IRTF News

The Livestream of our 2022 Liberation Lab: A Social Justice Teach-In on Abolition and Environmental Justice is now available! Watch it if you couldn't make it on Saturday or if you want to revisit the wonderful and interesting discussions we had on March 19!

As the head of Guatemala’s High-Risk Tribunal D, a court specialized in handling complex high-stakes criminal cases, Erika Aifán spent six years trying dozens of the most powerful business people, politicians, judges, and capos of Guatemala on charges of corruption, money laundering, and drug trafficking. For that work she has faced constant threats, espionage, and judicial persecution. In February, El Faro revealed that a witness in her court accused President Alejandro Giammattei of financing his electoral campaign with $2.6 million in bribes from construction firms. It was reason enough for Attorney General Consuelo Porras, converted into Giammattei’s enforcer, to file seven motions to repeal Aifán’s judicial immunity from prosecution and look to incarcerate the judge who may otherwise have put the president of Guatemala behind bars. In the evening on Wednesday, March 9, and without warning her team of bodyguards, Erika Aifán crossed the land border into El Salvador to fly via Costa Rica to the United States. This morning her attorneys formally tendered her resignation from the Guatemalan judiciary. Her departure makes fifteen justice system operators to have abandoned Guatemala in the last 11 months.

WOLA visited a large segment of the Texas-Mexico border, from Del Rio to Brownsville, during the week of March 7. Joy Olson, WOLA’s former executive director, and Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director for defense oversight, covered three of the nine sectors into which Border Patrol divides the U.S.-Mexico border, crossing into four Mexican border cities along the way. We were pursuing different research questions: Joy was looking at how the U.S. government could respond to ransom kidnappings, and Adam was looking at communities’ and migrants’ interactions with U.S. border law enforcement. Information about both topics is scarcer in this part of the border than it is from El Paso westward, and we wanted to know why. We saw many longtime colleagues, for the first time since before the pandemic, who are doing important work throughout the border zone. We introduced ourselves to many others whom we’d never met before. We talked to service providers, shelter personnel, attorneys, and some government officials and experts—and we put a lot of miles on our rental car. Here are a few things we saw.

The Title 42 expulsion policy — issued just days after COVID-19 began taking its grip on the U.S. — has driven a wedge between the Biden administration and immigrant communities, many of whom see its continued implementation as a broken campaign promise. As the Biden administration oversees the two-year anniversary of Title 42, it has given little sign it intends to lift the Trump-era policy that cites the pandemic as a reason to summarily expel asylum-seekers, even amid increasing pressure from members of its own party.

The West has a historical interest in Colombia, both for trade and for its regional geopolitical importance. Indebted due to financial backing during the independence struggle, Colombia’s sprouting elites were pushed into unequal trading and political relations with the UK and the US. Now, Colombia’s left-wing and progressive coalition, Pacto Historico, has become the country’s most popular political movement following the congressional elections last Sunday. Depending on what happens in May’s presidential election, this win could have global reverberations. Crucially, the West stands to lose the unconditional loyalty of their most stable ally in the region.

Advocates for migrants said the DHS guidance for Ukrainians [allowing Title 42 exemptions] showed unequal and discriminatory treatment of asylum-seekers based on their countries of origin, which is barred under international refugee law. "While it is heartening to see DHS acknowledge that they don't have to turn away asylum-seekers, that hasn't been applied to people from other countries," said Kennji Kizuka, an associate director at Human Rights First, a U.S. advocacy group. "Where were the exemptions for Haitian asylum-seekers arriving last fall?" Kizuka continued. "Where are those exemptions for Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan asylum-seekers, for asylum-seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras?"