Photos and Report: Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure on July 2, 2025 and the Growing Threat of the Gitmoization of the US

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On Wednesday July 2, the latest “First Wednesday” global vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay took place — four in the US, three in Europe, and one in Mexico City. An additional US vigil took place on Saturday July 5.

Please see the photos below, and read on for my analysis of the importance of the vigils, not only for the men still held, but also to highlight how, since Donald Trump came back to the White House, it has become increasingly apparent that the core injustice of Guantánamo — holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, and without providing any evidence for doing so — is being shamefully and cynically repurposed to justify detentions in the “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office in January.

I initiated the global vigils back in February 2023 to build on the monthly vigils that had been taking place in London since September 2022, initially securing the support of friends and colleagues in Washington, D.C., and, in the months that followed, welcoming supporters from other locations. Those involved include 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.

I’m immensely grateful to everyone who, once a month, takes the time — or perhaps invests the time is a more apt description — to bear witness to the ongoing crime scene that is the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, for 23 and a half years, successive US governments have deliberately buried their responsibilities to uphold the laws that supposedly differentiate democratic systems from dictatorships, holding people, for the most part, indefinitely without charge or trial, and without providing any evidence of alleged wrongdoing, and, along the way, engaging in various forms of torture and abuse that are resolutely unacceptable.

Although the most horrific treatment of prisoners took place in the prison’s early years, no one should be lulled into thinking that it remains anything other than a legal, moral and ethical abomination. Just two years ago, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, condemned the multiple, overlapping violation of numerous fundamental rights at Guantánamo, which, she said, “amounts to ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture”, as she explained in a scathing report after she became the first UN Rapporteur to visit the prison in February 2023.

The first 23 months of our vigils were largely devoted to maintaining pressure on President Biden to secure the release of men who had long been unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes, contributing to the release, in his last two months in office, of 15 of the 30 men he was still holding.

However, the return of Donald Trump to the White House has shifted our priorities.

Under Trump, the fate of the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison has largely been overlooked, as he has commandeered the naval base — and parts of the prison itself — to hold migrants as part of the shameful, racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office, deliberately and falsely portraying all undocumented migrants in the US as dangerous criminals, and using Guantánamo, in an echo of the Bush administration’s claims when it set up the “war on terror” prison, as an appropriate location for holding “the worst of the worst.”

In fact, as with the original claim, made by Donald Rumsfeld, the description of those held as “the worst of the worst” was an empty soundbite, a propaganda tool exposed as such when subjected to the sunlight of objective investigation.

Most of the 779 men and boys held at Guantánamo by the US military never had any meaningful connection to any kind of terrorist activities, just as most of the 500 or so migrants sent there by Trump were not dangerous criminals, with the majority never having been convicted of any crime.

The purpose was, and is, fundamentally, a form of state terror, sending a message to the Muslim world, in the case of the “war on terror” prison, that no foreign-born Muslim is safe anywhere in the world, and in the case of Trump’s phony “war”, that no undocumented migrant is safe anywhere on the US mainland.

The horrors of CECOT

Had Guantánamo been shut, either by Barack Obama or Joe Biden, it would no longer have been possible for Donald Trump to use it to combine hysterical propaganda while simultaneously denying all forms of due process to the targets of this hysteria. However, there was even worse to come, as Trump also cut a deal with the dictatorial President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to send migrants to a notoriously lawless prison facility in El Salvador, CECOT (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or Terrorism Confinement Center) whose very existence depended on the template provided by Guantánamo.

With a capacity of 40,000 (the equivalent of 50 Guantánamos), CECOT was established in 2023 after Bukele declared a state of emergency (technically, a “state of exception”) in relation to gang violence, empowering the police and the security services to seize people without providing any reason for doing so, and to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial at CECOT, with no prospect of them ever being released.

It’s no wonder that sending migrants to CECOT appealed to Trump and his senior officials, and, although the administration has run into legal challenges through its insistence that the government is under no obligation to provide any evidence to justify their actions, which have prevented any further deportations to CECOT, the contempt for the law, for evidence and for due process that is endemic to the Guantánamo model continues to permeate Trump’s “war on migrants”, giving our vigils an ongoing relevance beyond the fate of the 15 “war on terror” prisoners still held.

Across the US, the Guantánamo model underpins the complete disregard for evidence of wrongdoing that is evident in the relentless raids and the kidnappings conducted by ICE operatives, and, while CECOT seems to no longer be a viable option for the deportations of foreign nationals to countries that are not their own, the administration continues to be obsessed with finding ways to replicate this particularly cruel policy, in which senior officials are preoccupied with ruling out established methods of deporting migrants, which involves simply sending them back to their home countries.

Deportations to South Sudan

The use of CECOT, for example, was much more akin to the “extraordinary rendition” policies of the Bush administration in its “war on terror” than it was to established US deportation policies, and Trump and his officials continue to try to find new “extraordinary rendition” locations, as became horrifically apparent just three days ago — on Independence Day, ironically — when eight migrants were deported to South Sudan. Just one is from South Sudan, while the rest are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, South Korea and Vietnam.

The deportations only took place after a long legal struggle. Over three months ago,  on March 28, Boston-based District Judge Brian Murphy issued a court order “barring the removal of people to countries other than their place of origin”, or as listed on their final order of removal, “without an opportunity to raise concerns about their safety.” Just three days later, in open defiance of the court order, the Trump administration sent four Venezuelans to the CECOT prison from Guantánamo, with other deportations following until they were finally halted by the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, on May 20, the administration defied Judge Murphy once more, as it sought to send the eight men mentioned above to South Sudan, a plan that was only stopped following another court order, after which the men and their ICE agents were diverted to Djibouti, where the US has a military base, and where both the migrants and the ICE agents have spent the last seven weeks in arduous conditions.

Four days ago, however, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to deport the men to South Sudan, following up on an earlier ruling, last month, in which, as the Guardian described it, the Court “decided that immigration officials can quickly deport people to countries to which they have no connection.”

This is an alarming development, not only because of its apparent licence for the administration to freely engage in further “extraordinary rendition” deportations, but also because it sweeps away what, by law, ought to be a compelling restriction on this type of activity: robust assessments, under anti-torture legislation, to establish whether, as the Guardian put it, “they would face torture, persecution or death if they were sent there.”

This was noted in a dissent by two of the Supreme Court Justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Sotomayor starting, “What the government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death.”

“Alligator Alcatraz” and “concentration camps” in the US

As if these developments are not alarming enough, it is also becoming apparent that, even on the US mainland, the Guantánamo model of detention is being replicated, with, just last week, a new migrant detention facility — gleefully dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republicans — opening in the Florida Everglades.

As Andrea Pitzer, the author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps”, explained in an article for MSNBC, “Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a concentration camp”:

For many Americans, the word “concentration camp” evokes another country, a time long ago and a facility operating in the dark of night, away from the prying eyes of an outraged public. But a new concentration camp opened in Florida’s Everglades this week, and it’s the opposite of a secret.

President Donald Trump toured the facility with reporters in tow. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials posed with him, laughing in front of cages meant for human beings. The Florida Republican Party launched merchandise and gave the camp a nickname, “Alligator Alcatraz,” that the state made official.

But it’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed. And its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.

This camp stands apart from other immigration detention facilities for a few reasons. First, its projected capacity of 5,000 beds is several times the average detention center (though Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking at even larger facilities). Its improvised tents and chain-link cages put detainees on display reminiscent of El Salvador’s CECOT prison. And it is billed as a “temporary” camp, with the theory being that the administration can seamlessly process massive numbers of detainees with rapid-fire judicial hearings by National Guard members-turned-immigration judges. In practice, this is unlikely to go smoothly.

With “extraordinary rendition” and homegrown Guantánamos on the rise, everything that we, as campaigners for the closure of Guantánamo, have been struggling against for so long is now being revived on a horrible and seemingly boundless scale, both within the US and around the world, which demands our resistance more than ever.

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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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