affording them “very limited due process rights.”
Relatives of the new Guantanamo detainees and advocacy groups have accused the U.S. government of holding immigrants without access to counsel or any means of vindicating their rights, amid unsubstantiated or disputed accusations of criminal ties. U.S. authorities have not publicly confirmed the individual identities of immigrants recently transported to Guantanamo Bay.
A lawsuit on behalf of three immigrants detained at Guantanamo seeks a court order for authorities to provide unmonitored telephone and in-person access to legal counsel and advance notice before immigrants are transferred to Guantanamo or removed to other countries.
A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered authorities to provide phone access to legal counsel, and authorities at Guantanamo said in Thursday’s court filing that they have complied, while pushing back against in-person access to legal counsel, as well as the right to communicate with relatives.
The Departments of Homeland Security and Defense “are not presently offering the opportunity for in-person visits to immigration detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay but will continue to evaluate whether to extend this option in light of significant logistical challenges, the availability of alternative means of counsel communication, and the anticipated short duration of immigration detainee stays.”
The court filing notes that “Venezuela has historically resisted accepting repatriation of its citizens but has recently begun accepting removals following high-level political discussions and an investment of significant resources.”
Trump in January signaled that some migrants could be held indefinitely at Guantanamo.
“Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send ’em out to Guantanamo,” Trump said.
Relatives of immigrants believed to be at Guantanamo Bay and civil rights advocates say they have been left guessing about exactly who has been transferred there as they stitch together reports by immigrants in detention about people being led away from holding cells at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in El Paso. An online detainee locator is of limited use, they say.
“No one, to my knowledge, has heard from their loved ones” in U.S. detention at Guantanamo Bay, said Anwen Hughes of Human Rights First, who helps provide legal counsel to indigent immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. “We don’t normally disappear people from within the country like this.”
