Two weeks after his inauguration, President Trump began sending immigration detainees to the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. In addition to other legal issues with that action, the detainees there are in a legal black box, with no way to contact attorneys and no way for attorneys to contact them.
One week later, we filed this lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order, together with the National ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the International Refugee Assistance Project, on behalf of four refugee legal service organizations and family members of three detainees who have been sent to Guantanamo. We claim that this denial of access to counsel violates the First Amendment, Due Process, the Immigration statutes and regulations, and the right to seek habeas corpus (because without access to counsel, the right to habeas corpus is meaningless).
We ask the court to order the government to permit lawyers from the ACLU and the legal service providers to meet and confer with the Guantanamo detainees in scheduled, timely, free, confidential, and unmonitored attorney-client conversations, in person, and via video-conferencing or telephone, with accommodations for interpretation, so that counsel can advise them of their legal rights and to provide them with legal assistance; to provide a method for immigrants detained at Guantanamo to place timely, free, confidential, and unmonitored outgoing legal calls; to provide a method for timely and confidential legal document exchange and signature, including via fax, email or electronic signature platforms, courier service, and mail; and to make information regarding protocols for attorney-client communication at Guantanamo available to the public.
Update: Soon after we filed this lawsuit, all of the immigration detainees who had been sent to Guantanamo were deported to Venezuela. After a pause, new detainees were sent there, and on April 26 we filed an amended complaint and a new motion for class certification on behalf of new plaintiffs.
