After exposing the terrible conditions and suicide attempts of the migrants detained at a naval facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a US human rights organization filed a lawsuit on Saturday to prevent the Trump administration from possibly moving 10 migrants from the United States there.
The transfers are unlawful under US immigration law because they send the detainees overseas and are meant to induce fear without a legitimate basis, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, DC, Reuters reported.
According to the ACLU, the 10 detainees in the case are males from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Venezuela who have final deportation orders; some of them have even been threatened with transfer to Guantanamo. According to the ACLU, the males who are presently being imprisoned in Texas, Arizona, and Virginia are not high-risk criminals or members of gangs.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesman for the US Department of Homeland Security, described the ACLU's legal challenge as "baseless" on Saturday and stated that the department would cooperate with the Justice Department to combat the complaint.
Republican President Donald Trump has pledged to deport a record number of illegal immigrants. The administration started transporting migrants to a detention centre on the US base in Guantanamo Bay, which is most known for housing foreign terrorism suspects, in early February as part of its efforts to increase the number of deportations.
For decades, a migrant facility on the station has housed Haitian and Cuban migrants who were apprehended at sea. But according to the ACLU, the Trump administration's initiative was the first to send migrants there from the United States.
According to the government, around one-third of the original group of 177 Venezuelans had no criminal history, despite Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's claims that they are sending "the worst of the worst" to Guantanamo.
According to the ACLU petition, migrants incarcerated at Guantanamo have been denied access to family members, kept in windowless chambers for at least twenty-three hours every day, and endured intrusive strip examinations.
According to the lawsuit, guards "engage in verbal and physical abuse," which includes fracturing one person's hand, denying water, tying detainees to a chair, and threatening to shoot them.
"These degrading conditions and extreme isolation have led to several suicide attempts," according to the complaint.
In mid-February, a federal judge prevented the potential deportation of a number of Venezuelan migrants to Guantanamo; however, the men, who were also represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, were subsequently transferred back to Venezuela.
According to the New York Times on Saturday, a group of lawyers filed a separate action against the Panamanian government at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, naming 10 Iranians and 102 migrants detained at a camp in Panama as plaintiffs.
Immigrant rights groups and others filed a second lawsuit Friday to stop Trump's efforts to terminate former President Joe Biden's "parole" programs, which permitted hundreds of thousands of people with US sponsors or those escaping danger to enter the country lawfully.
The case, which was filed in a federal court in Massachusetts, contends that the administration violated the statute when it abruptly terminated programs for Afghans who had escaped the Taliban takeover as well as programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians with US sponsors.
