Photos and Report: Global Close Guantánamo Vigils Resume As Trump Begins Illegally Holding Migrants in the Prison

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Last Wednesday (February 5), the monthly “First Wednesday” global vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay resumed, taking place for the first time under the darkening shadow of Donald Trump’s chaotic but malevolent reach.

While we had all presumed that Guantánamo and its remaining 15 prisoners might be largely ignored by Trump, making our continuing efforts to keep shining a light on the prison all the more important, he surprised us all by doing the exact opposite, dragging Guantánamo into the global spotlight by proposing to send migrants there as part of the cynical and malevolent “war on migrants” that he initiated as soon as he took office.

Trump’s plan initially focused on a massive expansion of an existing facility used since the 1990s to temporarily hold migrants intercepted at sea, and declaring that it would hold 30,000 migrants. This was alarming enough, because he had not sought Congressional approval or funding for this project, which, moreover, clearly had no defensible legal basis.

In the days that followed, however, the unthinkable happened, as some migrants were imprisoned in one of the blocks of the “war on terror” prison, a move which is screamingly illegal, because the laws governing the existence of the military prison and who can be held there very clearly stipulate that it can only be used to detain individuals seized in connection with the post-9/11 “war on terror.”

As this story was breaking, some of us highlighted it at the vigils, but for the next vigils, on Wednesday March 5, we will be working on a campaigning poster that can be used across all the vigils, and we will also be working to widen the scope of our vigils to include other groups and individuals affected by this truly chilling and illegal effort to replicate the vile, divisive and brutal lawlessness of the “war on terror” by reframing it as a “war on migrants.” In the sick view of the US that is being peddled by Trump, 13.3 million undocumented migrants are all now dehumanized and portrayed as “enemy combatants” and “terrorists”, for whom imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo is being portrayed as the only appropriate response.

Check out the photos below, from the six vigils that took place on February 5 — in Washington, D.C., London, New York City, Brussels, Cobleskill, NY and Detroit — plus photos from two additional vigils that took place on February 11 and today, February 12, in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

With San Francisco, which took a break this month, the groups above are the core campaigning groups, including members of organizations including Amnesty International, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, who have pledged to continue the monthly vigils for as long as it takes to see Guantánamo closed, or, at least, for the men who have never been charged to be freed (six of the remaining 15), and for a just resolution to be delivered, including via plea deals, for the nine other men.

I initiated the global vigils, which take place on the first Wednesday of every month, two years ago, in what is now a lost world — the US during the presidency of Joe Biden, a fairly typical neoliberal, warmongering Democrat, albeit one already showing signs of mental collapse, but one who had not yet gone off the deep end by diverting most of the US’s colossal energy towards endorsing and sustaining a 15-month long genocide undertaken by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

Two years ago, Biden, while unwilling to prioritize the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, had at least recognized, via the lobbying of lawyers and human rights groups, with the support of 99 Democratic members of Congress, that its enduring stain could not be ignored, and that it was no longer tolerable to keep holding, indefinitely, men held without charge or trial for nearly 20 years.

When he took office, 40 men were still held, over half of whom (22 men in total) fell into this category — “forever prisoners”, as they were so aptly named by Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times.

Between May 2021 and September 2022, 19 of these 22 men were approved for release by Periodic Review Boards, the administrative review process established under President Obama, which had approved 38 men for release in his last three years in office, all but two of whom had been freed before he left the White House.

Biden also released six men between July 2021 and the start of February 2023, when our vigils began, including the two men approved for release by the PRBs before Obama left office, who had been trapped, with the rest of the men still held, for four years under Donald Trump, as he essentially sealed the prison shut.

Four more releases followed in the first months of our vigils, but then the good news stopped, as the releases ground to a halt, with 30 men still held, including 16 who had been approved for release. Via the vigils, I persistently highlighted the plight of these men in posters that I updated monthly, showing how long they had been held since the decisions to release them were taken, which spelled out the extent of Biden’s indifference more and more with every passing month.

By December 2023, when the penultimate vigils of Biden’s presidency took place, these men had been held for between two and four years since the decisions to free them were taken, and in three outlying cases for nearly 15 years. As time began to run out, I worked with campaigning colleagues in the US and the UK on strongly-worded letters to Biden calling for urgent action to free these men, and decrying his lack of action, which was only possible because, as has been the case throughout almost the whole of Guantánamo’s history, the decisions to release them were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism existed to compel the government to actually prioritize their release.

Despite securing the support of 140 prominent individuals and organizations — including former Guantánamo prisoners, ex-US government officials, British MPs and peers, lawyers, academics, psychologists, public figures and rights organizations — in the tense, politically-charged atmosphere of the time, as negotiations were taking place behind the scenes, we were prevailed upon to not publicize the contents of the letter widely.

To his credit, Biden — or, in particular, State Department officials, building on the legacy of Tina Kaidanow, the former diplomat and envoy for the resettlement of Guantánamo prisoners, who had sadly died in October 2024 — secured the release of 15 men in his last month in office, including 13 of the 16 long approved for release, and also, notably, ending with the resettlement, in Oman, of eleven of these men, all Yemenis, who could not be sent home because of a ban on their repatriation in US law. Tina Kaidanow had negotiated their resettlement in 2023, but, shamefully, that had been abandoned because of the perceived “political optics” of releasing them after the attacks in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, with which they were, of course, completely unconnected.

That tense, politically-charged atmosphere of just two months ago now looks like a children’s picnic compared to what is happening now that Trump is back in office. As we continue to remember the 15 men still held at Guantánamo, and to call for their release or for a just resolution of their cases, we must also swiftly adapt to the horrendous new reimagining of Guantánamo that Donald Trump has so swiftly and violently unveiled.

We need to build a movement to expose, and to challenge Trump’s depraved efforts to replicate the failed horrors of the “war on terror” by rebranding it as a “war on migrants”, in which he seeks to extennd the key components of the “war on terror” — dehumanization and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial — to a new target of horrendous, sweeping racism, in which Latin Americans have taken over from Muslims as America’s foremost demonized community.

Please check out the additional photos below, and I hope to see you next month!

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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