Jan 8, 2026, New York – With the 24th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay approaching on January 11, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement: 

We have said every year since the prison opened, and we say again after 24 years: Guantánamo must be closed now, permanently, starting with the prompt transfer and safe resettlement of our client Guled Hassan Duran, who has been approved for transfer for many years. 

Guantánamo persists, in both the literal and figurative sense. There is Guantánamo, the military prison that the Bush administration established in January 2002 to hold people it captured in its so-called global “war on terror,” a place of lawlessness and racism, where the U.S. government has tortured, indefinitely detained, humiliated, force-fed, and otherwise abused hundreds of Muslim men and boys. Down from a peak of 780, fifteen people remain. They include Mr. Duran and two other men also long approved for transfer; three men who have never been charged with any offense and await approval for transfer; and nine military commission defendants, including the five 9/11 suspects, whose plea agreements were unlawfully withdrawn by the Biden administration and who will never stand trial because they were tortured by the CIA, and two who have been convicted and are serving sentences. 

There is also what “Guantánamo” represents, the dark emblem of the Bush administration’s far-reaching effort to evade the law, wage war without end or territorial limits, and expand presidential power at the expense of human rights and civil liberties. One can see the influence of this approach all over the Trump presidency, most directly with the detention of hundreds of migrants at the military base, but also from the rendition and imprisonment of migrants at CECOT in El Salvador and the use of military force against civilians in the Caribbean and Venezuela, all in violation of U.S. and international law. Trump may well be a unique threat to U.S. democracy, even a fascist one, but it is important to understand that the architects of the “war on terror” – and the previous administrations who refused to hold them accountable and instead continued that legacy – opened the door to what is playing out now in Latin America and being threatened around the world. It is no coincidence that the U.S. brought the abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to Guantánamo before loading him and his wife on a plane to New York last weekend.

Regardless of who is in power or which issues are making headlines, we will continue to organize with our allies until Guantánamo has ended in every sense. Closing the physical prison at Guantánamo remains a necessary step to dismantling the culture of impunity that has led us to where we are today.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has led the legal battle over Guantánamo for 24 years – representing clients in two Supreme Court cases and organizing and coordinating hundreds of pro bono lawyers across the country, ensuring that nearly all the men detained at Guantánamo have had the option of legal representation. Among other Guantánamo cases, the Center has represented the families of men who died at Guantánamo, men who have been released and are seeking justice in international courts, and men who were charged before the military commissions.