Photos and Report: The Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure – and No More Migrant Prisoners – on April 2, 2025

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On Wednesday April 2, campaigners across the US and around the world — in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, London, Brussels, Detroit and Phoenix, AZ — held the latest coordinated monthly vigils (the “First Wednesday” vigils) calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and for Donald Trump to stop using the prison — and the wider naval base on which it is located — to hold migrants facing deportation from the US. Organizations involved include various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, with support from numerous other organizations.

Through illness or other commitments, three other vigils — in Mexico City, Portland, OR and Los Angeles — didn’t take place, while the vigil in Cobleskill, NY was moved to Saturday April 5, to coincide with the “Hands Off” rallies against Trump and Elon Musk taking place at over 1,400 locations across the US, attended by an estimated three million people.

Photos from the vigils are posted below, and please read on for some context about the vigils, their history, and their relevance.

The “First Wednesday” monthly vigils have been taking for over two years, beginning under Joe Biden and helping to maintain the political pressure — or, at the very least, to keep a light shining on Guantánamo in the face of widespread amnesia and indifference — which eventually led to him releasing 15 men — half of those still held — in his last two months in office.

The focus on Donald Trump has, of course, only emerged since he took office — for the second time — on January 20. In his first term, he fundamentally sealed Guantánamo shut, but this time around he immediately launched a deeply racist “war on migrants”, in which he cynically included Guantánamo, and continues to do so despite ongoing legal challenges asserting, correctly, that it is fundamentally illegal to do so.

Since February 4, when the first ten Venezuelan migrants arrived at Guantánamo from ICE detention facilities on the US mainland, in a blaze of hysterical rhetoric about them being “the worst of the worst”, nearly 400 migrants have been held — either in the Migrant Operations Center, an existing barracks-style building used for decades to house migrants intercepted at sea, pending their repatriation or their transfer to third countries, or in Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison, despite its use being reserved, under existing US law, solely for alleged members of Al-Qaeda or associated forces, seized in connection with the 9/11 attacks.

Trump’s use of Guantánamo seems to have been nothing more than a very public act of “performative cruelty”, as all of the men held could have been deported from ICE detention facilities without the extraordinarily expensive spectacle of sending them to Guantánamo.

It has, to date, cost the Trump administration over $100,000 for each migrant sent to Guantánamo — a total of over $40 million. Over half of the men have been deported, while the others were quietly returned to ICE facilities on the US mainland, sometimes only days after being first flown out.

Of those deported, 177 of the 178 Venezuelans sent to Guantánamo in the weeks following February 4 were deported on February 20, and, as the New York Times reported on April 4, the day before “ICE repatriated 44 Nicaraguan migrants who had been brought to the naval base days earlier.” The Times also noted that other migrants “have been deported to countries that included Brazil and Colombia.” For my coverage of Trump’s use of Guantánamo in his “war on migrants”, see my articles here, here, here, here, here and here, and also, most recently, a summary of the situation on the Close Guantánamo website.

Most contentiously, on March 31, 17 Venezuelans and Salvadorians were sent from Guantánamo to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, an abominable facility established by El Salvador’s far-right President Bukele to deal with gang violence after he declared a state of exception, in March 2022, which allowed the police and the military to arrest people on suspicion of gang affiliation without any evidence.

Sending these 17 men from Guantánamo to the CECOT prison on March 31 was a show of contempt by the Trump administration towards the courts in the US, where opposition to the “outsourcing” of the imprisonment of Venezuelans in the CECOT prison has been prominent since March 14, when Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., issued a temporary restraining order preventing any flights carrying migrants to El Salvador from the US, which was blatantly ignored, as the administration flew 238 Venezuelan migrants and 23 Salvadorians to the CECOT prison.

See here and here for my coverage of the Trump administration’s truly shameful deal with Bukele to hold Venezuelan migrants in the CECOT prison, rather than sending them home, in which I also covered the legal challenges, and the mounting evidence that many of these men are not the gang members that the Trump administration alleged that they were.

For those of us who understand the horrors of Guantánamo, the El Salvador component of Trump’s “war on migrants” is the most chilling development, because of its echoes of the “war on terror” and the prison at Guantánamo, where men were imprisoned as “terrorists” without any effort having been made to ascertain whether or not that was true.

Arguably, the CECOT prison would not even have been established without the baleful precedent established by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, and it is profoundly disturbing to see the Trump administration revisiting the crimes of the “war on terror” through its cooperation with the Bukele regime in holding men without any form of due process — or any effort to establish their guilt or innocence — in an even more unaccountable facility, in another country, that has the capacity to hold 50 times as many men as have been held at Guantánamo throughout its long and sordid 23-year history.

As for Guantánamo, as of April 4 officials told the New York Times that “ICE was housing 45 migrants at the base, 36 of them in the prison facility”, although everything about the use of Guantánamo is so opaque that it is impossible to know what will happen to them, or if or when other men will be sent to join them, or to take their place if they too are deported.

At some of the vigils, campaigners were photographed holding a poster I made calling for Trump to end migrant detention at Guantánamo, and, as there seems to be no end in sight for Trump’s cruel, absurd and hideously expensive use of Guantánamo as a prop in his malignant “war on migrants”, it seems reasonable to suggest that the poster will continue to be used at the next vigils, which are taking place on Wednesday May 7.

I hope you can join us, and, in the meantime, please see below for more inspiring photos from this month’s vigils.

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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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