Angela Sequera heard from her son in immigration detention twice a day every day for nearly five months, until Sunday.
That afternoon, another detainee called her with a message that left her panic-stricken: Her son, 25-year-old Yoiker David Sequera, had been taken away to a notorious offshore prison.
“Señora Angela, I’m calling to tell you that your son is going to Guantanamo,” she recalled the man saying, “he gave me your number.”
“We’re in a country where the laws should be respected,” she told USA TODAY by phone in California, after three days without word from her son.
“To me, and I’m speaking sincerely,” she said, “I believe my son was kidnapped by U.S. authorities.”
Sequera is one of several plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Trump administration demanding attorney access for people removed from the U.S. to the Guantanamo prison on the island of Cuba, where the Trump administration has set up a 30,000-bed immigrant detention camp.
The United States is “warehousing them on a remote island with no access to attorneys or the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, ACLU lead counsel who spearheaded high-profile litigation against the first Trump administration, including family separation. “This should concern anyone who believes in the rule of law.”
Multiple attempts by USA TODAY to reach U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by email and phone, at the agency’s Washington, D.C.; South Florida and West Texas offices went unanswered.
At least seven military flights carrying an undisclosed number of detainees have left El Paso’s Fort Bliss for Guantanamo Bay, according to social media posts by the Department of Defence Transportation Command. The Trump administration hasn’t published a roster of detainees held at the camp.
Sequera thinks her son, who has never been charged with any crime other than the misdemeanor of entering the U.S. illegally, was on the fifth flight, which departed Sunday.
She has tried to reach him. She knows his “alien number” by heart, the code that’s required to track him in the immigration detention system.
When she plugged it into the government’s online “detainee locator,” he would show up at the El Paso Processing Center, an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas. Now his name appears, confirmed by USA TODAY, at a building in Plantation, Florida, where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shares office space with the Food and Drug Administration.
It’s one of the addresses that appears when detainees have been transferred to Guantanamo, said Jennifer Babie, director of advocacy and legal services for the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which has been trying to keep tabs on detained clients.
“We can’t say for absolute certainty they’ve been transferred, because most aren’t showing up as being in Guantanamo,” she said. “But for the folks we’ve been tracking, it was a combination of their families calling and saying, ‘My son was told he was going to Guantanamo,’ and the ICE locator would change” to a Florida field office.
“Every American should be concerned that the government feels comfortable taking people in civil proceedings to a place where no one knows where they are,” she said. “They are being effectively disappeared.”
Sequera, who is in the country legally with Temporary Protected Status, worries about her son, whether he is being treated badly. She has heard stories about Guantanamo, about the documented abuse and torture that occurred there when accused terrorists were the main occupants. She wants to know with certainty where he is.
“They didn’t even give him a chance to tell me where he was going,” she said. “I have a right to know. I’m his mother.”
The ‘worst of the worst’?
President Donald Trump opened the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay with a plan, he said, to send the “worst of the worst” immigrant detainees – people with violent criminal histories.
But attorneys say the administration is moving individuals without criminal charges or convictions, Sequera among them, to Guantanamo. Venezuelan detainees are at particular risk of being accused without evidence of gang ties, they say.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the ACLU lawsuit or Guantanamo detainees.
The U.S. government previously held alleged terror suspects at Guantanamo. But transfers of detainees from within the United States to Cuba is unprecedented, said Ayla Kadah, and attorney and justice fellow with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“There have never been transfers of people from the mainland U.S. to Guantanamo,” Kadah said. “The government is disappearing people into what is essentially a legal black hole.”
Earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited the prison, then took to social media. She posted an aerial photo showing more than 60 dark green tents and another image of a man, chained at the ankles and wrists, marched by soldiers out of a military jet.
The immigrants at Guantanamo are convicted murderers and rapists, she told CNN.
“They’ll be there until we work out arrangements to bring them back to their countries where they belong,” Noem said on Monday. “They have due process. Every individual has due process.”
In its lawsuit, the ACLU, immigrant advocacy organizations and the family members of those detained contend the Guantanamo detainees aren’t being granted due process, or fair treatment under the law.
They’re being held “incomunicado,” without the ability to contact family members or consult with legal counsel, according to the complaint filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C.
The administration can’t eliminate access to counsel simply by moving the detainees offshore, Gelernt said. The complaint argues that people being held in immigration detention have a right to an attorney under the First and Fifth amendments.
Attorneys have fought for access to Guantanamo before.
During President George W. Bush’s war on terror, when suspected Al Qaeda terrorists were held at a military-run Guantanamo prison, many without charges or a trial, attorneys took the administration to court and won access – under strict conditions.
The government requires attorneys to pass security clearances to visit the base. They have travel to a mainland military base and take a military flight; there are no commercial flights to Guantanamo. Detainees’ phone access is so severely limited, it has to be reserved 15 days in advance, according to court filings.
There are still 15 war-on-terror detainees at Guantanamo.
But immigrants are being held at the base not by the military but by ICE, which so far hasn’t allowed attorneys to contact or visit detainees.
No evidence of gang ties
Yoiker David Sequera is a barber, his mother said. It’s been “his hobby, his everything,” since he was 13 years old, she said. He has no criminal record, other than a misdemeanor for crossing the U.S. border.
A nationwide records search by USA TODAY found no other evidence of criminal charges or convictions under his name and date of birth. Sequera provided USA TODAY with copies of documents certifying her son’s clean record in Venezuela and Colombia, which she obtained to support his immigration case.
In photos she shared of her son before he was detained, Sequera wears a beard, braces and close-cropped hair. Another photo compilation shows off his haircuts – flat tops and fades, with swooshes and angular designs.
A screenshot of one of their video calls shows Sequera’s son wearing orange scrubs and a mop of shaggy curls.
Her son originally turned himself in at the border in July 2022, amid an exodus of tens of thousands of Venezuelan nationals from South America. The country’s economy was in total collapse under an authoritarian regime. She and other relatives followed him, but he was the family pioneer, she said.
At the time, the Biden administration was processing migrants and asylum-seekers at the border and releasing them to follow up with court dates inside the U.S. He was allowed into the country and attended one court hearing in New York before reuniting with his mother in California.
Then he made a rash decision, Sequera said.
He learned that a family member, backed by a local government board, had taken over his vacant apartment in Venezuela. Sequera told her son to stay put. He left anyway.
“Like any young man, he went his own way,” she said. The fight over the house turned serious; she began receiving threatening messages. “They were going to send him back to me in a box,” she said.
He left the country for Ecuador for a few months then decided to make the treacherous journey overland to the U.S. border, again, during the summer of 2024.
He crossed the same way he had before, at Presidio, Texas, on Sept. 11, turning himself over to Border Patrol agents thinking he could just ask again for asylum, a legal process. But the Biden administration had by then suspended asylum access at the border.
Agents referred him for prosecution for crossing the border illegally.
He pleaded guilty, was sentenced to time served and handed over to ICE to pursue an asylum claim while in detention. He followed through with immigration court hearings while detained at the El Paso Processing Center. A judge denied his claim and issued a final order of removal on Jan. 6.
Recently, ICE began accusing Sequera of having ties to the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, his mother said. He has never been involved with a gang, she said.
He has anxiety, she said. She would try to lift his spirits by sending him money to buy chocolates – his favorite – in the detention center commissary in El Paso, she said. She’d tell him to stay calm.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” she’d say. “You’re going to get out of there.”
