A federal judge barred the U.S. government on Sunday from sending three detained Venezuelan men to the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to a lawyer for the migrants.
Lawyers for the men, who are detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Mexico, asked the court on Sunday evening for a temporary restraining order, opening the first legal front against the Trump administration’s new policy of sending undocumented migrants to Guantánamo.
Within an hour of the filing, which came at the start of the Super Bowl, Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico, convened a hearing by videoconference and verbally granted the restraining order, said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is helping represent the migrants.
According to the filing, the men are being held in the same ICE facility, the Otero County Processing Center, where previous groups of men who were flown to Guantánamo in recent days had apparently been held. The men recognized the faces of some of those detainees from government photographs provided to the news media, the filing said.
The filing also said that the men had heard rumors that more such transfers were coming, and that they “fit the profile of those the administration has prioritized for detention in Guantánamo, i.e. Venezuelan men detained in the El Paso area with (false) charges of connections with the Tren de Aragua gang.”
That lawsuit argues that the men cannot be held in perpetual detention and so must be freed. Their filing says that any transfer to Guantánamo would make it difficult for them to continue to communicate with their lawyers and could open the door to the government’s arguing that the court no longer has jurisdiction.
Posted by John3262005
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Will no one rid me of these troublesome justices?
-JD