IRTF News

For decades, wealthy Honduran elites and the global tourism industry have been violently destroying ancestral Garifuna lands along the Carribean shoreline in Honduras. Following U.S. intervention in Honduras' election in November 2025, violent disposession of Garifuna communities has spiked, including the July 6 illegal detention of five Garifuna land defenders.

UN experts raise concerns over the unexplained termination of at least 135 immigration judges in the United States. As many of these terminated judges have higher rates of granting asylum or had background in sympathetic fields (immigrant defense or humanitarian advoacy), the UN criticizes these politically charged actions and questions the ability of judges to effectively preside over cases with the looming threat of being targeted bases on their percieved politcal affiliation.

This Human Rights Watch report examines the execerbating conditions for detainees within immigration persecution and shedding light on the detention facility Camp East Montana in Texas and its treatment of detainees. 

The American Immigration Council describes the detention system as a system of systematic failure exposing its flawed nature of detention or deportation as a one-size-fits-all response.

This article looks at El Salvador's State of Exception through the lens of the unrightfully detained lawyer, activist and human rights defender Ruth López. 

A year after Trump allocated billions for his immigration terror campaign, deportation agents are amassing historic amounts of military weapons.

Was a  Canadian military/security consultant company  complicit in the 2016 assassination of Indigenous Lenca land defender Berta Céceres? Did they financially benefit?  What was their role in broader intimidation efforts against Indigenous land defenders?

According to a report published by The New York Times , by 2024 Honduras Próspera Inc., the main company behind the charter city located in Roatán and based in the United States, had raised around $120 million in investments, including contributions from venture capital funds backed by Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.

Recently, Jorge Constantino Colindres, technical secretary of Próspera, recalled that the project was the first ZEDE established in Honduras and stated that “its vision is to build in Honduras the best place in the world to do business, live, and work, with legal stability, physical security, and individual freedom. It does not receive funds from the central government, does not issue passports, has no army, and transfers 12% of its tax revenue to the national government and municipalities. What Próspera does have is what Honduras has needed for decades: a world-class regulatory environment .”

These statements contrast with the massive demonstrations in which millions of Hondurans participated between 2020 and 2021 to express their rejection of the ZEDEs and, in particular, of Prospera.