Judge rules against advocates trying to help migrants sent to Guantanamo and to stop more transfers

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge ruled Friday against immigration and civil rights advocates attempting to help migrants who had been sent to the Guantanamo Bay military base — and trying to prevent further transfers — days after the Trump administration transferred all migrants out of the facility in Cuba.

U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols refused to preemptively block a transfer of 10 migrants to the military base, and rejected a separate claim that migrants held at Guantanamo deserved access to attorneys. The judge's ruling in a Washington courtroom largely hinged on the fact that at the current time, there are no migrant detainees being held at the military base, which Nichols said undercut legal arguments that migrants being kept there or sent there would suffer irreparable harm.

President Donald Trump has said he wants to send the worst criminal migrants to Guantanamo Bay as his administration attempts to ramp up mass deportations and expand immigrant detention capacity.

But civil rights groups have sued in two cases that the judge combined.

In one case, the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center argued that migrants detained at Guantanamo had to have access to legal representation. In the second case, lawyers representing ten migrants sued, saying they fit a profile of people the government had already sent to Guantanamo and asking the judge to prevent them from being held there.

Lawyers representing the migrants have argued that people were being held in brutal conditions and some have attempted suicide.

But the judge rejected both efforts.

On the case about legal access for migrants on the island, government lawyers said they had taken steps to improve legal access at the island facility, such as putting up signage letting detainees known about their legal rights and allowing detainees to communicate with lawyers.

But ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said they still weren't able to have in-person legal visits. One of the government lawyers said they were still trying to work out security clearance issues.

On the second case, about efforts to prevent the 10 migrants from being sent to Guantanamo, the judge said they hadn't proved that they would definitely be sent there and that, at this point, transfer was just a possibility.

The judge indicated a willingness to revisit the issue if and when the government sends more detainees to Guantanamo. He said he wouldn't set a timeline for how quickly the government has to tell him of future transfers, but set a Wednesday deadline for the government to let the judge know how it will advise him of future transfer plans.

Gelernt said the government was playing a “little bit of gamesmanship" by transferring people on and off the island.

U.S. authorities have transferred at least 290 detainees to Guantanamo since February, but on Tuesday the 40 people who remained housed there were flown off the base to Louisiana.

Officials declined to specify why the immigrants were transferred, and the government has not said whether Guantanamo might be used again in the future.

ACLU attorneys say the transfer of immigrants to “extraterritorial” detention at Guantanamo constitutes an unlawful removal and is unprecedented during more than 75 years of detentions authorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

One of the detainees described the confinement conditions as “a living hell” in a statement submitted to the court. The plaintiffs’ lawyer said the base is “synonymous with secrecy, due process violations, and the evasion of judicial scrutiny.”

The Trump administration, on the other hand, has urged the court to uphold its discretion to use Guantanamo Bay as it manages limited detention resources and carries out final deportation orders.

“An order restricting the government’s ability to transfer detainees with final orders of removal will interfere with the government’s ability to plan, stage, and carry out removal operations, which would be contrary to the public interest,” attorneys for the Justice Department said in court filings.

The base, known as “Gitmo,” infamously housed foreigners associated with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but it has a separate facility used for decades to hold migrants intercepted trying to reach the U.S. by sea.

U.S. authorities say they began transferring migrants to Guantanamo Bay with the first military transport flight out of Fort Bliss on Feb. 4. Initial flights transported Venezuelans — a prelude to the the transfer of 177 detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Venezuela, with a brief stopover in Honduras.

But a spokesperson for the U.S. Southern Command said none were being held there as of this week.

A separate federal lawsuit filed in New Mexico last month secured a temporary order against the federal government to avoid transfer of three Venezuelan immigrants to Guantanamo Bay. The three men were deported the next day on Venezuelan flights to their home country, and the lawsuit was dismissed.

The more recent lawsuit was filed on behalf of 10 men who came to the U.S. in 2023 or 2024, seven from from Venezuela and the others from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

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Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington and Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed to this story.