IRTF News

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to tell her more about a deal struck between the Trump administration and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to imprison immigrants deported from the United States in a Salvadoran maximum-security facility in exchange for the return of top leaders of the MS-13 gang who are in U.S. custody.

The order by the judge, Joan M. Azrack, came as she was considering a request by federal prosecutors on Long Island to dismiss sprawling narco-terrorism charges against Vladimir Arévalo Chávez, who is alleged to be one of those leaders, in preparation for sending him back to El Salvador.

A new trial against five Salvadoran environmentalists, accused of murdering a woman in 1989 during the civil war, will take place on Tuesday, announced the NGO they belong to, denouncing the case as a form of “persecution” for their anti-mining activism.

The environmentalists, who were guerrilla fighters at the time of the crime, were acquitted on October 18 along with three other former rebels also accused of the murder. However, a higher court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial.

“The case is criminalization and persecution of environmental activism (…) they are key figures in the community resistance against metal mining,” said Alfredo Leiva, a board member of the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES).

The five environmentalists helped push through the 2017 ban on mining, which was repealed last December by the pro-government Congress at the request of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who supports gold mining operations.

Honduras is currently facing a total of $19.4 billion in lawsuits from corporations, an amount equivalent to roughly 53% of the country’s GDP in 2024, according to new data by the Institute for Policy Studies, Transnational Institute, Honduras Solidarity Network and TerraJusta. More than $1.6 billion of the claims are from the energy sector alone, most of which are investors or companies involved in renewables.

The lawsuits, most of which are tied to controversial investments made after the 2009 coup, undermine government efforts to implement reforms aimed at protecting the environment and human rights, the organizations say.

Under trade agreements, corporations are given the right to sue  governments using a controversial investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS), which allows private sector lawyers to determine whether the country has treated foreign investors fairly. Even though the government of Honduras announced its withdrawal from ISDS in February 2024, companies continue to sue governments for policies that may impact their profits, such as reforms to make electricity more affordable.

​​​​​​​Given that Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central America, the lawsuits from various corporations (totaling $19.4 billion, an amount equivalent to roughly 53% of the country’s GDP in 2024) add immense pressure on the government to implement policies that favor the companies’ interests. These actions often come with harmful consequences for environmental protection and human rights, as communities adjacent to the companies’ projects have denounced for years.

Through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Anti-Slavery Campaign, launched in the early 1990s,  farmworkers worked, often at great personal risk, to uncover and investigate modern-day slavery rings operating in Florida and throughout the eastern United States. 

By 2010, the CIW’s anti-trafficking efforts had helped federal prosecutors put over a dozen farm employers and supervisors behind bars for exploiting their workers through the threat and use of violence, prompting federal prosecutors to dub the Florida agricultural industry “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Also by 2010, the CIW had secured legally-binding “Fair Food Agreements” with nearly a dozen of the country’s largest buyers of produce, committing those companies to leverage their purchasing power to protect workers in their suppliers’ operations, though dogged resistance to reform on the part of Florida’s tomato growers, had, to that point, kept those agreements from being implemented on Florida farms. 

As of 2025, the Fair Food Program (FFP) is present in at least half the states in the continental U.S., and is also operating in two additional countries, Chile and South Africa. As a result, workers and growers in the flower industry in those countries are already benefiting from FFP implementation, with broader expansion into the fruit (South Africa) and salmon (Chile) industries on the runway.

The fiercest voices of dissent against President Nayib Bukele have long feared a widespread crackdown. They weathered police raids on their homes, watched their friends being thrown into jail and jumped between safe houses so they can stay in El Salvador.

Then they received a warning: Leave immediately. It’s exile or prison.

A combination of high-profile detentions, a new “foreign agents” law, violent repression of peaceful protesters and the risk of imminent government detention has driven more than 100 political exiles to flee in recent months.

The biggest exodus of journalists, lawyers, academics, environmentalists and human rights activists in years is a dark reminder of the nation’s brutal civil war decades ago, when tens of thousands of people are believed to have escaped. Exiles who spoke to The Associated Press say they are scattered across Central America and Mexico with little more than backpacks and a lingering question of where they will end up.

“We’re living through a moment where history is repeating itself,” said Ingrid Escobar, leader of the human rights legal group Socorro Juridico, who fled El Salvador with her two children.