ICE Puts Twelve Somali Men on a Plane Told They Were Bound for Somalia; They Landed at Guantanamo Bay

In late August 2026, ICE put twelve Somali men on a deportation flight out of Louisiana after telling them they were being removed to Somalia with a refueling stop in Cuba. The plane’s destination was the refueling stop. As many as twelve Somali deportees passed through the U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay in the following weeks; eight remained as of mid-September. Seven are held at Camp 6, a military detention block built for high-risk prisoners, and the eighth in isolation. Abdullahi Adam Mohamed, a St. Paul resident, contacted the Somali Embassy in Washington and learned that ICE had recorded his deportation to Somalia as completed on August 12 — a removal the government’s own records show as finished while the man it describes sat in Cuba. Sakariye Abdi Mohamed, another of the twelve, called the facility “the worst place ever I’ve been in my life.” The men describe aggressive shackling, constant cold air, and round-the-clock surveillance. Several had active asylum cases and valid work permits. Sen. Tina Smith has taken up Adam Mohamed’s case publicly.

The administrative record is the finding here. A deportation logged as executed to Somalia, for a man held at a U.S. military base in Cuba, is not a paperwork lag — it is the removal system reporting an outcome that did not occur, which means the population at Guantánamo is invisible to exactly the accounting that would locate them. That is what distinguishes this from an ordinary transfer: a detainee at a domestic facility has a docket and an A-number that resolve; a man recorded as removed has neither. Guantánamo’s use for immigration detention was framed from the start as reserved for foreign nationals with terrorism ties, and the corpus has tracked the expansion past that frame (2026-09-09–adam-abdullah-st-paul-asylum-seeker-sent-to-guantanamo-camp-six), running alongside the escalation of ICE operations against Somali Minnesotans (2025-12-04–ice-escalates-operations-targeting-somali-minnesota) that followed Stephen Miller’s public attacks on the community (2025-12-11–miller-attacks-1965-immigration-act-somali-targeting).

Named harm-subjects in this entry — Abdullahi Adam Mohamed and Sakariye Abdi Mohamed — require rows in the victim-story deployment index. Both are deployable: each spoke in his own words to a tier-1 outlet (Sahan Journal and Mother Jones respectively), and Adam Mohamed’s case has a senator on the record. The other ten men are not named in these sources and are class-level-only here.