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Trump to cut off funding for schools and universities with Covid vaccine mandates – US politics live
Donald Trump has convened the press in the Oval Office to sign an executive order cutting off federal funding for schools and universities that require students be vaccinated against Covid-19 to attend classes.In addition to that order, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president had signed another order establishing an “Energy Dominance Council” led by the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, and energy secretary, Chris Wright. Leavitt made a point to note that the Associated Press was not in attendance.More news of federal layoffs continues to roll in, this time from the department of health and human services – which Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed to lead in a controversial vote yesterday. According to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post, the department is in the process of firing about 5,200 health workers.The news comes just hours after the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – which is housed within HHS – will lose about 10% of its employees, following a Trump administration order to fire all hires still in their probationary period. That amounts to about 1,300 employees.Amid Donald Trump’s rampant efforts to downsize the civilian federal workforce, the president’s new veterans affairs secretary Doug Collins has announced plans to lay off at least 1,000 employees. He promised the layoffs (and subsequent $98 million cut in the department’s budget) will not affect veteran care or benefits. “I take Secretary Collins at his word when he says there will be no impact to the delivery of care, benefits, and services for veterans with this plan,” said Rep. Mike Bost, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.The ranking Democrat, Rep. Mark Takano, said the firings show a shocking disregard. The terminated include disabled veterans, military spouses and medical researchers.A second federal judge has paused Donald Trump’s order restricting healthcare for transgender youth.The temporary restraining order came from the US district court judge Lauren King in Seattle just a day after a federal judge in Baltimore also temporarily blocked the president’s executive order.Democratic attorneys general from Washington state, Oregon and Minnesota filed the Seattle lawsuit, arguing that the order discriminates against transgender people.The presidential order halted federal support for gender-affirming care for trans youth under 19, including by ending funding to institutions that offer such care and excluding the care from government-run insurance coverage.Gender-affirming healthcare includes a range of therapies – from emotional support to vocal coaching, puberty blockers and sometimes hormones and surgery. The treatments are considered the standard of care and are endorsed by all US medical associations.Since Trump returned to office last month, he has signed a series of executive orders targeting trans Americans, including by banning trans athletes from women’s sports, declaring the government will only recognize the male and female sexes and transferring incarcerated trans women to men’s facilities; a US judge temporarily blocked federal prisons from implementing the order to move trans people. Many of the orders have been framed as “defending women”.Donald Trump and Elon Musk will jointly appear on Fox News next week with host Sean Hannity. It will be the pair’s first televised interview together.In recent months, Trump has formed a close relationship with Musk, resulting in his appointment to lead the newly formed, so-called “department of government efficiency”. On Tuesday, Musk took questions from reporters alongside the president in an Oval Office ceremony regarding the closure of government offices. Musk spent $250m on the president’s re-election campaign.The Internal Revenue Service will lay off thousands of probationary employees, beginning potentially next week, the New York Times reports.The firings are in line with orders from the Office of Personnel Management, which acts as the federal government’s human resources department, to let go of employees new in their positions, who have fewer job protections.The layoffs come amid the annual tax season, as Americans file returns ahead of the 15 April deadline. The Times notes the layoffs seem to contradict comments to Bloomberg News from Treasury secretary Scott Bessent last week, who said any layoffs at the IRS would come after that deadline.At his speech today to a high-profile security conference in Germany, JD Vance made a number of claims that offer a window into how he views the United States’s relationship with the world.The problem is, several of them stretch the truth, as the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey and Alexandra Topping report:Donald Trump has green-lit the first new export of liquified natural gas since Joe Biden paused approvals early last year amid concerns over their impact on climate change, Reuters reports.The decision allows Louisiana’s Commonwealth LNG to export gas to markets in Asia and Europe. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump also said 600m acres (243m hectares) of offshore waters controlled by the federal government will reopen to oil and gas drilling, reversing a ban imposed by Biden.Here’s more about Biden’s steps against natural gas:Donald Trump revealed to reporters that he had spoken to Keir Starmer, and that they may meet in the next few weeks, Reuters reports.We first heard about the call, which came as something of a surprise to the British prime minister and his aides, earlier today:Donald Trump has convened the press in the Oval Office to sign an executive order cutting off federal funding for schools and universities that require students be vaccinated against Covid-19 to attend classes.In addition to that order, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president had signed another order establishing an “Energy Dominance Council” led by the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, and energy secretary, Chris Wright. Leavitt made a point to note that the Associated Press was not in attendance.JD Vance had no time to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz during his travel to the country, but did find an opportunity to sit down with the leader of the far-right AfD party, according to media reports.It was German broadcaster ZDF that broke news of the vice-president’s encounter with the AfD chief Alice Weidel, which lasted for about 30 minutes and saw them discuss the war in Ukraine and politics in Berlin. As for Scholz, Politico reports that Vance’s spokesperson cited a “scheduling conflict” the prevented them from meeting. But a former US official, referring to team Vance’s thinking, put it this way:
We don’t need to see him, he won’t be chancellor long.
Vance’s speech to the Munich security forum earlier in the day included a line seen as indicating his support for the AfD, which is expected to make gains in elections later this month. Follow our live blog for more: More - in US Politics
White House bans AP journalists from Oval Office amid continued Gulf dispute
The White House has announced that it is indefinitely blocking Associated Press journalists from accessing the Oval Office and Air Force One amid a growing standoff between Donald Trump’s administration and the news agency over the Gulf of Mexico’s name.White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich made the announcement on X, saying: “The Associated Press continues to ignore the lawful geographic name change of the Gulf of America. This decision is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press’s commitment to misinformation.”Budowich went on to accuse the 175-year-old news wire agency – whose style guidance is used by thousands of journalists and writers globally – of “irresponsible and dishonest reporting”.Budowich said he recognized that the Associated Press’s reporting is covered by the US constitution’s first amendment, which provides for the freedoms of speech and press. But he maintained that “does not ensure their privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One”.He added that Associated Press journalists and photographers would retain their credentials to the White House complex.According to the Hill, an Associated Press journalist was barred from attending an executive order signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon following the White House’s announcement.The outlet reports that a White House official told the Associated Press journalist, “No, sorry,” when the reporter tried to join the event.Friday’s announcement from the White House marks an escalation in the growing feud between the Trump administration and the Associated Press over the organization’s refusal to abide by Trump’s preference for Gulf of America and change its style on that body of water to Gulf of America.On Tuesday, the Associated Press said another one of its journalists was refused entry into an executive order signing ceremony at the Oval Office – a move described by the news agency’s executive editor Julie Pace as an attempt by the White House to “punish” the organization for its independent journalism.“Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the first amendment,” Pace said.After Tuesday’s episode, Pace sent a letter to the White House, calling the White House’s decision an “alarming precedent”.A separate statement from the New York Times said it stood by the Associated Press while “condemning repeated acts of retribution by this administration for editorial decisions it disagrees with”.“Any move to limit access or impede reporters doing their jobs is at odds with the press freedoms enshrined in the constitution,” said the statement, which was reported by chief CNN media analyst Brian Stelter.According to a 23 January style memo, the Associated Press said that it would not be changing its style on the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America after Trump’s decision to change the body of water’s name – a move which holds authority only within the US’s federal government.“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences,” the Associated Press said.Blocking the Associated Press’s access around Trump could substantially affect news consumption in certain markets.The Associated Press provides reporting to a numerous publications across the US that do not have their own reporters covering the White House.Supporters of Trump could also use the White House’s decision to limit access for Associated Press journalists as evidence for bad-faith arguments that the organization is unpatriotic or untrustworthy. More
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US watchdog to investigate Musk ‘Doge’ team’s access to payment systems
A government watchdog is to launch an inquiry into security over the US treasury’s payments system as a judge on Friday considered whether access by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to the highly sensitive data base was unconstitutional.Amid mounting court cases concerning Doge’s activities, the treasury department’s inspector general said it would launch an audit after Democrats complained about the access gained to a 25-year-old Musk associate, Marko Elez, who was briefly granted edit access within the system, meaning he had the potential to change entries. The access was later rescinded by an interim court ruling.The payment system contains the personal details of millions of Americans and disburses trillions of dollars to federal government programmes.Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, has been tasked by Trump to slash government spending by targeting alleged waste and fraud and has upended large swaths of the federal bureaucracy, cancelling contracts, stopping spending programs and throwing thousands of staff out of work.Loren Sciurba, the treasury’s deputy inspector general, said the audit would review the past two years of the system’s transactions to examine Musk’s claim that his team has uncovered evidence of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments.She said the audit – launched in response to demands from the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden – would begin immediately and take until August to complete.Its launch coincided with a judge in Washington considering a legal suit lodged by Democratic attorneys general from 14 states, arguing that Doge’s work was illegal on the alleged grounds that Trump violated the US constitution by creating a federal government department without congressional approval.The attorneys general argue that Musk has exercised “virtually unchecked power” by entering government agencies and ordering sweeping cuts without oversight or authorization from Congress.USAid, the government foreign assistance agency, has been shuttered on his authority and its workforce put on leave, although a judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift the funding freeze it has imposed on the agency’s humanitarian work.The suit, led by New Mexico’s justice department, alleges that Doge has “unraveled federal agencies, accessed sensitive data, and caused widespread disruption for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people”.The attorneys general asked the court to order Musk to identify how “any data obtained through unlawful agency access was used” and to destroy any “unauthorised access in his or Doge’s possession”. They called on the court to bar Musk and his team from stopping the disbursement of public funds, cancelling contracts and dismantling agencies.The hearing was due to take place after Musk said the US needed to “delete entire agencies” to eliminate waste.A separate hearing in a court in New York was due over whether to extend a temporary block on the Doge team entering the payments system that was imposed in an interim ruling last Saturday by Judge Paul Englemayer. Musk called for Englemayer’s impeachment after that ruling, while JD Vance, the vice-president, wrote in a social media most that judges were not allowed to interfere with a president’s “legitimate power” – a view contested by most constitutional law experts.Swingeing cuts continued apace despite the plethora of legal challenges. Federal agency heads were ordered to fire most recent hires who have not completed their probation period – a move likely to affect about 200,000 workers, the Washington Post reported.The treasury department audit coincided with a call from Chris Murphy, Democratic senator for Connecticut, for an official investigation into the “legality and scope” of Musk’s penetration of the federal bureaucracy.“Musk and his aides are subject to various conflict of interest statutes which prohibit federal employees from participating in matters that impact their own financial interests,” Murphy wrote to the US government comptroller general, Eugene Dodaro.He added: “It is imperative the public understands whether Musk and his aides have complied with the law and whether highly sensitive data could be at risk if accessed by private actors who seek to benefit from the information illegally, or worse, by foreign adversaries who wish to attack this country.”Despite the rising resistance to its activities, the US armed services were preparing a list of weapons systems to be cut in preparation for Doge casting its gaze over the Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal reported.Members of Musk’s team were expected to visit the Pentagon on Friday. “People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts,” a defence official told the Journal.The army was said to be volunteering cutting outdated drones and vehicles, while the navy is proposing cuts to frigates and littoral combat ships. More
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Some federal workers given just 30 minutes to leave amid Trump layoffs
Some federal employees who have been laid off were reportedly given only 30 minutes to pack their belongings and vacate federal offices. Federal agencies were ordered by Donald Trump to fire mostly probationary staff, with as many as 200,000 workers set to be affected and some made to rush off the premises, the Washington Post reported.More mass layoffs came on Friday as approximately 2,300 employees have been fired from the US interior department.The interior department oversees the US’s natural resources and manages 500m acres of public land, including national parks. The widespread layoffs were confirmed by three sources with knowledge on the subject, who spoke to Reuters anonymously.Probationary employees at two US agriculture department research agencies were also fired, Reuters reported, citing two anonymous sources. The exact number of terminated workers has not been confirmed, but layoffs reportedly happened overnight.Several federal unions have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for mass terminations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), ABC News reported. The plaintiffs argued that Russ Vought, the acting director of CFPB, plans to slash 95% of the agency’s workforce, essentially gutting the agency.The large-scale layoff strategy, led by Elon Musk’s so called “department of government efficiency”, is meant to cut costs by downsizing the federal government. Trump and Musk have both criticized the federal workforce as being oversized, with Trump calling the federal government “bloated” and filled with “people that are unnecessary”. Musk said on Thursday that the US should “delete entire agencies”, comparing them to “weeds” that needed to be rooted out.But massive layoffs have created chaos for affected federal employees. Thousands of workers were fired in group calls or via pre-recorded messages in recent days, the Post reported. Others were told they would be laid off by email, but never received such messages.Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press that firing employees on probation is flawed because it targets younger workers.“Baby boomers are retiring right and left, so actually the people you want to keep are probably most of the people who are right now on probation,” said Kamarck, who worked in former president Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration when about 426,000 federal jobs were cut over more than eight years in a deliberative effort aimed at reinventing government. “They’re younger and presumably have better skills, and that’s who you want.”About 100 employees at the office of personnel management (OPM) were fired in a Microsoft Teams group call, CNN reported, and told they had half an hour to leave the building.OPM workers were told that they were terminated because they did not accept the Trump administration’s deferred resignation plan, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union told CNN. The buyout offers allowed employees who agreed to stop working to be paid through 30 September, although some have questioned if the payment offer is valid.Everett Kelley, head of the AFGE, which represents 800,000 federal workers, has condemned the layoffs and promised to use “every legal challenge available”, in comments to the Post.“Employees were given no notice, no due process, and no opportunity to defend themselves in a blatant violation of the principles of fairness and merit that are supposed to govern federal employment,” said Kelley.So far, at least six agencies have carried out widespread layoffs. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which oversees services and benefits to military veterans, laid off 1,000 probationaries, Reuters reported. A termination notice to VA employees stated and CNN reported: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”Termination notices were also sent to employees at the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the General Services Administration (GSA).Additional layoffs are expected at the National Science Foundation and Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Post reported, citing a person with knowledge on the reductions who spoke anonymously. The US Forest Service, which manages 193m acres (78m hectares) of US public lands, is also expected to fire more than 3,000 workers.The job slashing comes as a judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s buyout offers could proceed, with officials then closing the plan to employees who may still have been weighing the decision.Approximately 3.75% of workers – or about 75,000 people – accepted the deal, Semafor reported. The figure is below the 5-10% of workers that the White House aimed to get rid of and estimated would accept the buyout offers.Send us a tip
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Seth Meyers on Trump and Musk: ‘They’re trying to rip you off’
Late-night hosts took aim at Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s too-close relationship and how one is clearly in control of the other.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about how voters have been most concerned about grocery prices yet Trump has been “easily distracted by silly stuff” and placed his attention elsewhere.This week saw him elected chair of the Kennedy Center, which led to Meyers joking that the next round of honors would include “Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood and Big Mouth Billy Bass”.It’s meant that he’s had less time to help Musk in his project of “dismantling the government”. Meyers joked that it’s “fun sometimes to pretend bad things might be good things”.In audio from a call about the Kennedy Center, Trump said he was going to make it “hot” again like he had also made the presidency. “You didn’t make the presidency hot unless you mean hot like a low-grade fever,” he said.Another “frivolous distraction Trump is obsessed with” concerns him renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has led to Associated Press journalists being banned from official press events as they refuse to obey. “At least give people like a week to process it!” Meyers said.He also said that “we should stop waiting for tech companies to be part of the pushback” with both Google and Apple following the change on official maps.Meyers played a clip of Trump trying to explain Musk’s dismantling, which was a ramble about magnets, tractors and planes. “Every time Trump speaks I feel like a guy who started season two of Severance without watching season one,” he said.He said they want to avoid talking about what’s really happening as “the reality of what they’re doing is unpopular and illegal” and Musk essentially wants “direct control of the government” by taking over the regulatory group that would otherwise be able to stop his business practices.He said that there is “a lot of bad stuff happening right now” and “they’re trying to rip you off and they hope you’ll be distracted by all the nonsense going through Trump’s head”.Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host spoke about the nationwide shortage of eggs with grocery stores hiking prices and limiting the number of eggs customers can purchase.He said that regular eggs are now “more valuable than Faberge”.For Valentine’s Day, he joked that Trump has “got a little something for his sugar vladdy” after a call with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian dictator was given essentially everything he wanted out of the negotiation.Kimmel said it is “honestly amazing the guy only bankrupted three casinos” while saying that “if you attack and murder our allies, it will make no difference at all”.Trump’s rambling explanation led Kimmel to say that we are “one weird press conference away from Trump saying he wants to move Ukraine to Gaza”.Then, “as if we don’t have enough to worry about”, Kimmel said that “measles and wide-leg jeans are back”, joking about Kendrick Lamar’s outfit choice at the Super Bowl.He reassured us that “Bobby Brainworm is on the job” to fix measles with the outspoken anti-vax crusader confirmed as the new head of health and human services.In a press conference, Robert F Kennedy Jr said that God sent him Trump. “Next God is gonna send us diphtheria,” Kimmel joked.The clip saw Kennedy engage in “triple-A ass kissing”, which Kimmel said would have aroused Trump. “Melania couldn’t turn him on like that the first night they met,” he joked. More
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Want to defeat Trump? Support unions | Eric Blanc
Can anybody stop Trumpism? Progressives are understandably worried. Though federal judges may temporarily pause some of the new administration’s most brazenly illegal executive orders, a hyper-conservative supreme court lies waiting in the wings. And looking ahead to 2028, it’s hard to feel hopeful about defeating Maga given that the Democratic party continues to hemorrhage working-class voters.But there’s no need to despair. A powerful force in our society has the legitimacy, resources and leverage to turn things around: organized labor. Unions can beat back Donald Trump’s attacks, expose his sham populism, and – by uniting workers around their shared economic interests – help isolate his xenophobic scapegoating.Rather than hibernate for the next four years, or limit ourselves to posting online about the president’s latest outrages, each of us can lend support to workers organizing at federal agencies, schools, Starbucks, Amazon, auto plants and beyond. Just as importantly, we can expand the labor movement’s reach by unionizing our own workplaces. It won’t be easy to counter Trump’s shock-and-awe offensive, or to fill the void left by the Democrats’ disarray. But it’s both necessary and possible.Consider Trump’s latest moves. While he can appoint his cronies to head crucial civil service agencies, it is still unionized federal employees who make these institutions run. And their resistance to his power grab – through defying the new administration and enlisting public support – constitutes our best hope for protecting these services upon which millions of Americans depend.Remember the government shutdown during the first Trump administration? By late January 2019, the crisis had already lasted a month, with no end in sight. But then the flight attendant leader Sara Nelson began making national waves by agitating for a general strike, stressing the public safety dangers of not paying the people whose labor makes air travel possible. On 25 January, various air traffic controllers refused to come into work, resulting in a temporary grounding of New York flights. Only a few hours later, Trump announced a deal to end the shutdown.Resisting Maga’s barrage is crucial. But it would be a mistake to fight only on the right’s chosen political terrain. Trump’s achilles heel is that he won by speaking to the economic grievances of working people, but heads an administration of and for billionaires obsessed with maximizing their own profits and control. Centrist Democrats have generally been unable to expose this contradiction, as they too are often tied to big business. But combating corporate greed is the labor movement’s bread and butter, which is why unions in our era of rampant inequality are experiencing record-high levels of popularity, even among conservatives and independents.The administration’s connection to the world’s richest men – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – makes it easier for anti-Trump sentiment to channel into workplace battles. When Tesla factory workers unionize, or coders at X push back against their boss, this is now de facto a confrontation with the White House. By scaling up high-publicity union drives and strikes for economic dignity across the country, labor and its supporters can force politicians to show which side they’re really on.Even labor struggles focused on economic issues can have dramatic political repercussions. Faced with Trump’s efforts to deprive workers of the right to unionize by kneecapping the National Labor Relations Board, every union drive is now on a collision course with the new regime. Moreover, since workplaces bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds and ideologies, union organizing requires listening to and persuading people who disagree with us, a skill sorely lacking among most progressives today. Effective persuasion happens not by haranguing or shaming others, but rather by finding points of commonality – often economic – around which working people can come together.Through this patient process of building solidarity across differences, labor organizing is uniquely positioned to convince large numbers of Americans to direct their anger at the bosses above (and their political proxies), instead of immigrants or trans people. Unsurprisingly, union members voted for Kamala Harris by a 16-point margin in the last election; indeed, Trump would probably have lost had the US labor movement represented a significantly higher percent of the American workforce.Despite Trump’s constriction of labor rights, conditions overall remain favorable for union growth. Organized labor, for example, is sitting on an unprecedented war chest of roughly $38bn in assets, over a third of which are highly liquid. This is more than enough to defend against Project 2025 while simultaneously going on the offensive against corporate America. Big, assertive unionization battles could lay bare Trump’s oligarchic allegiances, while pressuring Democratic politicians to champion economic populism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnfortunately, it’s unclear whether union officials will finally find the chutzpah to break from business as usual. Most remain exceedingly risk averse, narrowly focused, and deferential to establishment politicians. For that reason, labor’s post-pandemic upsurge has been driven from below, with young, left-leaning workers taking the lead – most recently at the Whole Foods in Philadelphia that voted for a union last Monday. But to scale up widely enough to transform the US, this grassroots uptick will need deep-pocketed labor leaders to fully jump into the fight.It remains to be seen whether unions can rise to the challenge of Trumpism. For the sake of our democracy, our livelihoods, and our planet, let’s hope they do.What’s giving me hope nowWhat’s giving me hope is that Philadelphia Whole Foods workers last Monday voted to unionize, 130 to 100. It’s a really big deal: this was only the second time American workers have defeated Amazon in a union election. Many in the labor movement were expecting a loss, since Maga is now in office and since management – headed by Trump’s new billionaire buddy Bezos – went scorched earth against the nascent union effort. But a multiracial crew of young, self-organized, left-leaning workers proved the skeptics wrong, as so often has been the case since 2021. Labor passed its first big test under Trump, and hopefully we’ll see many similar wins in the months to come.
Eric Blanc is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which is out with UC Press in February 2025 More
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‘A human rights disaster’: immigrants sent into Guantánamo black hole despite no proof of crime
Handcuffed and shackled, the men appear in government propaganda photos being herded towards military cargo planes that will carry them to an uncertain future in an infamous land.“These individuals are the worst of the worst that we have pulled off of our streets,” Donald Trump’s homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, thundered against the supposedly “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” being packed off to Guantánamo Bay.In interviews and on social media, Noem alleged those being sent to the notorious US naval base in Cuba included South American “child pedophiles”, drug traffickers and “vicious gang members” guilty of “heinous crimes”.But 10 days after the Trump administration began sending immigrants to Guantánamo, authorities have yet to provide proof of those claims as mystery continues to surround their identities and doubts grow over whether many have committed any crime at all.“It sounds like this picture the government is painting of them being people who are dangerous and violent is patently false,” said Jessica Vosburgh, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of a coalition of rights groups that this week sued the Trump administration for access to the Guantánamo detainees. “It’s clear the folks who we suspect have been sent to Guantánamo are not, on the whole, dangerous people,” Vosburgh added, even if people in immigration detention “may have a mix of criminal backgrounds”.View image in fullscreenJ Wells Dixon, a lawyer with nearly two decades’ experience working with prisoners in a place critics call “America’s gulag”, said: “It is almost impossible to know exactly what is happening at Guantánamo at this moment. I’m not sure the Trump administration really understands what is happening.”The pictures US authorities have released of people they call “highly dangerous criminal aliens” have inadvertently shed some light on the identity of Trump’s Guantánamo internees.According to the website Migrant Insider, relatives identified one member of the first 10-member group flown to Guantánamo on 4 February as Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera. The 23-year-old Venezuelan was detained seeking asylum on the southern border on 19 January, one day before Trump took power vowing to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came”. “He’s innocent,” Castillo’s sister, Yajaira Castillo, told the Spanish news agency EFE, denying her brother was part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.A second man spotted in the photos is Tilso Ramón Gómez Lugo, 37, a car mechanic from north-west Venezuela who had been sent to an immigration detention facility in Texas after being picked up on the border in April 2024. “I’ve known him since he was a child. He’s an educated boy who has no problems with anyone. He is someone with good parents, a hard worker and a good family – and very well-liked in the town we are from,” a friend, who asked not to be named, told the Guardian.“Trump had and has my support – but I do not agree with these extreme measures, especially against our compatriots,” added the friend, who like many fellow Venezuelans backed Trump believing he would take a hard-line stance on their home country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.A third detainee is reportedly 25-year-old Yoiker David Sequera, a Venezuelan barber who was reportedly picked up by border agents last September after making the perilous journey through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama to reach the US. “My son is no criminal,” one relative, who suspected Sequera had been targeted because of his tattoos, told Migrant Insider.For the most part, however, the life stories of the immigrants remain an enigma.View image in fullscreen“The US government has shared close to nothing … they’re being completely evasive with sharing names,” said Vosburgh, whose conversations with other detainees and relatives of those suspected to be in Guantánamo led her to believe that Noem’s descriptions of the detainees as “vicious” criminals were “bald-faced lies”.A senior Department of Homeland Security official said all of those sent to Guantánamo had “committed a crime by entering the United States illegally”. “In addition to holding violent gang members and other high-threat illegal aliens, Guantánamo Bay is also holding other illegal aliens with final deportation orders. Every single alien at Guantánamo Bay has a final deportation order,” the official added, without offering evidence that any of the detainees had links to gangs or crime.The official declined to disclose precisely how many detainees were being held at Guantánamo but said it was “less than 100”. “In total, there have been eight flights in eight days,” the official added on Wednesday. On Thursday the New York Times said 98 men had been sent to the island base by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) between 4 and 11 February.“We don’t know who these individuals are yet. In that sense, it is reminiscent of Guantánamo’s past,” said Dixon, recalling the base’s post-9/11 conversion into a prison for “enemy combatants” captured in the “war on terror”.“People may forget [that] after Guantánamo opened in early 2002, it took quite a long time to learn who was detained [there], why they were there and what had happened to them. That information only started to become public when lawyers like me started traveling to Guantánamo to meet these individuals.”Back then, US authorities also called those held at Guantánamo “the worst of the worst”, recalled Dixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The reality was something very different. The reality was that you had people like the Uyghurs [Turkic Muslims] who had fled persecution in China and were rounded up in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan … and ended up in Guantánamo … The reality was something very different from the propaganda – and I think that’s undoubtedly what you’re going to see here.”Lee Gelernt, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, said all of the detainees were thought to be Venezuelan men. “But until we’re down there, we can’t be sure. And the government’s … threatening to send thousands [of people, so] I suspect at some point it’ll move beyond Venezuelans,” he added.If the identities of the Guantánamo detainees remain cloaked in secrecy, activists say there is little doubt over the conditions that await them at an isolated island base that has become synonymous with human rights abuses and torture.Fifty-three of the 98 detainees have reportedly been sent to a medium- to high-security military prison called Camp 6. It has previously been used to house “war on terror” prisoners, in some cases for years. The other 45 people are being held in “a lower-security building” on the other side of the base and being guarded by members of the US Coast Guard, according to the New York Times.A 2007 Amnesty International report painted a dire picture of life inside Camp 6, which was originally built to house 178 detainees. The US government claimed the facility combined “humane treatment with security needs” but activists called conditions there “unacceptably harsh”.The cells had no access to natural light or air and were lit by fluorescent lighting 24 hours a day, Amnesty said. Detainees “consistently complained of being too cold in the steel cells” as a result of air conditioning controlled by guards.Five Uyghur prisoners cited in the report told lawyers Camp 6’s strict regime left them feeling “despair, crushing loneliness, and abandonment by the world”. One previously smiley, “gentle and pleasant” man now “appeared to be in despair” and said he was “beginning to hear voices”.Dixon said it was possible detainees could be held in isolation for 22 hours each day.Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, said the Guantánamo detainees had fallen into “a legal black hole”.“You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse … and the inability to contact the outside world is intense,” she said, calling for an end to Trump’s transfers.Schacher believes the Guantánamo transfers were designed to please Trump’s base. “It’s political theater … cruelty theater … harsh-on-immigrants theater,” she added.“All we really know is that the Trump administration is trying to evoke the terrible images of Guantánamo in order to appear tough on illegal immigration in the United States. That’s what this is about,” said Dixon. “This is not about law or policy … It’s a catastrophic human rights disaster.”Additional reporting by Clavel Rangel More
