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Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

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More than a dozen South American travel agencies have rented planes from low-budget Latin American airlines — some of them as large as 238-seat Airbuses — and then sold tickets at premium prices. Many of the customers are Haitians who had been living in Chile and Brazil before they made their way to the Texas border in September, only to be expelled by the Biden administration and prevented from seeking asylum. They are using the charter flights to flee Haiti again and return to South America. Rodolfo Noriega of the National Coordinator of Immigrants in Chile said Haitians are being exploited by businesses taking advantage of their desperation. They “are at the end of a chain of powerful businesses making money from this circuit of Haitian migration,” he said.

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Since May, there has been an alarming trend of social movement leaders being arbitrarily arrested in the context of the nationwide State of Exception. Under the State of Exception, which was approved on March 27 for a 30-day period, but which has already been extended twice, raising concerns that the Bukele administration seeks to maintain its expanded power in perpetuity, constitutional rights such as the right to due process and the right to defense are suspended. A person can be arrested without a warrant and held for up to 15 days without charges being presented. As of June 5, the government reports that the total number of people arrested has since risen to over 37,000. As news outlet Gato Encerrado has reported, the number of people incarcerated in El Salvador has doubled within the span of less than three months.

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As the largest caravan of migrants so far this year journeys into central Mexico, the continued enforcement of a public health order barring their admission into the United States threatens to exacerbate already deteriorating humanitarian conditions on the southern border. The caravan, largely composed of asylum seekers from Venezuela, could add as many as 11,000 people to the population of migrants currently stuck in limbo near the U.S.-Mexico border—estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them have been living in dangerous conditions for months or longer awaiting the final repeal of Title 42, the public health order that has effectively halted asylum admissions into the United States from Central and South America.

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The Honorable Alejandro Mayorkas

Secretary of Homeland Security

Washington, DC 20528

Dear Secretary Mayorkas:

We write to express our concern over the drastic increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) which relies on punitive surveillance, such as the use of ankle shackles, and facial recognition and geolocation tracking through a mobile application called SmartLINK as an ill-conceived “alternative” to detention.

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By Kim LaCapria

The Supreme Court 100-Miles Border Ruling - Truth or Fiction?

Claim

"The Supreme Court just ruled [in June 2022] that Border Patrol can enter any home without a warrant and assault you, within 100 miles of the border. And no, you have zero federal protections if they do so."

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In the Salvadoran Constitution, Article 29 establishes the Regime of Exception aka State of Emergency, to respond to extreme circumstances, such as war, invasion of territory, rebellion, sedition, catastrophe, epidemic, or other general calamities, or serious disturbances of public order. Thus, it is possible to suspend freedom of movement, expression, association, assembly, and inviolability of communications, among other rights. At midnight on March 27, 2022, the Legislative Assembly, which was by that time fully controlled by the ruling party, imposed an Regime of Exception of for 30 days, in response to a spike in homicides that claimed the lives of 62 people in a single day. These are the articles that were affected by the 30-day suspension.

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We are excited to share with you the video recordings of the The Lessons from Central American Resistance and Diasporic Solidarity event. During this event, representatives from several solidarity organizations, including Lulu Matute of SOA Watch, reflected on our recent collaborative Congressional delegation to Central America.

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Vice President Kamala Harris today announced more than $1.9 billion in new private sector commitments to create economic opportunity in northern Central America, more than doubling the value of initial private sector investments in response to her Call to Action.  As part of her role addressing the root causes of migration from Central America, in May 2021, the Vice President launched the Call to Action for businesses and social enterprises to make significant commitments to promote economic opportunity for people in the region. This is in support for the U.S. Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration which the Vice President launched in July 2021. The announcement today builds on the announcement the Vice President made in December 2021 of $1.2 billion in private sector commitments.  Aggregate commitments under this initiative now total more than $3.2 billion.  Taken together, these investments are creating an ecosystem of opportunity and helping to provide hope for people in the region to build safe and prosperous lives at home.  
 

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