IRTF News

From researcher Austin Kocher: Over the past week, I’ve been looking into DHS’s claim that it deported 622,000 people and trying to reverse-engineer that number given the lack of transparency surrounding DHS’s enforcement data. Counting “deportations” turns out to be far more complicated than it appears, and the definition matters enormously.

Not all these people are receiving “deportation orders” from an immigration judge. Most of the repatriations, in fact, are “enforcement returns.”  Some readers might have heard of “expedited removal.” Those are forced, or rather “enforced.” But also in those numbers are a large number of people who are simply withdrawing their request to enter the country or returning voluntarily.

Confusing? Yes.

Camp East Montana (at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, TX)--called the largest detention facility by the ACLU-- is now responsible for three deaths in the past two months. The latest: Geraldo Lunas Campos.  Although located on an army base, the facility is run by the private corporation Acquisition Logistics LLC. Three detainees have died there over a period of 44 days. 

When he was repatriated to Colombia, Salvatore Mancuso was named a “peace facilitator” by Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, a designation that enables him to act as a mediator in talks with armed groups.

Now the former paramilitary leader has been sentencedto 40 years in prison for crimes committed against Indigenous communities in the province of La Guajira, including homicides, forced disappearances and the displacement of people from 2002 to 2006.

U.S. meddling in Honduras strikes again: Trump pardons ex-president Hernández, backs a preferred candidate, and threatens aid—undermining democracy & enabling corrupt corporate networks. Honduran sovereignty must be respected.

DHS claims it has deported 622,000 people under Trump—but the data doesn’t add up. This analysis breaks down ICE and DHS numbers to explain why the headline figure may be misleading, incomparable, or meaningless without transparency.

Austin Kocher maps deaths in ICE detention.

This article by the American Immigration Council provides overview on the newest detention expansion. Today there are approximately 73,000 people in immigration detention, the highest in the history of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).  More than 90 percent of people in ICE detention are held in privately-run immigrant detention centers.

Admist media attention being drawn to trumps "war on drugs" and his interference in Venezuela, a regime change operation in Honduras and the pardoning of its former president --a  convicted criminal, drug trafficker--is overshadowed. This article gives insight on how the elections went (November 30 2025) and which parties were involved with not only influencing elections but the broader political landscape in Honduras.

While Trump's imperial endeavours in Venezuela and aspirations to extract gain from  other countries within the Western Hemisphere such as Mexico, Colombia and Panama, Nicaragua seems to be broadly ignored by the White House. This article by Politico explains how the co-presidents of Nicaragua (labeled by many critics as dictators) manage to evade US interference and why the administration hasn't focused on Nicaragua yet.

This article by InSight Crime reviews the conspiratorial nature of the Berta Cáceres murder ten years ago. In February 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights announced the creation of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes – GIEI) responsible for producing this report. ary 2025 The report’s investigators tied one deposit in the amount of $2.6 million that development banks made to the account of CONCASA (a shell company) in December 2015 directly to Cáceres’ murderers.