Organized by the Interreligious Communities United for Justice and Peace, the fourteenth annual protest called on “the United States to leave Guantanamo” and lift the economic, commercial and financial blockade against the Caribbean country, according to a message sent to Prensa Latina.
The participants, some of them dressed in the orange suits used in that detention center, also demanded the return of the territory occupied against the will of the Cuban people.
President Trump is once again following this well-known and dangerous playbook by deciding to send undocumented immigrants to the detention center at the military base, the text stressed, warning that these policies are not aimed at keeping America safe, but at demonizing others.
At the end of Joe Biden’s administration in January of this year, 15 inmates remained in that prison, whose maintenance cost American taxpayers approximately 500 million dollars annually, it said.
It added that now “with President Trump’s plans to use it as an immigrant concentration center, up to 30 thousand people could be sent there, which would also be at the expense of American taxpayers.”
According to the president and co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Salam Al-Marayati, the establishment in 2002 of that high-security military prison there “is a total insult to the dignity, not only of those who are there (…), but of the American people, because it does not represent American values.”
For more than two decades, this facility has tarnished our country’s moral authority on the international stage, undermining America’s core values of human rights and the rule of law, he noted.
Also among the speakers was Mark Friedman, representing the Machinists Union Local 1484 and the Hands Off Cuba Committee of Los Angeles, who reported on national medical relief efforts for the island, as well as the delegation that will travel for the May Day celebrations organized by the Cuban Workers’ Central.
Activists warned that another manifestation of the shame of the United States is currently unfolding at the prison at the Guantanamo military base with the decision to house the tens of thousands of undocumented migrants it will deport.
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