Sasha Pfeiffer
speaker
350 appearances
23 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 21 Aug
Sasha Pfeiffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
These are massive, primitive tent camps in northeast Syria. They hold about 35,000 people at this point from more than 60 countries. It's mainly the wives and widows of ISIS militants and their kids. They're officially called displacement camps, but they essentially function as detention centers, barbed wire, Little health care or schooling, high rates of violence.
And some of the women there are still loyal to ISIS, so the camps are not considered safe places. So if that's the case, what's the motivation to let people out? The camps are considered a humanitarian catastrophe. So some countries feel an obligation to end that situation by taking back their citizens.
And Michelle, there's also a concern that if people remain there, especially kids, they could become a new generation of terrorists. One person I spoke with who worries about that kind of radicalization is a former U.S. ambassador named Peter Galbraith. He has helped get many kids out of those camps, and here he is.
And Michelle, the current Trump State Department calls it a high priority, its words, to try to shrink these camps. I will note that some European countries have resisted taking back ISIS family members, even kids, because they worry they're a safety risk. But the U.S. says the greater risk is leaving them there and that these children are innocent victims of mistakes made by their parents.
In the case of adults, they get repatriated to their home countries and sometimes end up being prosecuted for their involvement with ISIS. The two kids I met are fortunate because they have grandparents in the U.S. Their dad grew up in Minnesota. When he was 18, he quietly left his family and joined ISIS after being recruited on social media. Then he became a father while he was overseas.
Eventually, he surrendered and was jailed, and his children got put in these Syrian camps we're talking about. And the kids, where are they now? They're 8 and 10 years old, living with their grandparents outside Minneapolis. Getting them back to the U.S. took a lot of work by the American government. But the U.S.
considers this family a model for how to help clear out those camps and keep families together. This is their grandfather, Ahmed, who asked that we not use his last name because he's concerned about the security of his family.
The mother was supposedly killed in Iraq. That's according to the father. The father now says he is remorseful for having joined ISIS. He pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge, and he's now serving a 10-year U.S. federal prison sentence. Once he's out of prison, his parents say they want him to live with them and their grandkids all under one roof.
And when I visited their house, I saw what looked like a busy, chaotic, happy home. You know, kids finally getting a normal childhood. That's NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer.
What does the suit say? It says that ever since the migrants were shipped to Guantanamo, they've been held, quote, incommunicado without access to attorneys, family, or the outside world.
And the lawsuit alleges this isolation is not a coincidence, that the point of flying these migrants to a remote Caribbean island is to make it especially difficult for them to communicate with lawyers, lawyers who could explain their legal rights and possibly challenge their detention. Here's something that the lead attorney in the lawsuit, League Alert of the ACLU, said to me.
Correct. Those images were released by the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. And the ACLU says some of the migrants' family members learned their relatives had been sent to Guantanamo because they saw them in those photos. Wow. They recognized a brother or a son. And now several of those family members are plaintiffs in this legal case.
It wants lawyers to be able to go to Guantanamo and meet with the migrants, but the suit acknowledges that traveling there will be arduous, will be hard to get to. So it asks that at a minimum, attorneys be allowed to communicate with the migrants by phone or video conference or email.
The ACLU lawyer, Galert, points out that the suspected foreign terrorists who've been held for up to two decades at Guantanamo do have access to lawyers.
What's the U.S. government saying in response to this? So, Leila, our colleague Jimena Bustillo, who covers immigration for NPR, got a statement from Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin that says there is a, quote, system for phone utilization to reach lawyers, but no additional detail was provided.
And several of the migrants' relatives say they've repeatedly called ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to get information about their family members, but no success. And by the way, the DHS statement also said this.
If the American, all caps, Civil Liberties Union cares more about highly dangerous criminal aliens, including murderers and vicious gang members, than they do about American citizens, they should change their name. In reply to that, Gelernt of the ACLU said to me, we were hoping to get a serious professional response from the U.S. government. This was not a serious response.
Has the government said what happens to these people next? It says they'll be held at Guantanamo only temporarily until it can find other countries to take them. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledges that could take a long time.
And we know from having sent suspected terrorists to Gitmo after 9-11 that some of those prisoners have never been allowed to leave, even ones who've been cleared for release. But DHS told us it will be ramping up the tempo further. of plane loads of migrants arriving at Guantanamo soon.
You're welcome.
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