Editor: Before we get to the ProPublica story, I want to remind everyone of the news that broke this week about the migrants being held at Guantanamo. They were strip searched, photographed and humiliated. They are held in cells without windows 22 hours a day. They don’t know if it’s day or night. They barely have any human contact.
That is torture.
They are all in what constitutes solitary confinement and some of them are looking for a way out. One man who was interviewed said he considered suicide after two weeks, but thoughts of his wife and daughter held him back.
Others have attempted suicide. One man tried to hang himself with a bed sheet, but it was too short. Another swallowed 10 screws and had to be taken for medical treatment. Another man sharpened pieces of a plastic bottle to try to cut his wrists, but he couldn’t cut deep enough.
This is what’s happening there—to people who haven’t committed any crimes. They are only “guilty” of crossing the border without proper documentation and that’s not a crime! It’s a civil offense. There are people in Guantanamo who were taken there from the border immediately after crossing into the United States. I recently reported how ICE agents are waiting for immigrants to show up to their asylum hearings and arresting them right there on the spot.
They’re also nabbing people who show up for mandatory check-ins—arrested for following the rules. Agents are calling migrants and lying to them, saying they need to report so they can arrest them. It doesn’t get much more slimy than that. President Trump lied to his base about how many violent criminals were in the country illegally. Now he doesn’t have the deportation numbers to match his lies. That’s why they are targeting innocent people and doing it in such cruel ways.
Imagine traveling thousands of miles to escape war, abuse, and poverty just to have a chance at happiness in America—or to unite with family that’s already here. That joy you feel after reaching the “beacon on the hill”—the country where Lady Liberty welcomes immigrants to her shores—is quickly replaced by fear when you are arrested and taken to another country. Now you’re sitting in a cell without a window, barely any human contact, hearing the screams of others who are suffering the same emotional pain and betrayal you feel.
I am ashamed of what the United States has become and I’m ashamed of the Americans who have jumped on the immigrant-hating bandwagon even though we are all immigrants!
ProPublica is reporting on what happened to one mother’s son when he was moved from an immigrant detention center in the U.S. to Guantanamo in Cuba. He was accused of being a member of a Venezuelan gang even though he isn’t associated with them in any way. The video of her interview is available after the article.
Reporting by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica
Less than a week after deporting Venezuelans detained at Guantanamo Bay, the Trump administration has again flown about two dozen migrants to the U.S. naval base in Cuba. This time, however, the migrants are from countries across the world, including from places that are willing to take them back, which has raised additional questions about whom the government is choosing to send there and why.
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ProPublica and The Texas Tribune interviewed Angela Sequera, the mother of one of the first migrants sent to Guantanamo. She described her fear and desperation upon learning that her son, Yoiker Sequera, had been transferred to the facility, which she knew only as a place where terrorists were held and tortured after the 9/11 attacks.
On Feb. 9, Sequera was waiting for her daily phone call from Yoiker, who had been in an El Paso immigration detention facility since he was charged with entering the U.S. illegally late last year. When the phone finally rang, it wasn’t her son but another detainee who told her that Yoiker had been taken to Guantanamo.
“It hit me like a bucket of cold water. I asked the man: ‘Why? Why? Why?’” Sequera recalled. She said the detainee told her that the federal government was trying to link Yoiker to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for migrant smuggling and other crimes in Latin America.
She panicked. She couldn’t understand why this was happening. She and some of the relatives of 178 Venezuelans who were among the first migrants transferred to Guantanamo by the U.S. government scrambled to try to establish contact with their loved ones, scoured the internet and exchanged messages on an impromptu WhatsApp group.
ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained records about Yoiker and two other Venezuelans taken to Guantanamo. A search of U.S. federal court records found that Yoiker and another man had no crimes except for illegal entry, while a third had been convicted for assaulting a federal officer during a riot while in detention. “My son is not a criminal. He has no record. He has nothing to do with gangs. He does not belong to any Tren de Aragua,” said Sequera, who shared documentation from Venezuelan authorities that stated he did not have a criminal history.
On Feb. 21, after 13 days without hearing from her son, Sequera got a call from Yoiker. He had been released and was back in Venezuela, but he refused to discuss the time he spent detained at the naval base. “I think he does it to not make me worry,” said Sequera, who is among the plaintiffs named in a lawsuit filed by immigrants’ rights advocates seeking legal access to the migrants in Guantanamo.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said this week that nearly half of the Venezuelans originally detained at Guantanamo were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and that many had serious criminal records. DHS did not provide evidence to support that assertion.
DHS also said in court filings this month that Guantanamo will continue to “temporarily house” migrants before they are “removed to their home country or a safe third country.”
Migrants on recent flights to Guantanamo have come from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Guinea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Senegal, according to government data shared with ProPublica and the Tribune. DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the most recent transfers.
“We continue to know very little about the conditions there, who the government is sending there and why this is happening,” said Zoe Bowman, an attorney with the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Mauricio Rodríguez Pons contributed to the production.
This article was originally published by ProPublica, and republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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