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For Immediate Release
February, 08 2017, 11:45am EDT
Contact:
Reprieve's London office can be contacted on: communications [at] reprieve.org.uk / +44 (0) 207 553 8140.,Reprieve US,, based in New York City, can be contacted on Katherine [dot] oshea [at] reprieve.org
Guantanamo Set to Grow: Reprieve Comment
According to a memo seen by the New York Times, the Trump White House is nearing completion of an order that would direct the Pentagon to bring more detainees to the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Commenting, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, a Reprieve US attorney who represents multiple Guantanamo inmates, said:
"The detention center at Guantanamo has been counterproductive for everyone involved. Based on poorly-vetted intelligence, it has housed countless detainees without charge or trial whom the US Government has openly admitted were not who they were originally thought to be. Cases of mistaken identity have continued to plague the detention regime at Guantanamo until as recently as last year.
"Guantanamo has been an unending headache for the US military, the US Department of Justice, the US Courts, and the rest of us. Guantanamo 2.0 would be a national security disaster, fueling ISIS recruitment for years to come. It is another toxic policy that will distract and dismay but serve no useful purpose. President Trump seems determined to squander his Presidency on a futile fight with the courts, the law and basic human decency."
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
LATEST NEWS
Trump FCC Chair Hints at TV Warnings for Kids' Content That Acknowledges Existence of Transgender People
"This is a solution in search of a problem, and another example of this commission prioritizing culture war politics over the real issues that affect consumers every day," said the only Democratic FCC commissioner.
Apr 22, 2026
In the Trump administration's latest attempt to push transgender people out of public life, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr said Wednesday that his agency is weighing whether ratings on television shows should be modified to warn viewers when trans people are acknowledged.
Carr posted a public notice on social media that the FCC's Media Bureau would be seeking public comment on whether the TV Parental Guidelines age rating system—established under the Telecommunications Act of 1996—should include notices for "transgender and gender nonbinary programming" in a similar fashion to existing labels for sex, violence, and other content that parents could consider "harmful" to children.
Carr wrote: "Recently, parents have raised concerns with the industry’s approach... They argue that New York and Hollywood programmers are promoting controversial issues in kids' programming without providing any transparency or disclosures to parents."
Neither Carr nor the FCC's notice elaborated on what supposedly harmful content children were being exposed to or which programs it would seek to warn families about.
The FCC notice also asked for public comment on whether other changes should be made to ensure that the TV Oversight Management Board, which oversees the rating system, represents a "range of family values." It also inquired about whether it should add board members from religious organizations.
While the FCC does not directly implement the programming ratings, it does have a role in overseeing them. As FCC chairman, Carr has brought an unusually heavy hand down on the rights of broadcasters to air content critical of President Donald Trump.
He has threatened to strip the broadcast licenses of networks that cover Trump's war in Iran unfavorably. Before that, he was briefly successful in his efforts to bully ABC into pulling the Trump-critical late-night host Jimmy Kimmel's show from the air.
By labeling transgender and nonbinary representation as dangerous to children, Carr would be taking yet another action to bring the media landscape into conformity with the Trump administration's agenda, which has consisted of systematic attempts to push transgender Americans to the margins of society and portray them as deviant and dangerous, particularly to children.
Among a slew of other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, the administration has reinstated a full ban on transgender people in the military, attempted to punish medical establishments that provide gender-affirming care, withheld passports and other legal documents from transgender people containing their preferred gender identifiers, and aggressively sought to pressure school districts into adopting policies that refuse to recognize trans students.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s only Democratic commissioner, criticized Carr's push to revise TV ratings.
“American families are worried about affordability, access, and rising costs, not whether the TV ratings system has enough warnings about gender identity,” Gomez said in a statement. “The FCC’s own record shows the existing system is working fine."
While Carr claimed there had been many complaints about "ratings creep" from parents, Gomez noted that the most recent report from the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board said it received just 11 complaints about ratings guidelines in 2025 and that only two resulted in a ratings change.
Gomez said, "This is a solution in search of a problem, and another example of this commission prioritizing culture war politics over the real issues that affect consumers every day."
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'What Are They Hiding?' Trump's Secret Contract for White House Ballroom Revealed
"At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Apr 22, 2026
While the financing of President Donald Trump's planned $400 million White House ballroom has been shrouded in mystery for months, government watchdog Public Citizen has obtained important new information about the project's funding.
Public Citizen on Tuesday unveiled a copy of the funding agreement the Trump administration has used for the ballroom project after months of legal wrangling that forced the group to file a lawsuit to compel enforcement of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it made last year.
As summarized by The Washington Post, the ballroom contract's provisions "allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public."
While dozens of big-name corporate donors—including Amazon, Apple, Lockheed Martin, Google, Altria, and Union Pacific Railroad—have been public about their donations to the project, the fact that some donors can choose to remain anonymous is raising serious concerns among ethics experts.
Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore with a long history of scrutinizing government contracts, told the Post that the contract's anonymity provisions could give the Trump administration an escape hatch from future congressional scrutiny.
"If Congress knocks on the door," Tiefer said, "the White House is going to slam it shut and say, ‘You’re not allowed to know these donors.'"
This means that there is no way to know whether these donors have business before the government, and no way to know if they expect to get something in return for their donations.
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post that the contract's very narrow scope of reviewing for conflicts of interest among donors renders it "nothing more than a sham."
Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen, said the key takeaway from the newly unearthed documents is that "anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement."
"The questions this raises are, of the hundreds of millions being funneled in secret, who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?" Golinger added. "The American people deserve answers, and we’ll keep fighting until they get them."
Wendy Liu, Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit to obtain the contract, said the administration's initial refusal to comply with a FOIA request was "flatly unlawful," and "the American people are entitled to transparency over this multimillion-dollar project, and this win gets us a bit closer to knowing the truth."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) blasted the Trump administration's efforts to hide the contract in a statement given to the Post.
“At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom,” Blumenthal said. “His administration has kept the contract under wraps, the identities of big dollar donors secret, and the American people in the dark about what big corporations have to gain by funding this boondoggle.”
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'Call Your Senator': New Iran War Powers Resolution Set for US Senate Vote
“This war has simply been a disaster, and there is absolutely no reason we should go full steam ahead back into it," says Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Apr 22, 2026
Opponents of the US-Israeli assault on Iran are urging like-minded Americans to call their senators ahead of Wednesday afternoon's expected vote on yet another bid to curb President Donald Trump's power to continue waging his war.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said she will force a vote Wednesday on a war powers resolution "to end Trump’s illegal war of choice in Iran."
“The ceasefire, which is being broken left and right, expires in less than two days, and Congress now must do its job," Baldwin said in a Monday statement referring to Trump's extended truce. "This war has simply been a disaster, and there is absolutely no reason we should go full steam ahead back into it."
TODAY Senate Democrats will force a vote on a War Powers Resolution to assert Congressional authority over Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran for the FIFTH timeWill Senate Republicans finally step and exercise their constitutional responsibility?Via @warren.senate.gov
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— Senate Democrats (@democrats.senate.gov) April 22, 2026 at 10:16 AM
Baldwin noted Tuesday that 13 US service members "are dead and hundreds more are injured, gas and fertilizer prices are tthrough the roof, and we have already spent an untold amount of taxpayer money—but it certainly is in the tens of billions of dollars."
US-Israeli bombing has also killed or wounded more than 30,000 Iranians, many of them civilians, including hundreds of children, according to officials in Tehran and international organizations.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) urged Americans to "call your senator" ahead of Wednesday's vote.
NIAC said that "lawmakers who have defended Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran without congressional approval argue the president can legally wage the conflict for 60 days before needing authorization" under the War Powers Act of 1973, which was enacted during the Nixon administration toward the end of the US war on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
"That 60-day clock is now almost up, just one week remains," the group added. "As that clock winds down, last week’s House and Senate votes make one thing clear: Support for reining in the war is growing, but not yet enough to force action. That leaves members, especially Republicans who have largely resisted these efforts, facing increasing pressure as the legal deadline comes into view."
Baldwin argued Monday that "diplomacy is the only way out of this mess—and that is where every ounce of attention of this administration should be, not threatening to commit war crimes."
Trump's threats have ranged from destroying Iranian power plants and bridges to genocidal destruction of Iran's entire civilization. Threatening to commit genocide and war crimes is a crime.
Baldwin said Monday that "the only question will be whether my Republican colleagues want to own the consequences" of Trump's war "raging on, or they will step up for the American people and put an end to this life-taking, cost-raising chaos.”
Every Republican senator with the exception of libertarian Rand Paul of Kentucky has voted against previous Iran war powers resolutions, the last of which was defeated in a 47-52 vote on April 15, with right-wing Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman the only Democrat to vote against the measure.
There have been four failed attempts in the House and Senate to pass Iran war powers resolutions.
In addition to Iran, members of Congress have tried—and failed—to pass multiple war powers resolutions limiting Trump’s attacks on Venezuela, whose president was kidnapped during a brief US invasion in January.
Correction: This article originally cited an incorrectly dated news article about Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) saying they would try to force a vote on an Iran war powers resolution.
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