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05-03-2025
GUANTANAMO BAY: We, the undersigned former Guantanamo prisoners, strongly condemn US President Donald Trump’s executive order to expand detention facilities for undocumented people at Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo 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 that exists outside the law designed to strip them of their rights. Guantanamo does not just allow abuse; it ensures cruelty. This executive order does not just enable injustice; it guarantees it.
Detaining migrants at Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo’s darkness to conceal yet another injustice.
This decision is a direct result of the impunity the US has enjoyed for the crimes committed at Guantanamo. 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. Guantanamo should have been shut down long ago; 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 Guantanamo’s horrors be repeated.
Close Guantanamo. End indefinite detention. Stop this order.
We are not just survivors of Guantanamo. We are witnesses. And we will not let the world forget.
In solidarity,
Mansoor Adayfi (GTMO441)
Mansoor Adayfi is a writer, artist, activist, and former Guantanamo prisoner held for over 14 years without charges. Adayfi was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of suspected terrorist. In 2019, Adayfi won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism. His memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantanamo was released in August 2021. He Works as Cage’s Guantanamo Project Coordinator.
He writes, I was subjected to torture and continual harassment. I fought to be treated humanely and to be granted basic human rights, and after 14 years was released. Throughout my imprisonment, I imagined that one day the world would learn what happened to us and would demand accountability and justice. I thought once people knew, they would close this deplorable place.
It has been almost nine years since I was released. All this time, I have not stopped writing and giving interviews about what happened to me. The world knows, and yet, Guantanamo is still functioning.
Guantanamo was established in the aftermath of 9/11, a tragic event that profoundly shook the world. In its wake, the US launched the so-called global “war on terror”, a campaign ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism but which, in reality, legalized torture, undermined international law, and dehumanized an entire faith community. (BBC)
