Guantanamo

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and in London, Brussels and Mexico City on May 7, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for 28 months, and have gained greater resonance under Donald Trump and his “war on migrants”, in which he has cynically used Guantánamo, and, more recently, has also sent migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo that, arguably, wouldn’t exist at all without the template provide by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, and shamefully maintained by every president ever since.

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 latest long read, a detailed account of Trump’s “war on migrants”, from the slew of “Presidential Actions” to Guantánamo and then, most monstrously, the deal with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador involving a one-way trip for Venezuelan migrants from the US to Bukele’s horrendous CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo, where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial in brutal conditions. I run through the legal challenges, up to and including the Supreme Court, and the horrendous reality that most of the men transferred are not gang members, as alleged, and that the Trump administration has no evidence that they are, that it doesn’t care, and that it is trying to hide this truth behind claims of “national security” secrecy. I also focus on two particularly egregious cases of injustice: that of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela, who was sent to the CECOT prison despite having an ongoing asylum claim in the US, and the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian resident of Maryland, who had protected status explicitly preventing his deportation to El Salvador, but who was sent to the CECOT prison because of an “administrative error”, and the truly chilling implications of the refusal of both the Trump administration and Bukele to bring him back, defying an order by the Supreme Court. As I say, “If the courts don’t prevail, and if the majority of the Justices in the Conservative-dominated Supreme Court don’t firmly grasp the enormity of how they are being snubbed and sidelined, and thoroughly assert their authority, the US will be entering truly perilous and lawless territory, in which no one — or, at least, no one who isn’t, essentially, a powerful white supremacist — will be safe.”

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and in London and Brussels on April 2, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for more than two years, and are, of course, continuing under Donald Trump, after he has cynically, cruelly and illegally decided to use the prison to hold migrants as part of the racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office.

My latest — a detailed report about the formidable legal challenges to Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which he used to deport 238 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, without providing any evidence that the men were, as he alleged, members of the Tren de Aragua gang. The flights took place on March 15, even though Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C. had issued a temporary restraining order preventing the removal of any migrants, and I analyze the subsequent litigation, leading to a definitive ruling by Judge Boasberg on March 24, in which he refused to back down, and the ruling two days later, in the Circuit Court, supporting Judge Boasberg’s ruling, in which Judge Patricia Millett made the memorable observation — highlighted in the heading of my article — that Nazis held in the US in the Second War and subjected to the Alien Enemies Act had more rights than Venezuelan migrants right now under Donald Trump. The case has now been submitted to the Supreme Court, where, we must hope, it doesn’t prevail, as the heart of Trump’s cruel lawlessness is his insistence that he had the right to deport these men to a notoriously vile foreign prison without providing any evidence that any of them were gang members, as alleged, and without providing them with any form of due process. I also run through some of the many stories reported about these men, which would seem to establish definitively that they are not gang members, and conclude by comparing Trump’s actions to those of the Bush administration, when the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay was established 23 years ago, holding men and boys without evidence, and without any due process, which, as I explain, was, and is “a fast-track way to turn a country that claims to respect the rule into one that is indistinguishable from a brutal dictatorship.”

My report about the latest horrors in the “war on migrants” declared by Donald Trump when he took office two months ago, focused on his inappropriate invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants, which also involved him flagrantly ignoring a temporary restraining order issued by a federal court judge preventing the use of the Act, and immediately sending 238 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, along with 23 alleged Salvadorian gang members, to be imprisoned in the notorious CECOT “mega-prison”, established by El Salvador’s hardline President Nayib Bukele. This unconscionable off-shoring — for money — of migrants to a reviled prison in another country took place, as with Trump’s recent use of Guantánamo to hold migrants, without any evidence having been provided to back up the administration’s assertions that these men were members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, with stories emerging, as at Guantánamo, that they were nothing more than men who had sought to get to the US to secure work, and that the entire basis of their alleged gang membership is a result of sweeping and imprecise assessments of the significance of their tattoos.

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and in London, Brussels and Mexico City on March 5, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for the last two years, and are, of course, continuing under Donald Trump, after he has cynically, cruelly and illegally decided to use the prison to hold migrants as part of the racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office.

My report about an important lawsuit submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), asking the Court to urgently intervene to “put a stop” to what they accurately describe as the Trump administration’s “cruel, unnecessary and illegal transfers” of migrants to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The lawsuit was submitted on behalf of ten named individuals — seven Venezuelans, an Afghan, a Pakistani and a Bangladeshi — who are currently being held in immigration detention facilities in Texas, Virginia and Arizona run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but who legitimately fear being sent to Guantánamo. The lawyers correctly argue that, even though the men’s asylum claims were ultimately unsuccessful, and they have all been subjected to “final removal” orders, they are still protected by the US Constitution, and by US law; specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Regarding the Constitution, the lawyers argue that the transfers and detention of the migrants at Guantánamo “violate due process under the Fifth Amendment because the transfers are undertaken for punitive, illegitimate reasons and the conditions in which the detainees are housed are unconstitutional.” It is to be hoped that the Court arranges a hearing soon, and that the judge recognizes the illegality of the Trump administration’s actions, and can act to stop it.

Following up on a compelling Washington Post article featuring interviews with three of the 127 Venezuelan migrants held in Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay between February 4 and February 20, when they were repatriated (although only to be replaced by new arrivals from the US mainland), I note how alarming it is to hear about the brutality and dehumanization to which they were subjected, including invasive strip-searches, a ban on almost all outdoor recreation time, a ban on all contact with the outside world, and an atmosphere that was so oppressive that a number of them tried to kill themselves. I discuss how the rhetoric about them being “the worst of the worst” seems to be entirely unfounded, and ask, above all, one burning question: who authorized these conditions of confinement, more punitive than those implemented since the early days of the “war on terror”? I note that military guards don’t act autonomously, and that, therefore, their actions must be dictated by the “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs) put in place since Trump’s cynical and cruel “war on migrants” began, which need to be publicly revealed.

I celebrate the welcome news that Donald Trump’s use of Guantánamo to hold Venezuelan migrants as part of his cynical and cruel “war on migrants” seems to have come to an abrupt end, less than a month since it was first announced. On Thursday, 178 men were held in total — 51 in the existing Migrant Operations Center, established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, and 127 in Camp 6 of the “war on terror” prison. While the legality of the entire enterprise was extremely dubious, the use of Camp 6 was glaringly illegal, as the legislation establishing the prison’s existence in January 2002 (the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force) only ever justified its use for those seized in connection with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces, with specific reference to the 9/11 attacks. On Thursday, after a court hearing in response to a challenge by rights groups including the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, all but one of these men were flown back to Venezuela via Honduras, with the remaining man flown back to detention on the US mainland. It is to be hoped that this is the end of this particularly malign and lawless project, and that it was meant to be an act of “performative cruelty” on Trump’s part to appeal to his base, but it is, sadly, all too typical of an administration that, on as many fronts as possible, is intent on pushing a narrative that the president should be able to do whatever he wants, unrestrained by any of the checks and balances on presidential power that are part of the Constitution.