AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday evening, our next guest found himself on a video conference with federal Judge Kenneth Gonzales in New Mexico as the judge temporarily blocked the U.S. government from sending his clients, three Venezuelan men, to the U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the Trump administration is preparing a 30,000-person detention center. Baher Azmy is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which sought an emergency order to protect the three men, who had been held for about a year at the Otero detention center for reentering the United States. The men say they left Venezuela to request asylum in the U.S. but were rejected. When they saw others from the detention center transferred to Guantánamo, they feared they could be next and asked the judge to preemptively block their transfer.

Over the weekend, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited Guantánamo, days after the first detained immigrants were flown there. She claimed, without evidence, on CNN that the people deported there were dangerous criminals.

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: These individuals are the worst of the worst that we pulled off of our streets. So —

DANA BASH: Who are they?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM: Murderers, rapists. When I was there, I was able to watch one of the flights landing and them unload about 15 different of these criminals. Those were mainly child pedophiles, those that were out there trafficking children, trafficking drugs, and were pulled off of our streets and put at this facility.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the Trump administration recently withdrew temporary protected status for Venezuelans living here in the U.S.

Baher Azmy joins us now for more on this case filed with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, Las Americas Immigrant Advisory Center. His recent article for Slate, well, we’ll talk about that in a minute.

So, Sunday night, more than 100 million people are watching the Super Bowl, but you’re on a conference call. How did this happen?

BAHER AZMY: Once our clients had some credible information that they might be transferred to Guantánamo — after all, they fit the profile of Venezuelans in detention in New Mexico — we decided we had to move and prevent their transfer, their rendition, to the lawless base in Guantánamo. And our team from CCR and Las Americas and ACLU of New Mexico worked around the clock and filed an emergency motion Sunday maybe at 5:00. And as — I don’t remember who was playing, but within an hour, the judge asked for a conference call. Our team got on. He took it from the side of the road and agreed that there’s too much of a risk to our ability to access our clients and to the court’s jurisdiction to allow the government to transfer them, so he issued an order forbidding their transfer to Gitmo.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the challenges faced by immigration and human rights advocates in dealing with this Guantánamo situation, given the fact that there aren’t even — you don’t even have the names of the people who are being shipped there?

BAHER AZMY: Yeah. Thanks, Juan. This is like a grim déjà vu from 2001, early 2002, when the then-lawless Guantánamo prison was populated by, as Noem repurposed, “the worst of the worst.” That was what was said about the Muslim men and boys who were sent there. And then, as now, we had no idea the identities of people there, their legal status, or at least the administration’s position regarding their legal status. And then, as of now, Guantánamo just represents this security theater. It’s a kind of performative cruelty that stamps people simply by virtue of their placement there as dangerous. It’s an utterly manufactured kind of performance to show muscularity through vengeance.

AMY GOODMAN: In addition to Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, we’re joined by Vince Warren, executive director of CCR. And, Vince, I wanted to ask you about the constitutional crisis that is looming in this country. Many of Trump’s executive orders have already been temporarily halted. Already a judge has said he is not obeying his order to start the funds flowing at the Treasury that have been approved by Congress. Yet you have Vice President JD Vance writing on X — that’s the richest man in the world’s platform, Elon Musk’s platform — Vice President JD Vance said, “Judges are not allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Your response?

VINCENT WARREN: That is 100% not true. And we’ve been actually talking for many years about when does a constitutional crisis present itself. And I’m here to say that this is the moment. The question that we’re all facing is that when courts issue legitimate orders to get the government to do things that it should do or to stop doing things that it shouldn’t do or to comply with the law, and the administration says, “Yeah, we don’t really have to comply with that,” that’s the definition of a constitutional crisis.

And we’re seeing that possibility in just about everything. In terms of the temporary restraining order that we got in Guantánamo, what’s the guarantee that they are going to show up to court and, with an adverse ruling, stop transferring people? What’s the guarantee that they’re going to release the funds that courts order them to do? There is no guarantee, precisely because this administration has been built on lies and the idea that it is actually — that the law just doesn’t apply to them. What applies to them are their political points.

So, we have an administration that is really moving to seize the pillars of our constitutional system and our laws and to rip them to shreds — not only just to test them, but to just destroy them. We are actually facing a constitutional crisis on a range of issues, and it’s just not clear to any of us whether this administration will actually comply with the rule of law in any context.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Vince, this use of Guantánamo Bay not simply as a detention center for or as a black hole prison for suspected terrorists, but Guantánamo was used even before that to house thousands of Haitians and Cubans who were trying to get — to migrate into the United States. And interestingly, Rudy Giuliani was back then — before he was even mayor of New York, he was in the Justice Department involved in those. Are there any legal lessons from that prior period of using Guantánamo as a detention center for migrants?

VINCENT WARREN: Yeah, I think there are political lessons, Juan, and there are legal lessons. The political lesson is that for 40 years, dating back to the early 1990s, the United States government has used Guantánamo as a legal dumping ground for its political problems. Back then with the Haitians, you will recall that Haitians were sent there for suspected of having HIV and AIDS. And that was a health security crisis that the government said needed to happen. The Center for Constitutional Rights, Yale Law School, Harold Koh, Michael Ratner successfully sued and got Haitian migrants released on that boundary, only to go maybe 10, 12 years later, and they’re opening Guantánamo now, the military side, for Guantánamo detainees, a story of the work that the Center for Constitutional Rights and Baher Azmy is stuff of legend now. There are only 15 people left. But we were able to show, number one, that the people that were then described as the worst of the worst were not in fact so. There are only 15 men left in Guantánamo now.

And as we are trying to make good on the failed promise of Barack Obama and Joe Biden to close that terrible facility, here comes Donald Trump, who now wants to open it up for yet another purpose. And he’s using national security and the, quote-unquote, “invasion of migrants” as the emergency to reopen that base and to house people there for that purpose. I would say one thing that legally that we know that I think is significant here is that Trump himself has said that the reason why he’s opening it up is because he doesn’t trust the governments to take these people back, and if they take them back, then they’re just going to rerelease them. So, that speaks to me of an indefinite detention regime, which is really, really problematic, the issue that we’ve been dealing with in Guantánamo. Kristi Noem, when she talked about it, as we just saw, she made no promises or guarantees as to what would happen. She largely said, “Well, it really depends on what Trump wants to do. That’s how we’re going to roll.” There are violations, potential violations, of due process, the rights that these men have in this context. And we have not yet seen a situation where people are put in Guantánamo coming from the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, Vince Warren, I want to ask you about Trump and the ICC. He’s issued sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its investigations of Israeli officials for war crimes in Gaza. The chief prosecutor Karim Khan is their first target, after arrest warrants were issued for Prime Minister Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Can you lay out, what you’re calling, this direct attack on the rule of law?

VINCENT WARREN: Absolutely. The Trump administration is saying, once and for all, without any doubt, that they are siding with war criminals as opposed to the victims of war crimes. This is not a position that the United States should take, obviously. But I think what’s more troubling is it’s reopening the executive order that he had done previously, but it’s now done in the context specifically of Israel and the United States. The executive order says specifically that because of what the ICC has done with respect to Netanyahu and Gallant, and because the U.S. has been targeted in ICC investigations, therefore the court is illegitimate. This is clearly an attempt to step away from the rule of law for the United States and, more importantly, to shield from any kind of liability or accountability people who are committing war crimes, just because they’re not signatories to the ICC. And we also know that the reason why they’re not signatories to the ICC is because this is exactly the type of things that they were afraid of to begin with.

So we’re living outside of the law domestically. We’re living outside of the law in terms of international human rights. And in every instance, it feels to me that we are siding for the unbridled power of the U.S. and Israel to do whatever the hell that they want and that there’s no court, this administration is saying, that can stop them.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Vince Warren, executive director, Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Next up, we’ll be joined by the acclaimed Palestinian author and poet Mohammed El-Kurd. His new book is out today, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal.