As of 2025-08. The 780 figure is cumulative since 2002; fifteen men remained in detention as of August 2025 after eleven Yemenis were transferred to Oman in January 2025, and the number changes with each transfer.
From January 2002 the United States transferred men captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to a detention facility at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, chosen in part because the government argued that its location outside United States sovereign territory placed detainees beyond the reach of the federal courts. The administration classified them as unlawful enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war and asserted that they could be held under the law of war until the end of hostilities without criminal charge; a small number were prosecuted before military commissions, and the case against those accused of the September 11 attacks has not reached trial after more than a decade of pre-trial litigation. The Supreme Court progressively rejected the jurisdictional argument, holding in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that federal habeas statutes reached the base, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) that the original commissions were unlawful, and in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) that detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus and that the Military Commissions Act's suspension of it was invalid. Most detainees were released or transferred without charge to third countries; by January 2025 fifteen remained, several of them held for more than twenty years, including men cleared for transfer years earlier who could not be resettled. UN special procedures and human rights organisations have found the detention arbitrary, criticised the conditions of confinement and the effects of earlier torture in CIA custody, and called for closure, while successive United States administrations have differed on closure but maintained that law-of-war detention is lawful.
The United States holding foreign nationals captured in counter-terrorism operations at a naval base on leased Cuban territory, outside the ordinary reach of United States immigration and criminal courts
About 780 men have been held at Guantanamo since January 2002. They were captured across Afghanistan, Pakistan and many other states, often by bounty, and belonged to no bounded community or territory, so any denominator - a national population, a religious group - would be arbitrary and misleading. The meaningful figures are the cumulative total held and the number remaining.
US Department of Defense records nine detainee deaths at Guantanamo since 2002, six of them classified as suicides; there is no dispute about the magnitude, only about causes — Seton Hall Law's Center for Policy and Research and reporting in Harper's Magazine have challenged the official finding that the three men who died on 10 June 2006 killed themselves, a challenge the Pentagon rejects.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (2004 assessment reported in the press) described an intentional system of cruel and degrading treatment amounting to torture, and the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism concluded in 2023 that indefinite detention without trial and continuing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment persist.
Cuba