Groups Ask Biden to Stop Detaining Asylum Seekers at US Guantanamo Bay Facility

MIAMI — More than a hundred organizations are asking the White House to shut down a migrant processing facility at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and stop detaining asylum seekers found at sea at the center.

“The U.S. government cannot continue to hide its diversion and mistreatment of asylum seekers by exiling them to Guantánamo, out of reach of their families, advocates, public consciousness – and the law,” the organizations said in a letter sent to President Joe Biden Wednesday morning.

The International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal aid and advocacy group, spearheaded the letter along with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which advocates for Haitian migrants across the United States. The letter’s 125 signatories include immigration and human-rights groups, legal service providers, child advocacy groups and religious organizations.

Guantanamo Bay is known for holding suspected terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. But for decades, it has also hosted a separate facility for migrants, including thousands of Haitians and people who were HIV-positive at the turn of the 21st century. Today, the federal government uses it to process people the U.S. Coast Guard encounters at sea, including Cubans and Haitians asking for asylum.

Last month the International Refugee Assistance Project, in a published report, accused the U.S. government of detaining refugees in inhumane, prison-like conditions at its Migrant Operations Center — findings the U.S. has denied. The group, along with others in the White House letter, is asking the federal government to shutter the facility and to process asylum seekers in the U.S.

“The United States has a long and notorious history of detaining people at Guantanamo without adequate legal protection or oversight, and the detention of asylum seekers and refugees there is part of this horrific history that is continuing today,” said Hannah Flamm, an attorney and policy council at the project.

The project’s September report said migrants at the center, including families and children, were being held indefinitely and in prison-like conditions that violated their rights. The group interviewed former staffers and immigrants who were processed at the center as part of its investigation, which concluded that migrants were receiving inadequate healthcare, little to no legal representation and were deprived of freedom of movement.

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, which runs the facility with the Department of Homeland Security, told the Miami Herald last month that the findings in the report about the conditions refugees are held in are false. The agency’s spokesperson said the facility is humanitarian in nature, that migrants have several amenities and resources on site, and that they are not detained because they can go to places like the base’s grocery store.

But Flamm said the organization stands by its report and accused the federal government of presenting a false choice to the people being held of either staying in the U.S. government facility indefinitely or returning to a country where they face persecution, harm or death.

“The idea that somebody is not in custody because they can choose to be repatriated to a country that they fled is a false paradigm,” said Flamm. “Every asylum seeker deserves the chance to pursue protections in the United States.”

The push to get the U.S. to stop using Guantanamo as a processing facility comes amid reports that the Biden administration has been eyeing the facility to process Haitian migrants should there be a mass exodus to the U.S. amid the country’s worsening violence and hunger crisis. Earlier this month,the Dominican Republic announced it would deport up to 10,000 Haitians a week, increasing worries that those forced back into Haiti may try to risk their lives at sea to escape the worsening gang violence that has now displaced over 700,000 people from their homes.

Guerline Jozef, executive director and founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told the Herald that the the recent targeting of Haitian immigrants in Ohio and the ongoing incarceration of asylum seekers in Guantánamo are connected “by hate, anti-blackness, and xenophobia.” She called on the government to stop deportations to Haiti and shut down the Guantanamo facility.

“We strongly urge president Biden and his administration to suspend imprisoning Haitians seeking safety at Gitmo,” she said.

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