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guantanamo
Violence Against Guantánamo Detainees, Again
Immigrant prisoners are isolated and mistreated in what a post-9/11 lawyer called a "lawless enclave."
Mar 05, 2025
Just weeks after the Trump administration began sending immigration detainees to Guantánamo, the detainees report windowless solitary confinement for up to 23-hours-a-day; denial of drinking water as a form of punishment or retaliation; verbal and psychological abuse, including guards "threatening to shoot detainees"; and "never [being] permitted to contact family members."
These allegations are from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on March 1 to prevent new transfers to the offshore prison. The mistreatment is not surprising.
In 1991, U.S. military personnel dressed in riot gear and carrying "rifles with fixed bayonets" attacked Haitian asylum-seekers at Guantánamo—while the Haitians were sleeping.
ICE detention has long aspired to the lawlessness which Guantánamo makes possible.
That's according to an official military history of the detention of thousands of Haitians at the U.S. Naval Station in Cuba. Some of the Haitians had protested delays in their cases, as well as their mistreatment in U.S. custody, after fleeing U.S.-sponsored political violence in their country.
"The stunned migrants offered no resistance," writes the Marine Corps historian in his account of this "humanitarian mission."
In 1993, an American soldier at Guantánamo was angered when a Haitian child urinated in the dirt. The soldier "took the little boy's hand and rubbed it in the urine and mud, and then wiped it in his face and in his mouth," according to a fellow service member who later spoke to documentary filmmakers about his refusal to violently suppress nonviolent protests (see Crowing Rooster Arts, Guantánamo Notes, at 21:29).
In 1995, Haitian children unaccompanied by adults reported being "cracked" by U.S. military guards at Guantánamo: "their hands cuffed behind their back, their feet cuffed and then stepped on... The cuffings often occur[ed] in conjunction with other punishments, such as... being forced to kneel for hours on hot cement or beds of ants," according to the newspaper Haïti Progres.
After a 15-year-old Haitian girl threw food on another girl's bed, American soldiers handcuffed her to a cot in solitary confinement for a day-and-a-half, the girl told a visiting attorney. (You can read more about those imprisoned Haitian children in this pamphlet, published as part of "Ghosts of Guantánamo," a 1995 exhibit in Miami Beach organized to bring attention to those children in a time before social media.)
A brigadier general who acknowledged these incidents said they were not "abuse" but merely the result of "poor judgment and improper disciplinary techniques." A press release from the U.S. Atlantic Command said that the "conduct" of the military was being "closely monitored" by the U.S. immigration service.
Today, as the U.S. military collaborates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Guantánamo, "degrading conditions and extreme isolation have led to several suicide attempts," according to the ACLU.
Remember that these "administrative detainees" are being held for alleged civil violations, and their past crimes are either exaggerated or non-existent.
The conflation of "immigrant" and "criminal" by anti-immigrant movements preceded the Trump administration by decades, of course, but the Trump-Vance campaign took mere lies to a new level, claiming outright that even legal immigrants are "illegal." On January 28, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked up the line, saying that all undocumented immigrants are criminals. (That's not true, either.) Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth parroted the slogan that the immigration detainees sent to Guantánamo are the "worst of the worst." The phrase was popularized by former Vice President Dick Cheney in his justification for sending post-September-11 prisoners to the U.S. base in Cuba, and it was misinformation then, too.
So what is the real point of Guantánamo detentions?
In the 2004 Supreme Court arguments in Rasul v. Bush, concerning the post-9/11 detainees, attorney John Gibbons called the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo a "lawless enclave." That lawlessness had already been tested on the immigration prisoners. It's now more widely understood that the point of imprisoning Haitians—and others, including Cubans and Chinese—in offshore camps on foreign territory controlled by the U.S. was to keep them isolated from the U.S. justice system. Attorney Gibbons was referring to this lack of access to courts and due process.
ICE detention has long aspired to the lawlessness which Guantánamo makes possible. That's part of what the oft-quoted "taking the shackles off" of ICE really means, and it's why the Trump administration has ordered legal organizations to stop helping detained noncitizens within the U.S. even to understand the laws they're accused of breaking, much less to know their own rights under the law. (That order has been blocked by a federal judge for now.)
It's also worth remembering, with all the propaganda about borders and invasion, that the executive's backwards rationale for its claim to unlimited detention authority in Cuba has been that the U.S. is holding the prisoners outside U.S. borders. But Escalona v. Noem, the ACLU lawsuit, argues that the very transfer of immigration detainees from the U.S. to Cuba is illegal under U.S. immigration law. (The 1990s immigration detainees at Guantánamo had been picked up at sea, not transferred from the mainland U.S.)
At Guantánamo, as in ICE detention centers here, the lawlessness of procedure and the brutality of daily mistreatment are part of the same fabric. Isolating the detained persons—from lawyers, family, and the media—is crucial to that project. Trying to break the prisoners' isolation is therefore paramount.
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'Moral Crisis for This Nation': Trump Sued Over Access to Gitmo Prisoners Held 'Illegally' Offshore
“Our Constitution does not allow the government to hold people incommunicado, without any ability to speak to counsel or the outside world."
Feb 13, 2025
A coalition of civil liberties and immigrant rights groups have sued the Trump administration for detaining migrants incommunicado at the offshore prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after they were initially taken into custody in the United States.
The lawsuit—filed Wednesday in federal court by the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), and ACLU of the District of Columbia—was brought on behalf of several plaintiffs, including the sister of a Venezuelan man being held at the facility. It demands that all those being detained have immediate access to legal assistance.
According to the groups, the administration "has provided virtually no information about immigrants newly detained at Guantánamo, including how long they will be held there, under what authority and conditions, subject to what legal processes, or whether they will have any means of communicating with their families and attorneys."
“Our country must not create a shadow system of indefinite detention, stripping noncitizens of their legal protections simply by transferring them offshore."
After pictures emerged last week of the first batch of prisoners shipped to the island and a large tent city that has been erected at Gitmo since President Donald Trump took office less than four weeks ago, fears over what the administration has in store for the facility have only grown.
On Sunday, a federal judge blocked the transfer of three men, currently held in New Mexico, to the island prison complex, but that order only pertained to those specific individuals. The individuals already transferred to Gitmo have yet to be identified by the administration, according to the right groups, or given access to outside legal assistance.
"By hurrying immigrants off to a remote island cut off from lawyers, family, and the rest of the world, the Trump administration is sending its clearest signal yet that the rule of law means nothing to it. It will now be up to the courts to ensure that immigrants cannot be warehoused on offshore islands," Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in a Wednesday statement announcing the lawsuit.
Deepa Alagesan, senior supervising attorney at IRAP, said, "Secretly transferring people from the United States to Guantánamo without access to legal representation or the outside world is not only illegal, it is a moral crisis for this nation."
In an interview with the New York Times published Tuesday, Yajaira Castillo, who lives in Colombia, said she only realized her brother, Luis Alberto Castillo of Venezuela, was among those detained at Gitmo because she spotted him in photos posted on social media by Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who visited the island Friday.
"My brother is not a criminal," said Castillo. “This is all discrimination and xenophobia, just because he's Venezuelan.”
Eucaris Carolina Gomez Lugo, a plaintiff in the suit filed Wednesday, has a similar story: she only discovered her brother was in detention after photos of him in shackles were spotted.
While the administration has claimed those migrants sent to Gitmo are the "worst of the worst," they have presented no evidence to back up these claims, and the relatives of those who have come forward, like Castillo, say they are completely fraudulent. Castillo shared details and documentation about her brother's asylum claim efforts with the Times.
"Detaining immigrants at Guantánamo Bay without access to legal counsel or basic due process protections is a grave violation of their rights and an alarming abuse of government power," said Rebecca Lightsey, co-executive director of American Gateways. "Our country must not create a shadow system of indefinite detention, stripping noncitizens of their legal protections simply by transferring them offshore."
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'Careful What You Post': ICE Expanding Surveillance of Social Media Critics
"ICE's attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us," said one campaigner.
Feb 11, 2025
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to hire a contractor as part of an effort to expand the monitoring of negative social media posts about the agency, its personnel, and operations, according to a report published Monday.
According to The Intercept's Sam Biddle, ICE is citing "an increase in threats" to agents and leadership as the reason for seeking a contractor to keep tabs on the public's social media activity.
The agency said the contractor "shall provide all necessary personnel, supervision, management, equipment, materials, and services, except for those provided by the government, in support of ICE's desire to protect ICE senior leaders, personnel, and facilities via internet-based threat mitigation and monitoring services."
"These efforts include conducting vulnerability assessments and proactive threat monitoring," ICE added, explaining that the contractor will be required to provide daily and monthly status reports and immediately alert supervisors of "imminent threats."
Careful what you post: ICE is seeking private contractors to conduct social media surveillance including detection of merely "negative" sentiment about the agency's leadership, agents, and general operations theintercept.com/2025/02/11/i...
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— Sam Biddle (@sambiddle.com) February 11, 2025 at 9:27 AM
ICE will require the monitor to identify and report "previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE," as well as any information indicating that individuals or groups "making threats have a proclivity for violence" and anything "indicating a potential for carrying out a threat."
According to Biddle:
It's unclear how exactly any contractor might sniff out someone's "proclivity for violence." The ICE document states only that the contractor will use "social and behavioral sciences" and "psychological profiles" to accomplish its automated threat detection.
Once flagged, the system will further scour a target's internet history and attempt to reveal their real-world position and offline identity. In addition to compiling personal information—such as the Social Security numbers and addresses of those whose posts are flagged—the contractor will also provide ICE with a "photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates."
The document also requests "facial recognition capabilities that could take a photograph of a subject and search the internet to find all relevant information associated with the subject." The contract contains specific directions for targets found in other countries, implying the program would scan the domestic speech of American citizens.
"Careful what you post," Biddle warned in a social media post promoting his article.
ICE is already monitoring social media posts via contractor Giant Oak, which was hired during the first Trump administration and former Democratic President Joe Biden's term. However, "the goal of this [new] contract, ostensibly, is focused more narrowly on threats to ICE leadership, agents, facilities, and operations," according to Biddle.
Cinthya Rodriguez, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Mijente, told Biddle that "the current administration's attempt to use this technology falls within the agency's larger history of mass surveillance, which includes gathering information from personal social media accounts and retaliating against immigrant activists."
"ICE's attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us," Rodriguez added.
The search for expanded ICE social media surveillance comes as President Donald Trump's administration is carrying out what the Republican leader has promised will be the biggest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been deporting migrants on military flights, with some deportees imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, the notorious offshore U.S. military prison in Cuba.
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'Small But Important Win': Court Blocks Trump From Sending 3 Immigrants to Guantánamo
"Our clients refuse to be used as pawns in this twisted game of punishment theater," said a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Feb 10, 2025
A federal court late Sunday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from sending three Venezuelan immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. president is planning to jail tens of thousands of people in new detention facilities that critics have likened to concentration camps.
The decision from Judge Kenneth Gonzales of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico came in response to a request for a temporary restraining order filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and other advocacy organizations on behalf of three Venezuelan men currently being held in U.S. immigration detention in New Mexico.
"I fear being taken to Guantánamo because the news is painting it as a black hole," said Abrahan Barrios Morales, one of the petitioners. "I also see that human rights are constantly violated at Guantánamo, so I fear what could happen to me if I get taken there."
Baher Azmy, CCR's legal director, called the judge's decision Sunday a "small but important win for clients otherwise bound to the latest iteration of the legal black hole."
"Will the judge allow the executive branch to smuggle away individuals who have a pending case to a military prison on a remote island where there is no guarantee their rights will be respected or that they will even be able to make a phone call to their lawyers or their loved ones?"
The Trump administration has already moved dozens of people it characterized as Venezuelan gang members from El Paso, Texas to Guantánamo, the site of a notorious U.S. military prison that Amnesty International has described as "a symbol of torture, rendition, and indefinite detention without charge or trial."
The New York Times noted over the weekend that the administration "has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost."
"So far, none of the first arrivals have been taken to an emerging tent city that has been set up for migrants," the Times reported. "Instead, they have been housed in the military prison."
According to CCR, its clients "came to the United States seeking asylum, and each passed an initial Credible Fear Interview with U.S. asylum officers by establishing a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country" of Venezuela.
Jessica Vosburgh, a senior staff attorney at CCR, said in a statement Sunday that "our clients refuse to be used as pawns in this twisted game of punishment theater."
"The question before the court is simple," said Vosburgh. "Will the judge allow the executive branch to smuggle away individuals who have a pending case to a military prison on a remote island where there is no guarantee their rights will be respected or that they will even be able to make a phone call to their lawyers or their loved ones? The answer must be a resounding no."
Rebecca Sheff, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico, warned that "transferring immigrants from Otero County to Guantánamo is a blatant attempt to obstruct their legal rights by placing them thousands of miles from their families and attorneys."
"We're outraged that New Mexico and El Paso, against the backdrop of the horrific cruelty of family separation in the first Trump administration, are once again being used as a testing ground for dehumanizing and dangerous immigration policies," Sheff added.
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'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
"There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
Feb 09, 2025
Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are an ominous sign of what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faces immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress.
After the first pictures emerged Saturday of still unidentified persons transferred to the island from the U.S. mainland by immigration officials, progressive journalist Nathan Robinson was among those raising the alarm, accusing Trump of "building a concentration camp and deliberately putting it where it is hardest to monitor or enforce the law."
The New York Times, alongside pictures of newly-erected tents taken by photojournalist Doug Mills, reported Saturday that the administration had already "moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants." Mills was traveling Friday with Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, as she made her first visit to the offshore site.
According to the outlet:
Ms. Noem visited the nascent tent camp, where the administration has suggested that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of migrants who pose lesser threats could be housed. She watched Marines rehearse how to move migrants to the future tent city, and she was shown a tent with cots and a display of basic items to be provided each new arrival — T-shirt, shorts, underwear and a towel — and then got an aerial view of the mission from a Chinook helicopter.
"The Trump administration," the Times reported, "has not released any of their identities, though they are believed to all be men, nor has it said how long they might be held at the island outpost."
According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
On Friday, a coalition of more than a dozen rights groups—including the ACLU, National Immigration Law Center, and others—sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DoD), and the U.S. State Department demanding Trump officials provide immediate access to those who have been transferred out of the country to the offshore facility.
In addition, the groups demanded to know:
- The immigration status of the ten noncitizens detained there
- Who does the government intend to transfer to and detain at Guantánamo, including what criteria, legal or otherwise, the administration is or will be using to decide who to transfer and detain at Guantánamo
- Which government agency has custody of the transferred noncitizens at Guantánamo
- What authority is the government invoking to transfer noncitizens from the United States to Guantánamo and what authority is the government invoking to hold them at Guantánamo
- The length of time that the government will be holding these noncitizens at Guantánamo and plans for them after
"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that the expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."
While previous administrations have exploited the land seized by the U.S. in Cuba to detain and process asylum seekers and migrants in the past, those were individuals interdicted at sea or before having ever set foot on American soil. The facilities have not been used to hold noncitizens deported from the U.S. mainland.
Last week, Slate's Mary Harris interviewed journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps," who acknowledged that while many immediately think of Nazi Germany's death camps under Adolf Hitler when they hear the term "concentration camp," it is not wrong to describe the U.S. prison facilities at Guantánamo that way and for important reasons.
In her questioning, Harris posed to Pitzer how the existence of Guantánamo "doesn’t mean it’s going to become Auschwitz" necessarily, but that it does make "the road to Auschwitz more possible."
And Pitzer responded:
That's exactly right. And so what it means is even to do the most horrible things that humans have done takes time. It takes sort of a space and imagination and tools and resources. And the more of those kinds of tools and resources we line up in one place, the more room there is for the obscene or the perverted imagination to work. And even Auschwitz—keep in mind that it was 1933 when Hitler came to power and they started with concentration camps right out of the gate. So within the first weeks, Dakau is opened, though not quite in its final form, but it is already a camp and it takes almost a decade to get to even this final solution. And so, yes, absolutely, the Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand.
"And right now," Pitzer said of Gitmo's legacy and the new purpose that Trump is giving it, "we have a place where there has been torture, we have a place where there has been riots, we have a place where there have been people held without trial for more than 20 years. And those are some of the most dangerous seeds that humanity can plant."
"The Holocaust as we know it, as we remember it, has never been repeated. Nothing has come close to that. But you do not get to the death camps without having several years of Auschwitz, of Buchenwalds, of those beforehand."
In a weekend column, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch warned that even as much of the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants and refugees thus far should be seen as a "propaganda" exercise designed to titillate his base and antagonize his liberal opponents, the danger present by the Gitmo policy and others are very real.
"The bigger worry, " writes Bunch, "is that just because the cruelty of mass deportation is largely performative doesn’t mean these performances won’t scale up dramatically in the months ahead. Trump reportedly is already badgering his border czar, Tom Homan, and ICE to meet ambitious arrest targets, which would probably require crueler and more legally dubious measures that would fill those empty tents at Gitmo. If the president needs his phony war against a nonexistent border invasion to distract the American heartland from the coming evisceration of government services, the cruelty will become a bigger and bigger point."
Referencing the great Russian playwright's famous quote about the introduction of a gun onstage, Bunch opined that Trump's performative brand of governance does not mean the threat isn't real.
"You don't need Anton Chekhov," noted Bunch, "to understand that you don't build empty tents at Gitmo in Act One of your presidency unless you plan to fill them in Act Three."
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Trump Has Begun Deportation Flights to Feared 'American Gulag' at Gitmo
"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," said one rights advocate.
Feb 04, 2025
"America can and must be better than this," said U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal Tuesday as the Trump administration announced it had begun operating deportation flights bound for Cuba, where President Donald Trump has said he wants to detain undocumented immigrants at the notorious Guantánamo Bay naval base and prison.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the first flights authorized last week by Trump were underway, with the Department of Defense having deployed Marines to the U.S. base in Cuba on Sunday to begin expanding detention facilities.
Trump has called for the prison to be expanded to hold 30,000 people.
The flights announced Tuesday are the latest step in Trump's militarized anti-immigration operations, with 1,500 soldiers and Marines deployed to the southern U.S. border and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducting major immigration raids across the country.
According to reports, roughly half of the people arrested in cities such as New York and Chicago have had no criminal records and were guilty only of overstaying a visa or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without going through a port of entry—civil violations of U.S. immigration laws rather than criminal offenses.
Last week, Leavitt said all undocumented immigrants, not just those who have committed violent crimes—whose arrests Trump had previously said would be prioritized—were criminals who had "invaded our nation's borders."
At Slate on Sunday, Pedro Gerson noted that Trump's "entire political rise is tethered to the idea that immigrants are invading the country and that only he can fix it."
"Trump intends to build in Guantánamo purposely to reify the same message that propelled him to power: Immigrants are criminals and they are here to hurt you," wrote Gerson. "But now Trump is going further: Some of these immigrants are not only criminals, they are equivalent to terrorists. Frighteningly, this move may also be Trump signaling an intent to strip undocumented immigrants of even more rights and treat them under similarly abusive conditions as recent Guantánamo Bay detainees have experienced."
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was vague in an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday about who exactly would be sent to Guantánamo Bay, commonly known as Gitmo, via military planes.
When host Kristen Welker asked whether "women, children, and families" would be imprisoned there, Noem reverted back to the administration's previous claim that it is "targeting the worst of the worst" and detaining people who "are making our streets more dangerous."
"After that, we have final removal orders on many individuals in this country. They are the next priority," said Noem. "We're going to use the facilities that we have."
"Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."
The mass detention facility was built by the Clinton administration to hold 12,500 inmates, and became infamous during President George W. Bush's administration for its detention of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror." Detainees have been held without charges in violation of the U.S. Constitution and have been subjected to torture. Fifteen detainees remain at the prison following the Biden administration's transfer of 11 people to Oman last month.
Trump's planned expansion of Gitmo's prison would result in "a detention facility of unprecedented size in the American context," wrote Gerson at Slate. "The Tule Lake Japanese internment camp, for example, had a capacity of around 18,000. If the Trump administration actually builds the detention camp in Guantanamo, it'll double in size Auschwitz-Birkenau's original design and be bigger than Dachau and Treblinka combined."
As Yael Schacher, director for the Americans and Europe at Refugees International, said in a statement, the U.S. prison was also used to "inhumanely [detain] Cuban and Haitian asylum-seekers in the 1990s."
"The Trump administration's use of military planes to send immigrants to detention at Guantánamo Bay epitomizes the administration's gratuitously cruel, illegal, expensive, and burdensome approach to immigration policy," said Schacher. "Guantánamo's Migrant Operations Center, which the Trump administration is sending Marines to expand, is truly a black box that no nongovernmental organization has been allowed to visit."
"The administration's claim that there is a migrant 'invasion' is unfounded, and its mislabeling immigrants as 'terrorists' is diversionary—and neither makes offshore detention lawful," Schacher added. "Members of Congress should investigate the move as a misuse of military assets. Setting up an American gulag in the Caribbean in response to forced displacement in the Americas is a shameful low in U.S. history."
Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, warned that mass deportation to Gitmo will "cut people off from lawyers, family, and support systems, throwing them into a black hole so the U.S. government can continue to violate their human rights out of sight."
"Sending immigrants to Guantánamo is a profoundly cruel, costly move," she said. "Shut Gitmo down now and forever!"
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Trump Plan for Migrant Prison Camp at Gitmo Should 'Horrify Us All'
"Guantánamo has long been a stain on America's human rights record. Using it to detain migrants would be a dangerous escalation of anti-immigrant policies," wrote one immigrant advocate.
Jan 31, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement Wednesday that he is ordering officials to prepare the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to house tens of thousands of migrants was met with swift condemnation from rights groups this week.
"Guantánamo has long been a stain on America's human rights record. Using it to detain migrants would be a dangerous escalation of anti-immigrant policies," wrote Guerline Jozef, executive director at Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant advocacy group, in a statement on Friday.
Trump announced the plan during a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, legislation that strips due process rights from millions of undocumented immigrants, saying, "we have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people."
A presidential action published by the White House that same day called on the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security "to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens." The memorandum did not state how many migrants are expected to be detained there.
Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, called the move a decision that "should horrify us all."
"The order... sends a clear message: migrants and asylum seekers are being cast as the new terrorist threat, deserving to be discarded in an island prison, removed from legal and social services and supports," Warren continued.
Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) said in a Thursday statement that he is "deeply troubled" by the plan, arguing that it raises "serious human rights concerns, risks significant abuses, and would impose unnecessary costs on taxpayers." Amnesty International has also decried the announcement.
Guantánamo Bay's military prison has become associated with the repression and violence carried out by the United States during the "War on Terror" that launched after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It has been used to hold hundreds of foreign terrorism suspects, many without charge, since it opened in 2002.
Facilities at Guantánamo Bay facilities have also been used to detain asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees for decades, but not in the manner that Trump is now suggesting.
Both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton processed Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay, but those were people taken into custody at sea, not brought from the U.S. mainland. And while the Biden administration last year considered processing Haitian migrants there as well, it never followed through with the policy.
Looking ahead, Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights also vowed to fight back, saying his group "has challenged the U.S. government's use of Guantánamo in all its incarnations, and we, along with our partners, will do so again."
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Guantánamo: the Forever Mistake
Once you violate both fair treatment of prisoners and the basic principles of law, finding an unchallenged resolution to such cases is essentially inconceivable.
Jan 31, 2025
On January 10, one day before the 23rd anniversary of its opening, a much-anticipated hearing was set to take place at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility on the island of Cuba. After nearly 17 years of pretrial litigation, the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or (KSM), the “mastermind” of the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed poised to achieve its ever-elusive goal of bringing his case to a conclusion. After three years of negotiations, the Pentagon had finally arranged a plea deal in the most significant case at Guantánamo. Along with two others accused of conspiring in the attacks of 9/11, KSM had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the government replacing the death penalty with a life sentence.
After more than 50 pre-trial hearings and other related proceedings, Americans–and the victims’ families—would finally see closure for those three individuals who stood at the center of this country’s attempt to reckon legally with the 9/11 attacks.
More than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks, here we are in the very same place we’ve been for endless years—on pause again, despite the endless charade of forward steps that go nowhere.
Because of the fact that the defendants had been tortured at notorious CIA “black sites” before arriving at Guantánamo, the case had long been endlessly stalled. After all, so much of the evidence against them came from torture confessions. As it happens, such evidence is not admissible in court under U.S. or international law, or even under the rules of Guantánamo’s military commissions. For obvious reasons, it’s considered tainted information, “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” and so inadmissible in court. Although military commission prosecutors tried repeatedly over the years to find ways to introduce that all too tainted evidence at trial, attempts to do so failed time and again, repeatedly pushing potential trial dates years into the future. As a recently compiled Center on National Security chart shows, the forever delays in those hearings led to calendars of such length as to defy comprehension. In Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s case, for example, such delays have so far amounted to 870.7 weeks.
With the plea deal now set to come before Judge Matthew McCall, who had agreed to delay his retirement in an effort to see this case to its conclusion, attorneys, journalists, and victims’ family members boarded planes, preparing to witness the longed-for conclusion to a case that had seemed endless. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the hearing never took place. Delay was again the name of the game. As it turned out, from the moment the plea deal was announced, it became the centerpiece of an intense battle launched by then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
What Happened
Two days after the August 2024 announcement of the plea deal by the “convening authority,” Brigadier General (Ret.) Susan Escallier, the Pentagon official in charge of the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Austin summarily overruled her, revoking the plea deal with little explanation and leaving experts and observers alike confused and disappointed. Had the secretary of defense not been consulted on the plea arrangement? That seemed unlikely. Had political pressure caused him to take such a drastic act? If so, then perhaps after the election he would change his mind and restore it. No such luck.
Whatever Austin’s motivation, Judge McCall refused to take “no” for an answer, declaring his revocation invalid.
McCall made it clear, instead, that he was moving forward. As the judge explained, in the memo that Austin had long ago issued appointing Escallier, he had attested to her independent authority. “Ms. Escallier shall exercise her independent legal discretion with regard to judicial acts and other duties of the Convening Authority.” But even as McCall prepared to go forward, Austin appealed to the Court of Military Commissions Review, asking it to rule that he did indeed have the authority to revoke the plea deal. However, that court then ruled that the secretary had improperly rescinded the deal after it had taken effect.
Still, he refused to give up, seeking help elsewhere. And he found it. On the eve of the scheduled hearing, the Department of Justice filed papers asking the D.C. Circuit Court to prohibit the Gitmo court from moving ahead and to stay proceedings while it contemplated the decision. Those who had flown to Guantánamo then returned home, and a new hearing was set for January 28th at the D.C. Circuit Court. At issue was both Austin’s authority to take over the plea deal and whether he had the right to withdraw from it, as lawyers argue that the dependents had already started performing their part of the deal. Of course, in the second age of Trump, it is no longer Austin but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who will decide what happens next.
So, more than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks, here we are in the very same place we’ve been for endless years—on pause again, despite the endless charade of forward steps that go nowhere.
The Mirage of the Military Commissions
At this point, it’s worth asking whether the resolution of those cases by trial was ever a priority—or even a realistic goal. A look back over the course of the military commissions and the 9/11 case suggests some answers.
The Guantánamo detention facility was set up by a presidential military order issued on November 13, 2001. It authorized the detention of war-on-terror captives and mentioned future trials. “It is necessary for individuals subject to this order… to be detained, and, when tried, to be tried for violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws by military tribunals.” Accordingly, the commander of the naval base at Guantánamo spent the early months of the detention operation scouring the base itself for a suitable facility in which to hold such trials. He was surprised when no one at the Pentagon approached him about the need for such a building.
So here we stand, with Donald Trump back in the White House, awaiting what this will mean for the future of the forever prison.
Fast forward six years, a year after those “high-value detainees” already tortured at CIA black sites were brought to Guantánamo. As NBC’s Bob Windrem later reported, an “Expeditionary Legal Complex was built in 2007 in the expectation it would be used for the trial of terrorists accused of murdering nearly 3,000 people with twin attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.” In 2008, the 9/11 defendants were charged. And last April, 17 years later, the Pentagon opened a second courtroom at the cost of $4 million for other cases pending before the military tribunals. Intrepid New York Times Gitmo reporter Carol Rosenberg recently summed up the costs associated with those signs of a continuing belief that actual trial proceedings were indeed in the cards this way: “The war court proceedings have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries, infrastructure, and transportation. Since 2019, the Office of Military Commissions has added two new courtroom chambers, new offices and temporary housing, more lawyers, more security personnel, and more contractors.”
On the surface, it would seem as if the commitment to holding various war-on-terror trials was perfectly real. The price tag was certainly hefty enough, as were the numerous pre-trial proceedings in the 9/11 case, as well as in other cases before the military commissions, each involving charges against those accused of committing acts of terrorism—the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole destroyer with one defendant; terror bombings in Bali, Indonesia, with three defendants; and the cases of several other individuals charged with crimes of terrorism.
Yet given the failure of significant forward movement in such cases for so long, it’s hard not to wonder just how serious the commitment to resolving them ever was and whether the construction of such expensive trial buildings was either a mirage, intended to hide the fact that the cases were destined to go nowhere, or self-deception on the part of presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. (Donald Trump halted the military commissions during his first term in office, leaving them in legal limbo.)
After all this time, only two cases have ever gone to trial, one of which, that of Salim Hamdan, was later overturned. In the other, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was convicted on three counts, two of which were eventually overturned. (At present, Mr. Bahlul is serving a life sentence at Gitmo, having arrived on its opening day 23 years ago.)
Meanwhile, there have been a grand total of nine plea deals over all these years. Of those, one convicted detainee is serving out a sentence at Guantánamo that ends in 2032, two convictions have been overturned, and two remain on appeal—a paltry record at best, especially given the grimness of those acts of terror. For all of the time, effort, and money, not to mention emotional distress, the results have been appallingly minimal.
Biden and Gitmo
To his credit, President Joe Biden, who inherited a Guantánamo with only 40 detainees left out of a total population that once stood at 790, seemed determined to make progress both in the military commissions and in releasing some of the remaining “forever prisoners” (a term originally coined by Times reporter Rosenberg to describe those living in the legal limbo of indefinite detention, neither charged nor released). Biden provided Gitmo watchers (like me) with some hope that the prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, would actually close someday.
During Biden’s years in office, the population was reduced to 15 men—six forever prisoners and nine still part of the military commissions (two of whom are already convicted). Eleven of the Biden releases, consisting of Yemenis sent to Oman, occurred amid the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plea deal, as if he were whispering to us that we needn’t worry, the road to closure was still available. Yet even that set of transfers suffered from the same sort of one-step-forward-two steps-back shuffle that’s been the essence of Gitmo’s history. The Oman arrangement had originally been planned for October 2023, only to be put on pause once the war in Gaza erupted. One of the men released had been cleared since 2010, only to await arrangements made two presidencies later.
The Biden administration unfortunately never released the last prisoners held without charge or brought the accused to trial. Even in these final moments of his presidency, when he was arguably free to do whatever he wanted, including closing the prison, he chose instead, by virtue of his administration putting the deal on hold, to halt forward progress, leaving us to wonder why.
So here we stand, with Donald Trump back in the White House, awaiting what this will mean for the future of the forever prison.
Once You Break It, You Can Never Really Fix It
Sometimes, when it comes to Gitmo, it almost seems as if forces beyond the capacity of mere mortals are at play. No matter what promises are made, no matter what hope-inspiring acts are taken, no matter what progress occurs, the prison seems to have a life of its own, aided and abetted by those who continue to mount obstacles to any significant steps forward.
Of course, the biggest of the lessons learned should have been to honor the laws, both domestic and international, forbidding torture. Had the United States not authorized a program of what was euphemistically referred to by the administration of President George W. Bush as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory bombardment, and all too much more, those trials could have been held in a timely fashion and in federal court on the mainland.
As President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had wanted, the federal courts would have been capable of handling such cases without using “evidence” produced by torture. In fact, one Guantánamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was indeed transferred to the United States for trial in federal court and, though he was acquitted on 284 of 285 charges, he was found guilty on one count and sentenced to life in federal prison. Still, the hundreds of acquittals in his case chased away the idea of trying the remaining Guantánamo defendants in federal court.
From all of this, there’s a basic lesson to be learned: Once you violate both fair treatment of prisoners and the basic principles of law, finding an unchallenged resolution to such cases is essentially inconceivable.
In other words, once you break it, you can never really fix it.
Today, that long, soul-crushing, legally abhorrent story stands, at a far greater cost than we might once have imagined, where it has always stood—as a mistake that never should have happened and that, once made, never found a leader able to muster the courage to end it.
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Pentagon Repatriates Guantánamo Detainee Held Without Charge for Over Two Decades
The move came as the Biden administration faced pressure to clear the notorious military prison of all uncharged detainees before Donald Trump takes office.
Dec 31, 2024
The Biden administration announced late Monday that it transferred a Tunisian man who was never charged with a crime out of the notorious Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba, a move that came more than a decade after the detainee was approved for release.
The man, 59-year-old Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, had been held at Guantánamo since the day former U.S. President George W. Bush opened the prison camp in 2002. The Pentagon said in a statement Monday that al-Yazidi has been repatriated to the government of Tunisia.
With al-Yazidi's transfer, there are now 26 detainees remaining at Guantánamo, the majority of whom have never been charged with a crime and have been approved for release from the prison, which United Nations experts have said is "defined by the systematic use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." More detainees have died at Guantánamo than have been convicted of a crime, according to the human rights group Reprieve.
The Biden administration said in 2021 that it intended to shutter the prison, and critics have accused the administration of "a lack of courage" as it has dragged its feet on the matter.
But human rights campaigners have welcomed recent progress. Al-Yazidi was the fourth Guantánamo detainee in two weeks to be transferred from the prison by the Biden administration, which has faced growing pressure to clear the camp of the remaining uncharged men before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes power next month.
"Fifteen men remain who have never been charged with any crimes and have long been cleared by U.S. security agencies to leave Guantánamo, some for more than a decade," Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement earlier this month after the Biden administration announced the transfer of three never-charged men out of the prison camp.
"President Biden must transfer these men before he leaves office, or he will continue to bear responsibility for the abhorrent practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial by the U.S. government," said Eviatar. "It has been 23 years; President Biden can, and must, put an end to this now."
The transfer was announced on the same day that a Pentagon appeals panel "upheld a military judge's finding that the plea deals in the September 11 case are valid, clearing the way at least for now for a guilty plea hearing next week with the accused mastermind of the attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed," The New York Times reported Monday. Mohammed is among the Guantánamo detainees who have been charged with a crime by a military commission.
"Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge in the case, had ruled that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III acted too late and beyond the scope of his authority when he rescinded the three deals on August 2, two days after a senior Pentagon appointee had signed them," the Times reported. "Under the pretrial agreements, or PTAs, Mr. Mohammed and two co-defendants agreed to plead guilty to war crimes charges in exchange for life prison sentences rather than face a death-penalty trial."
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The Sentencing of Saeed Bakhouche Is a Grim Reminder of the Legacy of Guantánamo
We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to his plight or the plight of countless others who have been wrongfully detained and subjected to abuse.
May 21, 2024
On May 11, Saeed Bakhouche, a survivor of Guantánamo Bay, was abruptly sentenced to three years in prison and fined $2,000, taken immediately to jail from the courtroom.
An anonymous source said: "We were all stunned by the court's decision. Here's a man who spent over 21 years in Guantánamo, barely had eight months of freedom, homeless and unable to feed himself, and yet the court sends him to what is essentially another Guantánamo, if not worse."
The sentence came only two days after the United Nations experts warned that Bakhouche, 57 years old, would face terrorism charges in Algeria, not receive a fair trial, and risked renewed arbitrary detention.
From Guantánamo to Algeria, the road to justice has been littered with obstacles, with individuals like Bakhouche caught in the crossfire of geopolitical maneuvering and security theater.
The courtroom drama marked yet another chapter in the harrowing saga of Bakhouche, a man whose life has been entangled in the complex web of post-9/11 counterterrorism measures. As the gavel struck, sentencing him to three years behind bars, it was a stark reminder of the injustices that continue to plague him even after his release from Guantánamo Bay.
Bakhouche's journey from the confines of Guantánamo to the courtroom in Algeria has been marred by a litany of human rights violations, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by international observers. The recent warning issued by U.N. experts underscores the gravity of the situation, highlighting the inherent flaws in the legal proceedings against him.
In April 2022, Bakhouche was cleared for release from the notorious prison in U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay after enduring over two decades of arbitrary detention and torture. His transfer to Algeria in April 2023 was accompanied by assurances of humane treatment, yet the reality has been anything but humane.
The decision to return him to his home country came with assurances from the U.S. State Department regarding his treatment upon arrival. Bakhouch's lawyer, H. Candace Gorman, was led to believe that her client would be treated humanely, with access to legal representation and support to reintegrate into society.
However, upon his arrival in Algeria, he was quickly thrown into a bewildering ordeal of imprisonment, intense interrogations, and legal limbo, resembling a nightmarish scenario of Guantánamo. Deprived of legal representation and held incommunicado, he found himself caught in a complex legal situation where the principle of innocence until proven guilty appeared to have vanished.
The charges leveled against Bakhouche under Algeria's Penal Code reek of political opportunism, a thinly veiled attempt to scapegoat a man who has already suffered immeasurable trauma at the hands of the U.S. government. His prosecution flies in the face of fundamental principles of justice and fair trial, raising serious concerns about the integrity of the legal process.
The U.N. experts' assertion that Bakhouche faces the risk of renewed arbitrary detention further underscores the urgent need for international scrutiny and intervention. His plight serves as a stark reminder of the enduring legacy of Guantánamo, where justice has often taken a backseat to political expediency.
Bakhouche's case is not an isolated one; it is emblematic of a larger pattern of abuse and impunity that has characterized the so-called "war on terror." From Guantánamo to Algeria, the road to justice has been littered with obstacles, with individuals like Bakhouche caught in the crossfire of geopolitical maneuvering and security theater.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the former U.N. special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, recently highlighted ongoing concerns regarding the U.S. government's handling of detainees released from Guantánamo. In her comprehensive report published in June 2023, Ní Aoláin detailed numerous rights violations stemming from the transfer of detainees to foreign countries.
Among various violations, Ní Aoláin revealed instances of torture, arbitrary detention, and disappearances among released prisoners. Shockingly, in 30% of documented cases, recipient countries deprived these individuals of proper legal status.
The U.N. report underscored the United States' involvement in these problematic transfers, emphasizing a clear legal and moral obligation for the U.S. government. It must use diplomatic and legal resources to ensure these men are relocated, providing proper assurance and support to the recipient countries.
As the Biden administration seeks to extricate itself from the dilemma of Guantánamo, it must reckon with the human cost of its actions. Bakhouche and others like him are not mere statistics; they are individuals whose lives have been irreparably altered by the machinery of state-sanctioned violence.
The recent sentencing of Bakhouche serves as a grim reminder of the urgent need for accountability and justice. It is not enough to simply close the doors of Guantánamo; we must also reckon with the legacy of injustice it has left behind. Anything less would be a betrayal of the principles we claim to uphold.
In the pursuit of justice for Bakhouche and others like him, the international community must remain vigilant. We cannot allow the shadows of Guantánamo to continue to darken the lives of innocent individuals who have already suffered far too much.
As Bakhouche begins his journey behind bars once again, in Guantánamo 2.0 this time, let us not forget the injustices that have brought him to this point. His story stands as a testament to the depravity of both the U.S. and Algerian governments, subjecting him to abuse and torture, and it is a call to action for all those who believe in the sanctity of justice and the dignity of every individual.
In closing, let us heed the words of the U.N. experts who have sounded the alarm on Bakhouche's case. Let us demand accountability, transparency, and above all, justice for those who have been failed by the very systems meant to protect them. Only then can we truly begin to heal the wounds inflicted by Guantánamo and its legacy of injustice.
Saeed Bakhouche's case underscores the urgent need for action and accountability in the pursuit of justice. It is a stark reminder of the human cost of unchecked power and the devastating impact of prolonged detention without charge or trial. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to his plight or the plight of countless others who have been wrongfully detained and subjected to abuse.
We must demand transparency, accountability, and fair treatment for all detainees, regardless of their circumstances. We must advocate for Bakhouche's immediate release and call for reforms to ensure that such injustices never occur again. Only through collective action and unwavering commitment to human rights can we bring about meaningful change and ensure that justice prevails.
This article was first published by Cage International.
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