The Guantánamo prison, made infamous by its opening-day photo of men in orange uniforms and on their knees, entered its 25th year on Sunday, holding the last 15 detainees from the war against terrorism.
The U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, in southeast 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 U.S. military has held about 780 men and boys there, with the Bush administration repatriating about 500 of them.
Today the operation has a staff of 800 soldiers and civilians — more than 50 U.S. government workers for 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 this month, a U.S. military cargo plane brought the deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to the base on the day of their capture by U.S. forces.
They were there 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 Guantánamo, 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 Shaikh 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.
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Guantánamo’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 Guantánamo 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 defense 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 $13 million per year for 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 Guantánamo 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 Saudi, is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the U.S.S. 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 C.I.A. had tortured him.
Pretrial hearings in the Sept. 11 case could restart in March for three of the five defendants. Those three men, Mr. Mohammed, 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, and there is no timeline that would start it before the 25th anniversary of 9/11. 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 C.I.A.’s torture of him.
The fifth, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, has been sidelined for years as mentally incompetent to stand trial. Prosecutors want that decision reviewed, too.
Migrant Operations
Last January, President Trump ordered his administration to prepare to hold up to 30,000 migrants a day at Guantánamo. But that plan faded from view soon after separate high-profile visits by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Mr. Hegseth in February 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 Friday, the Homeland Security Department held 54 men there.
Because of the deployments and the aircraft needed to shuttle the migrants and support staff to the base, the Guantánamo transit-hub and migrant-detention operation is likely more expensive than the prison.
The Trump administration has refused to release the costs. But the Pentagon told Congress in March that it had spent $40 million in the first month, prompting Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, to estimate costs of $100,000 a day for Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisoner.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
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