IRTF News

For more than four decades, IRTF has welcomed dozens of interns who have helped carry forward our mission of promoting peace, human rights and systemic transformation across the Americas. Each year, our interns enter the living legacy of IRTF: never-ending advocacy, organizing, and accompaniment. Their experiences, like those of Lucia and Maddie, remind us of the importance of this work and of forming the next generation of justice seekers.

Maddie: As a small organization and a tight-knit community, IRTF’s support is direct. This summer, we accompanied migrants to their immigration hearings, speaking with them in a mix of broken English and Spanish, learning their stories and offering them support and companionship. We connected with other community groups to learn how we could best inform local migrant and refugee families through Know Your Rights training. We challenged our own comfort and security by attempting to take on the fear and uncertainty faced by the migrant community.

Lucia: IRTF has been an indispensable part of discerning the world I want to live in, the role I will have in that, and the way I hope to go about it. This haven of social justice, activism, and human-centered civic engagement has become the foundation on which I hope to build a lifetime of advocacy and purposeful action.

Please read more from the reflections of student interns Maddie and Lucia.

This article examines the origins and culture of the U.S. Border Patrol, arguing that its history and structure have fostered aggressive, militarized practices and weak accountability. These longstanding patterns of abuse are now becoming more visible as the agency’s operations expand beyond the border. 

Groups like WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) and the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC) have been tracking these violent (and sometimes deadly) incidents for years. WOLA’s database identifies a whopping 455 cases of alleged abusive agent conduct just from 2020 to 2024. SBCC has tracked fatal encounters with the Border Patrol since 2010; it has found 364 lives lost. Alex Pretti is the most recent name on the list.

Thomas Mockaitis, a professor of history at DePaul University, studies violent extremism and military history across the world. He described the Border Patrol as a paramilitary force comparable to the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, the B Specials in Northern Ireland, or the Stasi in East Germany.

This op-ed recently published in Cleveland.com by Dr Gina Pérez, a cultural anthropologist and professor of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, examines a rethoric weaponized by structures of power to defame the ones they murder.  She highlights parallels between the Reagen administration's reaction to the assasination of four women missioners who were murdered in El Salvador in December 1980 and the current administration's response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 

If the rhetoric of Jeane Kirkpatrick, a top foreign policy adviser to President Reagan, sounds familiar ("the nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were also political activists"), it's because we're hearing it again in the discrediting trash-talk from the White House aboutu Renee Good and Alex Pretti ("domestic terrorists").

This aricle published in The Guardian gives insight on what consequences the pardoning of convicted drug smuggler and former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez might have on enviromental defenders in Honduras.  Impunity for violent crimes committed against environmental defenders gives a green light to would-be assassins. In February 2025, an environmental defender in the central department of Comayagua, Juan Bautista, and his son were ambushed and killed, with their bodies dismembered and discarded in a canyon. These were just two of at least 155 murders of land and environmental defenders in Honduras documented by Global Witness between 2012 and 2024, the vast majority unresolved.

In response to Trump's pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, one environmental defender noted: “There is a sense that the brakes are off again. People feel exposed.”

Between July 2025 and January 28, 2026, 35 people have died in immigration detention centers. But those are the ones we know about. So now there is a new independent tracker. Our (Portside.org) information comes from a variety of sources, primarily news reports, government data, and other sources such as immigration legal advocates. The agency involved is also included. About those agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are both active, though most people call all agents “ICE.” Border Patrol is an agency housed under Customs and Border Protection (CBP); all these agencies are within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Fields are left blank when those details are absent from reports. We will update this tracker as more information becomes available.

Adam Isacson from the Washington Office on Latin America examines the accountability gap in federal immigration enforcement. While DHS has written standards requiring deadly force only when "necessary" and when there's "imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury," these policies are rarely enforced. International standards require both necessity and proportionality—but U.S. agencies don't apply them.

This article by Geopolitical Economy portrays the discrepancy between propaganda agenda promoted by the US president, declaring himself a peace president and his actual actions, which have led to the bombing of 10 countries (more than any other president in US history has ever bombed), a staggering  $1.5 trillion in military expenditures and the fostering of countless trade conflicts that ultimately inflict themselves on the lower class US-American.

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Canadian activist and writer Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism and Undoing Border Imperialism, about the current moment. She articulates the correlations between law enforcement agencies fostering domestic militarization and the broader imperialist nature of settler colonialist states such as the US and Israel. 

Says Walia: 

...it’s critical to understand that ICE emerges from the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terror “context. The post-9/11 policies were a continuation of the war at home and the war abroad.

So in the 90s and the 80s, we kind of saw that the war on migrants was deeply connected to U.S. foreign policy and coups and interventions in South and Central America. In the post-9/11 climate, we saw that the war at home was a war on migrants through “anti-terror” arrests, security detentions, and Guantanamo Bay.

All of that was completely connected to imperialism in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia. the expansion of AFRICOM [United States Africa Command], etc. The war at home and the war abroad were completely merged together.

ICE was, in fact, the domestic arm of this imperial warfare. I think, as we look at ICE’s expansion over the past 20-plus years, it’s important to note similar reverberations. Right now, we see U.S. imperialism in Gaza, in Palestine, in support of the Zionist entity. Also, in the recent U.S. interventions in Venezuela.