Lawsuit Challenges “Unlawful” Detention of Migrants at Guantánamo Bay

Immigrant rights advocates on Wednesday launched a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration for detaining migrants at the U.S. naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the site of a “notorious” prison where several foreign men and boys were indefinitely held and tortured as part of the so-called War on Terror.

The class action suit was filed in the District of Columbia by the ACLU’s national and D.C. arms, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the International Refugee Assistance Project against the secretaries of defense, homeland security, and state, as well as their departments, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and ICE’s acting director.

The coalition brought the case on behalf of two Nicaraguan men previously detained a facilities in Virginia and Louisiana — Yamil Luna Gutierrez and Rafael Angel Lopez Ocon — and other noncitizens the Trump administration is now holding under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in “disturbing” conditions at Guantánamo.

Rather than keeping these migrants in the United States “while making arrangements to effectuate their removal, the government has flown them hundreds of miles away to detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for no legitimate purpose,” the complaint states. “Plaintiffs are surrounded by military officials, deprived of in-person contact with legal counsel, and subject to punitive conditions of confinement, including in facilities previously used by the military to hold law-of-war detainees.”

The plaintiffs, the filing says, “do not challenge the government’s authority to detain them on U.S. soil or to directly remove them to their home country or to another statutorily authorized country. What they challenge is the government’s unprecedented and unlawful decision to hold them in a detention facility at Guantánamo — which, under the INA, and for purposes of the application of that statute, is not the United States. Immigration detention outside the United States is straightforwardly illegal under the statute.”

“Moreover,” the document argues, “the government’s use of Guantánamo for immigration detention is arbitrary and capricious, lacks any legitimate purpose, and imposes punitive detention conditions on immigration detainees in violation of their constitutional rights.”

“Never before this administration has the federal government moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to Guantánamo, or to any other facility outside the United States, for the purpose of civil immigration detention. Nor is there any legitimate reason to do so,” the document notes. “The government has ample detention capacity inside the United States, which is far less costly and poses none of the logistical hurdles attendant to detaining people at Guantánamo.”

Specifically, according to the complaint, “since February 4, 2025, the government has held approximately 500 people in immigration detention at Guantánamo, at a reported cost of more than $40 million, or approximately $100,000 per day per detainee. In contrast, immigration detention at a U.S.-based detention facility costs, on average, $165 per day per detainee.”

Previewing the Trump administration’s likely arguments in court, the suit says that “in attempting to justify the transfers, the government has claimed that the individuals it is sending to Guantánamo are members of gangs and dangerous criminals — the ‘worst of the worst.’ That characterization has been proven wrong. Regardless, it is legally irrelevant.”

The filing also stresses that “the government’s real reason for holding immigration detainees at Guantánamo is to instill fear in the immigrant population. That is not conjecture; it is government policy.”

The coalition is asking the court to rule that detaining these migrants at Guantánamo violates the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, and Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to block the Trump administration from continuing to do so.