Editor’s Note

The recent reporting on eight Somali men detained at Guantánamo is among the first detailed firsthand accounts I have seen since Chikin Melele reported on the experience of a Marshallese man held there more than a year ago. The parallels are striking. In both cases, men were held at Guantánamo for about a month—considerably longer than the roughly 12-day average reported for immigration detainees sent there—and described harsh conditions, including extreme heat or cold, shackling, isolation, confinement in outdoor cages, inadequate food and psychological distress. Perhaps most strikingly, after returning home, both Adam Abdullah in Somalia and Gideon Aron in the Marshall Islands described a stigma that followed them from Guantánamo: family and community members assumed that being sent to a prison synonymous with terrorism must mean they had done something terrible.

Adam Abdullah, 31, had been detained since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota in December 2025. He arrived in the United States in 2023 as an asylum seeker. He had work authorization and a Social Security number, established a mechanic business and also worked repairing vehicles for Amazon. Reporting by Sahan Journal and MPR News found no Minnesota criminal record beyond two snow-emergency parking citations.

Sahan Journal’s latest article adds a particularly painful detail: Adam’s mother died in March while he was being held at a detention center in Kentucky. He said that while she was ill, he agreed to voluntary departure because he wanted to return home to see her. He asked again after she died. Instead, he remained in U.S. detention for approximately another six months, including about a month at Guantánamo.

Now he is trying to rebuild his life in Somalia, but the stigma followed him there. Neighbors and even relatives question whether he could really have been imprisoned at Guantánamo if he had done nothing seriously wrong.

Gideon, the Marshallese man that Chikin Melele interviewed, told us essentially the same thing.

Hassan Abdi Abtidoon, also 31, was another asylum seeker. He worked in factories and drove for Uber and Lyft. After receiving a removal order, he attempted to seek asylum in Canada in May. Canadian authorities returned him to U.S. officials, and he was detained in Minnesota before eventually being transferred through Louisiana to Guantánamo.

Hassan said ICE took his iPhone, wallet and $740 in cash while he was detained at the Kandiyohi County jail in Willmar, Minnesota, and the belongings were never returned to him. He therefore arrived at the Mogadishu airport without his phone and the contact information stored in it, without his money, and without a way to pay for food or lodging. He was eventually able to reach his sister.

His life has been profoundly disrupted—and it is worth remembering that there was a reason he had sought asylum in the first place. Hassan told Sahan Journal that he remains concerned about his safety in Somalia.

Then there is Abdullahi Jamal Abdi, 42, of Pennsylvania, who was deported to a country he barely knows.

Abdullahi entered the United States legally as a refugee at eight years old in 1992. He has spent nearly his entire life in the United States. According to his wife, he does not speak Somali and is unfamiliar with Somali culture. As someone who studies language education, I cannot overlook the irony here: the United States spent decades educating a refugee child almost entirely in English, and then, more than three decades later, deported the adult he became to a country whose language he does not speak.

Abdullahi and his wife, Reyann Abdi, have been together for more than 17 years and have two children. Their youngest is five years old and keeps asking where his father went.

Reyann told Sahan Journal that Abdullahi’s immigration problems trace back to a DUI when he was a teenager and a filing fee his mother failed to pay while he was still a minor. She said the family was contesting his case when he was abruptly deported. His situation in Somalia is particularly precarious because, according to his wife, he has no family ties there.

There is an important legal distinction here.

Did the government have legal authority to deport these men? Their attorney acknowledges that they had final removal orders.

But that does not answer another question: Why did the U.S. government need to detain them at Guantánamo before deporting them?

Immigration attorney Marc Prokosch, who is representing four of the Somali men detained at Guantánamo, believes transferring immigration detainees through the military base is intended in part to deter future asylum seekers. That is his interpretation—not an established statement of DHS policy. But his argument is that Guantánamo itself carries a message. Detention there creates an association between ordinary immigration detainees and terrorism: if someone was imprisoned at Guantánamo, people assume there must have been a reason.

There is another development that concerns me as an editor.

ICE has stopped displaying detention locations in its public detainee database for people with final removal orders. Attorneys say that makes it harder to locate and communicate with clients who may still have legal options despite having removal orders.

That matters directly to Chikin Melele.

The ICE detainee locator is how we discovered that Marshallese man Gideon Aron had been transferred to Guantánamo in July 2025. We entered his information and suddenly saw something we did not expect: Guantánamo Bay.

Under the current policy, finding another person through that same method may no longer be possible.

Whether deterrence through stigma is actually DHS’s intention is not established by Sahan Journal’s reporting. That is Prokosch’s interpretation, and it should be understood as such.

But the effect of that stigma is documented. Gideon described the same experience.

Before his deportation, Hassan predicted what would happen. He worried that his name would become associated with Guantánamo and that people in Somalia would assume someone held there must be a terrorist or dangerous person.

After his deportation, Adam reported that it did happen. Even members of his own family questioned whether he could have been sent to Guantánamo without having done something terrible.

And independently, thousands of miles away in the Marshall Islands, Gideon described essentially the same experience.

Before his detention and deportation, Gideon told us he had rebuilt his life. He had become a model employee, was active in his church and was devoted to his family. After returning to the Marshall Islands, however, he felt like an outcast. He experienced night terrors and said he was constantly looking over his shoulder in Majuro. He missed his children in the United States and wrestled with what it would mean to bring them to a country—and particularly to life in an outer island—that they had never known.

Gideon’s difficulties after deportation weren’t simply the result of government neglect. Gideon and immigration lawyers are still working on his case, while the Marshall Islands government has itself had to respond to an increasing number of citizens being deported from the United States.

The RMI has formed a task force and established procedures to receive and orient returning citizens when they arrive. That assistance can include transportation from the airport and temporary lodging for people who need to wait for a boat or flight to Ebeye or their home islands.

But the increase in deportations raises other questions that Chikin Melele will continue to report on: How much information does the RMI receive from the United States before its citizens are returned? Does it arrive early enough for the government to prepare? And what information and resources does the RMI need to support people returning after years—or even decades—away?

For Gideon, reintegration has also happened at the community level.

Telling his story was painful, but Gideon later told us that it also helped clear his name.

After Chikin Melele shared his story, people began treating him differently. When people on the island recognized him, they called him over to sit with them and eat. He began to feel included in the community rather than feared or avoided.

That is what makes the new reporting from Somalia so important to me.

More than a year after a Marshallese man described what happened to him at Guantánamo and what followed him home, eight Somali men have emerged from the same prison with accounts that are strikingly familiar.

The detention ended when they left Guantánamo. The consequences do not.

To read the original reporting on the Somali cohort detained at Guantánamo, see: https://sahanjournal.com/immigration/guantanamo-bay-prison-nine-men-deported-somalia/

To watch Gideon’s video story or read our previous reporting about him, see:

Bwebwenatoun Mour: Gideon Aron