Photos and Report: The 29th Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure, June 4, 2025
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On Wednesday June 4, campaigners across the US — in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit — and in London, Brussels and Mexico City, held the latest “First Wednesday” coordinated vigils calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay. In Belgrade, former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi held a solo vigil, and on Saturday June 7, campaigners in Cobleskill, NY rounded off the week of actions with a defiant protest in the rain.
I can’t express sufficiently my admiration for the small but big-hearted global family of activists who come out together once a month to defy the collective amnesia that, for the most part, has engulfed Guantánamo throughout most of the 23 wretched years of its existence. Many thanks to those involved, 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, as well as numerous other supporting groups.
Please see below for photos of the vigils, and read on for my assessment of why it remains important to campaign for Guantánamo’s closure — including the performative cruelty of Donald Trump’s use of the prison in his horrendous “war on migrants,” and how, inadvertently, he has demonstrated that the prison itself, although still holding 15 men, has become politically irrelevant, furthering arguments for its closure.
Podcast: Guantánamo’s Forgotten Prisoners, Trump’s “War on Migrants” and the Horrors of El Salvador’s CECOT Prison on Due Dissidence
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This article was originally published on May 27 on the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
Many thanks to Misty Winston for interviewing me two weeks ago for her show on Due Dissidence, a channel that we might call an alt-left alternative to the plague of alt-right streaming channels that dominate so much social media.
Misty and I have spoken many times before, beginning in the days when she was an indefatigable activist for Julian Assange, and, after finding a temporary home on various other platforms, it was great to catch up with her on a channel that, I hope, values her presence.
We spoke for 90 minutes, and the show was live-streamed on Rumble, and also on X, and was subsequently posted in its entirety on Substack.
Photos and Report: The Ongoing Relevance of the Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure, May 7, 2025
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
On Wednesday May 7, for the 28th successive month, a global family of dedicated campaigners held vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay at nine locations across the US and around the world — Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Brussels, Mexico City, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Portland, OR — with Cobleskill, NY holding an additional vigil on Saturday May 10.
I’m immensely proud of, and grateful for the dedication of our global family of campaigners — from various Amnesty International groups, and representatives of other groups including the Close Guantánamo campaign, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait and the UK Guantánamo Network — for continuing to shine a light on the lawlessness of Guantánamo, in the face of widespread amnesia or indifference.
This month’s London vigil, in particular, was noteworthy, as campaigners with the UK Guantánamo Network, who have been working assiduously with MPs and peers to reestablish an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Guantánamo’s closure, invited members of the APPG to show support by visiting the vigil for a photo opportunity, and five MPs and peers took a break from their busy schedules to join us — Chris Law of the SNP, the chair of the APPG, Baroness Natalie Bennett of the Green Party, John McDonnell and Andy Slaughter of the Labour Party, and Brian Mathew, a Liberal Democrat.
Updates on Trump’s Deportation Obsession and His Open Warfare on the US Courts, and My Interview on Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook
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Many thanks to Chris Cook in western Canada for having me on his weekly Gorilla Radio show on Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in the horrendous “war on migrants” that Donald Trump initiated when he took office three months ago. The interview is available here, on Gorilla Radio’s Substack, taking up the first half of the hour-long show, with Canadian author Ray McGinnis in the second half.
Chris and I last spoke in February, just after Donald Trump had started using Guantánamo to hold migrants — the majority of whom were Venezuelans, who were accused, without evidence, of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. I wrote about the use of Guantánamo for migrants in a series of articles here, here, here, here, here and here, with a summary on the Close Guantánamo website on March 21.
By that point, Trump had begun shifting his focus to an even more alarming location than Guantánamo, sending 238 Venezuelan migrants and 23 Salvadorians — all, again, accused of being gang members, without any evidence being provided — on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or, in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center) on March 15.
No One Is Safe As Trump Gleefully Deports Migrants to El Salvador’s Mega-Guantánamo Without Evidence, Or Even Via An “Administrative Error”
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.
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.
Photos and Report: Monthly Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure Also Call on Trump to Stop Lawlessly Holding Migrants in the Prison
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
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.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
