Hours after telling a judge exactly how many people are being held in a U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, including immigrants with little or no criminal records, Donald Trump’s administration emptied out the entire facility.
A plane carrying nearly 200 Venezuelan immigrants who were detained at the naval base arrived in Venezuela late Thursday, clearing out the Cuban naval base that the president turned into a detention center for immigrants ordered for deportation from the United States.
After the Department of Justice outlined exactly how many immigrants were being held at the facility, and where, while arguing that they do not have any statutory rights to attorneys or legal assistance, “there are no immigration detainees” at the facility, government lawyers wrote.
Justice Department attorneys were responding to a lawsuit from immigration attorneys, civil rights groups and the families of detained immigrants demanding access to the prison to offer legal aid.
That lawsuit from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, among others, argues that detainees have “effectively disappeared into a black box and cannot contact or communicate with their family or attorneys.”
The Justice Department now argues that “completion of the removal operation eliminates any need for temporary injunctive relief.”
Removing all of the 178 detainees from the facility also “underscores that immigration detention at [Guantanamo] is intended for temporary staging and not for indefinite detention,” government lawyers wrote.
This week, the Trump administration said 178 immigrants were being held at the high-security U.S. military prison, but nearly one-third of detainees are considered “lower-threat” and likely do not have any serious criminal records, according to court filings.
At least 128 people who are considered “higher-threat” immigrants were detained inside Camp IV, which resembles facilities used to house prisoners of war, according to sworn statements from Homeland Security and U.S. Army personnel.
Camp IV has a capacity of approximately 175 people, but its current capacity is 131 due to “ongoing maintenance being performed in certain cells,” according to the statements.
The remaining 51 “lower-threat” detainees — roughly 28 percent — were held “in and around” a barracks-like “Migrant Operations Center,” the filings say.
The government has offered “no legal authority” for this “unprecedented action” while cutting off “any means of communication” for detainees to the outside world, plaintiffs wrote in a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. last week.
In response to the lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers claim that the facility does offer them access to legal counsel, but that plaintiffs are relying on an “overstated framing of the limited rights of immigration detainees,” all of whom are Venezuelan nationals subject to final removal orders from the United States.
“Detainees have not been deprived of a constitutional right to access counsel” because they “do not have the same due process protections,” according to the Justice Department.
The detainees there “do not have a statutory right to counsel,” they argued.
Instructions in English and Spanish telling detainees how to make phone calls to counsel are posted at the facility, and “retained counsel for the detainees are also able to make requests for phone calls to their clients,” according to Justice Department lawyers.
Detainees also “have the ability to send and receive legal mail through the process used by law-of-war detainees,” though the administration admits that the facility is “not presently offering the opportunity for in-person visits to immigration detainees,” the filing states.
Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have repeatedly defended use of the facility — which opened in 2002 to hold terrorism suspects during the War on Terror — to jail suspected Tren de Aragua gang members and “the worst of the worst and illegal criminals,” according to Noem.
But “lower-threat” immigrants may include nonviolent immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally but who have never been charged or convicted of violent offenses or other serious crimes, according to federal guidelines.
Use of the facility, where Trump has suggested detaining as many as 30,000 people, has drawn international scrutiny from humanitarian groups fearing potential for abuse in the secrecy of an offshore facility beyond the nation’s borders.
Over the past month, U.S. military personnel have been seen erecting tents around the facility,
“Guantanamo is a breeding ground for violence, abuse, and neglect,” according to Jennifer Babaie, director of advocacy and legal services with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, New Mexico and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, which is the lead plaintiff in the case.
“Many of these men have already been subjected to countless human rights abuses and due process violations,” she said in a statement last week. “Keeping them in Guantanamo without regular access to lawyers and loved ones while at the same time spreading unfounded accusations against them all on the basis of what they look like and where they come from, is dangerous, violent, and completely unacceptable.”
Earlier this month, a judge blocked the administration from transferring three Venezuelan men to Guantanamo after they were held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for more than a year.
The men had passed credible fear interviews as part of their request for asylum in the United States, where they were seeking refuge after fleeing their home country.
In response to the judge’s order, the administration deported them to Venezuela.
Trump-appointed District Judge Carl Nichols is overseeing the latest Guantanamo case. A hearing has not yet been scheduled.
