Podcast: Guantánamo’s Forgotten Prisoners, Trump’s “War on Migrants” and the Horrors of El Salvador’s CECOT Prison on Due Dissidence
A screenshot of our co-founder Andy Worthington's appearance on the Misty Winston Show on May 21, 2025.
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By Andy Worthington, May 27, 2025
Many thanks to Misty Winston for interviewing me last week 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.
Two excerpts have also been posted on Due Dissidence’s YouTube channel, and I’ve embedded them below, although I do hope that you’ll watch the whole show if they whet your appetite.
We discussed the forgotten "war on terror" prison at Guantánamo, where 15 men are still held, Donald Trump's grotesque "war on migrants," in which he has used Guantánamo as a location for performative cruelty, and the even more alarming deal he reached with El Salvador's dictator, Nayib Bukele, to send migrants on a one-way trip to Bukele's mega-Guantánamo, the CECOT prison that wouldn't exist without the template for indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that was provided by the Bush administration at Guantánamo.
I’ve previously written about Trump’s "war on migrants," and his use of Guantánamo, here, and here, and also here, and you can also find more articles on my website.
Much of our discussion focused on the deliberately cruel and arbitrary nature of the Trump administration's "war," with no evidence provided that the deported migrants were gang members, as alleged, with many of the men deported despite having ongoing asylum appeals, and with, notoriously, one man — Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — sent to CECOT via an administrative error.
The Trump administration has fought back against numerous court rulings seeking to rein in their blatant lawlessness, and officials have also contemptuously refused to contemplate taking any action to remedy their mistakes — in Abrego Garcia's case, launching a black propaganda campaign reviling him in an attempt to erase their mistake.
I was particularly concerned to highlight the similarities between "the war on terror" and the "war on migrants," both of which explicitly involve, or involved imprisoning people without any form of due process, claiming a national emergency as justification.
In the "war on terror," however, this applied to Muslims who had to be rounded up abroad, but in Trump's "war," the victims are not just migrants in ICE detention centers, but any migrant anywhere on the U.S. mainland, with millions of people living and working in the U.S. at risk of being abducted, "war on terror"-style, and ending up, potentially, being sent on a one-way trip to a mega-Guantánamo in another country.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, as I discussed with Misty, that, in Donald Trump's white supremacist America, no one of color is safe anywhere.
