The Trump administration transfers of immigrant detainees from mainland jails to the notorious Guantánamo Bay offshore naval base is part of a larger effort to generate headlines and “instill fear in the immigrant population,” all while wasting government resources, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by civil rights groups this week.
The transfers to Guantánamo Bay are part of an all-of-government crackdown on immigration that is intensifying as President Donald Trump and his allies push to weaponize unrelated federal agencies against immigrants, access private tax records to surveil suspects, and rapidly expand the prison industry’s capacity to detain tens of thousands of people, including entire families facing deportation.
The lawsuit seeks to block the potential transfer of 10 immigration defendants from jails in the U.S. to Guantánamo Bay, where other detainees were paraded in front of cameras last month and cut off from attorneys and family members until courts stepped in. Civil rights groups filed a previous lawsuit last month on behalf of family members and attorneys seeking to communicate with the men already transferred to Guantánamo without notice.
Trump and other officials claimed without evidence that Venezuelan nationals reportedly transferred to Guantánamo since January are the “worst of the worst” criminals, but records show many were charged with minor crimes or arrested upon arrival at the U.S. border, and some had no records at all. The administration had transferred at least 178 people to the naval base as of late February, according to the lawsuit.
“As we know from decades of challenging indefinite detention there, Guantánamo has no purpose other than to project lawlessness, domination, and cruelty,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), in a statement on Friday.
CCR and other groups spent decades challenging the torture and indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay of men and boys rounded up during the so-called war on terror. Before that, Guantánamo Bay was known for the mistreatment of Haitian refugees during an outbreak of violence in the 1990s.
The Trump administration says it wants to detain 30,000 immigration detainees in a facility on the naval base that typically holds small numbers of migrants encountered at sea. However, Guantánamo Bay is located on territory that the U.S. leases from Cuba, and civil rights groups argue the Trump administration does not have legal authority to take the unprecedented step of jailing immigrants in an unauthorized third country.
“Sending immigrants to a remote abusive prison is not only illegal and unprecedented, but illogical given the additional cost and logistical complications,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement on Friday.
Civil rights groups have implied that transferring immigrants to Guantánamo Bay is ultimately about theatrics despite the real human cost to families trying desperately to reach their loved ones. The infrastructure for holding 30,000 people does not exist, at least not yet, but Trump is leveraging Guantánamo’s global reputation as a place where the U.S. violates human rights in secret to send a message.
The lawsuit alleges that the transfers to Guantánamo “violate due process under the Fifth Amendment because the transfers are undertaken for punitive, illegitimate reasons and the conditions in which the detainees are housed are unconstitutional.” Conditions at Guantánamo are far worse than at mainland detention centers, according to the lawsuit, with detainees at the Camp 6 military prison held in “what is essentially solitary confinement” for 23 hours a day.
The lawsuit does not, however, challenge the Trump administration’s legal authority to detain or deport the 10 plaintiffs. In reality, most people arrested and detained as part of Trump’s mass deportation agenda will likely end up in immigration jails and prisons run by local sheriffs and private prison companies. Several existing ICE jails and prisons are notorious for abuse and abysmal conditions, and ICE has signed contracts to expand or reopen detention facilities in New Jersey, Alabama and Colorado, for example. At least three detainees have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since Trump took office, the most deaths recorded in the first quarter of the year since 2020. All three men who died were under the age of 45, including a 44-year-old Ukrainian man who suffered seizures and brain bleeding after being transferred to ICE custody from a local jail in Florida.
Katie Blankenship, managing partner for Sanctuary of the South, a human rights group, has been visiting the Krome North Service Processing Center in southern Florida where the Ukrainian refugee and at least one other detainee recently died. Blankenship is working with the family of the Ukrainian man to get an independent autopsy and file a wrongful death lawsuit.
“His family says he entered completely healthy, no history of health conditions, and within three weeks he left the facility brain dead,” Blankenship said in an interview.
Blankenship said the facility is becoming seriously overcrowded as the Trump administration systematically denies bond and parole to keep immigrants incarcerated, with men crowding into a room meant for visits with attorneys and women sleeping on buses in a parking lot.
“The expansion [of immigrant detention] is absolutely happening with the intent to inflict fear and harm, they are housing people in ways that are illegal, unconstitutional, and are leading to gross harm and death,” Blankenship said, adding that ICE contractors are paid up to $200 per detainee each day. “And they are simultaneously closing the window of release so they can keep them inside so it lines their own pockets.”
About 41,000 people are currently reportedly locked up at jails and prisons run or contracted by ICE. More than half do not have a criminal record, and many others were charged with minor offenses such as traffic violations, according to the TRAC database of immigration court records at Syracuse University.
However, TRAC found “errors” and “strange inconsistencies” in recent data released by ICE, including detention statistics released on February 14 that do not mention the immigrants transferred to Guantánamo Bay in late January.
Marcela Hernandez, the organizing director at the Detention Watch Network, said Trump’s immigration detention expansion plan, if realized, would triple the capacity of a system that has a well-documented record of medical neglect, abuse and lack of transparency.
“The tragic passing of three people in ICE custody in just over a month underscores that detention is deadly,” Hernandez said in a statement last week. “Trump’s multi-layered detention expansion plan will exacerbate a system that is rife with abuse, undoubtedly leading to more tragedies while tearing apart families and costing taxpayers greatly.”
Those taxpayers could include some of the very same people targeted by the administration’s widely expanding anti-immigrant apparatus. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently rejected a request from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for access to the private tax records of up to 700,000 people as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, the Washington Post reported on February 28.
The Post also reported that the new acting commissioner of the IRS “quickly indicated she was interested in exploring how to comply with the DHS request.” Undocumented people paid nearly $100 billion in taxes in 2022.
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