Court Blocks U.S. From Sending Venezuelan Migrants to Guantánamo

A federal judge barred the U.S. government on Sunday from sending three detained Venezuelan men to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, opening the first legal front against the Trump administration’s new policy of sending undocumented migrants to the American military base there.

“Considering the uncertainty surrounding jurisdiction, the court determines it is necessary to enjoin the transfer of petitioners to Guantánamo Bay,” wrote Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico.

Judge Gonzales has already been overseeing a lawsuit by the men challenging their continued detention in immigration custody. Given the uncertainty over whether any transfer to Guantánamo might disrupt his jurisdiction to finish that matter, he wrote, blocking any such move “is necessary to achieve the ends of justice entrusted to this court.”

Lawyers for the men, who are detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Mexico, had asked Judge Gonzales on Sunday evening for a temporary restraining order. Within an hour of the filing, which came at the start of the Super Bowl, the judge had convened a hearing by videoconference and verbally granted the restraining order.

Immigration and human rights advocates have been stymied in immediately challenging the Trump administration’s policy of sending migrants to Guantánamo, in part because the government has not released the identities of the roughly 50 men it is believed to have flown there so far.

But the three Venezuelan men were already represented by lawyers, and their court filing said they had a credible fear that they could be transferred.

According to the filing, the men are being held in the same ICE facility, the Otero County Processing Center, where previous groups of men who were flown to Guantánamo in recent days had apparently been held. The men recognized the faces of some of those detainees from government photographs provided to the news media, the filing said.

The filing also said that the men had heard rumors that more such transfers were coming, and that they “fit the profile of those the administration has prioritized for detention in Guantánamo, i.e. Venezuelan men detained in the El Paso area with (false) charges of connections with the Tren de Aragua gang.”

President Trump issued a directive to the Homeland Security and Defense Departments on Jan. 29, ordering them to prepare to expand a migrant operations center at Guantánamo Bay to “provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” The military also sent troops to help expand a tent city on one side of the base there.

Since then, five military flights have taken undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay. So far, however, the men have been housed in an empty wing of the wartime prison complex erected by the Bush administration to hold terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The legal challenge brought on behalf of the men is relatively modest. It does not seek to block the administration from sending any more migrants to Guantánamo in general — only the three specific detainees. And the filing acknowledges that a lawyer for the government told them that none of the three “are being moved” to the naval base, though the filing argues that their status could change.

While the U.S. government has taken migrants intercepted at sea to Guantánamo to be processed, it is different to take people who were already on American soil — and therefore covered by the Constitution, even if they were in the United States unlawfully — to the Navy base on Cuban soil to be held in continued immigration detention.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may hold Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo under a law passed by Congress that authorizes the use of military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. It is not clear what legal authority the Trump administration has to take migrants there and to hold them in continued immigration detention.

The filing came as part of an existing lawsuit brought by the men that has been filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, and the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

The men requested asylum but were rejected and received removal orders. But they have not been repatriated because of the breakdown in relations between the U.S. government and that of their native Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro.

That lawsuit argues that the men cannot be held in perpetual detention and so must be freed. Their filing says that any transfer to Guantánamo would make it difficult for them to continue to communicate with their lawyers and could open the door to the government’s arguing that the court no longer has jurisdiction.

Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting from Miami.