MIAMI — Migrants intercepted at sea aboard U.S.-bound voyages are being kept in inhumane and prison-like conditions at a federal facility at Guantanamo Bay, according to a report released Wednesday by a legal-aid and advocacy group that has represented migrants at the center.
The International Refugee Assistance Project said that migrants waiting to be resettled in a third country or returned back home at the Migrant Operations Center in the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay had inadequate healthcare, lived in deteriorated quarters with mold and sewage issues and were denied confidential phone calls with attorneys. The group collected the testimony of migrants and former staff as part of its investigation, and conducted independent research. It is asking that the federal government shut the facility down.
“This is in clear violation of the United States’ legal commitments and a violation of core values that anyone should have and the U.S. purports to have,” said Jose Miranda, a senior staff attorney at the organization who represented a Cuban family featured in the report.
Many of those kept at the facility are Haitian and Cuban migrants, who use makeshift boats to try to reach the United States by sea. The migrant processing facility is separate from the operations of the naval base. A spokesperson from the Department of State, which oversees the processing and care of migrants held there with the Department of Homeland Security and the International Organization for Migration, denied the report’s findings to the Miami Herald.
“The claim that migrants housed at the Migrant Operations Center (MOC) are ‘detainees’ and they lived there in ‘prison-like conditions and had their rights violated’ are false,” said the spokesperson.
The spokesperson said the facility’s operations were consistent with the Department of Homeland Security’s housing policies, and that migrants received food and health care and had access to learning and recreational activities as well as laundry, gym and kitchen facilities. They also said that protected migrants could go to work, shop for groceries at the base’s store and attend social and religious activities.
The spokesperson emphasized that the facility is humanitarian in nature and that people can return to their country of origin at any time, while eligible migrants can wait to be resettled.
But Miranda said that the migrants were presented with a “false choice.”
“People are faced with the choice to wait indefinitely to be resettled somewhere they will be safe or return somewhere where they face persecution,” he told the Herald.
The New York Times first reported the report’s findings, as well as the results of an investigation from the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, a watchdog agency that urged the government to not house children in the Migrant Operation in Guantanamo Bay. The advocacy organization said in its report that children were kept in the same facilities as single adults, contrary to U.S. detention standards.
The migrant population at the facility is low, with no more than a few dozen people waiting to be resettled at a time, according to statistics the New York Times and Dropsite news compiled through documents and interviews.
Miranda represented a couple and their two young children who fled Cuba by boat because they feared political persecution on the island. The U.S. Coast Guard intercepted the family at sea and sent them to Guantanamo. The paternal grandparents of the children, who were traveling with them, were paroled into the United States to seek medical treatment.
They lived for over a year at Guantanamo, where the report says they spent weeks at a time in their rooms and had limited access to confidential attorney calls. The children could not continue their schooling or seek adequate medical treatment, the organization said. IRAP shared a letter the group attributed to a Navy doctor who wrote about the couple’s son, which said that his diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and inguinal hernia “exceeded the treatment capabilities” of the Naval Hospital in Guantanamo Bay.
The organization said that its clients were finally resettled to a third country after they threatened to sue on their behalf. The report also features the stories of a pair of journalists who escaped Cuba with their children and other relatives.
Guantanamo Bay is famously known for holding suspected terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. But during the 1980s and '90s, it held thousands of Haitians, including HIV-positive patients from the Caribbean country. When Cubans started leaving their island en masse during the 1994 rafter crisis, the federal government also held them in custody at Guantanamo. The Biden administration – anticipating a mass exodus – also considered using it to process Haitian migrants after gang violence in the spring led to the resignation of former Prime Minister Ariel Henry and the creation of a presidential transitional council.
For several immigrants-rights advocates, the facility is a symbol of the mistreatment that Haitians have historically faced navigating the U.S. immigration system.
“The administration should be working to close the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center and to process all asylum seekers in a manner consistent with its human rights obligations, including those interdicted in the Florida Straits or Caribbean Sea,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.
In its report, IRAP said that everyone who is currently in the facility should be paroled into the United States. It also called on Congress to investigate the Migrant Operations Center.
Miranda told the Herald that while the family was settling in the third country, their preference was to be with their grandparents and other relatives in the United States.
“Overall, there is little transparency and accountability for what happens,” said Miranda.
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