A Legal Resident, No Criminal Record, Sent to Guantánamo Anyway

On December 12, 2025, ICE agents pulled over Adam Abdullah, a 31-year-old auto mechanic in St. Paul, Minnesota. He asked for a warrant. They told him they didn't need one — they already knew who he was. Nine months, three jails, and one aborted deportation order to Somalia later, Abdullah is now one of eight Somali men imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. naval base built to hold people the state wanted to disappear from the reach of law entirely. He has no criminal record. He came to the U.S. seeking asylum in 2023 and had been checking in with ICE the whole time, exactly as required. None of that mattered.

This is the tell that the entire 'worst of the worst' framing around immigration enforcement was always a lie designed to manufacture consent. Guantánamo was sold, and still gets sold in press releases, as a facility for dangerous criminals ICE can't safely hold on the mainland. Abdullah's case, reported this week by Minnesota Public Radio and Truthout, shows the actual selection criteria: he was findable, he was Black, he was Muslim, and he was from a country the administration has already tried to cut off with a Somalia-specific immigration moratorium bill working through Congress. Yumna Rizvi of the Center for Victims of Torture put the logic plainly — this is about conflating immigration itself with terrorism, using a base built for that exact purpose after 9/11 to do it again to a different population.

The conditions matter as much as the location. Human Rights Watch documented Venezuelan detainees at the same facility describing isolated confinement up to 23 hours a day, no information about their cases, and forbidden even from speaking to each other during their one hour of release. Abdullah's own contact with the outside world is a 10-minute call, and his lawyer Marc Prokosch isn't even confident those calls are confidential. A man with a clean record, checking in with immigration authorities as instructed, is being held in a facility built and defended on the premise that ordinary legal process doesn't apply there. That is not an accident of bureaucracy. Guantánamo's entire post-9/11 legal architecture exists specifically to put people beyond the reach of counsel and courts — that's the product being deployed here, not a side effect.

None of this needed new legislation or a court ruling to happen. It needed only a highway stop under something branded "Operation Metro Surge" and a decision, made somewhere without any visible due process, to route a man toward a facility infamous for torture instead of the deportation flight he'd already been told to expect. The infrastructure was already sitting there from the war on terror, repurposed with zero public debate about whether a prison built for indefinite detention without trial should ever hold immigration detainees at all. It should not. No one should be inside Guantánamo, and building a "migrant wing" of it doesn't launder that history, it extends it.

Solidarity here isn't abstract. It means naming what's happening to Abdullah and the seven other men held with him for what it is — extrajudicial detention of people who committed no crime, chosen because of where they were born and what that lets the state pretend about them. It means refusing the framing every time a spokesperson calls this facility a security necessity rather than what the record shows: a legal void built to swallow people ICE finds administratively convenient to disappear.

Sources

Truthout: Somali Migrant With Legal Right to Live in US Sent to Guantánamo
Minnesota Public Radio: St. Paul man Adam Abdullah arrested in ICE surge, sent to Guantánamo Bay
Human Rights Watch: US Migrants Face Abuse in Guantánamo