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Rights Groups Sue Over Illegal Detention of Migrants at 'Notorious' Guantánamo
Migrants at the infamous torture site "are surrounded by military officials, deprived of in-person contact with legal counsel, and subject to punitive conditions of confinement," the suit says.
Jun 05, 2025
Immigrant rights advocates on Wednesday launched a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration for detaining migrants at the U.S. naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—the site of a "notorious" prison where several foreign men and boys were indefinitely held and tortured as part of the so-called War on Terror.
The class action suit was filed in the District of Columbia by the ACLU's national and D.C. arms, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the International Refugee Assistance Project against the secretaries of defense, homeland security, and state, as well as their departments, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and ICE's acting director.
The coalition brought the case on behalf of two Nicaraguan men previously detained a facilities in Virginia and Louisiana—Yamil Luna Gutierrez and Rafael Angel Lopez Ocon—and other noncitizens the Trump administration is now holding under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in "disturbing" conditions at Guantánamo.
"Immigration detention outside the United States is straightforwardly illegal."
Rather than keeping these migrants in the United States "while making arrangements to effectuate their removal, the government has flown them hundreds of miles away to detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for no legitimate purpose," the complaint states. "Plaintiffs are surrounded by military officials, deprived of in-person contact with legal counsel, and subject to punitive conditions of confinement, including in facilities previously used by the military to hold law-of-war detainees."
The plaintiffs, the filing says, "do not challenge the government's authority to detain them on U.S. soil or to directly remove them to their home country or to another statutorily authorized country. What they challenge is the government's unprecedented and unlawful decision to hold them in a detention facility at Guantánamo—which, under the INA, and for purposes of the application of that statute, is not the United States. Immigration detention outside the United States is straightforwardly illegal under the statute."
"Moreover," the document argues, "the government's use of Guantánamo for immigration detention is arbitrary and capricious, lacks any legitimate purpose, and imposes punitive detention conditions on immigration detainees in violation of their constitutional rights."
"Never before this administration has the federal government moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to Guantánamo, or to any other facility outside the United States, for the purpose of civil immigration detention. Nor is there any legitimate reason to do so," the document notes. "The government has ample detention capacity inside the United States, which is far less costly and poses none of the logistical hurdles attendant to detaining people at Guantánamo."
Specifically, according to the complaint, "since February 4, 2025, the government has held approximately 500 people in immigration detention at Guantánamo, at a reported cost of more than $40 million, or approximately $100,000 per day per detainee. In contrast, immigration detention at a U.S.-based detention facility costs, on average, $165 per day per detainee."
Previewing the Trump administration's likely arguments in court, the suit says that "in attempting to justify the transfers, the government has claimed that the individuals it is sending to Guantánamo are members of gangs and dangerous criminals—the 'worst of the worst.' That characterization has been proven wrong. Regardless, it is legally irrelevant."
The filing also stresses that "the government's real reason for holding immigration detainees at Guantánamo is to instill fear in the immigrant population. That is not conjecture; it is government policy."
The coalition is asking the court to rule that detaining these migrants at Guantánamo violates the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, and Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to block the Trump administration from continuing to do so.
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Judge Rules Trump Admin's Detention of Mahmoud Khalil 'Likely' Unconstitutional
"Every day Mahmoud spends languishing in an ICE detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, is an affront to justice, and we won't stop working until he is free," said Khalil's legal team.
May 29, 2025
Former Columbia University student protester Mahmoud Khalil remained in detention in Louisiana Thursday even after a ruling by a federal judge who found that his imprisonment by Trump immigration officials is "likely" unconstitutional—but his attorneys expressed hope that the decision brought Khalil a step closer to being reunited with his wife and newborn son.
U.S. District Court Judge Michael Farbiarz in New Jersey ruled that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has likely violated constitutional law in his attempt to use Section 1227 of the U.S. Code to remove Khalil from the United States.
Rubio first claimed that Khalil's involvement in student protests supporting Palestinian rights last year threatened U.S. foreign policy interests, and then alleged that Khalil committed fraud by not disclosing information about his past work with the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut and with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), an agency that has long received U.S. funding to provide aid to Palestinians in Gaza.
Calling the administration's pursuit of Khalil's deportation "unprecedented," Farbiarz wrote, "The issue now before the court has been this: Does the Constitution allow the Secretary of State to use Section 1227, as applied through the determination, to try to remove the petitioner from the United States? The court's answer: likely not."
"If Section 1227 can apply, here, to the petitioner, then other, similar statutes can also one day be made to apply," the judge added. "Not just in the removal context, as to foreign nationals. But also in the criminal context, as to everyone."
But Farbiarz called on Khalil's legal team to provide more information pertaining to the government's accusations against him regarding his immigration application, and declined to issue a preliminary injunction to release Khalil on bail—or to move him from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Jena, Louisiana to one in New Jersey where he would be closer to his wife and son.
The judge wrote that his finding "does not entitle [Khalil] to a preliminary injunction. He has not put before the court evidence as to the various other things he must prove... before an injunction might issue... The court will give the petitioner a chance to quickly fill out the record, and for the respondents to then weigh in."
Khalil is being represented by groups including the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU of New Jersey, and several legal firms. His legal team said that Farbiarz "held what we already knew: Secretary Rubio's weaponization of immigration law to punish Mahmoud and others like him is likely unconstitutional."
"We will work as quickly as possible to provide the court the additional information it requested supporting our effort to free Mahmoud or otherwise return him to his wife and newborn son," said the team. "Every day Mahmoud spends languishing in an ICE detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, is an affront to justice, and we won't stop working until he is free."
Khalil was informed by immigration agents who detained him outside his Columbia University-owned apartment in March that his green card had been revoked, before they took him in an unmarked vehicle to a detention center in New Jersey. He was then transferred 1,400 miles away to Jena where he's been separated from his legal counsel as well as his family
An immigration judge in Louisiana ruled last month that the administration can pursue Khalil's deportation. The case in New Jersey is challenging his detention on the grounds that his constitutional free speech and due process rights have been violated.
Several other international students who have been detained for supporting Palestinian rights—and opposing Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza—have been released from detention in recent weeks.
Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School, said Farbiarz's ruling was "a victory in terms of the court recognizing that the targeting of Mahmoud Khalil based on his protected speech violates the due process protection he should be afforded under the Constitution."
"People around the world are watching to see what is happening in Mahmoud Khalil's case as one of the most prominent examples of the Trump administration taking actions against international students in the United States," Mukherjee told The Washington Post. "And I think the biggest takeaway that people will see is that he is still in detention in Louisiana, separated from his wife and his newborn baby and having missed his graduation. It is a symbol of the hostility of the executive branch to international students and lawful permanent residents right now."
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Report: State and Local Cops Doing License Plate Lookups for ICE
"If ICE can use a nationwide network of license place readers for its purposes, what's stopping the government from using it for whatever purposes they want?" asked one critic.
May 27, 2025
State and local law enforcement agencies across the United States are using data gleaned from automated license plate readers to assist federal immigration authorities in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts, a report published Tuesday detailed.
Data reviewed by 404 Mediafound that state and local police are using an artificial-intelligence-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system made by Atlanta-based Flock Safety to perform immigration-related lookups and other actions in service of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigations, "giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for," according to report authors Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox.
Koebler and Cox found that Flock Safety's ALRP systems are being used in more than 5,000 communities from coast to coast, where law enforcement agencies have conducted over 4,000 lookups "either at the behest of the federal government or as an 'informal' favor to federal law enforcement."
According to Koebler and Cox:
As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a "reason" they are performing the lookup. In the "reason" field for searches of [Danville, Illinois'] cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote "immigration," "ICE," "ICE+ERO"—which is ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the section that focuses on deportations—"illegal immigration," "ICE WARRANT," and other immigration-related reasons. Although lookups mentioning ICE occurred across both the Biden and Trump administrations, all of the lookups that explicitly list "immigration" as their reason were made after [U.S. President Donald] Trump was inaugurated, according to the data.
The Department of Homeland Security does use license plate scanning cameras at the border and has shown great interest in the technology. Immigration advocates have been concerned that ICE could turn to local agencies' ALPR networks, but this is the first confirmation such data access is happening during Trump's mass deportation efforts.
"Different law enforcement systems serve different purposes and might be more appropriate for one agency or another," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media. "There should be public conversations about what we want different agencies to be able to do."
"I assume there's a fair number of community residents who accept giving police the power to deploy license plate readers to catch a bank robber, who would absolutely gag on the idea that their community's cameras have become part of a nationwide ICE surveillance infrastructure," Stanley added. "And yet if this kind of informal backdoor access to surveillance devices is allowed, then there's functionally no limits to what systems ICE can tap into with no public oversight or control into what they are tapping into."
While state and local law enforcement agencies normally lack the authority to enforce federal immigration laws, the Trump administration has encouraged them to participate in a program called 287(g), a provision of the the Immigration and Nationality Act that authorizes DHS agencies including ICE to delegate certain immigration enforcement actions to state and municipal police.
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order "to authorize state and local law enforcement officials, as the secretary of homeland security determines are qualified and appropriate, to perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States."
In an opinion piece published by Common Dreams in 2021, immigrant rights defenders Gabriela Viera and Cynthia Garcia wrote that 287(g) "turns local law enforcement into a gateway to deportation and deepens collaboration between ICE and local police."
Previous reporting by The Guardian's Johana Bhuiyan detailed how ICE "has gained access to troves of data from sanctuary cities that could aid its raids and enforcement actions" in municipalities where undocumented immigrants are ostensibly protected.
"This sort of mass tracking violates the promise made to undocumented residents that they will be safe in the county," Albert Fox Cahn, the director of the privacy advocacy group the Surveillance Tech Oversight Project, told Bhuiyan.
Responding to 404 Media's request for comment, Flock Safety said that "we are committed to ensuring every customer can leverage technology in a way that reflects their values, and support democratically authorized governing bodies to determine what that means for their community."
"We work with local governments across the country to adopt best practices on [license plate reader] policies, including robust auditing requirements," the company added.
However, ACLU of Illinois communications and public policy director Edwin Yohnka told
404 Media, "This is is really a national system of data once you start collecting," adding that "it is incredibly troubling to see this list of places from around the country who are performing these searches of Illinois cameras."
Responding to the 404 Media report, journalist Krishna Sai Andavolu asked, "If ICE can use a nationwide network of license place readers for its purposes, what's stopping the government from using it for whatever purposes they want?"
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