Gitmo Detainees: Where Are They Now?

One of the earliest Obama pledges was to close the detention camp at Guantanamo. After Congress moved to block any Guantanamo detainee from entering the United States, the courts appear to be relocating the detainees to exotic places like Herzagovinia, Palau, and Chad.

Chisun Lee wrote this as an Op-Ed for the NY Times:

As the Obama administration and Congress try to forge a legal framework for detaining suspected terrorists, they might want to take a close look at what's happening at the federal district courthouse just a short walk down Pennsylvania Avenue from both the White House and the Capitol.

Trial judges there have quietly decided 31 of some 200 cases brought by Guantánamo inmates seeking freedom. Dossier by dossier, the jurists have answered the core questions that policy experts have been addressing in theory: When can the president place someone in preventive detention, and how solid does the evidence need to be?

President Obama, like George W. Bush before him, has claimed the power to detain not only Qaeda and Taliban members, but also those who "support" them. Last year the Supreme Court ruled [2] (PDF) that the courts can scrutinize these detention decisions and overturn them if they are invalid. But the court didn't say exactly what a valid detention looks like, and Congress hasn't stepped in to make it clear.

Nonprofit news source Propublica, has a chart of where 36 of the, as of January 17, 2009, approximately 245 detainees have ended up. Here is what happened to detainees prior to 2009.

Is There a Detention Center Near You?

By the fall of 2007 the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will spend an estimated $1 billion per year to detain over 27, 500 immigrants. ICE operates eight Service Processing Centers (SPCs) and seven contract detention facilities. Additionally, immigration detainees are being held in local jails and private prisons across the United States. According to ICE, the average detention is about one month, although some detainees are kept for several years.

Why Detention Centers are a bad idea.

If you live near a detention center (or even if you don't), consider ways to make the plight of the detainees and their families more widely known and what you can do to help them gain fair treatment. Visit the web sites of organizations listed in our Threatened Communities page for more information and suggestions. Also, please see Other Resources at the bottom of this page for further information on immigration detention and deportation, news articles and how to protect your rights. Also view strategies for dealing with local detention centers in your community, from the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee.