Photos and Report: The 29th Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure, June 4, 2025

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On Wednesday June 4, campaigners across the US — in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit — and in London, Brussels and Mexico City, held the latest “First Wednesday” coordinated vigils calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay. In Belgrade, former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi held a solo vigil, and on Saturday June 7, campaigners in Cobleskill, NY rounded off the week of actions with a defiant protest in the rain.

I can’t express sufficiently my admiration for the small but big-hearted global family of activists who come out together once a month to defy the collective amnesia that, for the most part, has engulfed Guantánamo throughout most of the 23 wretched years of its existence. Many thanks to those involved, from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, as well as numerous other supporting groups.

Please see below for photos of the vigils, and read on for my assessment of why it remains important to campaign for Guantánamo’s closure — including the performative cruelty of Donald Trump’s use of the prison in his horrendous “war on migrants,” and how, inadvertently, he has demonstrated that the prison itself, although still holding 15 men, has become politically irrelevant, furthering arguments for its closure.

I initiated the coordinated global vigils, with support from activist friends in the US, in Europe and in Mexico, 29 months ago, in February 2023, and, after we campaigned relentlessly for nearly two years via the vigils to try to get Joe Biden to pay attention, we were finally rewarded with a flurry of activity at the end of his presidency, when 15 men out of the 30 men still held — most held for many years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes — were finally freed.

Unfortunately, however, our rejoicing was short-lived. Within ten days of Donald Trump taking office, he decided to use Guantánamo as the location for an authoritarian show of performative cruelty, part of the sweeping and profoundly racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office. In an executive order, he commanded the military and the Department of Homeland Security to massively expand an existing Migrant Operations Center at the naval base — used since the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea — to hold up to 30,000 migrants.

Tents were erected to hold these anticipated arrivals, although they were never used because they failed to conform to required health and safety standards. Instead, between February 4 and 20, 178 Venezuelan migrants — all alleged gang members, although no evidence was provided to justify these claims — were held in the existing Migrant Operations Center, and also, illegally, in Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison, whose use is strictly reserved solely for individuals allegedly involved with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces, in connection with the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism committed over two decades ago.

Challenged in the courts, Trump largely abandoned his circus of cruelty at Guantánamo by deporting all the Venezuelans, although the naval base and the prison have continued to be used in the months since to hold several hundred more migrants from a variety of countries, some of whom have subsequently been returned to ICE detention facilities on the US mainland, while others have been deported.

The deportees include ten alleged gang members from Venezuela and El Salvador, who, on April 13, were flown to El Salvador, to be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial in the CECOT “mega-prison” for alleged terrorists, inspired by Guantánamo, but executed on a colossal scale, with a capacity of 40,000, and with the Trump administration evidently hoping that, by doing so, they (and 238 others sent there on March 15) would be more thoroughly beyond the reach of the US courts than anyone held at Guantánamo over the deplorably long existence of the “war on terror” prison.

Despite Trump’s hopes, numerous cases are ongoing in the US courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, challenging the flagrant injustice of his “war on migrants.” One, submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on the day of our vigils, on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals currently held at Guantánamo, exposes the illegality of using Guantánamo at all to detain migrants previously held on the US mainland, while many other cases challenge the basis for sending migrants to a mega-Guantánamo in another country.

This, after all, is a policy that has more in common with the “extraordinary rendition” policies of the early years of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” than it does with any kind of legal and appropriate deportation program, and it is made even more repugnant through Trump’s efforts to frame deportations as part of a “war” and an “invasion” by foreign gang members, in which, as with the “war on terror,” the need for due process and evidence of wrongdoing has been shamefully and perilously discarded. In the “war on terror,” having a beard and being a Muslim was enough to secure a one-way trip to Guantánamo; this time around, having tattoos appears to be the only “evidence” required to justify a one-way trip to CECOT.

While everyone who has been involved in campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo over the last 23 years recognizes the alarming parallels between the “war on terror” and the “war on migrants”, in which the latter, of course, is being enacted on the US mainland, with the potential or even the intention of targeting millions of people, it remains crucially important that campaigners also retain a focus on the “original sin” of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo.

Astonishingly, when Trump decided to use Camp 6 of the prison to illegally hold and use migrants, he also demonstrated complete contempt for the 15 “war on terror” prisoners still held there, breezily removing Camp 6’s remaining prisoners — three “low-value detainees” long approved for release — and shunting them into Camp 5, a maximum-security facility where the 12 other men are still held, all described as “high-value detainees”, and including three “forever prisoners” who have never been charged, as well as nine others charged (and in two cases convicted) in the military commission trial system.

Moving these three men casually erased an understanding, in place since 2006, when most of the “high-value detainees” arrived at Guantánamo from the CIA’s “black sites”, that they must be permanently separated from the “low-value detainees”, to prevent the leaking of any information regarding the horrors of the CIA’s torture program, which, it was alleged, would have a devastating impact on the US’s national security.

Although these men include Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, and other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, who have been regarded, for over two decades, as the most significant imprisoned terrorists in US history, Trump’s recent circus of cruelty sidelined them so thoroughly that it was almost as though they had ceased to exist.

Trump’s indifference confirms, ironically, how, nearly a quarter of a century on from the 9/11 attacks, the “war on terror” prison no longer has any fundamental relevance, although sadly it will do nothing to help the men still held.

The six men still held without charge or trial should be freed, and plea deals should be arranged for the men who have been charged, but none of this, unfortunately, seems likely under Trump and his administration, who, if they are reminded of the continued existence of these 15 men, may well also rediscover the opportunities for hysteria that have, for so long, been embraced by dangerously authoritarian Republicans.

Indifference, then, may well be the best these men can hope for under Trump, although that is no reason for us not to continue to highlight the injustice of their ongoing imprisonment, which remains as crucial as it always has been, both to expose the gulf between the US’s rhetoric and reality regarding their detention, and their claimed respect for the rule of law, and to expose how the prison’s continued existence has dire repercussions far beyond its walls — in particular via the existence of the CECOT prison, and Trump’s depraved alliance with El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele.

As we continue our vigils, we hope you’ll join us next month, on Wednesday July 2, and on the first Wednesday of every month until the prison is finally closed.

Please see below for more photos from last week.

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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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