A Justice Department lawyer today urged an appeals court to overturn a judge's order to release a group of Chinese Muslims at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison into the United States. Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre said U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina overstepped his authority in ordering the release of the 17 men, all Chinese Uighurs, a group that is seeking a homeland in western China. Garre argued that only the president has such authority. "We have the authority to hold these men pending resettlement efforts," he told the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. "Neither our Constitution nor our laws entitle them to come to the United States and to be released here."
The government is appealing Urbina's October decision to release the Uighurs, who have been held at Guantanamo for nearly seven years.
The United States no longer considers the men enemy combatants and would like to release them. But it cannot send them home to China, where they are considered terrorists by the government and may be tortured or killed, and has been unable to find another country willing to take them. Albania accepted five Uighurs in 2006, but other countries have refused for fear of offending China.
However, in their filings to the appeals court, Justice Department lawyers wrote that the men may be dangerous because they had military training at camps in Afghanistan. Releasing them into the Washington region "threatens serious harm to the United States and its citizens," the lawyers wrote.
When the government provided no evidence to justify their continued detention, Urbina ordered their transfer to the Washington area, where they would have been resettled temporarily with Uighur families.
The appeals court stayed Urbina's ruling by a 2-1 vote, and it appeared from questioning of the attorneys this morning that the judges might be inclined to overturn Urbina's ruling. Judges A. Raymond Randolph and Karen LeCraft Henderson, both appointees of Republican presidents, seemed sympathetic to the government's arguments. Judge Judith W. Rogers, a Clinton appointee, dissented when the stay was issued and seemed more skeptical of the government's legal arguments.
The Uighurs' lead attorney, P. Sabin Willett, argued that Urbina was well within his authority to grant the Uighurs' release. He said judges have the power to order such relief under a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their detentions in federal court under the legal doctrine of habeas corpus.
Willett argued that the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurz) should not continue to be held at the military prison while the government tries to find them new homes. "The fact is, they have nowhere else to go," Willett said, in urging the judges to uphold Urbina's ruling and lift the stay that prevents them from being brought to Washington.
The judges did not indicate when they expect to rule in the case.