Trump's Guantanamo ICE facility an end-run around Congressional inspections
President Donald Trump's decision to fly ICE detainees to a U.S. military base in Cuba has effectively blocked almost anyone ‒ including members of Congress ‒ from monitoring what's happening there.
During the first Trump administration, lawmakers passed a measure allowing them to conduct surprise inspections at any ICE facilities. Some members of Congress are still using that power to inspect sites within their constituencies, reporting everything from the number of detainees to how hot the water is in sinks, and how many medical professionals are on site.
By establishing a 30,000-bed ICE facility on the Guantanamo Bay naval base, Trump has made an end run around the power Congress specifically gave itself as a check on the executive branch.
Now, some members of Congress are expressing concern that Trump's move means they cannot conduct the kind of oversight their equal branch of government is supposed to do, from checking whether conditions are humane to ensuring that taxpayer money isn't being wasted.
NBC News reported Thursday, and Paste BN has independently confirmed, that ICE agents had cleared out all of the approximately 180 detainees being held at Guantanamo but were preparing to transfer more in. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
"Guantánamo is synonymous with the types of human-rights violations that happen when people are held without due process, access to counsel, or consideration for U.S. and international law," Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who serves on the Homeland Security Committee, told Paste BN. "An immigrant detention facility is being set up on a military base, offshore, in a foreign country, effectively attempting to shield it from congressional scrutiny. That is unacceptable."
Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat representing a sprawling border district in New Mexico, said he and colleagues are discussing how best to proceed in visiting the "secretive" detention facility. Lawyers for terror suspects told Paste BN it can take weeks to organize a visit.
"I think Americans and New Mexicans agree that detaining dangerous individuals is something we have to do," Vasquez told Paste BN. "We also agree that due-process-violating the Constitution is not the way to go about it."
While government social media accounts have posted videos showing some detainees being flown to Guantanamo in chains, administration officials have so far refused to provide a public accounting of who is detained there, and on what specific legal grounds.
The ACLU has also sued and argued detainees cannot effectively find legal representation because they lack regular access to phones or the Internet.
In announcing the new detention center, Trump acknowledged Guantanamo Bay's reputation as a "tough" place. He said it was an appropriate site to hold the worst-of-the-worst offenders. Immigration cases are typically considered confidential, in contrast with criminal cases where the public has the right to know about virtually every step of the process, from arrest to court appearances and sentencing.
"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 Guantanamo," Trump said in January.
But at least some of the men transferred to Guantanamo had no criminal record, other than an immigration violation, according to immigrant advocates and relatives of those detained.
Costly and legally distinct
Satellite images show the U.S. military has begun erecting a tent city to house detainees, and a press release from the Joint Task Force Southern Guard said military personnel and contractors are installing high-security fencing and barriers, along with ramping up food and medical care provisions for both detainees and guards.
One estimate suggested that each new detainee bed at Guantanamo Bay will cost five times more than a comparable one on the mainland United States. The estimate by the American Immigration Council said a small existing Guantanamo Bay detention center used to house Cuban and Haitian migrants intercepted at sea costs more than $270,000 a bed per person annually, compared to an average of about $58,00 annually within the United States.
ICE has so far not released any cost estimates for Trump's 30,000-bed facility, in line with the agency's decades-long refusal to provide routine data. Instead, occasional voluntary disclosures, inspector-general reports and legal filings offering peeks beneath the curtain.
The agency doesn’t routinely release names of the people it arrests, nor is it possible to find a specific detainee without knowing their individual name and birth date, or the “alien number” assigned them by the U.S. government. And while ICE cites detainee privacy in routinely denying access to information, its leaders regularly violate that privacy in social media posts.
ICE detainees can also be held indefinitely and without charges. The stakes are substantially higher for those immigrants who are transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where so far, lawyers say detainees have no access to legal counsel.
"We don’t believe that ICE even on U.S. soil is sufficiently transparent, but this is at a whole different level – shipping them off to Guantanamo where there apparently will be no access for legal counsel, the press or the public to know what’s happening," said Lee Gelernt, lead ACLU attorney in a lawsuit demanding access to the offshore detention facility.
In contrast, the U.S. criminal justice system holds public hearings, jails and prisons publish rosters of detainees, and criminal charges and sentences are made public.
Immigration expert and law professor Michael Kagan said the public isn't asking enough questions about whether Trump has the authority to send people to Cuba, especially if they have not yet been judged guilty of any immigration violations.
"There are many questions, not just about who they are but also legally speaking, is this even legal? Because I think it's a deportation: they're being taking out of the country and they're no longer inside the United States," said Kagan, who also runs the University of Nevada-Las Vegas immigration clinic.
He added, "That's what's so alarming about this moment: People can just be put on a plane to Guantanamo and the administration just refuses to answer under what authority that is being done."