Last Thursday, 11 of these “forever prisoners” filed a habeas corpus petition in the United States District Court in Washington, D.C. The men, all foreign-born Muslims, say their continued detention violates the Constitution’s guarantee of due process and the 2001 law that gave presidents the power to send enemy combatants to Guantánamo.

One of the plaintiffs, prisoner No. 893, a 45-year-old Yemeni named Tolfiq al Bihani, has been held at Guantánamo for nearly 15 years. He was cleared for conditional release in 2010. The Saudi government agreed to accept him in 2016, along with nine other Yemenis. Those nine were all transferred, but Mr. al Bihani remains at Guantánamo without explanation.

President George W. Bush may be guilty of creating the constitutional calamity that is Guantánamo, but at least he made an effort to empty it of men who clearly posed no threat to the United States, releasing 532 detainees by the end of his second term. President Barack Obama, who was blocked by Republicans in Congress from keeping his campaign promise to close the prison, established regular reviews of each inmate’s case and worked intensively to negotiate the transfer of those who could not be returned safely to their home countries. In the end, he released 197 detainees.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump bragged that he would “absolutely authorize” torture techniques like waterboarding, on the ground that terrorism suspects “deserve it anyway.” The remaining Guantánamo prisoners appear fated to stay locked up not based on an individual assessment of their cases — there will be none of those under Mr. Trump — but because they serve as convenient symbols of the aggressive antiterrorist and anti-Muslim platform he ran on.

And yet the men make a straightforward case for their release. The Supreme Court has ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo must have a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge the legal and factual grounds for their detention, which means that the federal courts have the power to review those claims and grant any appropriate relief.