IRTF News

2022 started in Honduras with everything in place for a new start. Xiomara Castro won the election with a clear mandate for change and even in Congress, the opposition alliance together with some Liberal Party dissidents could have reached a simple majority. But this in not the story of this month. Last month, several human rights defenders were murdered, the Guapinol water defenders are still in detention, the Congress is splitting in two and on top of everything, the Omicron-wave is hitting Honduras and its public health system. Read Daniel Langmeier's full report on January 2022 in Honduras.

For years, under multiple presidents of both parties, the immigration court system has been something of a mess, struggling with a huge backlog of cases that has just seemed to snowball and snowball, sometimes keeping individuals in legal limbo for several years. Now new data shows the backlog of cases in immigration court has reached the highest level ever—at almost 1.6 million, according to a recent report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. And it’s not just that more cases are being added because more people are trying to either request asylum or enter the US illegally. Changing politics actually have a lot to do with it, and it’s been a constant challenge for immigration judges, lawyers, and immigrants themselves to survive the whiplash. While talking about court backlogs can seem abstract or too in the weeds, each of these cases has a person’s future at stake; it can determine whether someone gets deported, is granted asylum, is released from a detention center, or is given a green card.

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) on Saturday called on immigration authorities to speed up visa processing so that nearly 2000 migrants seeking asylum in the US and Mexico could access documents to regularize their stay in Mexico or let them travel through Mexico without being detained.  Last week, Mexican immigration agents raided migrant shelters in Tapachula, seeking to detain people with “irregular status.” Agents are typically prohibited from raiding the shelters, but the massive influx in asylum seekers have pushed refugees onto the streets and nearby hotels. The commission’s statement said that many migrants currently survive “in conditions contrary to respect for their dignity” due to shelter overcrowding in Tapachula. They called on immigration authorities such as the National Migration Institute (INM) and the Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) to provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance to these migrants.

This year kicked off with a violent start on the Colombia-Venezuela border, where dissident militant factions have been competing for territorial control of lucrative drug routes that connect the South American country to the US and Europe. The renewed violence comes more than five years after the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), ending a 52-year armed conflict that killed up to 220,000 people and displaced as many as 5 million people. Colombian President Ivan Duque vowed to stamp out the violence during his presidency. But it continues to plague rural areas, where peace was supposed to bring development and new opportunities -- mounting concerns that the country's most violent days might not be over. Here's what you need to know about the simmering conflict on Colombia's border with Venezuela.

President Biden halted the returns when he took office, but in September a U.S. District Court ordered his administration to reinstate the program, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. After months of negotiations with Mexico, the Biden administration relaunched MPP in early December, starting in El Paso. Immigration advocates were furious, blaming Biden for not pushing back harder. But two months after its restart, the new version of MPP bears little resemblance to President Donald Trump’s. The Biden administration has re-implemented the program with a narrow scope and none of the zeal demonstrated by Trump officials. Border arrests are even higher now than in 2019, but El Paso’s immigration courts remain light on MPP cases. On a recent afternoon, two MPP enrollees, both adult men from Nicaragua, appeared before immigration judge Nathan L. Herbert. The next day, there were three.

Fighting between rival guerrilla groups along Colombia’s border with Venezuela has ushered in a bloody start to the new year, leaving dozens dead and sending residents fleeing from some of the worst violence since the country’s historic peace accords five years ago. At least 23 people were killed in clashes between leftist armed groups in the northeastern department of Arauca during the first weekend of January. Later in the month, car bomb exploded in front of a building where more than 40 social leaders were gathered in a self-protection workshop, injuring dozens and killing a security guard.

For nearly 30 years, the town of El Carmen de Bolivar and the surrounding region of Montes de María were infamous for violence perpetrated against LGBTQ+ individuals, targeted at one time or another over the country’s long civil war by rightwing paramilitaries, leftwing guerrillas, government soldiers and the police. In 1999, Helicopters were dropping pamphlets with a warning to the LGBTQ+ society to leave town. Now, Many of those who left are returning as their home has become much safer. “It gives me a lot of joy to see how we have been able to achieve so much in a place that people thought was impossible," Tito, leader of a folk dance group, says.

The Guapinol Water Defenders are a group of community members local to the Guapinol and San Pedro Rivers, who protested against the US-backed mining company "Inversiones Los Pinares" and their illegal and environmentally harmful operations in the protected area of the Carlos Escaleras National Park in September of 2018. They have since been accused by the company on false claims and unjustly imprisoned for over two years, waiting for the trial to start as the Honduran state has ignored international calls for their release. Now, finally, after several postponements, their trial is getting close to the end. Here is a summary of what the trial has looked like so far and the most important events from each day.