ACLU and IRAP Sue U.S. Government for Information Regarding Secretive Practice of Refugee Detention at Guantánamo Bay 

NEW YORK — The American Civil Liberties Union and International Refugee Assistance Project filed a federal lawsuit today under the Freedom of Information Act seeking to compel the disclosure of records about the interdiction and detention of refugees held at the Guantánamo Bay Migrant Operations Center in Cuba.

Last week, IRAP released a report, Offshoring Human Rights: Detention of Refugees at Guantánamo Bay, about the U.S. government’s practice of intercepting refugees fleeing persecution by sea and detaining them at the naval base, based on testimony from formerly detained refugees.

To date, there is very little public information about how the facility operates, and the U.S. government denies that the refugees it intercepts and holds at the facility are actually “detained.”

The groups filed their initial FOIA request in December 2022. The government responded by claiming that the Guantánamo Bay Migrant Operations Center was not a “detention” center and administratively closed the request.

After the ACLU and IRAP resubmitted the request in March 2023, the government again insisted the center “is not a detention facility and none of the migrants there are detained.” The government indicated the organizations would have to “remove all references to” detention before it would fulfill the FOIA request. Despite the groups complying with this demand, the FOIA request is still outstanding.

“The government has kept its treatment of migrants at Guantánamo hidden in the shadows for far too long,” said Wafa Junaid, Skadden Fellow with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “What little we do know about the conditions at the Migrant Operations Center is alarming, and we refuse to allow the government to continue concealing its detention practices there.”

As detailed in IRAP’s report, for decades the United States has detained refugees, many Cuban and Haitian, encountered at sea at Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. has not applied the same screening and detention standards as it does to migrants at land borders.

Refugees provided IRAP with firsthand accounts of inhumane conditions, mistreatment, and a complete lack of accountability at the offshore detention site, including undrinkable water and exposure to open sewage, inadequate schooling and medical care for children, and collective punishment of detained refugees.

“It is outrageous that the U.S. government refuses to even acknowledge the reality of refugee detention at Guantánamo Bay,” said Kimberly Grano, U.S. litigation staff attorney at IRAP. “We experienced the government’s lack of transparency and accountability firsthand as we tried for months to get in contact with our clients, who the U.S. government itself deemed as refugees warranting humanitarian protection. The public deserves to know the truth about the government’s treatment of families seeking safety.”

The complaint is online here.

Read the IRAP report: Offshoring Human Rights: Detention of Refugees at Guantánamo Bay