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IRTFDonate – use this code and Equal Exchange donates 10% of your purchase to IRTF

We’re excited to announce that Equal Exchange will be donating a portion of their sales to IRTF when you shop their online store. 

To shop Equal Exchange click here. Find organic and fairly traded coffees, teas, chocolate, cocoa, nuts, dried fruits, and even olive oil—all from small farmer co-ops, available by the case for stocking up.

Promo code:  IRTFDonate . Enter this code when you check out and Equal Exchange will donate 10% of your purchase back to IRTF!

Equal Exchange was founded as a solidarity organization in 1986 to support small farmers in Nicaragua by importing their coffee despite the US embargo.  Forty years later, this worker-owned co-op continues to prove that a more democratic food system is possible.

To shop Equal Exchange click here

When President Trump took office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement held approximately 40,000 people in immigration detention. By the middle of December, that number had risen by almost 75 percent to over 68,000—the highest level in history. Yet this is just the start for the Trump administration, which according to leaked plans, hoped to have nearly 108,000 immigration detention beds online by January 2026 as part of its “mass deportation” agenda. With ICE newly flush with $45 billion from Congress to expand detention, America’s system of immigration detention is growing more opaque and more inhumane by the day. A new American Immigration Council report on Trump’s first year of mass detention breaks down not only the changes in who is being sent to detention, but also the ways in which the rapid expansion of detention, elimination of oversight, and changes in detention policy have led to worsening conditions and people giving up their immigration cases. Join Council Policy Director Nayna Gupta and Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick to learn more about the report, and hear from Congressman Seth Moulton (MA-06) about his work to conduct oversight over ICE detention, and from Marcelo Gomes, a Boston teen who was detained by ICE for months and came out of his experience with a passion to educate the world about what he went through.

to register click here

IRTF is one of many co-sponsors of this nonviolent noncooperation training on Saturday, January 24, 2026

Registration:  http://bit.ly/Jan24Info

Suzanne Zilber from SURJ NEO (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and Josiah Quarles from NEOCH (Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless) will co-faciitate this event sponsored by Racial Equity Buddies.   

This training is informed by successful international movements to resist dictators and authoritarian rule.

 Participants will learn

-How to identify institutions that uphold regimes

-Strategies for how to make demands and then encourage cooperation, or impose costs on those institutions.

The emphasis is on nonviolent noncooperation tactics. The training is interactive and we will practice the application to local threats.

We call on individuals and organizations around the world to join the Global Days of Action to #CloseBases on February 21-23, 2026, by organizing events at military base sites or other locations near you.

Military bases, especially foreign ones — current and sought — generate wars. The United States has used its bases in Latin America and the Caribbean to attack Venezuela, while threatening to take over Greenland to build more bases there. Iran is bordered by seven nations with U.S. bases. The nations to the south and east of China are packed with U.S. bases, as is Europe, as is Israel. Africa has foreign bases from several empires. Russia is making more use of its bases in Belarus.

On February 23, 1903, the United States took over Guantanamo from Cuba. It has never restored it. People across Latin America have used this date to organize events opposing bases, militarism, and the Monroe Doctrine. We made it a global day of action for the first time in 2025. We’re expanding our second annual collection of events to include the February 21-22 weekend.

What you can do: Use our resources to easily plan a local educational or activist event of any kind: a panel, a protest, an art display, a banner-drop, a sit-in, a press conference, a film screening, a rally, a march.

1. Bases often perpetuate colonialism, removing Indigenous people from their lands. From Panama to Guam to Puerto Rico to Okinawa to dozens of other locations across the world, militaries have taken valuable land from local populations, often pushing out Indigenous people in the process, without their consent and without reparations. For example, the entire population of the Chagos Islands was forcibly removed from the island of Diego Garcia by the UK so that it could be leased to the U.S. for an airbase.
2. Bases cost an exorbitant amount of $$. The cost of U.S. foreign military bases alone is estimated at $80 billion a year, money that could be better spent on healthcare, education, renewable energy, and so much more.
3. Bases exacerbate environmental damage and the climate crisis. Military emissions are exempted from climate agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol. The construction of bases has caused irreparable ecological damage, such as the destruction of coral reefs and the environment for endangered species in Henoko, Okinawa. Furthermore, it is well documented at hundreds of sites around the world that military bases leach toxic so-called “forever chemicals” (PFAS/PFOS) into local water supplies, which has had devastating health consequences for nearby communities.
4. Bases can have violent and harmful impacts on local communities.
   Militaries have a notorious legacy of sexual violence, including kidnapping, rape, and murders of women and girls in nearby communities. Yet troops stationed at foreign bases are often afforded impunity for their crimes due to Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) with the so-called “host” country. Bases can also bring a rise in property taxes and inflation in areas surrounding them which has been known to push locals out.
5. Bases heighten tensions and provoke war-making. The presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, massive arsenals, and thousands of aircraft, tanks, and ships in every corner of the globe facilitates war-making and promotes an arms race. Additionally, bases make locations into targets for attack. And foreign bases implicate countries in the crimes of foreign militaries.

to register click here