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NEARLY 200 Venezuelans were deported from the US to their home country this week after being detained at the notorious US torture camp in Guantanamo Bay on illegally occupied Cuban soil.
The government of President Nicolas Maduro said that it had “requested the repatriation of a group” of Venezuelans “who were unjustly taken” to Guantanamo Bay.
With the request accepted, an aircraft with the state-owned airline Conviasa picked up the Venezuelans from Honduras. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency confirmed the transfer of 177 “illegal aliens.”
It is not known how many people the Trump administration has sent to Guantanamo Bay — best known for holding people caught up in the US’s disastrous “war on terror” without trial or legal process but also used to hold people caught trying to reach the US by boat.
Human rights campaigners launched legal action against the Trump administration earlier this month for access to the people detained at Guantanamo Bay.
“The Trump administration cannot be allowed to build upon Guantanamo’s sordid past with these latest cruel, secretive and illegal manoeuvres,” said Eunice Cho, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union — one of the groups involved with the legal action.
“Our constitution does not allow the government to hold people incommunicado, without any ability to speak to counsel or the outside world.”
Baher Azmy, legal director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, said: “It is appalling but not surprising that the Trump administration is exploiting and expanding the 21st century’s greatest symbol of lawlessness and torture: Guantanamo.
“The Centre for Constitutional Rights has been challenging incommunicado detention and torture at Guantanamo since the early 1990s, and we see Trump’s actions for what they are — performative cruelty mixed with another authoritarian power grab.
“The courts, once again, must act to ensure the immigrants Trump seeks to detain there have access to lawyers and thus the law and are free from the cruelty and terror inherent in the project of Guantanamo.”
