Andy Worthington’s TV and radio appearances

A week is a long time in Donald Trump’s “war on migrants”, and in my latest long read I provide a detailed analysis of the last seven days of ongoing legal challenges, up to and including the Supreme Court, to prevent the administration from sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, which I have previously described as a mega-Guantánamo, where tens of thousands of men are held indefinitely without charge or trial. I also report on interventions by elected representatives of Congress in an effort to secure the return of men wrongly sent to the CECOT prison. The Supreme Court has previously issued rulings demanding that no one be deported without a habeas hearing, and that a Maryland resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador because of an “administrative error”, be returned. However, both rulings have been shamefully ignored by the Trump administration, which has continued to send men to El Salvador without a hearing, and without any effort by the executive branch to demonstrate that it has evidence establishing that they are gang members, as alleged. In cahoots with El Salvador’s dictatorial president Nayib Bukele, the administration has also refused to secure the return of Abrego Garcia. In a third ruling, on April 19, the Supreme Court imposed a temporary ban on any Venezuelans being sent to El Salvador, pending further review. The administration has not yet sought to imperiously sweep that ban aside, but their every action to date has shown complete contempt for the Supreme Court, and for the many other lower courts across the country that have been resisting its outrageous claims to have the right to send Venezuelans to the CECOT prison without providing any evidence that they are gang members, and with every indication that, in fact, the deportations are fundamentally arbitrary, based largely on ICE officials’ flawed assessments of the significance of the men’s tattoos, and with many of the men deported from ICE facilities despite having ongoing hearings regarding their asylum claims. The battle here, as I discussed this week with Chris Cook, on his Gorilla Radio show in Canada, which I link to in my article, is very clearly one in which the Trump administration believes it has the right to deport migrants on a one-way trip to a brutal and unaccountable prison in another country, without any due process, and without any interest in whether or not they are guilty of any crime whatsoever, and is also determined to try to crush any and all opposition in the courts to what it regards as its right to exercise unfettered executive power — or, as we might want to more accurately describe it, executive tyranny.

My assessment of the almost inestimably important case of Mahmoud Khalil, the legal US resident abducted on March 8 and taken to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana for deportation. Targeted for his involvement in student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza at Columbia University, Khalil’s abduction and his intended deportation are a glaring example of the Trump administration’s intention to shred the First Amendment to support Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza, although they are framing it as a “national security” matter. The Secretary of State, the pliant and dim-witted Marco Rubio, seeks to justify Khalil’s deportation by invoking a barely-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which gives him the authority to deport non-citizens if he has “reasonable ground to believe that [their] presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” If successful, the Trump administration will be able to deport any green card holder or visa holder who has engaged in any kind of non-violent opposition to Israel’s genocide, a startling development which would not only formally make the US into a dictatorship, in which freedom of speech (or even thought) is not allowed; it would also do so in the service of a foreign country, Israel. This is a position that, as I describe it, “lays bare how the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, prioritizes Israel’s interests over its own, in what really ought to be seen as a betrayal of America’s self-interest — or even as an act of treason.” Although an immigration judge rubber-stamped Khalil’s deportation on Friday, a legal challenge is ongoing in federal court in New Jersey, and we must all hope that it is successful, although it seems certain that it will be a protracted process that will last for many years. Its importance, however, cannot be underestimated. As I say, “It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of the US depends on it.”

My detailed examination of Donald Trump’s cynical and provocative announcement, last week, that he had issued an executive order for the massive expansion of an existing migrant detention facility on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay to hold 30,000 migrants as part of a monstrous “war on migrants” that has been unfolding since he took office just two weeks ago. I look at how Trump drew on the use of the facility to hold, at one point, 25,000 Haitian and Cuban migrants in the 1990s, and also at how he is using the proximity of the nearby “war on terror” prison to suggest that the migrants are “terrorists”, who should be held without rights, and how officials in his administration have reinforced this notion by describing those to be sent to the facility as “the worst of the worst.” I also examine the deeply troubling legal basis — or the lack of it — when it comes to holding migrants at Guantánamo, which has long been used by the US government as a “law-free zone”, and question who it is intended for, when Trump has already massively expanded the use of “expedited removal” to allow immigration enforcement agents in the US to remove undocumented migrants and send them back to their home countries without being able to meet with a lawyer or have any kind of immigration hearing. This is especially troubling as reports emerge of the first arrivals at the migrant facility, and I wonder, in particular, if Trump will, as I describe it, seek to create “a new law that would explicitly endorse holding undocumented migrants at Guantánamo indefinitely on the basis that they pose a direct threat to the US and its security as ‘invaders’ or ‘terrorists.’”

The video of my half-hour interview with the great peace activist David Swanson for his Talk World Radio show, which is syndicated by the Pacifica Network throughout the US, in which I was very helpfully and generously given the time to explain the many crimes of Guantánamo past, present and future. As David helpfully entitled the show, “Close Guantánamo While Its Victims Are Still Alive.”

My latest interview with Andy Bungay, recorded for his Riverside Radio show in London as part on an ongoing series of monthly interviews, and made available here as a stand-alone podcast. In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change. All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but our conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope, based on my assessment that societal tipping points may arrive unexpectedly when we are failed so persistently by our leaders, whichever political party they represent, as is very clearly the case right now.

Linking to and discussing my recent, in-depth, one-hour interview with Kevin Gosztola for his “Unauthorised Disclosure” podcast, in which we discussed Guantánamo, with a specific focus on the military commissions, and the recent ruling by the 9/11 trial judge refuting defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s claim that he had the right to revoke plea deals agreed in July with three of the 9/11 co-accused, and on the plight of the 16 men still held who have long been approved for release, and for whom President Biden urgently needs to find new homes before his presidency comes to an end. Kevin also promoted ’Songs of Loss and Resistance”, the new album of protest music by my band The Four Fathers, harking back to the ‘Protest Song of the Week’ feature that he ran on his previous site, Shadowproof, where he publicized our very first release nine years ago.

My recent hour-long interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio in south London, posted to my YouTube channel after it was broadcast, in which we discussed the ongoing horrors in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and my contention that our leaders, unable to accept that, for 40 years, their beloved neoliberalism has actually been killing us, have suffered a psychic derangement and have embraced endless war instead.

My latest interview with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, in which we discussed WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s first public appearance since he regained his freedom in June, and recent clampdowns of freedom of expression via social media censorship, which also included the new album by The Four Fathers, a collection of protest songs that was also caught up in the censorship dragnet, making us, briefly, “the band that was banned.”

My recent interview with Chris Cook, on his long-running Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, in which we discussed the recently announced, but swiftly aborted plea deals at Guantánamo for three men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the latest monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo, which had just taken place at ten locations across the US, and in London, Brussels and Mexico City, the far-right riots in the UK, and much more.

Linking to and discussing an interview with Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, which I’ve published as a podcast on my YouTube channel. In the 50-minute interview, recorded on July 13, and featured on Andy’s weekly show, we spoke about the UK General Election, and my relief at being rid of the cruel, corrupt and incompetent post-Brexit Tories. However, I also expressed my doubts about the incoming Labour government led by Keir Starmer, with worries about his authoritarianism, his approach to protest (and here I discussed the recent draconian sentencing of five climate activists for a Zoom call), and his support for war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We also spoke about the new political landscape in the UK — or England in particular — where there are now five main parties, but they are not adequately represented in Parliament because of the antiquated and unjust ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, and how we desperately need a proportional representation system to properly reflect voters’ choices. We also spoke about the release of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, after five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh, and how his release was a ray of light in an otherwise darkening world, and we also spoke about the ongoing injustices of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where 30 men are still held, 16 of whom have long been approved for release.