For 23 years, the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba has stood as a stain on the heart of American society. Conceived as a temporary holding site for detainees captured after 9/11, the base has become a permanent exception to the United States Constitution, where people are locked away without charge or trial. Its continued operation is a daily violation of the principles of justice and due process that the U.S. professes to stand for.
The history of Guantánamo Bay is directly responsible for upholding the current expansionary use proposed by the Trump administration. Many of Guantánamo’s detainees did not begin their captivity in Cuba; they were first held in a secret network of CIA “black sites” where they were subjected to brutal interrogations beyond the reach of courts or lawful government oversight. These covert facilities, scattered across the globe, allowed the Bush administration to operate outside both domestic and international law.
The CIA then quietly transferred the detainees to Guantánamo, carrying with them the scars of torture from years of unjust detention. It is clear that the prison is a system built to exploit legal loopholes and deny responsibility, trapping these detainees in a final destination of indefinite confinement.
The secrecy that defined those black sites did not end; it simply moved to Guantánamo Bay, where lawlessness was given an official address.
At its core, Guantánamo Bay exists beyond the framework of American justice. The Bush presidency established authority for the military to use its own separate justice system — military tribunals — for detainees.
Of the 780 men once held there without trial, most have been released — thanks to extensive international scrutiny of many of these tribunals. Still, 15 men remain in captivity there today. Though many of these men have no charges pending, they have no path to freedom. The U.S.’s continued negligence of justice behind the masquerade of national security has carved out a lawless zone where due process is optional and human rights are relative.
Guantánamo remains open through conscious political choice, sustained by Republican lawmakers who have fought to keep it in operation and by Democrats who, despite promising closure, have too often been complicit through inaction. Even with only 15 detainees, the prison costs roughly $500 million per year, or more than $30 million per prisoner. This financial cost would not be justifiable even if the amount was lower, and given the violations of due process, it is unreasonable for the U.S. to claim any moral credibility in their security funding allocations.
Lack of due process is not a relic of the past. It has spanned administrations, resurfacing most visibly under the current Republican presidency but rooted in a bipartisan willingness to sacrifice justice for the illusion of security. Defying federal courts, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrants to El Salvador’s supermax prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, without hearings. In doing so, the administration was testing whether executive power could override the Constitution’s guarantee of habeas corpus — and it can.
Guantánamo Bay set the stage for this kind of overreach, showing how easily the machinery of offshore detention can be revived to place people beyond the reach of American law. The genius and moral failure of Guantánamo’s design was geographic. By placing detainees just outside U.S. borders, the Bush administration invented a legal gray zone where the Constitution’s promise of due process no longer applied. That same logic is now being used by the Trump administration to justify deporting undocumented migrants to prisons outside the U.S.
The current administration publicly signaled plans in January to expand the number of detainees in Guantánamo Bay to “full capacity.” Rather than moving toward closure, this policy envisions Guantánamo as an enduring, scalable instrument of detention. By treating the base as an unfulfilled opportunity instead of a historical wrong to be remedied, Trump’s actions underscore how fragile constitutional safeguards are when pit against right-wing fear and expediency drives policy.
Supporters of Guantánamo’s continued operation claim it remains vital to national security, warning that shutting it down would be “the loss of an important tool that could potentially prevent future attacks.” Two decades of experience shows these fears are overstated.
The U.S. already has a secure, financially solvent, and lawful alternative: transfer detainees who have credible terrorism or war-crime charges to federal courts for trial, and provide humane, just resolutions for those who do not. This approach would end Guantánamo’s legal limbo while reaffirming that America confronts threats through the rule of law.
Guantánamo Bay stands as a lingering symbol of fear-driven politics created by the Bush administration’s disastrous “war on terror.” There is only one solution to minimize the moral, legal, and fiscal damage that the base in Guantánamo Bay has caused: shut it down.
