Photos and Report: The Ongoing Relevance of the Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure, May 7, 2025

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On Wednesday May 7, for the 28th successive month, a global family of dedicated campaigners held vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay at nine locations across the US and around the world — Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Brussels, Mexico City, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Portland, OR — with Cobleskill, NY holding an additional vigil on Saturday May 10.

I’m immensely proud of, and grateful for the dedication of our global family of campaigners — from various Amnesty International groups, and representatives of other groups including the Close Guantánamo campaign, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait and the UK Guantánamo Network — for continuing to shine a light on the lawlessness of Guantánamo, in the face of widespread amnesia or indifference.

This month’s London vigil, in particular, was noteworthy, as campaigners with the UK Guantánamo Network, who have been working assiduously with MPs and peers to reestablish an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Guantánamo’s closure, invited members of the APPG to show support by visiting the vigil for a photo opportunity, and five MPs and peers took a break from their busy schedules to join us — Chris Law of the SNP, the chair of the APPG, Baroness Natalie Bennett of the Green Party, John McDonnell and Andy Slaughter of the Labour Party, and Brian Mathew, a Liberal Democrat.

Please see below for photos of this month’s vigils, and continue reading for more commentary and even more photos. The next vigils take place on Wednesday June 4, and I hope that, if any of the vigils are within reach, you’ll consider joining us — or even set up your own.

Under President Biden, our monthly vigils — outside the White House, the UK Parliament, the European Parliament, and other locations — undoubtedly helped to maintain pressure on the administration to recognize how unacceptable it was that, after more than two decades, the US was continuing to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial.

Through, in particular, our ‘Free the Guantánamo 16’ poster, highlighting the administration’s moral obligation to free the 16 men, out of 30 held in total, who had all been approved for release by high-level government review processes, and a second poster, which I updated monthly, showing quite how disgracefully long these men had been held since the decisions were taken to approve them for release, the Biden administration finally took decisive actions shortly before leaving office, releasing 15 men in December 2024 and January 2025.

Since Donald Trump took office for the second time on January 20, however, the entire landscape of Guantánamo has been subjected to his chaotic whims. Shortly after taking office, as part of a cynical “war on migrants” that he immediately launched in a blizzard of executive orders and presidential actions, he ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to expand an existing Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo, used to house migrants intercepted at sea since the 1990s, to hold up to 30,000 migrants.

Soon after, as the first migrants — all Venezuelans — arrived from ICE facilities on the US mainland, Trump illegally expanded the remit of his executive order, holding these men not only in the Migrant Operations Center, but also in one of the cellblocks of the “war on terror” prison, whose use was strictly reserved for individuals held because of their alleged involvement in Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups thought to be involved in the 9/11 attacks or other acts of international terrorism.

Mostly, the mainstream media ignored the flagrant lawlessness of the use of Camp 6, just as they also overlooked the fact that, to do so, Trump had been required to empty Camp 6 of the three “low-value detainees” held there — the last of the men long approved for release, who hadn’t been freed before Biden left office — shunting them into Camp 5 with the 12 other remaining prisoners, all regarded as “high-value detainees.”

This broke with an 18-year obsession, by successive administrations (including that of Trump, in his own first term in office), with keeping the “high-value detainees” (all tortured in CIA “black sites” before their arrival at Guantánamo) strictly separated from the “low-value detainees” for reasons of national security, primarily intended to keep the torture victims isolated.

This ought to have been noteworthy, although, again, the mainstream media failed to notice, just as they also failed to notice that, by sidelining the “war on terror” prisoners, and treating the “low-value detainees” as inconvenient obstacles to the performative cruelty of his use of Camp 6 for his “war on migrants”, Trump was actually sending out a signal that the “war on terror” prison was no longer relevant, and that the men still held there, who include prisoners regarded as the most dangerous terrorists in US history for their alleged role in the 9/11 attacks, were worthy of nothing more than being mothballed and ignored.

In the end, having made spurious comparisons between the “war on terror” and his “war on migrants” via descriptions of the Venezuelans as “the worst of the worst”, Trump has largely given up on Guantánamo after facing legal challenges, and after spending $40 million to temporarily hold less than 500 men. According to NBC News, a DoD official recently told Congress that 32 migrants are currently held at Guantánamo, in a submission in which the Pentagon also admitted that, “Between January 20 and April 8, the US military flew 46 flights that carried migrants on military aircraft” to Guantánamo, which “lasted 802.5 hours, at a cost of approximately $21,087,300.”

After being largely thwarted at Guantánamo, Trump then turned his attention to another notorious prison — the CECOT facility in El Salvador, a “mega-prison” for alleged terrorists, established by El Salvador’s dictatorial President Nayib Bukele. At CECOT, men regarded as gang members and described as terrorists, who were seized without due process using emergency powers, are held indefinitely without charge or trial in numbers that dwarf the capacity of Guantánamo, with at least 15,000 men held in a facility that reportedly has a capacity of 40.000.

It’s genuinely difficult to imagine the CECOT prison existing without the template provided by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, and, for Trump, sending migrants to CECOT seemed to provide a perfect solution to the problems he had encountered at Guantánamo. Here, he thought, was an offshore mega-Guantánamo that was even more beyond the reach of the US courts than Guantánamo had proven to be after it opened in January 2002, because it was, conveniently, in another county and run by a foreign government.

Trump reportedly paid Bukele $6 million to hold 238 deported Venezuelans in the CECOT prison, although, again, he has aroused the wrath of the US courts, who are, correctly, unwilling to accept the deportation of alleged gang members to a mega-Guantánamo in a third country, without any form due process, and with a bullish refusal, on the part of the administration, to accept any responsibility for its actions, even when men have been sent there by mistake.

Despite these setbacks, Trump’s “war on migrants” continues, with what appears to be increased brutality and hysteria as the administration faces growing and implacable opposition in courts across the US, up to and including the Supreme Court.

It’s hugely important that all of us who care about the rule of law and the horrors of scapegoating entire communities continue to do all we can to resist the administration’s expansion of the tactics of the “war on terror” to millions of migrants in the US, by continuing to remind the world of the brutal, lawless and dehumanizing legacy of the “war on terror” at Guantánamo.

And for the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison, while it may not help them to either be freed or, finally, to be delivered something resembling justice, Trump’s cheap conjuring trick in February, when he pretended that they didn’t even exist, ought to be remembered and cited whenever supporters of Guantánamo’s continued existence insist, as they do periodically, that the prison still has any kind of practical purpose.

As our vigils will continue to demonstrate, the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo is a failed experiment in brutal, extrajudicial state terror, which should long ago have been closed, not least to prevent it from providing inspiration to monstrous individuals like El Salvador’s President Bukele.

The men still held at Guantánamo should either be freed, if they have never been charged with a crime (six of the 15 men still held), and, in the cases of the men who have been charged, plea deals should be reached that will bring to an end the purgatory of the broken military commissions, leading either to their release, or to their ongoing imprisonment, but in updated facilities that respect international law, and that provide torture rehabilitation and adequate care for the rest of the lives.

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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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