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.

In her 2024 book Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities, Dr. Gina Pérez, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Oberlin College,  presents a practical political strategy to cultivate safety, trust and belonging in all communities. It includes both physical sanctuary, where sacred space becomes a place of refuge, and a broader commitment to accompaniment and public advocacy.

Here Dr. Pérez reflects on the Catholic Church’s Year of Jubilee of Hope. Pope Leo XIV frames migrants and refugees as “messengers of hope”—a powerful challenge to the stigmatizing narratives that characterize migrants and global migration in our world today.

Dr. Pérez also highlights essays by two young IRTF student interns who are living out their commitment to “welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable…”  By participating in acts of accompaniment and collaboration across faith and secular communities, they credit IRTF with playing a significant role in their formation to become leaders in a new generation for social justice. Student intern Lucia reflects: “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 article by CovertAction Magazine provides an elaborate overview of Honduras' recent electoral history, its many struggles with this very crucial democratic procedure and the very recent electoral disaster. 

This article from NACLA provides insight on the Trump administration's contradictory polices. Occurrences such as the bombing of fisherboats in the Caribbean are contrasted with the pardon for fomer president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted in US federal court for trafficking tons of drugs into the US.  

This digital report by Andrew Trasher explores the nature of ICE's 287(g) agreements with local law enforment forces enabling the agencie to build a "deportation army." The report highlights the extend of ICE expansion by signing areements with different kinds of law enforcement entities, reaching from state prison systems and highway patrols to fish and wild life agencies.  Most importantly it  emphazises the fact that this quiet mobilization is what makes this widespread deportation action possible in the first place. 

A recent article published by The Guardian elaborates on the criminal history of former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez who was pardoned by Trump. It casts light on a long history of US support for him and shows how the US deliberately looked away during Hernandez's years of eroding democratic institutions and building the narcostate in Honduras. 

ICE released new detention data. Austin Kocher breaks down the data and discusses why the composition of people in detention with various criminal histories matters politically and legally.

Juan Orlando Hernández, former President of Honduras who last year was sentenced to 45 years in prison for flooding the United States with cocaine was recently pardoned by President Trump. A new article by the New Yok Times illuminates how this political act is in reluctance with the administrations “fight against drugs” and how Donald Trump's longest-serving political adviser and lobbyist Roger Stone has played into this.

More than 150 faith-based organizations from 25 countries launched an open letter on supporting an El Salvadoran ban on metals mining that was overturned by right-wing President Nayib Bukele in 2024. 

“We stand in solidarity with civic and religious leaders who are being persecuted and imprisoned for working against injustices, including the devastation that metals mining would cause their communities.”