Radio: Discussing Trump’s “War on Migrants”, the Template Provided by Guantánamo and the Horrors of the CECOT Prison in El Salvador
An image for our co-founder Andy Worthington's interview on "Frontline Voices" on WBAI in New York City on April 30, 2025.
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By Andy Worthington, May 1, 2025
It’s been a while since I last posted about the vile, lawless, racist and indiscriminate "war on migrants" that Donald Trump declared when he took office for the second time on January 20. My most recent article on the topic, Despite the Farcical Collapse of His Guantánamo Migrant Plan, Trump Sends More Venezuelans to the Notorious “War on Terror” Prison, told the story of the abrupt rise and fall of Trump’s efforts to use Guantánamo as part of his deportation policy.
In subsequent articles on my website — available here, here, here and here — I’ve followed up on this topic, as Trump’s attention has shifted to El Salvador, and a truly horrific deal with the sickeningly self-described "coolest dictator" Nayib Bukele to hold deported migrants, instead of at Guantánamo, in his "mega-prison" for alleged terrorists, the CECOT prison (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or, in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center).
Opened in 2023 to hold 40,000 individuals, the CECOT prison was, notoriously, established under a "state of exception" (a state of emergency) declared by Bukele in 2022, allowing the police and the security services to seize suspected gang members and, without providing any proof, to imprison them forever without charge or trial. The men are also forbidden family visits, and are also not allowed lawyers, and the administration proudly boasts that no will ever leave the prison alive.
If this sounds like a mega-Guantánamo, that’s because that is exactly what it is.
Fortunately, legal challenges have been undertaken in numerous courts across the U.S., up to and including the Supreme Court, and these are, with some success, chipping away at the Trump administration’s claims that, without providing any evidence, it can outsource the imprisonment of migrants from the U.S. to another country, where they can be held indefinitely without charge or trial.
However, the situation remains perilous for any migrant in the U.S. — and, indeed, for any other Americans who believe that replicating the extralegal horrors of the "war on terror" on migrants is absolutely unacceptable.
For further discussion on this topic, I’m posting below, via my YouTube channel, an interview I undertook yesterday with Rebecca Myles for "Frontline Voices", a show on WBAI in New York. The full show — which also featured former U.N. official Craig Mokhiber and the journalist and activist Jennifer Loewenstein — can be found on the WBAI website here.
Rebecca contacted me specifically to discuss the analogies between the "war on terror" prison and Trump’s use of the facility to hold migrants, and I hope you have time to listen to the interview.
In it, I condemned the Trump administration for cynically seeking to draw analogies between the "war on terror" and the "war on migrants" by referring to the men sent there as "the worst of the worst" (in a cynical echo of Donald Rumsfeld’s words when the "war on terror" prison opened), and I also discussed how extraordinarily troubling it is that Trump has subsequently decided to outsource his version of Guantánamo to another country, which is more demonstrably beyond the reach of the U.S. courts than Guantánamo ever was.
I also discussed how, when Trump was using Guantánamo, he was required to shunt the last three of the "low-value detainees" still held — three men never charged, and long approved for release — from Camp 6 to Camp 5, to make room for his show of "performative cruelty" towards the migrants.
This means that they are now held alongside the 12 remaining "high-value detainees", all held in CIA "black sites" before their arrival at Guantánamo, mostly in 2006, even though, for the previous 18 years, successive administrations insisted that, for reasons of national security, it was imperative that the two types of prisoners must never be allowed to be held in close proximity.
I’m also aware that the all-consuming chaos of Trump’s first 100 days has rather overshadowed the plight of the 15 men still held in the "war on terror" prison, and I’ll soon be publishing updates about their current status, as, for some of them at least, their seemingly endless pre-trial hearings in the military commissions are ongoing, with prosecutors finding it as hard as ever to create credible cases against men subjected, for many years, to long years of torture in the "black sites."
