Handcuffed and shackled, the men appear in government propaganda photos being herded towards military cargo planes that will carry them to an uncertain future in an infamous land.
“These individuals are the worst of the worst that we have pulled off of our streets,” Donald Trump’s homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, thundered against the supposedly “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” being packed off to Guantánamo Bay.
In interviews and on social media, Noem alleged those being sent to the notorious US naval base in Cuba included South American “child pedophiles”, drug traffickers and “vicious gang members” guilty of “heinous crimes”.
But 10 days after the Trump administration began sending immigrants to Guantánamo, authorities have yet to provide proof of those claims as mystery continues to surround their identities and doubts grow over whether many have committed any crime at all.
“It sounds like this picture the government is painting of them being people who are dangerous and violent is patently false,” said Jessica Vosburgh, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of a coalition of rights groups that this week sued the Trump administration for access to the Guantánamo detainees. “It’s clear the folks who we suspect have been sent to Guantánamo are not, on the whole, dangerous people,” Vosburgh added, even if people in immigration detention “may have a mix of criminal backgrounds”.
J Wells Dixon, a lawyer with nearly two decades’ experience working with prisoners in a place critics call “America’s gulag”, said: “It is almost impossible to know exactly what is happening at Guantánamo at this moment. I’m not sure the Trump administration really understands what is happening.”
The pictures US authorities have released of people they call “highly dangerous criminal aliens” have inadvertently shed some light on the identity of Trump’s Guantánamo internees.
According to the website Migrant Insider, relatives identified one member of the first 10-member group flown to Guantánamo on 4 February as Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera. The 23-year-old Venezuelan was detained seeking asylum on the southern border on 19 January, one day before Trump took power vowing to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came”. “He’s innocent,” Castillo’s sister, Yajaira Castillo, told the Spanish news agency EFE, denying her brother was part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
A second man spotted in the photos is Tilso Ramón Gómez Lugo, 37, a car mechanic from north-west Venezuela who had been sent to an immigration detention facility in Texas after being picked up on the border in April 2024. “I’ve known him since he was a child. He’s an educated boy who has no problems with anyone. He is someone with good parents, a hard worker and a good family – and very well-liked in the town we are from,” a friend, who asked not to be named, told the Guardian.
“Trump had and has my support – but I do not agree with these extreme measures, especially against our compatriots,” added the friend, who like many fellow Venezuelans backed Trump believing he would take a hard-line stance on their home country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.
A third detainee is reportedly 25-year-old Yoiker David Sequera, a Venezuelan barber who was reportedly picked up by border agents last September after making the perilous journey through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama to reach the US. “My son is no criminal,” one relative, who suspected Sequera had been targeted because of his tattoos, told Migrant Insider.
For the most part, however, the life stories of the immigrants remain an enigma.
“The US government has shared close to nothing … they’re being completely evasive with sharing names,” said Vosburgh, whose conversations with other detainees and relatives of those suspected to be in Guantánamo led her to believe that Noem’s descriptions of the detainees as “vicious” criminals were “bald-faced lies”.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official said all of those sent to Guantánamo had “committed a crime by entering the United States illegally”. “In addition to holding violent gang members and other high-threat illegal aliens, Guantánamo Bay is also holding other illegal aliens with final deportation orders. Every single alien at Guantánamo Bay has a final deportation order,” the official added, without offering evidence that any of the detainees had links to gangs or crime.
The official declined to disclose precisely how many detainees were being held at Guantánamo but said it was “less than 100”. “In total, there have been eight flights in eight days,” the official added on Wednesday. On Thursday the New York Times said 98 men had been sent to the island base by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) between 4 and 11 February.
“We don’t know who these individuals are yet. In that sense, it is reminiscent of Guantánamo’s past,” said Dixon, recalling the base’s post-9/11 conversion into a prison for “enemy combatants” captured in the “war on terror”.
“People may forget [that] after Guantánamo opened in early 2002, it took quite a long time to learn who was detained [there], why they were there and what had happened to them. That information only started to become public when lawyers like me started traveling to Guantánamo to meet these individuals.”
Back then, US authorities also called those held at Guantánamo “the worst of the worst”, recalled Dixon.
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“The reality was something very different. The reality was that you had people like the Uyghurs [Turkic Muslims] who had fled persecution in China and were rounded up in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan … and ended up in Guantánamo … The reality was something very different from the propaganda – and I think that’s undoubtedly what you’re going to see here.”
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, said all of the detainees were thought to be Venezuelan men. “But until we’re down there, we can’t be sure. And the government’s … threatening to send thousands [of people, so] I suspect at some point it’ll move beyond Venezuelans,” he added.
If the identities of the Guantánamo detainees remain cloaked in secrecy, activists say there is little doubt over the conditions that await them at an isolated island base that has become synonymous with human rights abuses and torture.
Fifty-three of the 98 detainees have reportedly been sent to a medium- to high-security military prison called Camp 6. It has previously been used to house “war on terror” prisoners, in some cases for years. The other 45 people are being held in “a lower-security building” on the other side of the base and being guarded by members of the US Coast Guard, according to the New York Times.
A 2007 Amnesty International report painted a dire picture of life inside Camp 6, which was originally built to house 178 detainees. The US government claimed the facility combined “humane treatment with security needs” but activists called conditions there “unacceptably harsh”.
The cells had no access to natural light or air and were lit by fluorescent lighting 24 hours a day, Amnesty said. Detainees “consistently complained of being too cold in the steel cells” as a result of air conditioning controlled by guards.
Five Uyghur prisoners cited in the report told lawyers Camp 6’s strict regime left them feeling “despair, crushing loneliness, and abandonment by the world”. One previously smiley, “gentle and pleasant” man now “appeared to be in despair” and said he was “beginning to hear voices”.
Dixon said it was possible detainees could be held in isolation for 22 hours each day.
Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, said the Guantánamo detainees had fallen into “a legal black hole”.
“You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse … and the inability to contact the outside world is intense,” she said, calling for an end to Trump’s transfers.
Schacher believes the Guantánamo transfers were designed to please Trump’s base. “It’s political theater … cruelty theater … harsh-on-immigrants theater,” she added.
“All we really know is that the Trump administration is trying to evoke the terrible images of Guantánamo in order to appear tough on illegal immigration in the United States. That’s what this is about,” said Dixon. “This is not about law or policy … It’s a catastrophic human rights disaster.”
Additional reporting by Clavel Rangel
