U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2d Marine Division board a C-130 Hercules on Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C., on Feb. 1, 2025. The Marines are deploying to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. (Alexandria Serrano/U.S. Marine Corps)
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.”
Four days ago the Trump administration flew the first migrants from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Guantanamo Bay. The officials said the detainees were “dangerous criminals,” “the worst of the worst” and alleged members of a violent Venezuelan gang, 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 American Civil Liberties Union, along with more than a dozen immigrant advocacy groups, sent a letter Friday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio 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 there and what authority the government has to transfer them from the U.S. to Guantanamo.
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 Guantanamo.
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. 11th 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 Guantanamo. “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.
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 on 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 recently arrived at Guantanamo, 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 Guantanamo 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,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said. “This is the normal ICE lack of transparency on steroids.”
A Department of Defense 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.
Noem traveled to Guantanamo on Friday to observe “some of the operations that we’re standing up to house the worst of the worst and illegal criminals that are in the United States of America,” she said in a video posted to social media Friday night. “They won’t be there for long,” she said in the video, wearing a DHS ball cap and standing in front of a razor-wire-topped fence as the sun appeared to set. In a separate post, she claimed that the migrants included “murderers & vicious gang members” and shared photos of several men exiting a plane in shackles.
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 convinced 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 terror suspects are kept can hold more than 100 people, and the migrant center can house about 120, lawyers said. None come close to the space needed for the 30,000 people Trump wants to detain there.
Satellite imagery on Saturday revealed 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 U.S., meaning that migrants apprehended in the Caribbean are either returned 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 kids. 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.
On Dec. 10 of that year, 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.
Alice Crites, Jarrett Ley and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
