Quixote Center recognizes migration as a fundamental human right under international law. In the United States, migrants strengthen our economy, enrich our culture, and strengthen our social fabric. We are a nation built by migrants for migrants.
The Quixote Center’s principal international partnership is with the Franciscan Network for Migrants (FNM). FNM connects Franciscan-run shelters and other humanitarian assistance programs for migrants who are making the dangerous trek through Mexico, Central America, and South America. We serve as the fiscal sponsor for the FNM within the United States, and coordinate advocacy efforts with their staff. We provide on-going financial support to FNM programs in Panama, a particularly strategic and dangerous migrant crossing point. We offer capacity-strengthening funding to FNM teams, so far supporting teams in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico.
Quixote Center and FNM organize Solidarity Trips approximately every six months since 2022 as part of our advocacy and education mission, bringing U.S. based migrant justice activists and other professionals to Southern Mexico and Panama to see firsthand how the U.S. border policies impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing their homelands to seek a new life, in the United States or elsewhere.
Find out more about our Solidarity Travel Program HERE.
Read the Red Clamor statement February 2025 in English HERE y en Español AQUI.
Read the Red Clamor Panama statement February 2025 HERE y en Español AQUI.
Read January 21st, 2025 Joint Statement with our partners at the Franciscan Network on Migration here
Read November 22nd, 2024 statement from the Franciscan Network on Migration's National Assembly in Mexico here.
Participants from our March 2025 trip to Panama hosted a webinar titled Stranded and Forgotten. You can listen to it HERE.
Participants from the March 2024 trip wrote the report: Danger in the Darién Gap: Human RIghts Abuses and the Need for Human Pathways to Safety to denounce US efforts to further externalize US border to Panama.
Despite the tone of emergency we see in the news about the number of people migrating to the United States, other countries in Latin America are receiving and resettling the vast majority of people migrating in our hemisphere.
The news is full of talk about trade agreements. For decades, US trade policies have been designed to benefit corporations while hurting workers in the United States and elsewhere. Will new tariffs and trade agreements make things better or worse? As of this writing, it is too soon to know.
The deportation agenda comes with a price tag--and a payout.
Since the current US administration took power in January, migration trends have shifted dramatically, resulting in a reverse flow southward. 85% of reverse flow migrants cite the new hostile US migration policies as the reason for their return, perceiving that migration to the north is no longer possible.
On May 30, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could terminate the Biden-era humanitarian parole program known as CHNV, which allowed more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States and remain temporarily for a period of two years.
On March 15, the United States government forcibly disappeared over 200 Venezuelans to a maximum security prison in El Salvador based on unproven allegations that they were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan organized crime group.
“Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” – Hannah Arendt (1)
More than half of the people in Haiti are facing severe hunger, with at least 8,000, specifically among those displaced and living in tent camps, facing starvation. Gang violence killed 5600 people in 2024, with more than one million people displaced. The violence, death, hunger and displacement are a result of weak U.S. gun laws and weak enforcement that enriches manufacturers and dealers and enables illegal gun trafficking across the Caribbean.
Quixote Center is set to embark on another Solidarity Trip to Panama (March 23-30) in partnership with the Franciscan Network for Migration (FNM).
The immigration system in the US is dysfunctional, with decades of failed attempts at comprehensive immigration reform. The reason: powerful interest groups are profiting from it. Although immigrants founded the United States, and our nation is supposed to be a land of opportunity for those seeking the “American Dream”, the US has a complex history of anti-immigrant sentiment with cycles that have pushed and pulled people from all parts of the world.
