Mexico: News & Updates

As immigration raids sweep through Latino neighborhoods across the U.S. Southwest, Catholic and interfaith communities are stepping up as lifelines of faith and resistance. In Coachella, California, parishioners deliver food to immigrants too terrified to leave their homes. In Nogales, Mexico, nuns and volunteers cook daily meals for deportees. And in El Paso, faith groups pray outside federal buildings as they watch asylum seekers’ cases—most ending in denial.

While politicians defend the crackdown as “the Lord’s work,” church leaders are calling it what it is: a moral crisis. Pope Leo XIV has condemned mass deportations as “inhuman,” urging U.S. bishops to speak louder for compassion. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso and others have taken that call to heart, demanding solidarity and reminding the faithful of America’s founding ideals of justice and welcome.

Across border cities, fear runs deep—families skipping Mass, children too afraid to go to school, priests celebrating online to reach those in hiding. Yet amid raids, trauma, and despair, faith endures. From Texas to California, believers continue to feed, shelter, and stand with the persecuted, transforming prayer into quiet defiance against a system that criminalizes hope.

Through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Anti-Slavery Campaign, launched in the early 1990s,  farmworkers worked, often at great personal risk, to uncover and investigate modern-day slavery rings operating in Florida and throughout the eastern United States. 

By 2010, the CIW’s anti-trafficking efforts had helped federal prosecutors put over a dozen farm employers and supervisors behind bars for exploiting their workers through the threat and use of violence, prompting federal prosecutors to dub the Florida agricultural industry “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Also by 2010, the CIW had secured legally-binding “Fair Food Agreements” with nearly a dozen of the country’s largest buyers of produce, committing those companies to leverage their purchasing power to protect workers in their suppliers’ operations, though dogged resistance to reform on the part of Florida’s tomato growers, had, to that point, kept those agreements from being implemented on Florida farms. 

As of 2025, the Fair Food Program (FFP) is present in at least half the states in the continental U.S., and is also operating in two additional countries, Chile and South Africa. As a result, workers and growers in the flower industry in those countries are already benefiting from FFP implementation, with broader expansion into the fruit (South Africa) and salmon (Chile) industries on the runway.

IRTF is grateful to the 200 supporters who gathered on October 27 at Pilgrim Church in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood for IRTF’s annual Commemoration of the Martyrs. In addition to marking the 44th anniversary of the martyrdom of Cleveland’s missioners in El Salvador (Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, alongside Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke), we commemorated 36 human rights defenders killed in Central America and Colombia this past year because they dared to speak truth to power.

Our keynote speaker, Lorena Araujo of the largest campesino organization in El Salvador (CRIPDES), held the crowd’s attention with horrific stories of mass arrests, detentions and deaths currently happening under their government’s State of Exception, now in its third year. With more 88,000 imprisoned (and more than 300 deaths in prison), El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world—surpassing the astronomical rate of incarceration in the United States. 

As the people of El Salvador face the greatest challenge to their democracy since the end of the civil war in 1992, they invite us to renew and deepen our solidarity.

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In this monthly newsletter, please read about : 1) ICE Air: Update on Removal Flight Trends, 2) US Government Policy: Some legislators and DHS trying to do more to offer humanitarian relief to migrants, 3) Migration Impacts on Women, 4) At the Border, 5) Beyond Borders: Health and Safety in the Age of Migration in Mexico, 6) Changing Demographics: Migrants to the US Come from Different Corners of the Globe, 7) Danger in the Darién Gap: Human rights abuses and the need for human pathways to safety, 8) Texas Gets Tough on Migrants, 9) Economic Benefits of Immigration – both documented and undocumented migrants, 10) Biden Can Claim Record Numbers of Removals.

TAKE ACTION NOW

Here is what you can do to take action this week and act in solidarity with migrants and their families. (See details at the bottom of this newsletter.)

A) Join a Solidarity Delegation to Southern Mexico:  November 11-16, 2024

B) Stop Criminalizing Migrants Traveling through the Darién Gap

C) Volunteer to Assistant Migrants and Refugees in Cleveland: Catholic Charities

D) Volunteer to Assistant Migrants and Refugees in Cleveland: NEO Friends of Immigrants

E) Get Paid to Assist Migrants and Refugees in Cleveland

F) Act Now for Welcoming, Dignified, and Just Immigration

Read the full IRTF Migrant Justice Newsletter each month at https://www.irtfcleveland.org/blog