The Trump Administration Is Imprisoning Somali Immigrants in Gitmo

“The worst place ever I’ve been in my life.” That’s how Sakariye Abdi Mohamed described the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where he and a handful of other Somali immigrants are being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Late last month, ICE put 12 Somali men on a plane and told them they were being deported to Somalia, according to interviews with community leaders, friends, and family members who are in touch with the detainees. Instead, they arrived at the notorious US military base in Cuba, where seven or eight of them remain. Since then, the men have said, they have been subjected to frigid temperatures, and they are shackled at all times. “Nobody tell us that we’re going to Guantanamo Bay,” Mohamed told me in a phone call last week. “Just like kidnapping.” It’s a dramatic escalation in President Donald Trump’s long-running campaign to target immigrants from the east African nation. Last year, he asserted that Somalis “contribute nothing” to the United States and declared, “I don’t want them in our country.” The president then unleashed roughly 2,000 heavily armed ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota, home to the country’s largest population of Somalis. The US military and the CIA began using Guantanamo to detain alleged “enemy combatants” following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The base, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, became a “symbol of injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law,” plagued by reports of torture and mistreatment of war on terrorism detainees. For years, ICE has operated its own, separate facility at Guantanamo called the Migrant Operations Center, which, according to a 2024 report by the International Refugee Assistance Project, was used to confine refugees apprehended at sea in “prison-like conditions.” At the beginning of his second term, Trump ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, to expand the Migrant Operations Center to “full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” The president promised to incarcerate as many as 30,000 of the “worst of the worst” immigrants at the Gitmo facility. That hasn’t happened, but over the past two years, ICE has used the base on and off to detain a smaller number of immigrants from countries including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. On August 28, Gillian Brockell—a journalist who closely tracks deportation flights—reported that migrants had been sent to the facility for the first time in months. Last week, Minnesota Public Radio first reported that at least some of those prisoners are members of that state’s Somali community. The detainees have been allowed to make phone calls from Guantanamo, and many have spoken to Abdinasir Kahin—a Chicago-based Somali community leader who has worked to connect the prisoners with the outside world—and Elmi Ware, a journalist who immigrated to the US from Somalia. In reporting this story, I spoke to Mohamed, Kahin, and Ware, as well as to friends and family of several of the detainees. In an email, a DHS spokesperson claimed that the Somalis flown to Guantanamo in late August “included some of the worst of the worst, with criminal histories including aggravated assaults, weapons offenses, robbery, multiple larcenies, police obstruction, possession of burglary tools, receiving stolen property, trespassing, unauthorized use of a vehicle, multiple drug charges, and DUIs.” He added that the detainees “have received due process, and all have final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge.” DHS declined to specify which of the Guantanamo inmates had been accused of those crimes; in response to follow-up questions, the spokesperson appeared to indicate that he did not know. At least some of the detainees have told people they have spoken to that they are not criminals and have not been charged with crimes. MPR reported last week that one of the men, Adam Abdullah, had received two parking tickets but had no criminal record. Several of the men at Guantanamo were applying for asylum and had work authorization, and at least one detainee had filed a habeas corpus petition, seeking to be released from detention. “I don’t have no criminal record,” Mohamed told me. “I don’t have no tickets.” I found no court records contradicting Mohamed’s assertion. Mohamed had been living with his cousin Ibrahim in Ohio at the time of his arrest. He said he was driving a truck for a commercial trucking company when he was pulled over by an Alabama state trooper on I-65. He was held by ICE for nearly a year in Louisiana before being sent to Guantanamo. “I told him at the time to stop working, because ICE was arresting everyone,” Ibrahim told me. But Mohamed refused. “He believed ICE was looking for criminals.” Mohamed’s friend and colleague, also named Ibrahim, affectionately described him as the rookie truck driver, viewed by his co-workers as a “young kid.” Mohamed had done everything right, he said: applied for asylum, waited for his work authorization, gotten his commercial driver’s license, paid his taxes. He’d hoped to build a better, brighter future in America than what he had left behind in Somalia. Now, he is detained in a facility originally meant for suspected terrorists. Another Guantanamo detainee, Kamal Hassan Olow, was arrested in December in Ohio, part of ICE’s Operation Buckeye. Abdirahman—a friend of Olow’s who is in daily contact with him—told me that Olow was working two jobs at the time of his arrest: a full-time position with Amazon and a part time job with a rental car agency. According to Abdirahman, Olow had a valid work permit and paid his taxes. He has a wife and children in Somalia, whom he was supporting. I found no evidence that Olow had a criminal record. The conditions at Guantanamo are harsh. There are cameras in the showers and the bathroom, according to Mohamed and those in communication with other detainees. The building is extremely cold—a condition that individuals previously detained by the CIA and the military at Guantanamo as part of the war on terrorism have also described. The DHS spokesperson said that all of the detainees’ allegations of mistreatment are “false,” adding that they are “provided three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries. Illegal aliens also have access to phones to communicate with family members and lawyers. Detainees have privacy in bathroom and shower areas.” According to Mohamed, guards at Guantanamo have said they are being held there because that’s what officials in Washington, DC, want. “There’s no other nation, only Somali people in Guantanamo Bay, in the prison,” he told me. “And when we ask them why we are here, they tell us…Washington…ordered to keep Somali people in the Guantanamo Bay.” Detainees held a hunger strike for several days after arriving in Cuba. According to those in contact with the men, officials told them that if they ended the strike, they would get to leave the naval base. Now, they no longer trust anything the guards say. When we spoke last week, Mohamed said he and the other detainees would once again be going on a hunger strike. This time, they would not be mollified by vague promises. “We die, or we go back to our country, or we go back to the States,” he said.