Venezuelan Immigrants Detained in New Mexico Granted Emergency Order to Prevent Transfer to Guantánamo
Molly Molloy
Contact: pr...@ccrjustice.org
Trump Administration Plans Mass Detention of Immigrants at Notorious Military Prison
February 10, 2025, Albuquerque, NM – Last night, a federal court granted the request
of three men in immigration detention for a temporary restraining order
(TRO) to prevent the Trump administration from sending them to
Guantánamo. The men, who have a pending case before the court
challenging their unlawfully prolonged detention, are migrants who fled
Venezuela seeking protection in the U.S. A motion filed on their behalf
says they face a risk of imminent transfer to the island prison. The
men, currently held at Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico,
recognized former fellow detainees in news coverage of recent Guantánamo
transfers.
“I fear being taken to Guantánamo because the news is painting it as a black hole... I also see that human rights are constantly violated at Guantánamo, so I fear what could happen to me if I get taken there,” said petitioner Abrahan Barrios Morales.
“The Center for Constitutional Rights has labored for decades to close Guantánamo and secure accountability for human rights abuses perpetrated there against Haitian migrants in the 1990s and hundreds of Muslim men and boys post-9/1. Now, the Trump administration is invoking the specter of Guantánamo, known around the world as a shameful symbol of torture and lawlessness, to terrorize our clients Luis, Leonel, and Abrahan and others like them,” said Jessica Vosburgh, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Our clients refuse to be used as pawns in this twisted game of punishment theater. The question before the court is simple: will the judge allow the executive branch to smuggle away individuals who have a pending case to a military prison on a remote island where there is no guarantee their rights will be respected or that they will even be able to make a phone call to their lawyers or their loved ones? The answer must be a resounding no.”
“For more than two decades, Guantánamo has been a symbol of human rights abuses and disregard for the rule of law,” said Zoe Bowman, Supervising Attorney at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, New Mexico and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. “Transferring people from the Otero County Processing Center, where we have ready access to visit our clients, to an offshore prison thousands of miles away from counsel, is appalling. Our clients have already suffered prolonged detention and been subjected to due process violations in Otero for months. The Trump administration is using a facility famous for torture to unnecessarily intimidate and terrorize migrants like our clients, who only wish to reunite with their families and loved ones in the U.S.”
The administration started transporting migrants from the El Paso, Texas, area to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, this past week as it implements Trump’s executive order to create a massive immigration prison there.
“Transferring immigrants from Otero County to Guantánamo is a blatant attempt to obstruct their legal rights by placing them thousands of miles from their families and attorneys,” said Rebecca Sheff, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico. “We're outraged that New Mexico and El Paso, against the backdrop of the horrific cruelty of family separation in the first Trump administration, are once again being used as a testing ground for dehumanizing and dangerous immigration policies.”
The court would retain jurisdiction even if the men were transferred, but past administrations have used Guantánamo specifically to evade legal oversight. Even if the men are not denied all legal rights, transfer to Guantánamo would severely limit their ability to meet with attorneys – a key reason the court should block the transfer.
“I fear going to Guantánamo because I’ve seen on the news that it’s a maximum security prison. I’m scared of how I’ll be treated there or that I’ll be tortured, that I won’t be able to communicate with my family or know when I’ll be released,” shared Luis Perez Parra, one of the petitioners. “The news is releasing pictures of the faces of people associated with this, and if that were to be released in my home country, I’m scared of what that could do to me and my family’s safety.”
See here for more information on the case.
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center is a 501(c)(3) non-profit providing high-quality legal services to low-income immigrants. Since its founding in 1987, Las Americas has served close to 60,000 persons, with a strong focus on women, children, families, the LGBTQ community and asylum seekers.
The ACLU of New Mexico works to make justice, liberty and equity realities for all people in New Mexico, with particular attention to the rights of people and groups who have historically been disenfranchised.
The Center for Constitutional Rights works with communities under threat to fight for justice and liberation through litigation, advocacy, and strategic communications. Since 1966, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken on oppressive systems of power, including structural racism, gender oppression, economic inequity, and governmental overreach. Learn more at ccrjustice.org.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/02/08/guantanamo-migrants-trump-deportations-noem/
Why lawyers worry migrants sent to Guantánamo are in a ‘legal black hole’
The Trump administration has released scant information on the migrants sent to the U.S. detention facility in Cuba. Human rights lawyers are demanding they be allowed access to legal counsel.
Their names have not been released. Their exact crimes are unknown. The more than three dozen immigrants being held at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba have entered what lawyers are calling a “legal black hole.”
Nearly a week ago, the Trump administration flew the first migrants from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Guantánamo Bay. The officials said the detainees were “dangerous criminals,” “the worst of the worst” and alleged members of a violent Venezuelan gang, and are holding them in a prison on the U.S. naval base created for suspected terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001. But administration officials have released almost no other information.
The unusual and hasty movement of detainees to the military prison with a history of accusations of human rights violations comes as President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill a campaign promise to aggressively increase the number of immigration arrests and deportations. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in the United States have quickly filled, officials say, and Trump has ordered the construction of detention space for as many as 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo.
In Guantánamo, most of those migrants are expected to live in tents pitched on a different part of the base. But the early arrivals are more than three dozen “high-threat criminal illegal aliens” who are in ICE custody and are being housed in a vacant military facility, a Defense Department spokesperson said Saturday.
“Any new arrivals of illegal aliens will be temporarily housed in designated migration holding areas at Naval Station Guantánamo and will be treated safely and humanely in accordance with international humanitarian standards,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This will be a temporary solution until the illegal immigrants are return[ed] to their countries of origin.”
For the migrants who have arrived at Guantánamo, four lawyers who are familiar with the military prison say the Trump administration is breaking the law by denying them access to legal counsel — something the suspected terrorists detained in Guantánamo have obtained. Even if the migrants are confirmed as members of the Venezuelan-based Tren de Aragua gang, as the Trump administration contends, the lawyers say the migrants do not qualify to be held in the high-security area of the base that some prisoners have described as a “tomb above ground.”
“It is essential to know who is there, what legal claims they have and whether they want attorneys,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt said. “This is the normal ICE lack of transparency on steroids.”
A Defense Department spokesperson did not answer questions about migrants’ legal access or other information about them. The Homeland Security and State departments did not respond to requests for comment.
On Sunday, the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, the ACLU of New Mexico and the Center for Constitutional Rights requested a temporary restraining order on behalf of three Venezuelan men to preemptively prevent their potential transfer to Guantánamo. In the court filing, they argued that if the Venezuelan migrants are transferred to Guantánamo, their “procedural rights will not be fully respected” by the Trump administration. A federal judge granted the request within hours.
The request came after lawyers with the ACLU, along with more than a dozen other human rights organizations, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday requesting immediate access to the migrants, as well as information on their immigration status, which agency has custody of them, their anticipated length of stay in Guantánamo, and what authority the government has to transfer them there from the United States.
Noem has defended the administration’s use of Guantánamo to detain migrants and told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the goal is to quickly move deportees in and out, though she did not rule out the possibility some could be there for weeks. She said migrants’ legal rights would be respected.
“They have due process,” she said. “My job is to make sure we’re following the law on every single individual that we’re bringing into custody and transporting back to their home.”
Noem traveled to Guantánamo on Friday to observe “some of the operations that we’re standing up to house the worst of the worst and illegal criminals,” she said in a video posted to social media that evening, wearing a DHS ball cap and standing in front of a razor-wire-topped fence as the sun appeared to set.
The military facility where the immigrants are being housed is known as Camp 6, according to recent reports and lawyers familiar with Guantánamo. The Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001, which allowed for the use of “necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for 9/11, was later clarified in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 to apply to people suspected of being members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or affiliated terrorist groups. Even if Trump were to designate Tren de Aragua as a terrorist group, lawyers said, those accused of being members cannot be held in military custody, which is only for people affiliated with the specific terrorist groups behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Defense Department says the migrants are considered to be in ICE custody despite being detained in a military facility.
That’s a distinction that’s impossible to make, said J. Wells Dixon, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented 9/11 defendants and has one remaining client there, who was never charged and has been approved for transfer.
“Camp 6 is inextricably intertwined with military detention,” Dixon said. “I don’t think you can unwrap Camp 6 from military detention.”
Dixon said the prison was made for suspected terrorists: “It was designed to break detainees psychologically.”
Other lawyers representing 9/11 defendants there also said the military-run building is operated like a high-security prison, with difficult living conditions.
“Conditions there are not sanitary — my understanding is they’re disgusting,” said Alka Pradhan, a human rights attorney who represents one of the remaining 9/11 defendants in Guantánamo. “They’re dirty. It’s in a tropical island that builds up bugs and sand and heat and the air conditioning goes out all the time.”
The military prison has held as many as 780 people over the years.
The Bush, Obama and Biden administrations made efforts to wind down Guantánamo Bay’s operations, decreasing the prisoner population at the base but not closing it, despite pressure from advocacy groups. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, he signed an executive order to keep the naval base open indefinitely.
Across the bay, which is traversed by ferry, is another facility on the western side of the base called the Migrant Operation Center, which is run by the State Department and is reserved for migrants who are apprehended at sea and have proved to U.S. officials that they have a credible fear of persecution if they return to their home country. These migrants often stay there for months.
“Trump is only the most recent president to seek to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole to try to get away with impermissible treatment,” said Hannah Flamm, acting director of policy at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which has documented suspected human rights abuses at the base.
The military site where terrorism suspects are kept can currently hold more than 100 people, and the migrant center can house about 120, lawyers said. Neither comes close to the space needed for the 30,000 people Trump wants to detain there.
Satellite imagery on Saturday revealed that more than 185 tents and temporary structures had been erected at the base near the migrant center in anticipation of an influx of deportees. A manual laying out rules on Guantánamo that was published by the International Refugee Assistance Project states that any migrants who were intercepted at sea and detained there can’t be moved to the United States, meaning that migrants apprehended in the Caribbean are either sent back to their country of origin or, if they are determined to have a credible fear of persecution, eventually to another country. But lawyers say that the newly arriving migrants, who come from U.S. custody, carry their rights with them and could return.
The International Refugee Assistance Project issued a scathing report on the migrant center in September. It described a “dilapidated building with mold and sewage issues,” where migrants are denied confidential phone calls, even with their attorneys, and punished if they share accounts of mistreatment.
The legal aid group said the report was based on accounts from former migrant detainees and center staff.
Yeilis Torres Cruz, 38, was apprehended by the U.S. Coast Guard while trying to reach the United States by raft from Cuba in May 2022. The 16 other migrants she was traveling with could not document a credible fear in interviews and were returned to Cuba, she said. She was taken to Guantánamo Bay, where she remained for seven months.
Torres Cruz said coming from the prisons in Cuba, the Guantánamo facility felt like a “hotel.” She and the other detainees were given adequate meals, and the beds and bathrooms were clean, she said. Staff at the center also let her and other migrants there take bike rides and go fishing. She got paid $5 an hour to clean up trash on the beach in the early morning hours, she said, which went toward buying toiletries.
But throughout her time there, Torres Cruz said she was unable to communicate with her attorney. Her husband was a U.S. citizen living in Florida, and he arranged for a lawyer to fight for her release. But she said the lawyer could not reach her.
“He tried every legal avenue, and they always rejected him,” she said. “Everyone has the right to legal access. … That was bad.”
She said the migrant camp was an especially difficult place for children. One began talking to walls, while another would urinate in the bed, she recalled. She pleaded with officials to let the kids go to a local school, but they would not let them.
In December 2022, Torres Cruz was released from the Guantánamo migrant center and taken to a detention facility in Florida, where she stayed for four months before she was released. She has since left Florida and lives in the Midwest with her husband and baby.
But Torres Cruz acknowledges that her story was unique: Most migrants don’t pass the credible-fear interview that allows them to stay in Guantánamo, and even fewer are able to resettle in the United States. And although she stayed at the migrant center, the newly arriving migrants from the United States are being put in the vacant military prison, an unprecedented move that raises even more uncertainty about their living conditions.
The three Venezuelans mentioned in the restraining order request were asylum seekers, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, and had passed interviews to determine if they had a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country. They filed a petition in September protesting their detention. At the time, the men had been held in detention between nine months and nearly one year.
The new complaint states that two of the migrants represented are incorrectly alleged to have ties to the Tren de Aragua gang. Lawyers for the men said only one of the petitioners has a criminal conviction, which was for planning to help other migrants cross the border.
The groups said lawyers for the Trump administration stated that the migrants mentioned in the petition are not being moved to Guantánamo, but did not guarantee they might not be relocated there in the future.
“The Trump administration is using a facility famous for torture to unnecessarily intimidate and terrorize migrants like our clients, who only wish to reunite with their families and loved ones in the U.S.,” said Zoe Bowman, a lawyer at the Las Americas legal aid center.
Luis Perez Parra, one of the restraining order petitioners, said he fears going to Guantánamo.
“I’m scared of how I’ll be treated there or that I’ll be tortured, that I won’t be able to communicate with my family or know when I’ll be released,” he said. “The news is releasing pictures of the faces of people associated with this, and if that were to be released in my home country, I’m scared of what that could do to me and my family’s safety.”
Marianne LeVine, Alice Crites, Jarrett Ley, Maria Sacchetti and Ian Duncan contributed to this report.