Gender & Sexual Solidarity: News & Updates

Thank you to all who gathered with IRTF on November 9 for our annual commemoration event to mark the 45th anniversary of the sacrifice of four US women missioners in El Salvador. In response to that horrific tragedy, people of faith and conscience in Cleveland founded IRTF as a way to carry forward their legacy—taking action in solidarity with oppressed and marginalized communities as they struggle for peace, dignity, and justice.

IRTF board and staff wishes to thank all the volunteers who helped us set up, decorate, run the event and pack up at the end of the night, Pilgrim Church for hosting us, the kitchen staff at Guanaquitas pupsería for preparing our dinner, Megan Wilson-Reitz for coordinating our social hour (and the many kitchen volunteers!), Salim and Lucía for coordinating our raffle/auction, Pastor Jay for running the tech, and all who participated in the service and speaker program.

To our 46 co-sponsors: Thank you for your financial support that helps us continue calling people into solidarity with oppressed peoples in Central America and Colombia. We are deeply appreciative of your affirmation of our mission and ongoing commitment to this important work.

The Trump administration has further dismantled legal protections for Honduran women fleeing gender-based violence. Recent U.S. immigration rulings have invalidated key “particular social group” (PSG) categories—such as “Honduran women unable to leave a relationship”—that previously allowed women to claim asylum based on gender persecution. These changes, effectively bar many victims of domestic and sexual violence from receiving asylum. The rulings ignore the deep links between private violence, organized crime, and state complicity in Honduras, which has the highest femicide rate in Latin America.

Members of the LGBTIQ+ community are among the most vulnerable of all populations in the Americas. Often they must migrate due to persecution, further increasing their vulnerability because of the marginalization migrants frequently endure, especially if they are Black, Indigenous, or otherwise non-White.

States’ responses to LGBTIQ+ migrants are vastly deficient throughout the hemisphere, including in the United States. They constitute a growing human rights crisis and a major lost opportunity for progress and prosperity.

The crime occurred in broad daylight and has terrified the LGBTQ+community living in Bello, Antioquia, particularly trans women. The family demands justice and asks that the victim, Sara Millerey, be remembered for her values and beauty, and not for the viral video of the brutal assault that led to her death.

You can read the RRN (Rapid Response Network) letter that IRTF sent to officials in Colombia about this horrific assassination at https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn/2025-05-06-000000.

To add your name as a signer on urgent human rights letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/RRN/join-RRN .

In 2013 a young woman, Beatriz had been denied an abortion, even though she was seriously ill and the foetus would not have survived outside the uterus. Beatriz died after being involved in a traffic accident in 2017, but her case is before judges at the inter-American court of human rights and could open the way for El Salvador to decriminalise abortion, which could also set an important precedent in across the Caribbean, South and Central America, abortion is not permitted in seven countries.

In El Salvador, abortion can be punished by up to eight years in prison, and women can even be charged with aggravated homicide, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years in prison. Women have been jailed for miscarriages. And women who advocate for safe access to abortion facing hate and threats online as well as offline.

The Global Center for Human Rights, a US-based anti-abortion organisation linked to conservative evangelical groups and the Heritage Foundation opposes what it calls “ideological colonisation [of] countries rooted in Christian values”. They create websites, petitions and videos where to spread fake news like that Beatriz case was made up by the inter-American court to legalize abortion but also to spread hate against abortion activists by for example calling them “enemy of the state”, a “colleague of terrorists” and a “feminazi”.

This has serious consequences. An activist telles the Guardian: “I have received a lot of threats and hate speech on social networks, especially on X,” she says. “A post can lead to a wave of comments where I’m called a murderer; people accuse me of promoting a crime and there are requests that the attorney general investigate me.”  Anti-abortion groups often gather outside her office to pray, which she sees as an act of intimidation. Her organisation’s website was the target of 13,000 cyber-attacks during the hearing of the landmark case of Manuela v El Salvador at the IACHR in 2021.