President Donald Trump holds an artist rendering of interior of the new White House ballroom as meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A federal judge on Friday rejected the Trump administration's efforts to dismiss a class action lawsuit brought by a group of immigrants challenging their detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum directing the requisite federal agencies "to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity and to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States."
By Feb. 4, the first group of immigrant detainees had been transferred to Guantanamo out of Fort Bliss, a military base in El Paso, Texas.
In June, the plaintiffs filed a 22-page class action lawsuit alleging the "never before used" Guantanamo detention regime was lacking statutory authority, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and seeking a writ of habeas corpus.
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The plaintiffs, a group of immigrants led by Yamil Luna Gutierrez, said the Trump administration failed to articulate "any legitimate reason" to hold immigrants at Guantanamo due to the "ample detention capacity" within the United States.
Moreover, none of the government's reasons for holding immigrants at Guantanamo held up to scrutiny, the lawsuit argued.
"In attempting to justify the transfers, the government has claimed that the individuals it is sending to Guantánamo are members of gangs and dangerous criminals—the 'worst of the worst,'" the lawsuit reads. "That characterization has been proven wrong. Regardless, it is legally irrelevant because the government lacks statutory authority."
In turn, the U.S. Department of Justice, in a 40-page motion to dismiss, argued the claims in the lawsuit cannot even be considered since the court lacks jurisdiction and the plaintiffs failed to state a claim.
Now, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a Joe Biden appointee, has rejected the government's efforts to toss the lawsuit in a 57-page memorandum opinion which harshly takes stock of the DOJ's arguments and the new detention regime, calling the base itself "synonymous with pervasive mistreatment and indefinite detention."
In ruling against the government, the court preliminarily accepted several of the plaintiffs' legal arguments.
"[T]he challenged policy of holding detainees subject to removal orders at Guantanamo is not authorized by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)," the opinion reads. "[I]mmigration detention at Guantanamo is for the purposes of retaliation and deterrence, meaning that the Defendants' policy is also impermissibly punitive in violation of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause."
In the bid for dismissal, the government argued a section of the INA stripped courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges over decisions about "appropriate places of detention for aliens detained pending removal or a decision on removal." The judge nixed that reading – saying her decision was in line with precedent dating back nearly 20 years.
Finding the claims justiciable, Sooknanan took the DOJ to task.
From the opinion, at length:
What does our immigration system get out of housing removed individuals abroad?
And all of this is consistent with the Executive's longstanding approach to immigration-detention locations. As counsel for the Defendants acknowledged at the motions hearing, before the Guantanamo-detention policy at issue here, the United States had never run a detention facility outside of the United States for individuals subject to removal orders. Yet now, the Defendants assert that the INA grants the Executive essentially boundless authority to arrange for detention facilities anywhere outside the United States. The unprecedented nature of this claim of authority is another clue that the Defendants' reading of the statutory scheme is wrong.
In sum, using Guantanamo as a detention center for run-of-the-mill immigrant detention – in light of other, less punitive alternatives – amounts to a due process violation, according to the court.
The opinion also took stock of the monetary cost.
"In executing this new policy, the Defendants held approximately 500 immigrants at Guantanamo between February and June 2025 at a reported cost of about $100,000 per day per detainee—over 600 times the average cost of detention elsewhere," Sooknanan goes on. "And immigration detention at Guantanamo is ongoing."
To hear the judge tell it, the Trump administration's interpretation of the INA is not only "wrong" but poorly argued in court – returning to the underlying allegations from the lawsuit.
Again, the opinion, at length:
[T]he Court finds notable that the Defendants have not yet proffered in this litigation any justification for that policy. The Complaint alleges that the government has previously stated that immigration detainees sent to Guantanamo are "the worst of the worst" and "'high-threat' criminals." But the Complaint further alleges that this explanation has been belied by the reality that detainees held there are in fact "'low-risk,' with no criminal record other than an immigration violation." And the alleged statements discussed above, when interpreted in the Plaintiffs' favor, indicate that a claimed purpose based on detainees' prior criminal convictions is pretextual.
