A federal judge on Friday rejected for now efforts to block the Trump administration from sending migrants to the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, declaring that because the government had emptied the wartime prison of those detainees, the petitions were moot.
Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia expressed doubts toward those bringing challenges on behalf of the migrants, a potentially favorable sign for the administration as it seeks to use the base in President Trump’s deportation campaign.
Mr. Trump has said he wants to use Guantánamo’s 30,000 beds “to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” He issued an executive order in January to expand the Migrant Operations Center there “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” The administration has sent two groups of migrants to Guantánamo, but it is not clear how many were considered dangerous criminals.
Days before the hearing on Friday, the Trump administration abruptly returned a group of migrants it had sent to Guantánamo to the United States, without indicating why. It was the second time federal officials had suddenly cleared the base of migrants who had been flown there. In late February, the government repatriated all but one of 178 detained migrants to Venezuela after they spent just a few weeks at the facility. One migrant was brought back to the United States.
Judge Nichols on Friday considered two challenges brought by migrants and advocacy groups on their behalf. Less than 30 minutes after the lawyers finished their arguments, he said the plaintiffs had “failed to established they are suffering irreparable harm” that warranted a temporary order to halt the administration’s policies.
Judge Nichols said that if the government sent any of the migrants in question to Guantánamo, he would be prepared to consider issuing an emergency order. Lawyers for the Trump administration said they would notify the judge if any plaintiffs were sent there, and were instructed to inform the court by Wednesday of how early in the relocation process they would do so.
But Judge Nichols expressed doubts that the plaintiffs would succeed on the merits of the cases, when no migrants remained at Guantánamo.
In the first lawsuit, filed in response to the administration sending Venezuelan citizens to Guantánamo, Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued that government had unfairly barred migrants from having in-person access to lawyers.
Sarah Wilson, a Justice Department lawyer, countered that the work of relocating migrants there was still too new to accommodate lawyers, given the logistical challenges and need for security clearances.
The second lawsuit, filed by 10 migrants who claimed to be at risk of being transferred to Guantánamo because of their nationalities and removal orders against them, challenged the legality of the transfers. The plaintiffs asserted that the government has no right to detain migrants outside the United States, and that conditions at Guantánamo were worse than those at domestic detention facilities.
Drew Ensign, a Justice Department lawyer, argued that since immigration enforcement by definition involves moving migrants across borders, the administration could keep migrants with removal orders in American custody overseas. The practice was akin to transporting migrants over international waters from Hawaii to the mainland, Mr. Ensign added, or through other countries while being deported to their home nations.
But Mr. Gelernt called Mr. Ensign’s comparisons misleading, saying the migrants at Guantánamo had not been in transit or in the process of being removed. No prior administration had argued that immigration law gave the government the right to detain migrants extraterritorially, he added.
Mr. Gelernt also pointed to the conditions some migrants were subject to at Guantánamo, including strip searches, shackling and solitary confinement. That treatment is harsher than conditions found in detention centers in the United States, he said, making relocation there unfair and unconstitutional.
Judge Nichols was particularly focused on the question of whether immigration law gave the government the right to detain migrants at extraterritorial facilities. Though he did not offer an answer, he said it was “a serious question.”
But Judge Nichols rejected the migrants’ argument that staying at Guantánamo, however briefly, would cause them irreparable harm. If migrants who brought the lawsuits were moved to Guantánamo, he said, lawyers could demand an emergency order to bring them back to the United States, likely within days.
Outside the courthouse, Mr. Gelernt expressed frustration, saying the administration had sidestepped challenges to its policy by abruptly relocating the migrants.
He suggested that the advocacy groups would try to mount a broader challenge by filing a class-action lawsuit. “We see now what the government is doing by continually trying to” get cases dismissed as moot “by moving people around,” Mr. Gelernt added.
Mr. Ensign said the Justice Department would ask to dismiss the case.