Is Guantanamo Bay still active? What next for notorious prison camp

For years, the images of shackled detainees in orange jumpsuits were synonymous with America’s War on Terror.

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the southeastern coast of Cuba had been leased to the US since 1903, but after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington it became home to America’s most notorious prison camp.

President Bush ordered a detention facility to be opened on the site in January 2002 specifically to house “enemy combatants” linked to the attacks.

The legal status of the detainees, the cage-like conditions in which they held, and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” they were subjected to triggered legal challenges and controversies for multiple administrations.

But efforts to shut it down have failed, and now the facility is facing another lease of life as a detention centre for undocumented migrants, after President Trump announced plans to turn it into a holding facility with 30,000 beds.

At its peak in 2003, Guantanamo Bay held about 680 prisoners. A total of about 780 inmates have passed through it in the past two decades.

In his first run for president in 2008, Barack Obama promised to close down the facility. During his presidency, the number of people detained there dropped from 242 to 55.

But some detainees could not return to their home countries and there was resistance to them being resettled in the United States.

During his first term, Trump vowed to keep Guantanamo Bay open before Joe Biden resumed efforts to shutter it. Just a few weeks before his term ended, 11 of the detainees — all from Yemen — were released and sent to Oman.

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That leaves 15 detainees in the facility. Two have been convicted on terrorist charges by a US military commission and seven others are awaiting trial, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11.

Three of the detainees have not been charged with any crimes but are considered too great a threat to national security to be released.

In June 2023 an independent UN investigator said inmates had been subjected to “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” at the existing facilities.

Tessa Lemos Del Pino, executive director of the Tennessee Justice for Our Neighbors migrant assistance group, said the announcement added to the sense of fear in migrant communities in America and raised concerns about access to legal counsel for anyone transported there.

“At this point, I feel like we have seen so many efforts to terrorise the immigrant community and those who are working with them that it just feels like one more attack,” she said.

“It’s incredibly sad to hear that they would be using Guantanamo Bay for this. It goes back to the question about folks accessing representation in detention, because who’s going to be able to go out there to meet with a client?”