No One Is Safe As Trump Gleefully Deports Migrants to El Salvador’s Mega-Guantánamo Without Evidence, Or Even Via An “Administrative Error”
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In the sordid, chaotic, belligerent and openly racist “war on migrants” that Donald Trump declared when he took office on January 20, two particular truths about the administration’s intentions have become increasingly evident, and both of them are profoundly disturbing.
The first is that no immigrant to the US from anywhere in the world — but mostly, to date, from countries in Central or South America — is safe from arbitrary detention and deportation, and, in particular, the threat of being deported, not to their home countries, but to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where prisoners are held indefinitely without charge or trial, dehumanized, half-starved and subjected to relentless violence. The CECOT prison, established under El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele, is nothing less than a futuristic, turbo-charged version of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.
The second cause for deep alarm is the Trump administration’s absolute contempt for any legal challenges to what it aggressively claims is its right to detain and deport anyone it feels like detaining and deporting. Primarily, to date, Venezuelans, these men are routinely described as dangerous “high-threat aliens”, gang members and terrorists at war with the US, although the administration has failed to back up its hysterical claims with anything resembling evidence.
Disturbingly, the administration insists that all of its claimed deliberations about who to detain and deport are shielded from any kind of scrutiny or review because of national security concerns, claims that are nothing less than the thinnest of covers for what is actually the the unacceptable and unconstitutional exercise of unfettered executive power.
The Case of Mahmoud Khalil: Trump Aims to Destroy the First Amendment and Deport Legal Residents to Defend a Genocide
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Over the last 18 months, the veneer of civilization has worn so thin that the darkness is pouring in, threatening to engulf us all.
It all began, of course, on October 7, 2023 — not with the attacks by Hamas and other militants in southern Israel, but with Israel’s response, which, almost immediately, very evidently involved implementing the “Final Solution”, with the full support of the US and most other western countries, to what was perceived as the long-standing “problem” of the Palestinians refusing to patiently and non-violently submit to a grotesque system of apartheid, to being expelled from their land, or imprisoned within it, or to being murdered indiscriminately, or imprisoned arbitrarily in brutal and fundamentally lawless prisons at the hands of their aggressors — monstrous injustices played out incessantly over the previous 75 years.
In all of the violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the long decades since the brutal, blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 750,000 exiled, nothing — not even the 1,139 deaths on October 7 (even discounting the as yet untold number of those who were killed by the Israelis themselves under the Hannibal Doctrine), or the more than 2,300 Palestinians killed in the longest of Israel’s previous military assaults on Gaza, for seven weeks in 2014 — can compare with the almost entirely relentless slaughter and destruction of the last 554 days, in which almost the entirety of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and, at the barest minimum, over 50,000 people have been killed, most of whom were civilians.
Not content with engaging in the industrial-scale slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, gleefully advocating genocide while pretending it is the world’s only perpetual victim, and has an infinite right to “defend itself” without any constraints whatsoever on its actions, Israel has also worked assiduously to promote its narrative in the west, having spent decades embedding itself in the corridors of power, and in newsrooms, and also, in recent years, aggressively promoting a legally-implemented definition of antisemitism that involves not, as it should, targeting the sweeping and indiscriminate hatred of an entire people that typifies all forms of racism, but by pretending that antisemitism actually means opposing the actions of the Israeli government, even when, as has been the case for the last 18 months, that government is manifestly engaging in a genocide.
Photos and Report: The Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure – and No More Migrant Prisoners – on April 2, 2025
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On Wednesday April 2, campaigners across the US and around the world — in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, London, Brussels, Detroit and Phoenix, AZ — held the latest coordinated monthly vigils (the “First Wednesday” vigils) calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and for Donald Trump to stop using the prison — and the wider naval base on which it is located — to hold migrants facing deportation from the US. Organizations involved include various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, with support from numerous other organizations.
Through illness or other commitments, three other vigils — in Mexico City, Portland, OR and Los Angeles — didn’t take place, while the vigil in Cobleskill, NY was moved to Saturday April 5, to coincide with the “Hands Off” rallies against Trump and Elon Musk taking place at over 1,400 locations across the US, attended by an estimated three million people.
Photos from the vigils are posted below, and please read on for some context about the vigils, their history, and their relevance.
Trump’s Migrant Deportations: Judge Says Nazis in US in WWII Had More Rights to Contest Their Removal Than Venezuelan Migrants Now
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Last Wednesday (March 26), Judge Patricia Millett, a judge in the appeals court in Washington D.C., delivered a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport 238 Venezuelan migrants — allegedly members of the Tren de Aragua gang — to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security “terrorist” prison, where they are all now imprisoned without charge or trial, for at least a year, and perhaps more, at a cost to the US taxpayer of $6 million, even though no evidence was presented by the Trump administration to confirm that they were gang members, and even though, in some cases, compelling testimony from family members would seem to confirm that they had no involvement whatsoever with Tren de Aragua.
At the hearing on March 26, Judge Millett told the government’s main lawyer, Drew Ensign, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here”, in an exchange relating to whether or not, as the Guardian described it, “Venezuelans targeted for removal under the Alien Enemies Act had time to contest the Trump administration’s assertion that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang before they were put on planes and deported to El Salvador.”
Trump’s disturbing invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in a “proclamation” on March 15, in what appeared to be a nakedly authoritarian attempt to deport Venezuelans alleged to be members of the gang without making any effort to establish whether or not that was the case.
Horror As Trump Invokes the Alien Enemies Act, Defies a Judge and Sends Innocent Venezuelans to El Salvador’s “Mega-Prison”
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Since Donald Trump launched a cynical, cruel and racist “war on migrants” when he took office two months ago, he has sought to use the existing “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay to hold migrants described as “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.” Most of these men — over 300 in total, just 1% of the 30,000 Trump pledged to imprison when he first announced his Guantánamo plans on January 29 — have been Venezuelans, although no evidence has been provided that any of them were the “high-priority criminal aliens” that Trump alleged, with copious amounts of evidence subsequently emerging to demonstrate that their purported involvement with a notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, was based solely on their tattoos.
Trump’s rationale for using Guantánamo has also been unclear. It appears, primarily, to have been an expensive act of “performative cruelty”, given how expensive it is to use Guantánamo, especially when all of the men detained could have been deported from the existing ICE facilities on the US mainland where they were previously held, a notion reinforced by the fact that most of the men were subsequently deported, while others were ignominiously returned to ICE facilities on US soil.
In an article for the Close Guantánamo website, I have just provided a detailed review of Trump’s Guantánamo migrant policy, but in this follow-up article I examine an even more disturbing development, involving Trump bypassing Guantánamo, and inappropriately invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants from the US mainland, flagrantly ignoring a temporary restraining order issued by a federal court judge preventing the use of the Act to deport migrants, 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 — again, without any evidence having been provided to back up the administration’s assertions regarding these men’s gang membership.
UN Report Finds Israel Guilty of Genocide and Extermination Against Women and Girls in Gaza, Through “Systematic Destruction” of Reproductive Healthcare
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On March 13, a devastating report, “‘More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023”, was issued by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The report’s most alarming findings are that, since October 2023, as described in an accompanying press release, Israel has engaged in “acts which amount to the crime against humanity of extermination”, through the deaths of women and girls “from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities which have denied access to reproductive healthcare.”
In addition, “through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare”, which has “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group”, the Commission found that Israel has engaged in acts “amounting to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention”; namely, “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”
Photos and Report: Monthly Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure Also Call on Trump to Stop Lawlessly Holding Migrants in the Prison
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On Wednesday (March 5), the latest “First Wednesday” vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — and for Donald Trump to stop using it as part of his cruel and illegal “war on migrants” — took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, OR, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, AZ, and in London, Brussels and Mexico City, with a vigil in Cobleskill, NY taking place this Saturday, March 8. Organizations involved include various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.
Check out the photos below, and please read on for the history of the vigils, and for the shocking resurgence of Guantánamo under Donald Trump, and for explanations of why his shameful use of the naval base and the prison must be resisted.
Lawsuit Challenges Trump’s “Cruel, Unnecessary and Illegal” Transfers of Migrants to Guantánamo
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In a lawsuit submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on Saturday (March 1), the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) asked 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. As the groups explained in a press release, transferring migrants to Guantánamo from the US mainland is a policy “without any legal authority, in violation of federal law and the US Constitution.”
The central premise of the lawsuit is that, although foreign nationals have been held at Guantánamo before — in a Migrant Operations Center established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, and, most notoriously, in the “war on terror” prison established in January 2002, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness — the foreign nationals being sent to Guantánamo by Donald Trump have legal and constitutional rights that cannot be wished away through the traditional subterfuge of pretending that US law doesn’t apply at Guantánamo because, technically, it is only leased from the Cuban government, which has ultimate sovereignty.
In relation to the Migrant Operations Center and the “war on terror” prison, this subterfuge has, shamefully, been largely successful, but, as the rights groups argue compellingly in their lawsuit, because the current migrants have been previously held on the US mainland, even though their 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.
Shocking Reports of the Systemic Brutalization and Dehumanization of Migrants Held at Guantánamo
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Huge congratulations to the Washington Post for highlighting the brutality and dehumanization taking place at the migrant detention facility that has been in operation for the last three weeks in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, specifically, through the use of one particular cellblock in the existing “war on terror” prison, Camp 6, where the majority of the more than 200 migrants flown to Guantánamo from the US mainland have been held since detention operations began on February 4.
Washington Post reporters spoke to three of the 178 Venezuelan men held there between February 4 and February 20, when, with one exception, they were all repatriated to Venezuela via Honduras — with that one exception, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, flown back to ongoing detention on the US mainland.
Since then, however, 17 more migrants arrived on February 23 — seven from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by the New York Times — with another nine following on February 24, during a visit by defense secretary Pete Hegseth. All are reportedly being held in Camp 6.
Victory for US Law as Trump Abruptly Empties Guantánamo of All the Migrants He Just Sent There
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NOTE: Please see the important postscript at the end of this article, about Trump’s revival of flights just after it was published. The struggle continues.
On Thursday (February 20), the Trump administration’s short-lived attempt to turn the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba into a migrant detention facility holding up to 30,000 migrants — a plan announced via an executive order on January 29, and which, as it developed, involved, with astonishing illegality, co-opting a block in the long-established “war on terror” military prison to hold the majority of these men — seemed to stunningly collapse as all but one of the 178 migrants flown there since February 4, all Venuzuelans, were deported back to Venezuela via Honduras. The one man not repatriated was brought back to the US mainland.
It will be difficult for the Trump administration to spin this as anything other than an abject humiliation, and a powerful reminder that a president doesn’t rule by executive order, or with unfettered executive authority; he — or she, if that day ever comes — has to work with Congress, which passes laws and appropriates funding, and has to operate within the constraints of US law, as interpreted through the judiciary.
Trump’s Guantánamo plan openly showed contempt for all of the above. It was never clear that any authority existed to hold migrants seized on the US mainland at the naval base, where a Migrant Operations Center, in operation since the early 1990s, had only ever been used for Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea, to prevent them from landing on the US mainland and claiming the rights to legal assistance that entailed.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
