IRTF News

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that a Border Patrol agent in Washington state cannot be personally sued in federal court for damages after a private citizen brought claims of illegal retaliation and excessive force. The decision continues a recent trend of the high court cutting back on the ability of individuals to sue law enforcement officers who violate their constitutional rights when there is no specific law authorizing such a claim to go forward. The ruling expands federal officers’ immunity from private lawsuits and reverses a lower court opinion that allowed the lawsuit to go forward. Lawyers for the Border Patrol agent argued that the threat of liability would interfere with his job duties.

In its annual human rights report released last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has placed Guatemala in chapter  IV.B, reserved for countries that violate aspects of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Analyzing the human rights situation in 2021 in the Organization of American States’ thirty-five member states, the IACHR has grouped Guatemala with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Explaining its decision to include Guatemala in this section, the IACHR cites “structural situations that seriously affect the use and enjoyment of fundamental rights recognized in the American Declaration, the American Convention or other applicable instruments,” including  “systematic noncompliance of the State with its obligation to combat impunity, attributable to a manifest lack of will.”

More than a dozen South American travel agencies have rented planes from low-budget Latin American airlines — some of them as large as 238-seat Airbuses — and then sold tickets at premium prices. Many of the customers are Haitians who had been living in Chile and Brazil before they made their way to the Texas border in September, only to be expelled by the Biden administration and prevented from seeking asylum. They are using the charter flights to flee Haiti again and return to South America. Rodolfo Noriega of the National Coordinator of Immigrants in Chile said Haitians are being exploited by businesses taking advantage of their desperation. They “are at the end of a chain of powerful businesses making money from this circuit of Haitian migration,” he said.

Since May, there has been an alarming trend of social movement leaders being arbitrarily arrested in the context of the nationwide State of Exception. Under the State of Exception, which was approved on March 27 for a 30-day period, but which has already been extended twice, raising concerns that the Bukele administration seeks to maintain its expanded power in perpetuity, constitutional rights such as the right to due process and the right to defense are suspended. A person can be arrested without a warrant and held for up to 15 days without charges being presented. As of June 5, the government reports that the total number of people arrested has since risen to over 37,000. As news outlet Gato Encerrado has reported, the number of people incarcerated in El Salvador has doubled within the span of less than three months.

As the largest caravan of migrants so far this year journeys into central Mexico, the continued enforcement of a public health order barring their admission into the United States threatens to exacerbate already deteriorating humanitarian conditions on the southern border. The caravan, largely composed of asylum seekers from Venezuela, could add as many as 11,000 people to the population of migrants currently stuck in limbo near the U.S.-Mexico border—estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them have been living in dangerous conditions for months or longer awaiting the final repeal of Title 42, the public health order that has effectively halted asylum admissions into the United States from Central and South America.

The Honorable Alejandro Mayorkas

Secretary of Homeland Security

Washington, DC 20528

Dear Secretary Mayorkas:

We write to express our concern over the drastic increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) which relies on punitive surveillance, such as the use of ankle shackles, and facial recognition and geolocation tracking through a mobile application called SmartLINK as an ill-conceived “alternative” to detention.