The judge argued that because the Trump administration has removed the migrants it sent there, the plaintiffs’ claim that the policy posed an imminent threat of irreparable harm lacked merit.
Two groups of migrants were previously sent to Guantanamo Bay, but all were either returned to the United States or repatriated to Venezuela.
The two legal complaints focus on allegations that the government unfairly barred migrants from in-person access to lawyers and lacked the authority to detain them outside the U.S., where conditions were worse.
Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the plaintiffs “failed to established they are suffering irreparable harm” that would warrant a pause on the government’s ability to send more migrants to the facility.
The government argues that because immigration enforcement involves moving migrants across borders, the Trump administration should be allowed to keep migrants with pending removal orders in Guantanamo Bay. Drew Ensign, a Justice Department lawyer, said it was like transporting migrants from Hawaii to the mainland over international waters.
President Donald Trump said he wants to use the facility to improve the U.S. capacity for migrants and to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens.”
“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” Trump said. “Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo.”
He said the move would “double our capacity immediately,” adding that Guantánamo was a “tough place to get out of.”
TRACKING WHAT DOGE IS DOING ACROSS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Nichols said that if the migrants had been currently located at the facility, an emergency order to stop their detainment there might be feasible.
He’s still contemplating whether immigration law would permit the government to detain migrants at facilities outside the U.S., saying it was a “serious question.”
