Four Cuban immigrants being held at a Texas detention center claim they were among dozens who were driven to the Mexican border and pressured by masked officials to cross it or face imprisonment and beatings, according to a letter civil liberties groups sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday and shared with The Washington Post.
Two said they were beaten inside the detention facility when they initially declined to be transported to the border.
The letter draws on interviews the American Civil Liberties Union and other nonprofit groups conducted last month with 45 detainees at ICE’s makeshift Fort Bliss detention camp in El Paso. It claims the Trump administration tried to illegally coerce many of these people into leaving the United States for a country where they are not citizens — violating its own guidance for “third country” deportations by failing to give some of them written notice or a hearing with an ICE officer.
The Post independently obtained internal ICE records verifying that the four Cubans resisted removal on or around the dates they said the events took place. The Post could not verify other details about the allegations, because the detainees had little means to document their experiences. ICE has declined The Post’s requests to visit the facility.
“These actions by federal officers are clear violations,” the civil liberties groups said in the letter. ICE officers have approached non-Mexicans held at Fort Bliss and “informed them orally that they will be deported to Mexico. When detainees state that they fear being removed to Mexico and decline third country deportation, officers have subjected them to physical abuse, and threats of criminal prosecution and lengthy imprisonment.”
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said “no detainees are being beaten or abused” and that all people being deported to third countries are given due process protections.
These deportations “are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people,” McLaughlin said. “If you break our laws and come to our country illegally, you could end up in any number of third countries.”
The ACLU said the attempted deportations are part of a pattern of mistreatment of people held at Fort Bliss U.S. Army base, where federal contractors turned an empty patch of desert into ICE’s largest detention center, with more than 2,800 detainees, over the past four months. In their letter, the advocacy groups urged the Trump administration to stop detaining immigrants at the facility, citing detainee accounts of physical abuse by guards, inadequate food and personal hygiene products, and substandard medical care.
The groups also cited The Post’s reporting from September, which revealed ICE’s own inspectors found that Fort Bliss violated 60 federal standards for immigrant detention during the first 50 days after the contract was awarded.
McLaughlin said any claims of inhumane conditions at ICE detention centers are false. She said all detainees “are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, access to showers, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members.”
Before the Trump administration began the practice this year, the United States rarely deported people to countries where they are not citizens. This includes citizens of Cuba, which accepts roughly one deportation flight per month because of the United States’ decades-long embargo and restrictions on travel to the island nation.
In July, ICE instructed agency personnel that they could remove people to third countries with as little as six hours’ advance written notice. This guidance came after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overruled the decision of a lower-court judge who said migrants must have a “meaningful opportunity” to contest their removal to third countries and seek humanitarian protection under the Convention Against Torture. Congress ratified that international treaty in 1994 to bar the government from sending immigrants to a country where they might face torture.
The Supreme Court ruling is temporary, pending the outcome of an appeal of the lower-court’s ruling. The merits of the original case, which claims migrants are entitled to notice and an opportunity to raise fear-based claims before removal to a third country, will be heard in federal court in Massachusetts this month.
In sworn declarations recorded by civil liberties attorneys in person and over video conferences, four Cubans at Fort Bliss described being shackled and taken to the Mexican border in several instances in recent months. The detainees provided their names in the declarations, and the ACLU shared the information with The Post on the condition that their names not be published for fear of punishment from the government because they are in custody. The ACLU shared the declarations with ICE without the immigrants’ real names, for the same reason.
One of the men, a middle-aged Cuban national the ACLU letter calls “Abel,” said that in late August or early September, guards told him he was going to Mexico and asked him to sign a document agreeing to it. He told them “no,” because he was scared of being “a foreigner in Mexico,” he said in his declaration.
He said guards locked him in a room, and when he refused to leave the room to be taken to Mexico, they slammed him on the ground, placed him in handcuffs and took him on a bus with about a dozen other people. They drove for about 40 minutes to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, a border city in an area known as a smuggling corridor and hub for Mexican cartels.
Of the four Cubans who gave declarations, he was the only one who said he was given written notice before the attempted deportation. One said he requested written papers but was denied. Another said that when he refused to be taken to Mexico, guards slammed his head against a wall, squeezed and twisted his ankles, and crushed his testicles between their fingers.
All the Cuban men said that when their buses arrived at the border, a group of masked men pressured the detainees to cross over. One of the Cuban men claimed the masked men said those who refused would be sent to a jail cell in El Salvador or to Africa. Another said those who didn’t cross were threatened with being charged with federal crimes.
They said many of the detainees went with the masked men to Mexico. The four Cubans said they refused and were returned to the detention center.
The Cuban detainees did not know whether the masked men worked for ICE or some other law enforcement agency, and Eunice Cho, an ACLU attorney, said the civil liberties groups have been unable to confirm who they were.
The government does not publicly release data on third-country removals. The administration has sent people to at least 12 countries where they are not citizens, including El Salvador, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan, according to data collected by nonprofit researchers at Human Rights First and Refugees International.
Trina Realmuto, an attorney who represents the migrants in the Massachusetts case, , said she has seen a sharp uptick in third-country removals since that ruling. The largest number are sent to Mexico, she said, because Mexican authorities are accepting deportees from Central American, South American and Caribbean countries, even though Mexico is generally not granting these people permanent status.
Realmuto, who reviewed the declarations made by the four Cubans, said their cases are notable because ICE agents allegedly violated their own policies and the basic rights of immigrant detainees.
“It is particularly cruel that in addition to violating that policy, they have threatened, coerced, beaten individuals who have attempted to assert their fear-based claims and the woefully inadequate procedural protections that ICE claims to afford,” said Realmuto, who works with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance.
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso and periodically visits Fort Bliss, said the facility appears increasingly incapable of meeting everyone’s needs as its population keeps growing toward an expected year-end capacity of 5,000.
The Fort Bliss contract says it is meant to hold people “for periods of approximately two weeks or less,” but many of the detainees Escobar has met have been there for months.
“The more people they detain in that facility — which was not ready to begin with — in my view will mean even bigger problems,” Escobar said in an interview.
The contract with ICE also requires the facility to have a law library and commissary for buying additional supplies and food, but detainees said in the recent declarations to civil liberties lawyers that more than four months after accepting migrants, it still offers neither amenity.
Several detainees said there is no soap, so they’ve had to wash their bodies and their laundry with their daily issuance of shampoo that’s a little bigger than a sugar packet. Staff members have rationed toilet paper by giving out single sheets at a time. Detainees aren’t always given meals and medicine on a regular basis. Several described being beaten by guards for complaining or refusing to eat to protest the conditions.
Another of the Cubans who resisted deportation to Mexico reported that when he asked for his medications once in September, guards beat his ribs, abdomen and the back of his head so hard that he lost consciousness and had to be taken to a hospital.
“Whenever I am allowed to leave this place,” he said in his declaration, “I will be leaving it with a great deal of trauma from my experience here.”
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