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.

Progressive leaders from 20 countries met in Bogotá for the Nuestra América convening, adopting a joint declaration to coordinate resistance to U.S. coercive policies and defend sovereignty and self-determination across the Americas. The gathering launched a new hemispheric alliance of governments, unions, and social movements committed to collective action and international solidarity.

ICE’s detention system is expanding at an unprecedented pace, with 237 facilities now detaining migrants.  Making sense of that expansion requires making the limited data ICE releases publicly accessible and understandable. That means tools that turn spreadsheets into insight, that make facility-level information accessible to reporters on deadline, researchers conducting analysis, and advocates tracking conditions on the ground.DetentionReports.com, a public tool tracking ICE detention facilities, has launched major upgrades including an interactive national map, new comparison graphs, and an archive of ICE detention contracts.

Honduras’s  presidential election has elvolved into a constitutional crisis, with fraud allegations, recount demands, and clashes between government institutions after the electoral council declared Nasry Asfura the winner. The controversy is also tied to U.S. political and corporate interests, including Trump-linked support and high-stakes “model city” investment projects.

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").