The first image of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, released by the Defence Department in 2002. — Shane T. McCoy/US Navy via The New York Times
THE Guantanamo prison, made infamous by its opening-day photo of men in orange uniforms and on their knees, entered its 25th year this month, holding the last 15 detainees from the war against terrorism.
The US base in Guantanamo Bay, in south-east Cuba, is more than 100 years old and has about 4,200 residents.
The prison opened on Jan 11, 2002, with the arrival of 20 detainees from the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Over the years, the US military has held about 780 men and boys there, with the Bush administration repatriating about 500 of them.
Today the operation is staffed with 800 soldiers and civilians – more than 50 US government workers for every detainee.
In the past year, the Trump administration has used the base as a transit hub for federal prisoners, including about 775 migrants held there for days or weeks.
In a secret operation early this month, a US military cargo plane brought deposed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to the base on the day of their capture by US forces.
They were there for a matter of minutes before they were taken across an airstrip to a large Justice Department passenger plane that flew them to New York for detention and federal charges.
But in 2026 the focus could return to the cases before the national security court at the remote base, which was created after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.
Wartime prison
The remaining 15 wartime prisoners at Guantanamo, ages 46 to 64, have been held in a single building since last year and are rarely seen by anybody but their guards and lawyers.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept 11 plot, has been there for nearly 20 years and has not yet faced trial.
Guantanamo’s longest-held prisoner, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence for conspiracy, is on his own tier, in a form of solitary confinement.
He is the only one who remains there from the day the prison opened, when a military photographer captured the first 20 detainees on their knees.
The prison at Guantanamo is an expensive operation, in part because it has no permanent staff.
Instead, tens of thousands of troops have served there on temporary deployments. Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, did so from 2004 to 2005 as a lieutenant in the New Jersey National Guard.
The last study of the costs of running the prison put the figure at more than US$13mil per year per prisoner in 2019. At the time, there were 40 prisoners, held across four different facilities, and a staff of 1,800.
Court cases
No death penalty case has ever reached trial at Guantanamo Bay, but the longest, continuously running case is scheduled to go to trial in June.
In that case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is from Saudi Arabia, is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000.
He has been held since 2002 and was charged in 2011. In 2023, a federal judge excluded his confessions to federal agents in his upcoming trial because the CIA had tortured him.
Pretrial hearings in the Sept 11 case could restart in March for three of the five defendants.
Those three men, Khalid, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, recently lost a bid to reinstate a plea-bargain agreement they had reached with prosecutors and a senior Pentagon official.
No date for a trial has been set by the judge. Five men are charged in the attacks, and they have been in custody since 2002 and 2003.
The case of a fourth defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, has been stalled while prosecutors appeal an adverse ruling stemming from the CIA’s torture of him.
The fifth, Ramzi Binalshibh, has been sidelined for years as mentally incompetent to stand trial. Prosecutors want that decision reviewed, too.
Migrant operations
In January 2025, President Donald Trump ordered his administration to prepare to hold up to 30,000 migrants a day at Guantanamo. But that plan faded from view soon after separate high-profile visits by Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, and Hegseth that appeared to be part of a strategy of trying to scare people into self-deporting.
Fewer than 775 foreign men being removed from the United States have passed through the deportation operation there, in part because of its expense and impracticality.
As of Jan 9, Homeland Security held 54 men there.
Because of the deployments and the aircraft needed to shuttle the migrants and support staff to the base, the Guantanamo transit hub and migrant-detention operation are likely more expensive than the prison.
The Trump administration has refused to release the costs. But the Pentagon told Congress last year that it had spent US$40mil in the first month, prompting a senator to estimate costs of US$100,000 a day per Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisoner. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
