The American Civil Liberties Union on Friday demanded access to migrants who the Trump administration is holding in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, raising concerns about their condition and lack of access to legal representation.
In a letter addressed to the secretaries of homeland security, state and defense—co-signed by 14 other immigrants’ rights organizations—the groups requested immediate access to the roughly “two dozen noncitizens” currently held in Guantánamo, noting that officials have promised to detain tens of thousands of additional migrants at the facility. Though the U.S. did at one point house asylum seekers at the naval base in the early 1990s, since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, it’s mostly been used to hold foreign nationals facing terrorism charges.
The letter suggests that some migrants currently housed at the facility are being detained “in the same prison housing law of war detainees,” also pointing to a 2024 report from the International Refugee Assistance Project that documented “appalling conditions” at Guantánamo including a lack of potable water, mold- and rat-infested living spaces and inadequate access to medical care.
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“Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,” Lee Gelernt, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing.”
The letter was sent just hours before Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was set to travel to Guantánamo Bay to tour the new facility, Scripps News has learned. Asked about the letter and concerns about conditions there, DHS Spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told Scripps News, “If the AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union cares more about highly dangerous criminal aliens that include murderers and vicious gang members than they do about American citizens then they should change their name.”
DHS has thus far released scant details about the new migrant holding facility since the Pentagon’s announcement of the first military flight carrying “criminal aliens” there on Dec. 4.
McLaughlin, the DHS official, provided no additional details about whether the agency would respond to the ACLU or make migrants available to legal counselors and humanitarian groups. Representatives for the Departments of Defense and State did not respond to inquiries about the letter. U.S. Southern Command, the combatant command that oversees the naval base at Guantánamo, declined to comment.
In the letter, the groups noted several of the signatories have expertise in “litigation to seek access to the asylum system and other humanitarian protections” and “litigation and advocacy regarding conditions of confinement in immigration detention facilities,” hinting at the possibility of further legal actions to come.
Gelernt declined to speak to the ACLU’s legal plans, but legal experts consulted by Scripps News have pointed to such letters as “precursors” to lawsuits requesting access to detention spaces in similar situations.
