‘A legal black box’: Trump uses treatment reserved for terrorists on migrants sent to Guantánamo

Donald Trump’s tough approach to migrants served to let Yajaira Castillo know where her brother Luis Alberto was. She, a Venezuelan citizen, had been speaking with him daily since January, when he crossed the border in El Paso (Texas) and was detained by the Border Patrol. Since February 3, however, there has been only silence. Days later, Yajaira came across an image of federal authorities loading migrants onto planes to fly them to Guantánamo. There was Luis Alberto, who has become one of the immigrants who form part of the inmate population of the infamous Caribbean prison located within the U.S. naval base. Castillo, along with two other families, initiated legal action against the Republican administration on Wednesday to assert the rights of the detainees, who are being held incommunicado.

The lawsuit was filed by Castillo and the relatives of two other Venezuelans, Tilso Ramón Gómez Lugo and Yoiker David Sequera. The latter were waiting in detention centers in Texas until the federal government sent them to the naval base in Cuba. Their relatives have not been able to speak with them and claim that they have been denied access to legal counsel.

“Isolation is no coincidence. Guantánamo is one of the most notorious prisons in the world, used when the United States government wants to act in secret without legal restrictions or accountability,” says the lawsuit, which was supported by four human rights organizations: Las Americas, Raíces, American Gateway and Americans for Immigrant Justice.

Tilso Ramón Gómez arrived in the United States in April 2024. After crossing the border, he began the long process to request asylum. He managed to pass the first filter, an interview in which he had to explain the risks he ran by being returned to his country, Venezuela. Gómez did not have the help of lawyers and was left without legal representation in this process, which he lost. Last November he received a court order for his expulsion. Tilso, who was in a detention center in El Paso, thought he would be deported, so he asked his family for a change of clothes for the flight. His family lost contact with him for four days, until on February 5 his sister, Carolina Gómez Lugo, recognized him among the photographs of people sent to Guantánamo.

The Trump administration launched the transfer of immigrants to the Caribbean base on February 4. The first flight, on a military aircraft, carried only a handful of undocumented immigrants. Since then, the trips have been scheduled daily. According to the lawsuit, at least 50 people are being held there. This is the first step in a plan by the Republican president to increase the prison population to 30,000 people on the 11,000 hectares that the United States government has been renting from Cuba for more than a century. The prisoners are receiving the same treatment that thousands of victims of the war on terrorism launched during the George W. Bush administration were subjected to.

“The government has concealed the legal status of these individuals, the details of their confinement, the likelihood of their continued detention, their immigration status, and the nature of any proceedings against them,” the lawsuit states. Activist groups say that if federal courts do not intervene, more undocumented immigrants will suffer the same fate and be placed in a “legal black box” without access to lawyers.

That’s what Angela Carolina Sequera, the mother of Yoiker David Sequera, a 25-year-old hairdresser from the state of Miranda, Venezuela, has faced. He arrived in the United States in July 2022 and worked in California barbershops until he returned to his country in 2023 for a personal matter, according to Migrant Insider. In September 2024, after crossing the Darién Gap for the second time, he entered by land and requested asylum. It was denied.

Yoiker Sequera received the order to leave the United States on January 6. Angela learned from a friend of her son’s at the El Paso detention center that he had been flown to the Caribbean. Since then, she has made several calls to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to locate Yoiker and speak with him. She has not been able to do so in four days.

As time goes by, more information is emerging about the undocumented immigrants who have been forcibly taken to Guantánamo. At first, not even their names were known. Some details have now come to light. The journalist Pablo Manríquez said on Sunday that Yoiker has no criminal record in either the United States or his native Venezuela. Nevertheless, he has been part of the display of force with which Trumpism has been subduing illegal immigrants.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday accuses Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security who oversees the actions of ICE and the Border Patrol, of degrading treatment of Venezuelan nationals. A spokesman told CBS on Wednesday that violent gang members cohabit in the U.S. prison with other “high-risk” undocumented immigrants. “Each of the illegals in Guantánamo has a final deportation order,” federal authorities say.

Some activists have questioned why Washington is holding prisoners on the island when deportations between the United States and Venezuela have already resumed. On Monday, two Conviasa planes were sent back to Caracas by the Trump administration. On board were alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, according to the White House, which did not provide evidence to prove this is true. These were the first flights to Venezuela in the second Trump administration. They resumed years after Joe Biden briefly forced the Nicolás Maduro regime to accept returnees during the height of the migration crisis.

This is the second lawsuit the government has faced over the conversion of Guantánamo into a detention center. A New Mexico judge on Monday issued a temporary order prohibiting three Venezuelan detainees from being sent to the naval base. “I am afraid they will take me there because the news portrays it as a black hole … I see that human rights are constantly violated there,” said one of the petitioners, Abraham Barrios Morales. The judge ruled in his favor, but dozens of detainees are still waiting for their rights to be enforced.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition