Former Guantánamo Prisoners Condemn Trump’s Order on Migrants

Edited by Sam Thielman

WE KNOW NOTHING about the newest people caged at Guantánamo Bay. That is by design. 

There is no publicly available roster of their names, where they were seized, or the status of their extant immigration cases. Immigration attorneys say the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detainee locator shows people suspected of being sent to Guantanamo appearing at an ICE facility in a Florida municipality called Plantation (...), a seeming placeholder. That reminded me of the Chicago attorneys who came to learn that when an arrested client was nowhere in the booking system, they were probably at Homan Square. 

"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," one such attorney, Jennifer Babaie of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, recently told USA Today. "They are being effectively disappeared."

These people, who reportedly are arriving at Guantanamo on daily flights, have no way of enforcing their basic rights beyond what the guards and the bureaucrats of one of the U.S. military's most inaccessible overseas bases permit them. Trump administration officials routinely talk of them as criminals, to spread the impression that those at Guantánamo deserve their fate. And that reminds 16 people who used to be caged there of precisely what they experienced, for many long and brutal years. 

FOREVER WARS friend Mansoor Adayfi—author, former Guantánamo prisoner, activist, and CAGE International's Guantanamo Project Coordinator—put together an open letter from several men who used to be caged there. They explain to the outside world, for whom Guantánamo is an abstraction, exactly what Guantánamo is: "a place where law is warped, dignity is stripped, and suffering is hidden behind barbed wire." 

What is happening to migrants at Guantánamo is the wages of normalizing indefinite detention. Make no mistake, the migrants being sent there today will not be the last group of people caged there. No one knows that better than the men who signed this letter. Some of them, like Mansoor and Moazzam Begg, never stopped fighting for the freedom of those still inside. Others, like Lakhdar Boumediene, fought for their rights all the way up to the Supreme Court and won. But then they learned that U.S. judges would never enforce their rights when the Defense Department objected. Will it be that way again? 

Mansoor shared this letter with FOREVER WARS. We publish it below, in full. If you read this, please share it. And support FOREVER WARS with a paid subscription. Other news outlets would not publish this letter—they barely publish news about Guantánamo at all anymore, let alone news that centers the people who best know what Guantánamo is. But the men who signed this letter know that what is at stake at Guantánamo is not how we remember the past. What is at stake there is the future.

An Open Letter from Former Guantánamo Prisoners Condemning Trump’s Order to Expand the Military Prison to Detain Migrants

We, the undersigned former Guantánamo prisoners, strongly condemn Donald Trump’s executive order to expand detention facilities for undocumented migrants at Guantánamo Bay.

Guantánamo is not just a prison—it is a place where law is warped, dignity is stripped, and suffering is hidden behind barbed wire. We lived it. We know the clang of metal doors, the weight of shackles, and the silence of a world that looked away. We know what it means to be caged without charge, without trial, without hope.

Now, the same system that stole years from our lives is expanding to imprison migrants, people seeking safety only to be sent to a place designed to strip them of their rights and exist outside the law. Guantánamo does not just allow abuse; it ensures cruelty. This executive order does not just enable injustice; it guarantees it.

Detaining migrants at Guantánamo denies them constitutional protections, trapping them in the same legal limbo we endured. This deliberate ambiguity enables abuse, just as it did with us. We know firsthand what happens when a system is designed to break people. This is not about security; it is about power, control, and using Guantánamo’s darkness to conceal yet another injustice.

This decision is a direct result of the impunity the U.S. has enjoyed for the crimes committed at Guantánamo. The failure to close the prison and reckon with its legacy has not only allowed these injustices to continue but has now enabled their expansion. Guantánamo should have been shut down long ago, yet instead, it is being revived for new victims.

We refuse to stay silent. We refuse to let others be swallowed by the same nightmare we endured. No one deserves to be thrown into a system built to erase them. We will not stop speaking. We will not stop fighting. We will not let Guantánamo’s horrors be repeated.

Close Guantánamo. End indefinite detention. Stop this order.

We are not just survivors of Guantánamo. We are witnesses. And we will not let the world forget.

In solidarity,

Mansoor Adayfi (GTMO441)
Moazzam Begg
Ahemed Errachidi
Lakhdar Boumediene
Ghalibe Al-bihani
Hisham Sliti
Abdellatif Nasr
Sufyian d Barhoumi
Hussein Yafai
Abdul-Almalik Abud
Ayoob Mohammed
Tarek Dergoul
Mohsen Alaskar
Djamel Ameziane
Hammami Hedi
Omar Deghayes

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