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A river at risk of drying up near the agricultural village of Guapinol, Honduras. The phrase "Cuidemos los bosques," painted onto a rock by villagers, translates to "Protect the forests." (Photo: Lawyers for Civil Rights)
The term "climate refugee" has real meaning for Jose, who says he was forced off his family farm in Tabasco, Mexico due to pollution from oil production, which damaged crops and contributed to climate change.
This twenty-four-year-old Mexican native, who now works on a dairy farm in Vermont, found that climate change made even getting financing for farming problematic.
"Those of us who cultivate the land, we couldn't get money anymore for it because it was too much of a risk," says Jose, who became a climate refugee in 2016. "People wouldn't invest because, with climate change, they didn't know if they'd make a profit."
Jose's father still grows melons and habaneros on the farm in Mexico but on a much smaller scale. What's marketed, he says, is about a third of what was sold a decade ago.
"On top of the contamination, we are also seeing big changes in weather patterns," Jose says. "There will be times when it rains four or five days straight. That will flood the fields and produce a lot of fungus on the plants. There will also be times of very, very hot weather when you can't water the plants during the day."
The fishing industry in the area is suffering as well, Jose says, because of polluted waters.
Tabasco, in southeastern Mexico, is a hub of activity for the government-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). The company is now planning an $8 billion refinery on the coast that the company's own review warned would have a "severe" impact on air quality.
Climate change has made even getting financing for farming problematic.
Jose, who doesn't want his full name disclosed because of his immigration status, is among the growing number of climate refugees who, facing diminishing economic opportunities at home, have come to the United States even without any pathway to legal status.
Their plight is addressed in legislation recently introduced by Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Nydia Velazquez, Democrat of New York, that would include the concept of a "climate-displaced person" in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Safe haven in the United States would be provided each year for at least 50,000 people displaced by climate change.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program that has provided relief to some refugees in the United States whose homelands have suffered environmental disasters.
TPS currently prevents the deportation of almost 320,000 foreign nationals from ten nations, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti. Trump seeks to terminate TPS for refugees from those countries as well as Nicaragua, Sudan, and Nepal.
Calls for Congress to address the effect of climate change on immigration come from many quarters--including actress and activist Jane Fonda's Fire Drill Fridays--weekly protests that highlight a climate issue with civil disobedience arrests.
"Time is running out on the climate. And the two issues--migration and climate--are connected," says Patrick Carolan, executive director of the Franciscan Action Network and an organizer of the protest.
But changes in immigration law alone can't adequately address the growing problem of climate displacement. Over a recent seven-year period, according to the World Meteorological Organization, climate-related events on average displaced 22.5 million people a year.
"We are just at the beginning of what will be a major wave of climate migrants and climate refugees we have to address," says Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, who as executive director of the Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights has focused on climate change and immigration.
And Trump calling climate change a "hoax" won't make the devastation caused by drought any less real for Nery Cantarero, who lives in Camasca, a small rural community in western Honduras.
In a recent long-distance telephone interview, Cantarero tells how he tried to make a go of it on his family's farm two decades ago but left to join other family members in Maryland. He then worked as a cook until he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported in 2007.
Back in Honduras, Cantarero tried farming again. But as the droughts have become longer and the temperature hotter, he has had to supplement his shrinking income by opening a small restaurant. In addition to the drought, he notes, environmental contamination and deforestation fuel migration.
Hit hard by the droughts, neighboring farmers ran out of options. Cantarero says as many as 300 residents from his community alone have left for the United States, most in recent years. "Many are now leaving with their families," Cantarero says. "You can't make a living as a farmer."
He does not see Trump's hard line on immigration as a deterrent to desperate people. Deportees, he adds, turn around and try again.
Between October 2018 and August 2019, more than 240,000 Hondurans were detained by U.S. Border and Customs Protection. Climate change is one factor among many driving immigrants here, especially since about two-thirds of Honduras' almost ten million people live in poverty.
"Climate change looms huge over everything we do," says Conor Walsh, Catholic Relief Services' representative for Honduras. He, too, tells of a growing number of Hondurans leaving the so-called Dry Corridor, an ecological region that stretches from southern Mexico through El Salvador, western Guatemala, and western Honduras to Panama.
Honduran farmers have been losing 80 percent or more of their corn and bean crops, says Walsh, who also notes how rising temperatures have made growing coffee much more difficult.
"The responses that we provided in the past are no longer up to the scale of the problem," he says. Yet his group still tries to mitigate the damage done by climate change by promoting such practices as limiting tilling and using cover crops to help soil retain water and nutrients.
Court challenges to Trump's attempt to dismantle Temporary Protected Status have resulted in preliminary injunctions that put the administration's plans on hold through January 2021. Even so, TPS has a limited reach, available only to foreign nationals in the United States when a TPS order is issued.
Cantarero, for instance, could not have been helped by the TPS designation for Hondurans. He arrived in the United States in 2000--a year after the TPS order for Hondurans was issued, in the aftermath of the devastation that Hurricane Mitch caused in Honduras.
According to a lawsuit brought by Lawyers for Civil Rights in federal court in Boston to prevent Trump from terminating TPS for Salvadorans, Haitians, and Hondurans, racial animosity was a major factor in the administration's disdain for the program. Indeed, even before hate-mongering White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller became Trump's anti-immigration architect, TPS was on his radar screen.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's recent disclosures of Miller emails, which show his affinity for white nationalism, include his messages in 2015 to a Breitbart editor expressing alarm about Hurricane Patricia, with winds reaching 215 mph off the coast of Mexico. Miller fretted that Mexican immigrants fleeing to the United States "will all get TPS."
Patricia Montes, an immigrant from Honduras who is now executive director of Centro Presente, a Massachusetts-based Latin American immigrant organization, argues that climate change must be understood in a broader context. "Climate change is a clear result of all of these corporations and all the economic dynamics that are destroying our economies, that are destroying our environment," she says.
In August, Montes led a delegation that included Espinoza-Madrigal on the visit to Honduras and El Salvador. Recalls Espinoza-Madrigal, "We heard directly from farmers who say, 'I was bullied, intimidated and threatened off my property.' "
"I was bullied, intimidated and threatened off my property."
A report based on this visit, titled "Fleeing, Not Migrating: Toward a Solution to the Human Rights Crisis Affecting Migrants and Asylum Seekers," speaks of "a toxic mix" of "violence coupled with a broken and corrupt law enforcement and judicial system." Increasingly, it says, "climate change is connected to poverty and displacement. Rivers have started drying up making agriculture and survival virtually impossible."
In recent years, a succession of rightwing governments in Honduras have made mining, agribusiness, and energy projects a priority while doing virtually nothing to protect people struggling to defend the environment, an increasingly hazardous undertaking. Since 2009, more than 120 environment and land defenders have been murdered, according to a 2017 report, including the 2016 killing of environmental and indigenous rights supporter Berta Caceres. Seven men have been convicted of her killing, ordered by executives of a dam company against which she had led protests. But Caceres's case is an exception. "In the majority of these cases, the attackers were not held to account, and the victims and their families were denied the protection and justice they deserve," says the report.
And those refugees who make it to the United States border with Mexico are increasingly being denied entry. Among those stuck in Mexico is Guatemalan environmental activist Gaspar Cobo Corio, a vocal opponent of mining interests who fled his homeland after receiving threats. He and Guatemalan political activist Francisco Chavez Raymundo were allegedly robbed by police in Mexico in June but are nonetheless required to stay in Mexico until their hearings.
Climate refugees who make it to the United States are in a bind as well, since there is no provision in asylum law to address their situation. Some of those displaced by climate change initially migrated internally, from their hometowns to larger cities, looking for work. But there they encountered gang violence extreme enough to push them to flee to the United States, where they have sought asylum. Now they face a Trump Administration doing everything it can to cut off this avenue to safe haven.
Trump is also sharply restricting the ability of those seeking admission to the United States as refugees facing persecution by decreasing the allowable total to a record low of 18,000 this fiscal year.
In introducing his Senate bill to provide for at least 50,000 climate-displaced persons, Markey cited an article in The Guardian on the State Department's recent warning to the International Organization for Migration that the programs it funds "must not be in conflict with current [U.S. government] political sensitivities."
These "sensitivities," the paper said, include climate change.
In an effort to make the climate-immigration connection more visible, Lawyers for Civil Rights has launched a Race and Climate Justice Project to help voice immigrant needs and concerns.
"We need to think more creatively about how our immigration laws really meaningfully address this emerging climate crisis," says Espinoza-Madrigal. "This problem isn't going away."
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
The term "climate refugee" has real meaning for Jose, who says he was forced off his family farm in Tabasco, Mexico due to pollution from oil production, which damaged crops and contributed to climate change.
This twenty-four-year-old Mexican native, who now works on a dairy farm in Vermont, found that climate change made even getting financing for farming problematic.
"Those of us who cultivate the land, we couldn't get money anymore for it because it was too much of a risk," says Jose, who became a climate refugee in 2016. "People wouldn't invest because, with climate change, they didn't know if they'd make a profit."
Jose's father still grows melons and habaneros on the farm in Mexico but on a much smaller scale. What's marketed, he says, is about a third of what was sold a decade ago.
"On top of the contamination, we are also seeing big changes in weather patterns," Jose says. "There will be times when it rains four or five days straight. That will flood the fields and produce a lot of fungus on the plants. There will also be times of very, very hot weather when you can't water the plants during the day."
The fishing industry in the area is suffering as well, Jose says, because of polluted waters.
Tabasco, in southeastern Mexico, is a hub of activity for the government-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). The company is now planning an $8 billion refinery on the coast that the company's own review warned would have a "severe" impact on air quality.
Climate change has made even getting financing for farming problematic.
Jose, who doesn't want his full name disclosed because of his immigration status, is among the growing number of climate refugees who, facing diminishing economic opportunities at home, have come to the United States even without any pathway to legal status.
Their plight is addressed in legislation recently introduced by Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Nydia Velazquez, Democrat of New York, that would include the concept of a "climate-displaced person" in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Safe haven in the United States would be provided each year for at least 50,000 people displaced by climate change.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program that has provided relief to some refugees in the United States whose homelands have suffered environmental disasters.
TPS currently prevents the deportation of almost 320,000 foreign nationals from ten nations, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti. Trump seeks to terminate TPS for refugees from those countries as well as Nicaragua, Sudan, and Nepal.
Calls for Congress to address the effect of climate change on immigration come from many quarters--including actress and activist Jane Fonda's Fire Drill Fridays--weekly protests that highlight a climate issue with civil disobedience arrests.
"Time is running out on the climate. And the two issues--migration and climate--are connected," says Patrick Carolan, executive director of the Franciscan Action Network and an organizer of the protest.
But changes in immigration law alone can't adequately address the growing problem of climate displacement. Over a recent seven-year period, according to the World Meteorological Organization, climate-related events on average displaced 22.5 million people a year.
"We are just at the beginning of what will be a major wave of climate migrants and climate refugees we have to address," says Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, who as executive director of the Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights has focused on climate change and immigration.
And Trump calling climate change a "hoax" won't make the devastation caused by drought any less real for Nery Cantarero, who lives in Camasca, a small rural community in western Honduras.
In a recent long-distance telephone interview, Cantarero tells how he tried to make a go of it on his family's farm two decades ago but left to join other family members in Maryland. He then worked as a cook until he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported in 2007.
Back in Honduras, Cantarero tried farming again. But as the droughts have become longer and the temperature hotter, he has had to supplement his shrinking income by opening a small restaurant. In addition to the drought, he notes, environmental contamination and deforestation fuel migration.
Hit hard by the droughts, neighboring farmers ran out of options. Cantarero says as many as 300 residents from his community alone have left for the United States, most in recent years. "Many are now leaving with their families," Cantarero says. "You can't make a living as a farmer."
He does not see Trump's hard line on immigration as a deterrent to desperate people. Deportees, he adds, turn around and try again.
Between October 2018 and August 2019, more than 240,000 Hondurans were detained by U.S. Border and Customs Protection. Climate change is one factor among many driving immigrants here, especially since about two-thirds of Honduras' almost ten million people live in poverty.
"Climate change looms huge over everything we do," says Conor Walsh, Catholic Relief Services' representative for Honduras. He, too, tells of a growing number of Hondurans leaving the so-called Dry Corridor, an ecological region that stretches from southern Mexico through El Salvador, western Guatemala, and western Honduras to Panama.
Honduran farmers have been losing 80 percent or more of their corn and bean crops, says Walsh, who also notes how rising temperatures have made growing coffee much more difficult.
"The responses that we provided in the past are no longer up to the scale of the problem," he says. Yet his group still tries to mitigate the damage done by climate change by promoting such practices as limiting tilling and using cover crops to help soil retain water and nutrients.
Court challenges to Trump's attempt to dismantle Temporary Protected Status have resulted in preliminary injunctions that put the administration's plans on hold through January 2021. Even so, TPS has a limited reach, available only to foreign nationals in the United States when a TPS order is issued.
Cantarero, for instance, could not have been helped by the TPS designation for Hondurans. He arrived in the United States in 2000--a year after the TPS order for Hondurans was issued, in the aftermath of the devastation that Hurricane Mitch caused in Honduras.
According to a lawsuit brought by Lawyers for Civil Rights in federal court in Boston to prevent Trump from terminating TPS for Salvadorans, Haitians, and Hondurans, racial animosity was a major factor in the administration's disdain for the program. Indeed, even before hate-mongering White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller became Trump's anti-immigration architect, TPS was on his radar screen.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's recent disclosures of Miller emails, which show his affinity for white nationalism, include his messages in 2015 to a Breitbart editor expressing alarm about Hurricane Patricia, with winds reaching 215 mph off the coast of Mexico. Miller fretted that Mexican immigrants fleeing to the United States "will all get TPS."
Patricia Montes, an immigrant from Honduras who is now executive director of Centro Presente, a Massachusetts-based Latin American immigrant organization, argues that climate change must be understood in a broader context. "Climate change is a clear result of all of these corporations and all the economic dynamics that are destroying our economies, that are destroying our environment," she says.
In August, Montes led a delegation that included Espinoza-Madrigal on the visit to Honduras and El Salvador. Recalls Espinoza-Madrigal, "We heard directly from farmers who say, 'I was bullied, intimidated and threatened off my property.' "
"I was bullied, intimidated and threatened off my property."
A report based on this visit, titled "Fleeing, Not Migrating: Toward a Solution to the Human Rights Crisis Affecting Migrants and Asylum Seekers," speaks of "a toxic mix" of "violence coupled with a broken and corrupt law enforcement and judicial system." Increasingly, it says, "climate change is connected to poverty and displacement. Rivers have started drying up making agriculture and survival virtually impossible."
In recent years, a succession of rightwing governments in Honduras have made mining, agribusiness, and energy projects a priority while doing virtually nothing to protect people struggling to defend the environment, an increasingly hazardous undertaking. Since 2009, more than 120 environment and land defenders have been murdered, according to a 2017 report, including the 2016 killing of environmental and indigenous rights supporter Berta Caceres. Seven men have been convicted of her killing, ordered by executives of a dam company against which she had led protests. But Caceres's case is an exception. "In the majority of these cases, the attackers were not held to account, and the victims and their families were denied the protection and justice they deserve," says the report.
And those refugees who make it to the United States border with Mexico are increasingly being denied entry. Among those stuck in Mexico is Guatemalan environmental activist Gaspar Cobo Corio, a vocal opponent of mining interests who fled his homeland after receiving threats. He and Guatemalan political activist Francisco Chavez Raymundo were allegedly robbed by police in Mexico in June but are nonetheless required to stay in Mexico until their hearings.
Climate refugees who make it to the United States are in a bind as well, since there is no provision in asylum law to address their situation. Some of those displaced by climate change initially migrated internally, from their hometowns to larger cities, looking for work. But there they encountered gang violence extreme enough to push them to flee to the United States, where they have sought asylum. Now they face a Trump Administration doing everything it can to cut off this avenue to safe haven.
Trump is also sharply restricting the ability of those seeking admission to the United States as refugees facing persecution by decreasing the allowable total to a record low of 18,000 this fiscal year.
In introducing his Senate bill to provide for at least 50,000 climate-displaced persons, Markey cited an article in The Guardian on the State Department's recent warning to the International Organization for Migration that the programs it funds "must not be in conflict with current [U.S. government] political sensitivities."
These "sensitivities," the paper said, include climate change.
In an effort to make the climate-immigration connection more visible, Lawyers for Civil Rights has launched a Race and Climate Justice Project to help voice immigrant needs and concerns.
"We need to think more creatively about how our immigration laws really meaningfully address this emerging climate crisis," says Espinoza-Madrigal. "This problem isn't going away."
The term "climate refugee" has real meaning for Jose, who says he was forced off his family farm in Tabasco, Mexico due to pollution from oil production, which damaged crops and contributed to climate change.
This twenty-four-year-old Mexican native, who now works on a dairy farm in Vermont, found that climate change made even getting financing for farming problematic.
"Those of us who cultivate the land, we couldn't get money anymore for it because it was too much of a risk," says Jose, who became a climate refugee in 2016. "People wouldn't invest because, with climate change, they didn't know if they'd make a profit."
Jose's father still grows melons and habaneros on the farm in Mexico but on a much smaller scale. What's marketed, he says, is about a third of what was sold a decade ago.
"On top of the contamination, we are also seeing big changes in weather patterns," Jose says. "There will be times when it rains four or five days straight. That will flood the fields and produce a lot of fungus on the plants. There will also be times of very, very hot weather when you can't water the plants during the day."
The fishing industry in the area is suffering as well, Jose says, because of polluted waters.
Tabasco, in southeastern Mexico, is a hub of activity for the government-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). The company is now planning an $8 billion refinery on the coast that the company's own review warned would have a "severe" impact on air quality.
Climate change has made even getting financing for farming problematic.
Jose, who doesn't want his full name disclosed because of his immigration status, is among the growing number of climate refugees who, facing diminishing economic opportunities at home, have come to the United States even without any pathway to legal status.
Their plight is addressed in legislation recently introduced by Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Nydia Velazquez, Democrat of New York, that would include the concept of a "climate-displaced person" in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Safe haven in the United States would be provided each year for at least 50,000 people displaced by climate change.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program that has provided relief to some refugees in the United States whose homelands have suffered environmental disasters.
TPS currently prevents the deportation of almost 320,000 foreign nationals from ten nations, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti. Trump seeks to terminate TPS for refugees from those countries as well as Nicaragua, Sudan, and Nepal.
Calls for Congress to address the effect of climate change on immigration come from many quarters--including actress and activist Jane Fonda's Fire Drill Fridays--weekly protests that highlight a climate issue with civil disobedience arrests.
"Time is running out on the climate. And the two issues--migration and climate--are connected," says Patrick Carolan, executive director of the Franciscan Action Network and an organizer of the protest.
But changes in immigration law alone can't adequately address the growing problem of climate displacement. Over a recent seven-year period, according to the World Meteorological Organization, climate-related events on average displaced 22.5 million people a year.
"We are just at the beginning of what will be a major wave of climate migrants and climate refugees we have to address," says Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, who as executive director of the Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights has focused on climate change and immigration.
And Trump calling climate change a "hoax" won't make the devastation caused by drought any less real for Nery Cantarero, who lives in Camasca, a small rural community in western Honduras.
In a recent long-distance telephone interview, Cantarero tells how he tried to make a go of it on his family's farm two decades ago but left to join other family members in Maryland. He then worked as a cook until he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported in 2007.
Back in Honduras, Cantarero tried farming again. But as the droughts have become longer and the temperature hotter, he has had to supplement his shrinking income by opening a small restaurant. In addition to the drought, he notes, environmental contamination and deforestation fuel migration.
Hit hard by the droughts, neighboring farmers ran out of options. Cantarero says as many as 300 residents from his community alone have left for the United States, most in recent years. "Many are now leaving with their families," Cantarero says. "You can't make a living as a farmer."
He does not see Trump's hard line on immigration as a deterrent to desperate people. Deportees, he adds, turn around and try again.
Between October 2018 and August 2019, more than 240,000 Hondurans were detained by U.S. Border and Customs Protection. Climate change is one factor among many driving immigrants here, especially since about two-thirds of Honduras' almost ten million people live in poverty.
"Climate change looms huge over everything we do," says Conor Walsh, Catholic Relief Services' representative for Honduras. He, too, tells of a growing number of Hondurans leaving the so-called Dry Corridor, an ecological region that stretches from southern Mexico through El Salvador, western Guatemala, and western Honduras to Panama.
Honduran farmers have been losing 80 percent or more of their corn and bean crops, says Walsh, who also notes how rising temperatures have made growing coffee much more difficult.
"The responses that we provided in the past are no longer up to the scale of the problem," he says. Yet his group still tries to mitigate the damage done by climate change by promoting such practices as limiting tilling and using cover crops to help soil retain water and nutrients.
Court challenges to Trump's attempt to dismantle Temporary Protected Status have resulted in preliminary injunctions that put the administration's plans on hold through January 2021. Even so, TPS has a limited reach, available only to foreign nationals in the United States when a TPS order is issued.
Cantarero, for instance, could not have been helped by the TPS designation for Hondurans. He arrived in the United States in 2000--a year after the TPS order for Hondurans was issued, in the aftermath of the devastation that Hurricane Mitch caused in Honduras.
According to a lawsuit brought by Lawyers for Civil Rights in federal court in Boston to prevent Trump from terminating TPS for Salvadorans, Haitians, and Hondurans, racial animosity was a major factor in the administration's disdain for the program. Indeed, even before hate-mongering White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller became Trump's anti-immigration architect, TPS was on his radar screen.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's recent disclosures of Miller emails, which show his affinity for white nationalism, include his messages in 2015 to a Breitbart editor expressing alarm about Hurricane Patricia, with winds reaching 215 mph off the coast of Mexico. Miller fretted that Mexican immigrants fleeing to the United States "will all get TPS."
Patricia Montes, an immigrant from Honduras who is now executive director of Centro Presente, a Massachusetts-based Latin American immigrant organization, argues that climate change must be understood in a broader context. "Climate change is a clear result of all of these corporations and all the economic dynamics that are destroying our economies, that are destroying our environment," she says.
In August, Montes led a delegation that included Espinoza-Madrigal on the visit to Honduras and El Salvador. Recalls Espinoza-Madrigal, "We heard directly from farmers who say, 'I was bullied, intimidated and threatened off my property.' "
"I was bullied, intimidated and threatened off my property."
A report based on this visit, titled "Fleeing, Not Migrating: Toward a Solution to the Human Rights Crisis Affecting Migrants and Asylum Seekers," speaks of "a toxic mix" of "violence coupled with a broken and corrupt law enforcement and judicial system." Increasingly, it says, "climate change is connected to poverty and displacement. Rivers have started drying up making agriculture and survival virtually impossible."
In recent years, a succession of rightwing governments in Honduras have made mining, agribusiness, and energy projects a priority while doing virtually nothing to protect people struggling to defend the environment, an increasingly hazardous undertaking. Since 2009, more than 120 environment and land defenders have been murdered, according to a 2017 report, including the 2016 killing of environmental and indigenous rights supporter Berta Caceres. Seven men have been convicted of her killing, ordered by executives of a dam company against which she had led protests. But Caceres's case is an exception. "In the majority of these cases, the attackers were not held to account, and the victims and their families were denied the protection and justice they deserve," says the report.
And those refugees who make it to the United States border with Mexico are increasingly being denied entry. Among those stuck in Mexico is Guatemalan environmental activist Gaspar Cobo Corio, a vocal opponent of mining interests who fled his homeland after receiving threats. He and Guatemalan political activist Francisco Chavez Raymundo were allegedly robbed by police in Mexico in June but are nonetheless required to stay in Mexico until their hearings.
Climate refugees who make it to the United States are in a bind as well, since there is no provision in asylum law to address their situation. Some of those displaced by climate change initially migrated internally, from their hometowns to larger cities, looking for work. But there they encountered gang violence extreme enough to push them to flee to the United States, where they have sought asylum. Now they face a Trump Administration doing everything it can to cut off this avenue to safe haven.
Trump is also sharply restricting the ability of those seeking admission to the United States as refugees facing persecution by decreasing the allowable total to a record low of 18,000 this fiscal year.
In introducing his Senate bill to provide for at least 50,000 climate-displaced persons, Markey cited an article in The Guardian on the State Department's recent warning to the International Organization for Migration that the programs it funds "must not be in conflict with current [U.S. government] political sensitivities."
These "sensitivities," the paper said, include climate change.
In an effort to make the climate-immigration connection more visible, Lawyers for Civil Rights has launched a Race and Climate Justice Project to help voice immigrant needs and concerns.
"We need to think more creatively about how our immigration laws really meaningfully address this emerging climate crisis," says Espinoza-Madrigal. "This problem isn't going away."
A spokesperson for the news agency said the ruling "affirms the fundamental right of the press and public to speak freely without government retaliation."
A federal judge appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term ruled Tuesday that the White House cannot cut off The Associated Press' access to the Republican leader because of the news agency's refusal to use his preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico.
"About two months ago, President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Associated Press did not follow suit. For that editorial choice, the White House sharply curtailed the AP's access to coveted, tightly controlled media events with the president," wrote Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who is based in Washington, D.C.
Specifically, according to the news outlet, "the AP has been blocked since February 11 from being among the small group of journalists to cover Trump in the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One, with sporadic ability to cover him at events in the East Room."
The AP responded to the restrictions by suing White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, "seeking a preliminary injunction enjoining the government from excluding it because of its viewpoint," McFadden noted in his 41-page order. "Today, the court grants that relief."
The judge explained that "this injunction does not limit the various permissible reasons the government may have for excluding journalists from limited-access events. It does not mandate that all eligible journalists, or indeed any journalists at all, be given access to the president or nonpublic government spaces. It does not prohibit government officials from freely choosing which journalists to sit down with for interviews or which ones' questions they answer. And it certainly does not prevent senior officials from publicly expressing their own views."
"The court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints," he stressed. "The Constitution requires no less."
McFadden blocked his own order from taking effect before next week, giving the Trump administration time to respond or appeal. Still, AP spokesperson Lauren Easton said Tuesday that "we are gratified by the court's decision."
"Today’s ruling affirms the fundamental right of the press and public to speak freely without government retaliation," Easton added. "This is a freedom guaranteed for all Americans in the U.S. Constitution."
NPR reported that "an AP reporter and photographer were turned back from joining a reporting pool on a presidential motorcade early Tuesday evening, almost two hours after the decision came down."
"The AEA has only ever been a power invoked in time of war, and plainly only applies to warlike actions," the lawsuit asserts.
The ACLU and allied groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday in a bid to stop U.S. President Donald Trump from "abusing the Alien Enemies Act"—an 18th-century law only ever invoked during wartime—to deport foreign nationals to a prison in El Salvador with allegedly rampant human rights abuses.
According to a statement, the ACLU and New York Civil Liberties Union, "in partnership with the Legal Aid Society whose clients are plaintiffs in the litigation, filed an emergency lawsuit this morning in federal court in New York to again halt removals under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) for people within that court's judicial district."
The lawsuit—which names Trump, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other officials as plaintiffs—follows Monday's 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court
ruling that largely reversed a lower court's decision blocking the deportation of Venezuelan nationals to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador.
BREAKING: Today the NYCLU and @aclu.org filed an emergency lawsuit to ensure the Trump administration does not deport people under the Alien Enemies Act without due process. No one should face the horrifying prospect of lifelong imprisonment without a fair hearing, let alone in another country.
— NYCLU (@nyclu.org) April 8, 2025 at 11:00 AM
While the high court said the Trump administration can resume deportations under the 1798 AEA, the justices included the caveat that people subject to such removals must be afforded due process under the law.
"The AEA has only ever been a power invoked in time of war, and plainly only applies to warlike actions," the ACLU argued in the new lawsuit. "It cannot be used here against nationals of a country—Venezuela—with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States, and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States."
Not only has Trump sent foreign nationals—including at least one wrongfully deported man—to CECOT, he has also floated the idea of sending U.S. citizens there at the invitation of right-wing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who is scheduled to visit the White House next week.
This, despite widespread reports of serious human rights violations at the facility and throughout El Salvador in general.
"The administration is shattering what little trust remains between immigrant communities and the government and putting critical revenue streams at risk," said one critic.
Migrant and privacy rights advocates this week are sounding the alarm over a deal signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to hand sensitive taxpayer data over to immigration authorities as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) "to establish a clear and secure process to support law enforcement's efforts to combat illegal immigration," a Treasury Department spokesperson told Fox News, which reported on the development after a late Monday court filing.
"The bases for this MOU are founded in long-standing authorities granted by Congress, which serve to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans while streamlining the ability to pursue criminals," the spokesperson said. "After four years of [former President] Joe Biden flooding the nation with illegal aliens, President Trump's highest priority is to ensure the safety of the American people."
After weeks of warnings about a potential data transfer deal, it was revealed as part of a legal case brought by Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, Inclusive Action for the City, and Somos Un Pueblo Unido, which are represented by Alan Morrison, Public Citizen Litigation Group, and Raise the Floor Alliance.
"Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the U.S. tax system," Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said in a Tuesday statement. "This move by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws and confidentiality, which has been respected by both political parties for decades."
"The Trump administration's terror tactic of using immigrants' tax data against them will drive some of our most vulnerable communities further underground," she warned. "If this taxpayer information isn't safe from the prying eyes of the Trump administration's goons, then no one's taxpayer information is safe."
Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official now lecturing at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote on social media: "Bad policy. Bad economics. And cruel. They are so desperate to get their deportation numbers up that they are doing this."
Multiple members of Congress also blasted the move. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) said that "the IRS should NEVER be weaponized to target immigrant families. This backdoor deal with ICE shatters decades of trust—and may be illegal."
"I will fight this with everything I've got," vowed Gomez, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. "No one should fear that filing taxes puts their family at risk."
Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) was among the critics who emphasized that the MOU doesn't just affect migrants.
"First things first: The impact of folks not filing their taxes because they are afraid of deportation would be detrimental to our economy," he explained. "Two: Immigrants pay taxes but do not benefit from the social programs that most taxpayers do. Three: Everyone should be concerned about the privacy implications here. This sets the precedent that the federal government can arbitrarily share your personal information with law enforcement. And it's just wrong."
Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) similarly said: "For decades, undocumented immigrants have trusted the IRS when it encouraged them to file. They've paid taxes in good faith, contributing nearly $100 BILLION per year and supporting social services they can't even access. Not only is this a total betrayal, but it's also illegal. We'll fight this."
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy also highlighted that "turning the IRS away from its job (collecting taxes) to instead focus on mass deportation efforts will mean less tax revenue collected on top of the harm done to families and communities affected by deportations."
In response to The New York Times' reporting on the deal, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out on social media that the MOU "is, on its face, limited to criminal investigations (not deportation investigations)."
"There are many questions raised about this new [agreement], which seems to violate previous understandings of the laws requiring IRS not to share taxpayer information," he continued. "But at its heart it does not seem that the MOU permits ICE to ask for taxpayer data for deportation reasons."
"It seems primarily to be aimed at criminal investigations for willful failure to depart after the issuance of a removal order, a crime on the books which (until now) is virtually never prosecuted," Reichlin-Melnick added. "Despite the fact that this MOU is limited only to criminal law enforcement, it will likely have a chilling effect on undocumented taxpayers."
How the Trump administration actually proceeds remains to be seen. The court filing says no information has been shared between the agenices yet—but the deal comes as part of a wave of anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric from the president and his officials.
"With the Supreme Court greenlighting Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act and the administration now gaining access to sensitive IRS data, we continue to slip into a new era of authoritarianism in America," Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of the Immigration Hub, said a Tuesday statement "The digital and physical dragnets that Trump is building mean millions of immigrants—many of whom have followed the law and paid their taxes for decades—are now vulnerable to indiscriminate brutality and quiet erasure with little opportunity for redress."
Lopez stressed that "undocumented immigrants already contribute billions to our economy—often paying a higher effective tax rate than 55 major corporations and some of the wealthiest individuals in America. By weaponizing private taxpayer data, the administration is shattering what little trust remains between immigrant communities and the government and putting critical revenue streams at risk."
"Coupled with Trump's xenophobic tariff threats and a $350 billion demand to fund mass disappearances and deportations, this is more than an attack on immigrants—it's a calculated effort to destabilize the country and remake its image," she concluded. "Congress must reject this funding and the authoritarian playbook behind it. This is not policy. It's punishment."