Photos and Report: Monthly Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure Also Call on Trump to Stop Lawlessly Holding Migrants in the Prison

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On Wednesday (March 5), the latest “First Wednesday” vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — and for Donald Trump to stop using it as part of his cruel and illegal “war on migrants” — took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, OR, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, AZ, and in London, Brussels and Mexico City, with a vigil in Cobleskill, NY taking place this Saturday, March 8. Organizations involved include various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

Check out the photos below, and please read on for the history of the vigils, and for the shocking resurgence of Guantánamo under Donald Trump, and for explanations of why his shameful use of the naval base and the prison must be resisted.

The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place for the last two years, beginning in what now seems to be ancient history — the one-term presidency of Joe Biden. Despite widespread indifference within the administration to the ongoing crime scene at Guantánamo, where, for most of these two years, 30 men were held, even though 16 of them had long been approved for release by high-level US government review processes, we believe that it’s fair to say that we played our part in ensuring that Guantánamo wasn’t forgotten completely — and were rewarded, in Biden’s last six weeks in office, with the release of 15 men in total, including 13 of those long approved for release.

Since January 20, however, and the return to the White House of Donald Trump, the 15 men still held have largely faded into the background, as Trump, immediately launching a cynical “war on migrants” through a slew of executive orders and proclamations designed to create the impression that the US is facing a “national emergency” and an “invasion” on its southern border and is overrun with criminal undocumented migrants, soon seized on Guantánamo as the ideal location for a flagship detention facility that would send a powerful message to the world, and to his base in the US, that he meant business.

The cynicism was profound. Using Guantánamo — home to the reviled “war on terror” prison — was meant to send a message equating “terrorists” with “migrants” — a notion reinforced by the repeated use, by senior officials, of the phrase “the worst of the worst” to describe the migrants sent there, echoing Donald Rumsfeld’s unsubstantiated allegations about the first prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo 23 years ago.

Even more cynical was the decision to shunt the last three “low-value detainees” in Camp 6 of the prison into Camp 5, where the 12 other men — all “high-value detainees” — are held, so that these demonized and dehumanized migrants could be held there instead, even though that is demonstrably illegal, as only those who allegedly “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001”, or those who “harbored” them can, by law, be held in the “war on terror” prison.

Over the last few weeks, the subterfuge has been repeatedly exposed. The men in question — much easier to track down than the anonymized “detainees” of the “war on terror” — were revealed not to be “the worst of the worst” at all; not gang members, as alleged, and not, in many cases, guilty of any crime apart from having crossed into the US illegally (because of a lack of practical legal routes), in an effort to find work.

Further damage to Trump’s narrative has been revealed through accounts of some of the more than 200 migrants held, most of whom — all Venezuelans — were unexpectedly repatriated on February 20, and who have revealed abusive treatment in detention that compares with the kinds of dehumanization and isolation that were prevalent in the early, hysterical years of the “war on terror.”

Please check out the additional photos below, and do join us if you can for the next “First Wednesday” vigils on April 2. It is hard to know if Trump’s use of Guantánamo for migrants will survive a current legal challenge, which I wrote about here, or, indeed, if fractures within the administration itself, exposed yesterday in a detailed article by NBC News (which I’ll be analyzing soon), will lead to it being abandoned anyway — or, at least, significantly scaled back.

Let’s hope that defeat for Trump is on the cards, but this is clearly no time for complacency, especially as the cynical Guantánamo showpiece is just one component of a truly shameful and racist immigration policy whereby the Trump administration remains determined to portray all undocumented migrants in the US — as many as 13.3 million people in total — as threats to the US’s national security.

POSTSCRIPT (March 8):

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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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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