Trump is disappearing immigrants into Guantanamo’s legal ‘black box,’ lawsuit says

Civil rights groups and families of detained immigrants are suing for access to the military prison. Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera’s family didn’t know where he was until government images showed him being loaded into a U.S. military plane bound for Guantanamo Bay. Tilso Ramon Gomez Lugo’s sister recognized her brother in the same images. A coalition of attorneys and civil rights groups — including the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights — and families of several detained immigrants are now suing the Trump administration for access to offer legal assistance.

When Yoiker David Sequera’s mother discovered her son was moved to the military prison, an online database for Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed he was still at an El Paso detention center. On Monday, an ICE agent told an attorney to call back the next day. On Tuesday, an attorney was told over email that he was no longer in El Paso. The online database said he was in Florida. The database states that detainees suspected of being transferred to Guantanamo are in “Florida,” but ICE isn’t disclosing their true location, and none of the men have had access to immigration attorneys or any communication with their families, who fear the men have entered a “legal black hole” under Donald Trump’s administration, according to the lawsuit.

Lugo arrived in the United States from Venezuela last April and passed a credible fear interview in his asylum claim, but he was ordered for removal from the country in November. He last spoke to his sister on February 1, asking for clothes for his flight out of the country. She was shocked to see him show up in photos alongside other men boarding military planes bound for a military prison in Cuba.

“By hurrying immigrants off to a remote island cut off from lawyers, family, and the rest of the world, the Trump administration is sending its clearest signal yet that the rule of law means nothing to it,” according to Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “It will now be up to the courts to ensure that immigrants cannot be warehoused on offshore islands,” he said.

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. on Wednesday. Immigrants at the detention center have “effectively disappeared into a black box and cannot contact or communicate with their family or attorneys,” the lawsuit states.

The administration has not publicly shared any information about the immigrants detained there, how long they will be held there, and under what authority and what conditions they face, attorneys wrote. “It is appalling but not surprising that the Trump administration is exploiting and expanding the 21st century's greatest symbol of lawlessness and torture,” said Baher Azmy, legal director with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has led challenges against detention at the facility since the 1990s.

“We see Trump's actions for what they are — performative cruelty mixed with another authoritarian power grab,” Azmy said. The Independent has requested comment from the State Department and Department of Homeland Security. “I fear being taken to Guantanamo because the news is painting it as a black hole,” Abrahan Barrios Morales, who has been in ICE custody since October 2023, said in a statement Monday.

“I also see that human rights are constantly violated at Guantanamo, so I fear what could happen to me if I get taken there,” he said. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended use of the facility, which the administration claims is being used to jail suspected Tren de Aragua gang members and “the worst of the worst and illegal criminals,” according to Noem. “Secretly transferring people from the United States to Guantanamo without access to legal representation or the outside world is not only illegal, it is a moral crisis for this nation,” said Deepa Alagesan, senior supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Without the court’s intervention, thousands of immigrants could be transferred to the facility without legal assistance, violating Fifth Amendment rights to due process, among other claims, according to the lawsuit. Detention of immigrants without access to legal aid “threatens to create a dangerous precedent” for the government to remove people seeking asylum to the Cuban prison, according to RAICES legal director Javier Hidalgo.