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By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. civil rights group on Saturday sued to block the Trump administration from potentially transferring 10 migrants from the U.S. to a naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detailing harsh conditions and suicide attempts among migrants held there.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., said the transfers violate U.S. immigration law by moving the detainees outside of the country and aim to stoke fear without a legitimate rationale.
The 10 detainees in the lawsuit are men from Venezuela, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan with final deportation orders, including some who have been threatened with transfer to Guantanamo, ACLU said. The men, currently held in Texas, Arizona and Virginia, are not gang members or high-risk criminals, the ACLU said.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin on Saturday called the ACLU legal challenge "baseless" and said the agency would work with the Justice Department to fight the lawsuit.
President Donald Trump, a Republican, has vowed to deport record numbers of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. As part of efforts to expand deportations, the administration in early February began sending migrants to a detention camp on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, best known for holding foreign terrorism suspects.
Cuban and Haitian migrants intercepted at sea have been held at a migrant facility on the base for decades. However, the Trump administration effort was the first to transfer migrants there from the U.S., according to ACLU.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said they are sending "the worst of the worst" to Guantanamo, but about a third of the initial group of 177 Venezuelans had no criminal record, according to the department.
The ACLU lawsuit alleges that migrants detained at Guantanamo have been held in windowless rooms for at least 23 hours per day, subjected to invasive strip searches, and unable to contact family members.
The suit said that guards "engage in verbal and physical abuse," including strapping detainees to a chair, withholding water, threatening to shoot detainees, and fracturing one person's hand.
"These degrading conditions and extreme isolation have led to several suicide attempts," the complaint said.
A federal judge blocked the possible transfer of several Venezuelan migrants to Guantanamo in mid-February but the men - also represented by ACLU - were then deported to Venezuela.
On Saturday, the New York Times reported a group of lawyers separately sued the Panamanian government in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, naming 10 Iranians and 102 migrants detained at a camp in Panama as plaintiffs.
In another lawsuit filed on Friday, immigrant rights organizations and others sued to block Trump's moves to end former President Joe Biden's "parole" programs that allowed hundreds of thousands of people with U.S. sponsors or fleeing danger to enter legally.
The lawsuit, filed in a Massachusetts federal court, argues the administration failed to follow proper regulatory steps when it abruptly ended programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Ukrainians with U.S. sponsors, as well as a program for Afghans who fled the Taliban takeover.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond and David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Marguerita Choy)
