White House defends inhumane treatment of migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay: ‘It’s a promise the president campaigned on’
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The White House is responding to reports that deported migrants who were detained at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay received inhumane treatment by citing the deportees’ alleged criminal records without denying that harsh methods were used against them.
During a briefing with reporters on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about reporting in the Washington Post that describes conditions at the U.S. base’s detention facility.
Guantanamo Bay is a military base on Cuba that served as a prison for alleged terrorists. In recent weeks, however, it has become home to migrants awaiting to be deported to their home country and the Trump administration increases efforts to remove people who illegally entered the U.S.
According to one former deportee who spoke to the newspaper, the two weeks he spent at the American base were passed while staying in a dark, windowless prison cell with only a bucket for relieving himself. He described being able to hear screams from other deportees — including threats to commit suicide.
The detainee, Diuvar Uzcátegui, said he was only let outside two times for short periods, and only while shackled in a cage. He said: “They didn’t treat me like a human being.”
Pressed to respond to the Post’s reporting, Leavitt replied that the conditions were appropriate because of the detainees’ criminal records.
“It’s a promise the President campaigned on, that if you invade our nation’s borders, if you break our country’s laws, and if then you further commit heinous, brutal crimes in the interior of our country … you are going to be deported from this country, and you may be held at Guantanamo Bay,” she said.
“These are criminals we are talking about — don’t forget that.”
Leavitt, however, did not deny any of the reports of harsh conditions at the facility, which has long been used to hold Global War on Terror detainees taken on battlefields in foreign countries who the U.S. considered to be unlawful enemy combatants.
Last week, the Trump administration appeared to have stopped using the American naval base to hold deported migrants after the Department of Justice said in a court filing that there were “no immigration detainees” there.
A plane carrying nearly 200 Venezuelan immigrants who were detained at the naval base arrived in Venezuela late Thursday after the administration’s use of the facility drew scrutiny from the courts after immigrant rights groups filed suit to halt the practice.
That lawsuit from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, among others, argued that detainees have “effectively disappeared into a black box and cannot contact or communicate with their family or attorneys.”
The Justice Department wrote in a response that “completion of the removal operation eliminates any need for temporary injunctive relief” and stressed that the base was “intended for temporary staging and not for indefinite detention.”
Government attorneys have also argued that detainees at Guantanamo don’t need to be afforded the same right to counsel as criminal defendants because they “do not have the same due process protections” and lack “a statutory right to counsel” because they are being deported from the U.S.
Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have repeatedly defended use of the facility — which opened in 2002 to hold terrorism suspects during the War on Terror — to jail suspected Tren de Aragua gang members and “the worst of the worst and illegal criminals,” according to Noem.
But “lower-threat” immigrants may include nonviolent immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally but who have never been charged or convicted of violent offenses or other serious crimes, according to federal guidelines.
Use of the facility, where Trump has suggested detaining as many as 30,000 people, has drawn international scrutiny from humanitarian groups fearing potential for abuse in the secrecy of an offshore facility beyond the nation’s borders.
Over the past month, U.S. military personnel have been seen erecting tents around the facility,
Alex Woodward contributed reporting
