IRTF News

As government human rights reporting becomes less comprehensive, historian Elliott Young's applied scholarship fills critical information gaps with rigorously documented country conditions research.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with historian Elliott Young from Lewis and Clark University’s Migration & Asylum Lab and recent graduate Soraya Talbot-Kerry about their work producing country conditions reports, essential resources that serve everyone involved in the immigration system. These meticulously researched, non-partisan reports provide critical information for immigration judges, attorneys, ICE prosecutors, advocacy organizations, and the general public who need accurate, objective data about conditions in countries around the world.

You can listen to this one-hour interview between Austin Kocher and researchers at the Migration & Asylum Lab here.

He has swept away checks and balances. His government has made mass arrests. And his lawmakers just rewrote the Constitution to let him lead indefinitely, raising fears that the man who once jokingly called himself the world’s “coolest dictator” isn’t kidding anymore.

But for many Salvadorans, President Nayib Bukele has been a godsend.

In the last few months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested immigrants at school, at work, in hospitals, and even at public protests. Since January, ICE has conducted more than 100,000 raids and between October 2024 and now, more than 158,000 immigrants have been deported. Families are faced with a terrible choice—leave their children behind in the U.S., or agree to their U.S. citizen child being deported as well.

Migrant detention has skyrocketed in the US, now approaching an unprecedented 60,000 in jail and prison cells. Benefiting: local county sheriffs (to fill empty cells in their jails) and for-profit prison companies. The  Administration is using no-bid contracts to expand detention. For example, the GEO group (which has been accused in numerous ongoing lawsuits of violating labor laws by paying detained immigrants extremely low wages to perform essential tasks for them, as well as unsanitary living conditions, restricting access to fresh air, and sexual abuse), just got a new contract with ICE to reopen an idle prison to hold 1,868 migrants—and earn $66 million in annual revenue.

Take Action.

Click here to tell the White House that detaining and deporting the people who keep our farms, restaurants, and infrastructure running is weakening the fabric of our society and is an affront to our moral and religious values. How are we a nation of “family values” if we are aggressively tearing families apart?

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Click here to urge your US congressperson to support H Res. 317 (with at least 21 co-sponsors) to lift up five common sense disarmament principles:  (1) Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;  (2) End any U.S. President’s ability to authorize a first strike nuclear attack;  (3) Take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert;  (4) Cancel plans to replace the nation’s arsenal with new, enhanced weapons;  (5) Actively pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear states to eliminate their arsenals

There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons on the planet, the majority of which are held by the United States and Russia. If even a fraction of these bombs were ever detonated, they would instantly kill millions and potentially trigger a global famine that could lead to the death of billions more. 

After multiple postponements, a worrisome trial began in El Salvador on July 29: a re-trial of the Santa Marta 5, a group of well-known water defenders who had been instrumental in the country’s successful effort to ban mining in 2017. In a press conference prior to the start of the trial, grassroots organizations in El Salvador joined community leaders from Santa Marta to denounce the proceedings as “double jeopardy” in practice, “violating the legal principle that no one can be tried twice for the same crime.” The community concluding that “the only lawful and just outcome is the absolution of our environmental leaders” due to the lack of evidence against them. The case has been a flashpoint internationally for concerns about the integrity of the justice system and increasing risk to environmental and human rights defenders in 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.

After 125 days behind bars, Arturo Suárez and the other detainees were freed on 18 July after a prisoner swap deal between Washington and Caracas. Since flying home to Venezuela, they have started to open up about their torment, offering a rare and disturbing glimpse of the human toll of President Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador and Trump’s campaign against immigration.

Suárez said conditions inside the maximum security prison were so dire he and other inmates considered killing themselves.

Noah Bullock, the head of the El Salvador-focused human rights group Cristosal, said activists had heard very similar accounts from prisoners in other Salvadoran jails, suggesting such terror tactics were not merely the behaviour of “bad apple prison guards”. “There’s clearly a culture coming from the leadership of the prison system to inculcate the guards into operating this way, [into] using dehumanising and physical abuse in a systematic way.”

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.

In exchange for taking the deportees, the Bukele government received millions of dollars from the United States, as well as the Trump administration’s pledge to return top MS-13 leaders who are facing charges in federal court.

An investigation by The New York Times found that the returning of the gang leaders to El Salvador was threatening a long-running federal investigation into the upper echelons of MS-13. Prosecutors had amassed substantial evidence of ties between the gang and the Bukele administration — and had been scrutinizing Mr. Bukele himself, The Times found.

A large coalition of faith groups is challenging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Secretary Kristi Noem over the sweeping and aggressive immigration policy that gives free rein to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to conduct enforcement actions in and around houses of worship and other “sensitive locations.” 
Read statements in the article.