Photos and Report: The 33rd Monthly Close Guantánamo Vigils Across the US and Around the World

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Last Wednesday, October 1, the world’s most dedicated campaigners for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay gathered, at significant locations across the US and globally, for the 33rd successive monthly coordinated Close Guantánamo vigils — in Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Brussels, Mexico City, Portland, Detroit, Los Angeles and Belgrade — with campaigners in Irvine, CA holding an indoor vigil, and with the redoubtable progressive outpost of Cobleskill, NY following on Saturday October 4.

The monthly “First Wednesday” vigils involve campaigners 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, with support from numerous other organizations.

As ever, I’m immensely proud of our little global family of activists, all of whom recognize the significance of the enduring injustice of Guantánamo, and its baleful influence on brutal and unjust detention policies from Israel to El Salvador and, more recently, the US mainland, via the expansion of fundamentally lawless detention facilities run by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as part of the malignant “war on migrants” that Donald Trump launched when he took office in January.

Please see below for photos and commentary from the vigils, and read on for my latest analysis of the cynical use of Guantánamo by Trump as an outlying theater of cruelty in his “war on migrants”, in which, terrifyingly, he is reviving the horrors of the “war on terror” on US soil, and on a truly colossal scale, this time treating immigrants, rather than Muslims, as “terrorists”, and abducting and often extrajudicially “disappearing” them in a fundamental betrayal of the protections that are supposed to apply to everyone on the US mainland.

In the eight baleful months since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the 15 “war on terror” prisoners still held have largely disappeared from view, made invisible as the would-be tyrannical president seized on the naval base as a venue for perforative cruelty in his “war on migrants”, ordering the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to make preparations to hold up to 30,000 migrants there — plans which, fortunately, never materialized.

Beginning in February, however, the first of what, to date, have been less than 700 migrants held at Guantánamo were flown to the naval base, some held in an existing Migrant Operations Center, used to hold migrants intercepted at sea since the 1990s, with others held, illegally, in Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison, which, by law, can only be used to hold prisoners allegedly seized in connection with the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

Faced with legal challenges, Trump disposed of all of the first migrants held at Guantánamo — 178 Venezuelans — within weeks, sending all but one back to Venezuela. In the months that followed, however, more migrants continued to arrive, in smaller numbers, and from a variety of countries, although they too were all subsequently deported or returned to the US mainland.

In June, reports emerged that Trump was once more threatening to massively increase the migrant population at Guantánamo, allegedly planning to send 9,000 men there, including 800 Europeans. I speculated at the time that the news had been an internal leak, designed to get the plans dropped via the fury of European leaders, who, as anticipated, in many cases vociferously complained in public about this flagrant affront to diplomacy.

In July, however, further disturbing news emerged, establishing that, at the time, 72 migrants were held, with 26 of them singled out for particular attention by the Department of Homeland Security, which published a hysterically-entitled list, describing them as the “Worst of the Worst Convicted Criminal Illegal Aliens”, and giving their names, their nationalities, and the alleged crimes for which they had allegedly been convicted. The men came from a variety of countries, mainly in Central and South America and South East Asia, although they also included individuals from the UK and Romania.

The decision to focus on alleged convicts had evidently arisen because the administration had been repeatedly humiliated, exposed time and again lying about most of the men it had been seizing, routinely describing them as gang members and “heinous criminals” based on nothing more than the fact that they had tattoos. In case after case, exposed by lawyers, investigators and journalists, their family members had established that their only “crime” had been to undertake perilous journeys to seek work in the promised land of the USA.

The decision to focus on alleged convicts was particularly disturbing because it coincided with the administration’s successful efforts to deport migrants not to their home countries, but to third countries (namely, South Sudan and Eswatini), with none of the guarantees required under international humanitarian law to ensure that they would not be abused, tortured, “disappeared”, or even killed.

Nevertheless, despite my best efforts to promote the precarious position these 26 men at Guantánamo were in, no one at all followed up on the story, attempts to chase leads led nowhere, and the story soon sank without trace.

It was only the day after our vigils, on October 2, that Carol Rosenberg reported for the New York Times that all of the migrants held over the summer had been removed, with none remaining at all — although there is, of course, no guarantee that more will not be arriving in the future.

As Rosenberg explained, on October 1, when our vigils were taking place, the last 18 migrants held were removed on a charter flight to the US mainland. As she stated, “Their final destinations were not known, but immigration authorities have in the past moved migrants back to the United States to consolidate deportation flights.”

Further elucidating the story of the migrants held over the summer, Rosenberg explained that, at the end of July, 61 migrants were held, but that, since then, 16 ICE flights had “picked up deportees, to either return them to the United States or to add to flights already loaded with other migrants and continue on to other countries.”

She added that, according to Thomas Cartwright, who tracks deportations with the immigrant rights group Witness at the Border, “Their destinations included Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, England, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Laos, Nigeria, Romania, St. Kitt, Sierra Leone and Vietnam.”

Some of these deportations undoubtedly included the 26 men on the list published by the DHS, most notably the British national, although as with his arrival at Guantánamo, and his imprisonment over the summer, there has never been any mention of him in any British media outlet at all.

Once upon a time, a British national held at Guantánamo, even one allegedly convicted of paedophilia, would have been a major news story, but now it’s lost in a vortex of media indifference and the perma-chaos of Trump’s insane rule.

I can only wonder how many other troubling stories are not even being noticed at all.

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Please see below for more photos from the vigils, and do join us if you can for the next vigils on Wednesday November 5, coinciding with the first anniversary of Trump’s re-election, when major protests are planned across the US.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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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