IRTF News

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.

The National Roundtable against Metallic Mining in El Salvador, a coalition of environmental and social movement organizations, universities, water justice activists, faith communities, human rights defenders, and others, issued a warning last week regarding the intention of the Bukele administration to permit metal mining in El Salvador, reversing the ban passed unanimously in 2017. As background, in 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to pass a total ban on metal mining. The historic legislation was the achievement of over a decade of community organizing and education, led principally by rural women, and came at the cost of violent harassment, threats, and even the assassination of community leaders involved in the struggle. Four years later, under the Bukele administration, environmental and social movement organizations are again on alert over the possible return of metal mining in El Salvador. “We are not being alarmists," said Omar Serrano from the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA). "There are signs indicating that [the administration] is thinking of returning to mining, even if they do not say so publicly.”

After burning down the FSLN party headquarters and raiding the city's social security building, priests in Nicaragua are now having to face empty churches and masses as Nicaraguan Catholics are protesting their political actions. Although the U.S. was funding the attempted ousting of Nicaragua’s democratically elected Sandinista government, the Catholic Church hierarchy in Nicaragua was instigating it. And while the Bishop’s conference was ostensibly “mediating” a national dialogue, its own priests were calling for violence.