Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas yesterday betrayed the Biden administration’s commitments to disentangle local policing from the federal detention and deportation system and called on local law enforcement agencies to assist DHS in the enforcement of federal civil immigration law. When local police, who lack expertise on immigration laws, act as ICE officers, the racial biases and discriminaton of the criminal legal system are layered on top of the already racist enforcement of U.S. immigration law. Sec. Mayorkas is urged to reverse course and follow-through on President Biden’s critical promises to affirmatively terminate “287(g)” agreements” with local law enforcement agencies around the country.

The community assembly in Nebaj, Guatemala is part of the Ixil’s historical struggle to pursue peaceful and local community-based solutions and transparency to institutional, governmental, and structural corruption and impunity at all levels of government. Guatemala is experiencing a weakening of democratic structures and the further entrenchment of corruption and impunity. Many Indigenous communities have been abandoned by the corrupt state and are displaced from their territories by the armed forces. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), created in 2006, gave Guatemalans hope that justice would be served to corrupt politicians, but the right-wing and military backlash was swift. In recent years, the Guatemalan state has become increasingly militarized and has overused states of sieges to suspend civil liberties. As a result, some fear that the government is regressing towards authoritarianism. Twenty-five years after the Peace Accords, Guatemalan democracy is at a crucial political juncture in which the safeguards against corruption, impunity, and state violence are being dismantled by the politicians, elites, and military.

Rights groups and politicians in Colombia have welcomed a decision by the country’s Constitutional Court, which ruled this week that the government failed to consult local communities over its plan to restart aerial fumigation of coca crops. Aerial spraying of glyphosate previously saw rural water supplies contaminated and food crops destroyed in the Colombian countryside. The court’s decision highlights the unfulfilled obligation the government had to engage with communities that would be affected by the spraying.

Senate Democrats in Washington on Monday asked the Biden administration to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) be extended to migrants of four Central American countries from where most are migrating to the U.S. Southwest border. The request was made to re-designate TPS for migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. The senators cited worsening humanitarian conditions across Central America, as well as rising coronavirus cases and multiple natural disasters.

Review of the Year 2021 The past year was a challenging year for FOR Peace Presence and Colombia. Let's look back on the year together.

The "Remain in Mexico" program, first implemented by the Trump administration in 2019, was halted after President Biden took office. A federal judge ordered the program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, to be reimplemented after Texas and Missouri sued over the way the policy ended. The Biden administration has defended the restart as something it was forced to do. Nicaraguans have been the largest group returned under the beginning of the reboot. Asylum seekers from Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba and Ecuador have also been sent back under MPP. Many details about the program’s logistics remain unclear.