The world should not praise Honduras and condemn Nicaragua for their very different responses [to the coronavirus], while ignoring the results in the numbers so far. Honduras, the United States, and Nicaragua seem to present different ways of dealing with…marginalized people. Nicaragua is tailoring its response to them, perhaps too much so, perhaps not. The U.S. is ignoring them. Honduras is persecuting them. The mainline media seem insensitive to cultural differences and marginalized people, and the media often fail to take account of inequalities. So far, the Nicaraguan strategy of emphasis on education and prevention and an open society with monitored borders seems to be working better than the iron hand strategy of the Honduran government. Berta Oliva, director of the Committee of the Families of the Detained/Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), a major human rights organization, and other human rights leaders have accused the government and the military of using the pandemic as an opportunity to tighten control of the population through fomenting fear of the virus and imposing draconian state-of-siege measures. Keeping people in a precarious state serves the interests of a government that many Hondurans call a “dictatorship.”
Just days after the United Nations urged governments around the world to release vulnerable prisoners to ease overcrowding, President Bukele of El Salvador is doing the opposite. While Chile, Colombia and Nicaragua have announced they will move thousands of prisoners into house arrest, El Salvador is aiming to lock up more. El Salvador has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world: 2.1 murders per day in March 2020. That average will go up in April since 24 people were killed on just one day, April 24. In response, the president has authorized the police and army to use lethal force to curb the violence. He is mixing members of rival gangs in prison cells and ordering 24/7 lockdown, saying that gangs are “taking advantage of the pandemic.” The security minister said that prisoners will: “not receive sunlight, they will be in total confinement 24 hours a day in [El Salvador’s] seven maximum security prisons.”
Stop detaining immigrants
Ohio policymakers have, overall, taken commendable, aggressive measures to avoid the spread of COVID-19. However, there is an easy action state and local officials have yet to take that could save potentially thousands of lives — suspend local law enforcement cooperation with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). This country is the world leader in immigration detention, with a daily average of 37,000 immigrants incarcerated; hundreds of those individuals are held in county jails and detention facilities right here in Ohio.
IRTF joins with 74 organizations calling on the Dept of Justice to immediately close the immigration courts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every link in the chain that brings individuals to the court—from the use of public transportation, to security lines, crowded elevators, cramped cubicle spaces of court staff, packed waiting room facilities in the courthouses, and inadequate sanitizing resources at the courts—places lives at risk.
