Somali legal resident detained by ICE transferred to Guantánamo Bay detention camp

In December, ICE agents pulled over Adam Abdullah, a 31-year-old Somali who arrived in the United States in 2023 and holds a work permit and Social Security number. He was arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota, as part of Operation Metro Surge and initially held at Freeborn County Jail before being moved to detention centers in Kentucky and Louisiana. ICE later arranged a flight from Miami that included a refueling stop in Cuba, after which Abdullah was placed at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Six, where he has remained for roughly two weeks.

He says he was shackled during each leg of the journey and now receives only five- to ten-minute phone calls, whose confidentiality is uncertain. His lawyer, Marc Prokosch, notes that Abdullah is his first client detained at Guantánamo. The detention follows a Trump-era executive order to send certain immigration detainees to the base, and the ACLU has filed a lawsuit to halt the practice, with a hearing set for October. The Department of Homeland Security described the recent flight as carrying “some of the worst of the worst” illegal aliens.