Shocking Reports of the Systemic Brutalization and Dehumanization of Migrants Held at Guantánamo

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Huge congratulations to the Washington Post for highlighting the brutality and dehumanization taking place at the migrant detention facility that has been in operation for the last three weeks in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, specifically, through the use of one particular cellblock in the existing “war on terror” prison, Camp 6, where the majority of the more than 200 migrants flown to Guantánamo from the US mainland have been held since detention operations began on February 4.

Washington Post reporters spoke to three of the 178 Venezuelan men held there between February 4 and February 20, when, with one exception, they were all repatriated to Venezuela via Honduras — with that one exception, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, flown back to ongoing detention on the US mainland.

Since then, however, 17 more migrants arrived on February 23 — seven from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by the New York Times — with another nine following on February 24, during a visit by defense secretary Pete Hegseth. All are reportedly being held in Camp 6.

Vivid and compelling accounts of abusive conditions in Camp 6

One of the men interviewed by the Post was Diuvar Uzcátegui, 27, who had been seized a month ago by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at the construction site where he worked. He had, he told the Post, “been working and attending regular check-ins with ICE officials after having crossed the border illegally in December 2023”, but was seized because, “they contended, he had missed an appointment — an accusation he denies.”

All three men, as the Post explained, “had crossed the [US] border illegally”, but they “could find no other criminal record for those interviewed”, reinforcing related assessments by journalists over the last three weeks that the rhetoric used to describe the migrants transported to Cuba as the “worst of the worst”, and to claim that they were all members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational, Venezuelan-based criminal organization, were nothing but lies. As Uzcátegui said after his repatriation, “Guantánamo is supposed to be a maximum-security prison for terrorists, no? I’m not any of that. I’m not a criminal. My record is clean.”

After he was unexpectedly flown to Guantánamo, Uzcátegui told the Post, he was given a copy of the Bible, a blanket and a ¾-inch foam pad to sleep on, and locked up “in a windowless cell, where the days and nights blended as he felt his mind begin to slip.” As more migrants arrived in the days that followed, he said he “could hear men screaming from other cells … pleading to be let out and threatening to kill themselves.” As he told the Post, he heard one man scream again and again, “Get me out of here. I’m going to kill myself.”

Another man interviewed, Franyer Montes, 22, told the Post that “he reached a point in his 13-day incarceration when he considered taking his own life”, but that “thoughts of his mother and child held him back”, although the third man, José Daniel Simancas, revealed that he “was one of the detainees who tried to kill himself during his 10-day stay there.”

As the Post described it, “He attempted to cut his wrists with plastic water bottles that he had tried to sharpen. But the edges didn’t cut deep enough.” The Post added that all three of the men they spoke to “said they had seen or spoken with at least two other men who acknowledged trying to end their own lives.” Simancas said, “One tried to hang himself with the sheet, but he couldn’t tie it to the table because it was too small Another swallowed 10 screws, and they took him to the emergency room several times.” He added, “We all thought about killing ourselves.”

The men interviewed made clear that, throughout their imprisonment at Guantánamo, they had been held incommunicado, with no ability to communicate with lawyers or with their families. All three men said that the first time they “were asked to fill out paperwork to begin facilitating calls to family or lawyers”, despite “having pleaded to talk to their relatives throughout their stay”, was on their last day, just before they were flown home.

The men also explained how they were only “allowed outside about once per week for a one-hour period”, adding, “The guards shackled them and put them in what they described as individual open-air cages placed next to each other.” Simancas conceded that, “At least there we didn’t have to shout to talk to each other. We could see each other’s faces.” However, the almost-total isolation throughout their imprisonment demonstrably “fits the definition of solitary confinement as laid out by the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules”, as the Post explained, “which define it as holding prisoners for more than 22 hours per day without ‘meaningful human contact.’”

For Duivar Uzcátegui, “the most traumatic part of his stay was being frisked.” As the Post described it, “Every time he left his cell, whether for the shower or the outdoor hour, he was frisked upon leaving and again when returning. During the searches, guards made him strip off his clothes and open up his backside and genitals. They watched him as he showered.”

He told the Post that he “started having panic attacks as a deep depression and anxiety set in.” As he described it, “I cried and cried. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to die here.’ It was affecting me psychologically.”

As the Post also explained, the testimonies of the three men “echoed the fears expressed by human rights groups — that migrants transferred to a place known for its isolation and history of torture allegations could be vulnerable to abuse.”

Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, whose parent organization, the ACLU, recently sued the Trump administration for access to the migrants, confirmed to the Post that the conditions for migrants at Guantánamo were “horrific”, and “far more restrictive, more severe and more abusive than what we would see in a typical immigration detention facility in the United States.”

Cho was particularly concerned by the use of military guards for what is, essentially, nothing more than “a civil, immigration violation, not alleged war crimes like the 9/11 detainees.” She added, as the Post described it, that “blurring the lines between civilian and military enforcement encroaches ‘on the division between civil society and militarized society.’”

“At the end of the day”, Cho said, “military staff are not supposed to be enforcing civilian law, which is immigration law”, but “by placing military guards to detain people in detention, that is exactly what is happening.”

What is the supposed justification for this systemic abuse?

What the Post’s coverage show, compellingly, is how, from the moment detention operations began at Guantánamo, the dehumanizing rhetoric used to describe these men — vilified as “the worst of the worst” in a deliberate echo of language used by the Bush administration to describe the first arrivals at the “war on terror” prison in January 2002 — led to them being treated accordingly, as “high-level threats” undeserving of humane treatment.

The burning question right now — which urgently needs answering — concerns the specific instructions given to guards regarding the treatment of migrants in Camp 6. Guards don’t autonomously decide to strip-search prisoners at every opportunity, and to prevent them from having more than one hour outside over the course of a week: they do so because they’ve been told to do so.

Because Camp 6 is part of the military prison, and because, for the last 23 years, the rules governing the treatment of “war on terror” prisoners have involved specific “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs), it is reasonable to assume that specific SOPs have been issued — or, perhaps, that old SOPs from the early days of the “war on terror” have been revived.

Apart from the odd leak over the years, the SOPs have always been a strenuously guarded secret at Guantánamo, although as was noted in a highly critical report about the prison in June 2023 by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, the SOPs also have a well-chronicled history of being both inconsistent and arbitrary.

As she noted in her report, the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that “are in place to regulate every aspect of detention operations, including detainee reception and transfer, restraints, cell block searches, mess operations, religious accommodations, and medication distribution” are “unavailable to the detainees or their counsel without a court order, in potential contravention of the right of persons detained and their legal counsel to know the rules which regulate their place of detention.”

She also noted that, although she “was informed by the US Government that detainees and their counsel are regularly briefed broadly on camp rules and procedures,” the reality is that “detainees, counsel, and even guard force personnel voiced significant frustration at the arbitrariness, confusion, and inconsistency that characterizes implementation of the SOPs.”

Answers are urgently needed as to why conditions are being imposed on migrants in Camp 6 that are, genuinely, harsher than those implemented since the early days of the “war on terror”, although, as the Washington Post declared yesterday in an editorial following up on their journalists’ groundbreaking report, what is clear above all is that the entire basis of detention at Guantánamo needs to be brought to an end.

Lamenting the chronic lawlessness of the prison over the last 23 years, in which it “has become a stain on America’s reputation as a country that values the rule of law and respects human rights”, and describing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s claims that the recent arrivals were “the worst of the worst” as “at best, a wild exaggeration”, the Post’s editors conclude, “This time, detained undocumented immigrants — not terrorism suspects — demonstrate why the prison should be closed.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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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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