9/11 at 25: Guantánamo Never Closed. Now It Holds Immigrants

Twenty-five years after September 11th, Guantánamo Bay is still open. Fifteen men are still held there. Six have never been charged with anything at all. And on August 26, 2026, a military judge finally set a trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants: June 5, 2028, nearly 27 years after the attacks.

In the first episode of Immigrantly's three-part 9/11 at 25 series, Saadia Khan sits down with Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has litigated Guantánamo cases since 2002. He filed the first habeas petition on behalf of detainees when no one in Washington would carry the papers to the courthouse. He was one of the first lawyers allowed onto the base.

This conversation covers what actually built Guantánamo and what has kept it standing through four presidencies:

• Why the first people held at Guantánamo were not Muslims, but Black Haitian refugees intercepted at sea in 1991• How the U.S. filled the prison using leaflets and $5,000 bounties, not battlefield capture• The domestic sweeps of South Asian and Arab Muslim men, held in secret immigration hearings with their names erased from the public docket• Mohammed al-Qahtani, a schizophrenic man held roughly two decades, much of it in solitary confinement, and Abu Zubaydah, the first man waterboarded, still never charged• Guled Duran, cleared for release by six agencies, whose habeas petition has sat with a judge for a decade• Why the torture evidence argument is not the reason these cases never went to trial• And what it means that the Trump administration flew roughly 500 immigrants to Guantánamo between February and June 2025, at a reported cost of about $100,000 per person per day

The machinery built in 2001 was never dismantled. Machinery that isn't dismantled gets used again on somebody else.

Saadia's take: she is not here to acknowledge the anniversary. She is here to audit it.

Learn more about the Center for Constitutional Rights at ccrjustice.org, or follow @ccrjustice.

Next Tuesday: a woman whose father, a firefighter, went into the towers and did not come out. She was six. She has spent the years since objecting to what this country did to Muslims in her family's name.

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Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound

Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.