IRTF News

Safe workplaces, dignified jobs, fair wages, good health. Those are things we can probably all agree we want. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how far away that vision seems for too many of us. This month, workers at some of the biggest companies are walking off the job, protesting lack of protective equipment, sick leave, and other safeguards. Meanwhile, as 30 million people have lost their jobs and working people struggle to make ends meet, the billionaires at the top are making a killing. The pandemic is laying bare how the concentration of wealth and power is leaving too many behind. Here are a few ways to take action on behalf of workers.

The cases among deported migrants have alarmed the public in Guatemala and its U.S.-aligned government, which indefinitely suspended deportation flights from the U.S. earlier this month. Guatemala's government, which has allowed two "humanitarian" flights in the past two weeks to receive repatriated children and families, has said it will only permit the resumption of regular deportation flights once the U.S. improves its screening protocols.

The world should not praise Honduras and condemn Nicaragua for their very different responses [to the coronavirus], while ignoring the results in the numbers so far. Honduras, the United States, and Nicaragua seem to present different ways of dealing with…marginalized people. Nicaragua is tailoring its response to them, perhaps too much so, perhaps not. The U.S. is ignoring them. Honduras is persecuting them. The mainline media seem insensitive to cultural differences and marginalized people, and the media often fail to take account of inequalities. So far, the Nicaraguan strategy of emphasis on education and prevention and an open society with monitored borders seems to be working better than the iron hand strategy of the Honduran government. Berta Oliva, director of the Committee of the Families of the Detained/Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), a major human rights organization, and other human rights leaders have accused the government and the military of using the pandemic as an opportunity to tighten control of the population through fomenting fear of the virus and imposing draconian state-of-siege measures. Keeping people in a precarious state serves the interests of a government that many Hondurans call a “dictatorship.”

Just days after the United Nations urged governments around the world to release vulnerable prisoners to ease overcrowding, President Bukele of El Salvador is doing the opposite. While Chile, Colombia and Nicaragua have announced they will move thousands of prisoners into house arrest, El Salvador is aiming to lock up more. El Salvador has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world: 2.1 murders per day in March 2020. That average will go up in April since 24 people were killed on just one day, April 24. In response, the president has authorized the police and army to use lethal force to curb the violence. He is mixing members of rival gangs in prison cells and ordering 24/7 lockdown, saying that gangs are “taking advantage of the pandemic.” The security minister said that prisoners will: “not receive sunlight, they will be in total confinement 24 hours a day in [El Salvador’s] seven maximum security prisons.”

Ohioans: Please tell Senator Brown and Senator Portman to urge Sen. Mitch McConnell to introduce this crucial legislation (HR 6) into the Senate for a vote. Senator Brown [Toll Free 1-888-896-OHIO] https://www.brown.senate.gov/contact Senator Portman [Toll Free 1-800-205-OHIO] https://www.portman.senate.gov/ It has been almost a year since the US House did the right thing, but the Senate has failed to act. Dreamers and TPS-holders deserve permanent legal status—now!! On June 4, 2019, the US House passed the American Dream and Promise Act, which put Dreamers and long-term beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) on a pathway to citizenship. The average DACA recipient (Dreamer) came to the US at age six, while the average TPS holder has been in the country for 22 years. Each year, they pay billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes and power the U.S. economy through their earnings, contributions, and entrepreneurship. They deserve permanent legal status and a pathway to citizenship now!

"This country has been inhaling tear gas since 2009," said Bertha Oliva, coordinator of the Honduran human rights group the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH). Repressive measures to arbitrarily detain citizens and control their movements could become normalised in the long term, particularly if these abuses happen without resistance from citizens or civil society, according to Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst for NGO the International Crisis Group. "Where there's no check, the government will implement these kinds of initiatives even when the crisis has passed," Breda said.

As Pope Francis wrote five years in Laudato Si’ (#139), the range of these issues, from deforestation to migration and overcrowded cities, suggests that “we are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis, which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

Stop detaining immigrants

Ohio policymakers have, overall, taken commendable, aggressive measures to avoid the spread of COVID-19. However, there is an easy action state and local officials have yet to take that could save potentially thousands of lives — suspend local law enforcement cooperation with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). This country is the world leader in immigration detention, with a daily average of 37,000 immigrants incarcerated; hundreds of those individuals are held in county jails and detention facilities right here in Ohio.