But the alleged episode shows how the United States is waging one of its biggest battles in the War on Drugs miles from American shores and largely out of sight. President Donald Trump has railed about drugs “pouring across the border” from Mexico; lawmakers have decried the “epidemic” of painkiller abuse at home. It’s the United States Coast Guard, though, that seizes more drugs than any other law-enforcement agency in the country. If proven, the alleged abuses would show what can happen when the reach of American law enforcement outstrips the protections of the American Constitution.

The ACLU argues that indefinite detentions of the kind it says its clients suffered are inhumane and illegal. Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU, told me his clients were essentially “forcibly disappeared” for weeks. Since they couldn’t speak to their families, Watt said, their loved ones were “were preparing for their sons’ and fathers’ deaths.”

“I think I never sleep one minute,” said Keisha Brown, Ferguson’s partner, in a video produced by the ACLU. “I don’t know how. I can’t describe that feeling. It’s a horrible feeling.”

“This case was not an isolated incident,” Watt told me. A New York Times investigation last year alleged another case of detainees held in similar conditions, likening the detentions to “floating Guantánamos.” In that case, though, the suspects pled guilty to drug smuggling and never challenged the conditions of their detention in court. The ACLU maintains that its clients’ detention was never justified in the first place.

The Coast Guard has racked up enormous successes in its maritime drug battle, routinely seizing tons of cocaine at sea and bringing hundreds of suspected smugglers to face trial in the U.S. Last year, the agency took more than 200 metric tons of cocaine off the market and detained more than 600 alleged smugglers, a large number of whom were then convicted of smuggling offenses in U.S. courts.

In the Jamaicans’ case, McBride said in his statement about the lawsuit that the agency requested permission from the government of Jamaica to prosecute the men in the United States. The agency then detained the men and later received consent from the Jamaican government.

But it’s what happens before they get to trial that especially worries the ACLU. Given that the Coast Guard often detains suspected smugglers hundreds of miles from U.S. shores, the protections of the U.S. justice system—such as prompt access to an attorney—are out of reach. Detainees spent an average of 16 days at sea last year, according to the Coast Guard. That’s a period of legal limbo.

Or worse. The ACLU’s complaint alleged that the Coast Guard officers, none of them named in the document, forced the four men to strip and wear paper-thin coveralls, gave them a metal bucket to defecate in, and refused to give them so much as a tarp for shelter as Hurricane Maria bore down on them.