The Trump administration has whisked away at least a hundred Venezuelan immigrants to the notorious Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detention camp, where they are in the custody of military guards and completely isolated from the outside world — a blatant violation of their civil rights, according to lawyers and advocates who spoke to Salon.
In interviews, they said Trump administration authorities had refused to grant their requests for access to the detainees or to even identify them; the federal government is also refusing to provide basic information, such as exactly how many people have been deported to the island prison since President Donald Trump took office.
"It's an attempt to disappear these individuals; to make it harder to communicate with them, harder to observe and monitor what is happening to them, and also done for the purpose of terrorizing them," J. Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Salon.
A lawsuit recently filed by CCR, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups accuses the government of preventing immigrants detained at Guantánamo Bay from "accessing legal assistance to understand their rights and to challenge their transfer and detention or conditions of confinement." The lawsuit was filed on behalf of all detained at Guantánamo, including three named prisoners — Tilso Ramon Gomez Lugo, Yoiker David Sequera and Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera — who were recognized by their relatives in photos that the government published flaunting the arrival of immigrants at the military prison camp.
After the Feb. 12 filing, authorities allowed the plaintiffs to communicate with those three men, but no one else.
"We know that the government can logistically make it possible for us to have access to the detainees, and the fact that we've already talked to three of the detainees reinforces that," the ACLU's Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney on the case, told Salon.
The prison in Guantánamo, an offshore facility previously reserved for foreign terrorism suspects and later also for immigrants caught at sea (but not on U.S. soil), has become a byword for the U.S. imperial state at its most unaccountable and oppressive, with inmates held in secrecy and often subjected to inhumane treatment, which critics say has been tantamount to torture. Now, Guantánamo is also housing Venezuelan immigrants who Trump administration officials have claimed, without evidence, are especially dangerous criminals, "the worst of the worst," including alleged gang members and pedophiles.
The Trump administration has signaled that as many as 30,000 immigrants could ultimately be detained at the prison camp.
Relatives of those held there already insist they have been falsely accused and advocates say there is no reason to believe the government's blanket assertions. In a statement to Salon, the Department of Homeland Security refused to provide any evidence supporting the government's claims, saying: "We cannot give out personal identifying information." DHS did not respond when asked why that is the case.
"We do not plan on trusting the Trump administration's characterization of who is being sent to Guantánamo. We believe we have a right, and the American public has a right, to find out for ourselves who has been sent there," Gelernt said. "Based on our own investigation, we do not believe that everyone being sent there has a serious criminal history, and notwithstanding the Trump administration's hyperbole, we also want to emphasize that even someone with a criminal history would have certain rights and should not be sent to Guantánamo."
News outlets also ran background research on the three named detainees in the lawsuit and could find no violent criminal record.
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Relatives of Sequera and Castillo told news outlets that authorities must have took their tattoos as a sign that they were part of the Tren de Aragua gang, and used them as "guinea pigs" for Trump's mass deportation program. That interpretation comes after ICE said that it viewed tattoos as “one of many indicators” that an individual belongs to the gang.
Independent experts have said that they could find no real connection between gang membership and tattoos, a popular adornment for Venezuelans and nearly one-third of Americans.
"Tattoos are greatly meaningless unless they are combined with other factors, like prison history or known criminal associations,” Pablo Zeballos, a Chile-based expert on organized crime, told the Washington Post.
Dozens of other transferred detainees have also been recognized since the photos were released, with their friends and relatives expressing horror and confusion that such punishment should befall people they have known as a friendly barber (in the case of Sequera), soccer teammate or loving father.
"I suspect that, as in the past, when we have access to these individuals, the truth will be that they are far from 'the worst of the worst,'" Dixon said. "I'm sure many of them were not ever charged, let alone convicted of crimes. I think it's important to remember that some of these individuals may have entered the United States legally seeking political asylum or other refuge under US and international law."
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Previously, federal authorities have kept immigrants, typically those caught at sea, at Guantánamo for "processing" that could sometimes take more than a year to complete. But the Trump administration's plan to pack an offshore detention facility with thousands of people detained on American soil — and therefore entitled to constitutional protections, whatever their legal status — is unprecedented.
Even when Guantánamo was housing only a small population, officials from the International Refugee Assistance Project found in 2023 that detainees were still being "held in dilapidated facilities with faulty plumbing, rodents, and a lack of potable water," according to Kimberly Grano, Litigation Staff Attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project.
"This administration's attempt to send thousands of people from the United States there all but guarantees that conditions will be even worse," she told Salon.
While many prisons run by the United States have faced scrutiny for mistreating its prisoners, Guantánamo, a "legal black hole" where people disappear without normal due process and evoking images of blindfolded prisoners prostrate before heavily armed guards or being threatened with snarling dogs, has an especially dreadful reputation.
The cruelty, Dixon told Salon, is exactly the point.
"What could be worse and more terrifying and more torturous than being told you're going to be sent to Guantánamo Bay?" he said. "They're doing this in order to strike terror in the minds of undocumented individuals in the United States. This is all about intentional cruelty towards non-citizens. It's not about law or policy or anything like that. It's purely performative."
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