Hundreds of people rallied outside Fort Benning in Georgia over the weekend for the annual protest calling for the closure of a controversial military training base. Formerly known as the School of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation has been used to train Latin American soldiers in combat, counterinsurgency and counternarcotics. Protesters included Courtney Collins, a youth activist from New Jersey.

Courtney Collins: “I definitely had to tell all my teachers before we left that, like, I wasn’t going to be in school for the next two days. And when they asked why I was going down to Georgia, I said that I was going on a protest for SOA. When they asked what that was, I just explained it as a school where they take in people from Third World countries and train them in 'democracy,' but they’re really teaching them how to torture people. And, like, they send them back down, and they’re major contributors in genocides and just awful, awful situations.”

On Saturday, protesters also rallied miles away at the privately owned Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, one of the nation’s largest prisons for undocumented immigrants. At least five people were arrested.