Immigrants’ rights advocates, including Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, signed a letter today urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DOD), and State Department to provide immediate access to the noncitizens transferred from immigration detention facilities in the United States and currently detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Their letter comes ahead of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s planned visit to Guantánamo on Friday.

“Questions abound regarding the authority for these transfers, which agency will have custody of the noncitizens, where they would be housed, and how the government will carry out the complicated and expensive logistics of this operation while respecting its legal obligations and the rights of noncitizens in the government’s custody,” the letter states. Despite these unknowns, the government has already transferred ten Venezuelan noncitizens to Guantánamo, with reports of additional deportation flights en route.

In addition to access to the noncitizens recently transferred and currently detained at the naval base, the immigrants’ rights groups are demanding information regarding:

• The immigration status of the ten noncitizens detained there
• Who the government intends to transfer to and detain at Guantánamo, including what criteria, legal or otherwise, the administration is or will be using to decide who to transfer and detain at Guantánamo
• Which government agency has custody of the transferred noncitizens at Guantánamo
• What authority is the government invoking to transfer noncitizens from the United States to Guantánamo and what authority the government is invoking to hold them at Guantánamo
• The length of time that the government will be holding these noncitizens at Guantánamo and plans for them after

“The United States has made chilling threats to disappear 30,000 immigrants from U.S. soil to Guantánamo’s infamous black hole prisons,” said Anthony Enriquez, Vice President of U.S. Advocacy and Litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “This expansion of mass incarceration continues a history of mass violation of human rights. In the 1980s, the U.S.-controlled Guantánamo detention camps held tens of thousands of Haitians fleeing persecution, with one government official admitting that the U.S. had ‘created the appearance of concentration camps filled largely by blacks.’ Infamously, Guantánamo later became the world’s first and only detention camp for refugees with HIV, characterized by abhorrent medical neglect, inedible food, often infested with maggots, and indefinite detention. Our Constitution does not permit the government to dispose of human lives so callously.”

Read the letter here.