‘Bogus’ Interpol red notice kept mum from El Salvador in US immigration detention for six years

Published

1 year ago

February 26, 2024

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A woman spent six years languishing in US immigration detention due to a “bogus” Interpol red notice stemming from a harassment campaign by a police officer in El Salvador.

Jessica Barahona Martinez, who is originally from the Central American country, told Sky News and its US partner NBC News about her ordeal in her first sit-down interview since her release.

During her time in detention, her sister died of cancer and she rarely saw her children after being moved to a facility more than 1,000 miles away from her family.

Ms Barahona Martinez’s lawyer Sandra Grossman describes it as one of the worst cases she had come across.

“We have been fighting bogus red notices for over 15 years,” she said.

“And I can tell you that this is one of the most egregious examples of Interpol abuse that we’ve ever seen.”

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The US is considered a leader in tackling Interpol abuse – in which authoritarian states use the notice system to target dissidents abroad, or when individuals use it in the service of private disputes.

While the US has specific legislation to prevent Interpol from being used for transnational repression, immigration authorities are ignoring guidance not to arrest people solely based on a red notice.

Ms Barahona Martinez said her ordeal began when a local police officer in her hometown in El Salvador began a campaign of harassment, targeting her due to her sexuality.

She said he initially accused her of being interested in his girlfriend, and went on to sexually harass and assault her in the town’s market.

“He talked to me like I was nothing, like I was trash,” she said. “He called me a waste of a woman.”

Dangerous allegation

Eventually, the police officer accused Ms Barahona Martinez of extortion, for the amount of roughly $30, and said she was part of a gang – which is considered an extremely serious allegation in El Salvador.

The country has a long history of gang violence, and at one point had the highest murder rate in the world.

The subsequent crackdown has been effective but brutal; human rights groups say it has included torture and arbitrary detention, while police have bragged about being able to “arrest anyone we want”.

Ms Barahona Martinez spent nine months detained in El Salvador waiting for a court date, until her case was dismissed for lack of evidence in March 2015.

Upon her release, the harassment resumed. She said the same car would drive by her house each night.

Ms Barahona Martinez has three children from a previous relationship, and says she started receiving threatening phone calls from a person who listed her children’s names and where they went to school.

In May 2016, a year after her case was dismissed in El Salvador, Ms Barahona Martinez fled to the US. She submitted an official asylum application in April 2017.

However, she was unaware that police in El Salvador had attempted to re-open her case in the meantime.

She did not show up for a subsequent court appearance, and so local police circulated a red notice via Interpol.

Immigration officers in the US are not supposed to detain somebody purely on the basis of a red notice.

But when Ms Barahona Martinez attended her monthly check-in with immigration authorities on a Friday in June, she was told to head home and pack her bags, say goodbye to her children and report to a detention centre the following Monday morning.

Two asylum bids

Ms Barahona Martinez first learned she had been detained due to a red notice when she was denied bail a month later.

She would spend six years in detention.

Twice she was granted asylum. Two separate immigration judges found her claims of persecution in El Salvador credible – in 2018 and again in 2019.

However, both times an immigration board overturned the asylum decision, citing the existence of the red notice.

Authorities claimed the red notice meant that Ms Barahona Martinez was banned from refugee status under a rule called the mandatory non-political crime bar, which is designed to prevent people who have committed crimes abroad from seeking asylum after they have gone on the run.

But for Ms Barahona Martinez, the red notice resulted from – and was evidence of – the very persecution she was escaping.

Nevertheless, she was detained for the entirety of her asylum proceedings.

Ms Grossman said this was because of a disconnect between US policy and practice when it comes to Interpol notices.

‘Fundamental misunderstanding’

Although the US government guidelines state that a red notice should not automatically lead to detention, in practice that is what happens in the immigration system.

“I think this might hopefully be changing in the United States, but it appears in most of these cases that the red notice is sort of looked at as evidence of criminality and often as conclusive evidence of criminality,” Ms Grossman said.

“There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding in the United States about what a red notice is and is not.”

What is an Interpol red notice?

An Interpol red notice is a request to law enforcement all around the world to locate and detain an individual, pending extradition back to the country that put in the request or other legal action.

It is not an international arrest warrant, but it is the highest alert a country can make.

There are eight alerts in total, seven of which are colour-coded, while an eighth can only be used by the UN’s Security Council.

Most red notices can only be used by law enforcement.

The individuals are wanted by the requesting member country, or international tribunal, but each country applies their own laws in deciding whether to arrest someone.

Parts of a red notice may be published, if requested, if there is a feeling the public’s help may be needed to locate the person or if the individual poses a threat.

There are currently nearly 7,000 Interpol red notices in effect – just 12 coming from the UK.

Ms Grossman believes that if Interpol was more transparent about the ways in which red notices can go wrong, both officials and victims of Interpol abuse would be better equipped to respond.

“It would be really helpful for cases where there’s bogus red notices involved for Interpol to be much more open about the fact that this happens,” she said.

Ms Barahona Martinez’s case came to light after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) met with her on one of their regular tours of detention centres in early 2023.

They then turned to Ms Grossman for specialist help.

When she petitioned Interpol’s review body she received an unusually swift reply telling her the red notice had been deleted.

From shock to panic

Still, Ms Barahona Martinez remained in detention until September last year, when she was released without warning after several interview requests by Sky News and the filing of a habeas petition by the ACLU, which would have seen her case brought before a higher judge.

On 28 September, as Ms Barahona Martinez was working in the kitchen at a Louisiana detention centre, an immigration official sought her out to inform her she was being released the following day.

She told Sky News she was so shocked that she told the officer there must have been a mistake.

However, her shock soon turned to panic. After six years inside, she was not sure how she would cope with the outside world or even how to get back to her family.

“What was I going to find outside? I spoke to my mother, I said to her ‘Mum, what if I get lost?’ It was something that I honestly wasn’t prepared for at the time. And she told me, ‘You’re not going to get lost. We will find you’.”

The day after Ms Barahona was released, US authorities published updated guidance, reiterating that immigration officers shouldn’t detain people solely on the basis of a red notice.

‘Very robust system’

In an earlier episode of Sky News’ Dirty Work podcast, Interpol Secretary General Jurgen Stock defended the red notice system.

He said: “I think it is a very robust system, and it is a very successful system first and foremost because it helps almost every day around the world to catch dangerous fugitives, murderers, rapists, those who are exploiting children, drug traffickers.”

When asked about people ending up with a notice that should not have been issued, he said: “[It is] a small number of cases, but of course, very often significant cases that end up in the media and where we say, yes, this notice should not have been published.

“Every one of those cases is a case too many because we know the consequences this might have,” he said.

A spokesperson for the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) said: “Regardless of nationality, ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with US law and US department of homeland security policy, considering the circumstances of each case.”

US

‘It feels like a bad dream’: Minnesota mourns victims of ‘politically motivated assassination’

Published

1 hour ago

June 16, 2025

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'It feels like a bad dream': Minnesota mourns victims of 'politically motivated assassination'

“Holy, holy, holy” they sang at the Church of St Timothy in Blaine, Minnesota.

But the congregation is struggling to comprehend an act of evil – the brutal murder of one of their own.

Melissa Hortman grew up here. The former state speaker and her husband Mark were shot dead in their home on Saturday morning.

Her friend and party colleague, Erin Koegal, was among those attending mass.

“It still feels like a bad dream. I woke up this morning and was like, okay, so that was real,” she said.

“It’s hit me in waves, the grief, and the anger, and the sadness. She was a leader, a true definition of a leader.

“I’ve never known our party without Melissa as the leader and so I can’t, I don’t even know how we’re going to go forward as a caucus without her.”

State senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette had already been shot and wounded.

Police sent to check on his colleague, Melissa Hortman, didn’t get there in time.

They named the suspect as Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old former Christian missionary.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called it a “politically motivated murder”.

Friends of Ms Hortman have told Sky News that her two children feared for their mother’s life after reading divisive rhetoric directed at her online.

Matt Norris, another political colleague of Ms Hortman, was also at church, reflecting on the rise of political violence in America.

“We’ve going to have to do some serious introspection as a state, as a country, and figure out how do we get beyond this,” he said.

“How have we been laying the seeds that have led to horrific acts of violence against public servants like this?

“And it’s going to be incumbent upon us as leaders to set a different tone, to set a different direction for our state and our country so that horrific tragedies like this never occur again.”

But there’s no sign of division at the State Capitol Building, where flags fly at half-mast and flowers are being left in tribute.

This is a community united in grief and in its hope for an end to gun violence in America.

US

Trump’s Iran remarks let him still play ‘good cop’ to Netanyahu’s ‘bad cop’

Published

19 hours ago

June 15, 2025

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Trump's Iran remarks let him still play 'good cop' to Netanyahu's 'bad cop'

Reading between the lines of President Trump’s social media posts is an art, not a science.

But whether by intention or not, there is always insight in his posts. His Truth Social words reacting to the Israeli attack on Iran are intentionally ambiguous.

When was he told by Israel that they would strike Iran? Did he give them a green light, or was it more amber?

Israel-Iran live: Missile from Iran and Yemen ‘hitting Israel’

Was his insistence, as recently as 48 hours ago, that a strike would “blow” the chances of a deal with Iran actually just a ruse to afford Israel the element of surprise? That’s what the Israelis are claiming.

Clearly, President Trump does not want to give the impression that his ‘don’t strike’ advice was ignored by Netanyahu.

His social posts are filled with enough ambiguity to allow him to maintain his good cop stance alongside Netanyahu, the bad cop: “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it’…”

Trump’s ‘art of the deal’, whether it be in real estate or nuclear weapon negotiations, requires unpredictability and ambiguity.

Both of those, as it happens, are useful to hide ineptitude too. The line between diplomatic masterstroke and disastrous diplomacy is thin.

The president is claiming that the Israeli attacks make a deal more, not less, likely because of the pressure Iran will now be under.

Maybe, but many regional watchers are very unconvinced.

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An alternative path to negotiations for Iran would be to go fully down the North Korea route, comforted in the knowledge that China – as a big Iranian oil customer – and Russia – as a weapons customer – will be on side.

Trump may think that the pressure of bombardment will force Iran to heel. But the other pressure the Iranian supreme leader is under is the pressure of survival.

Self-preservation necessitates the Iranian response that we’re now seeing before any prospect of renewed negotiations can come.

The Israelis and the Americans are calculating that Iran and its proxies are now sufficiently degraded, and so the response will be limp and containable.

They might be right in terms of conventional attacks, but asymmetrical operations are another fear – against Israeli targets or more broadly, softer Western targets in the region or beyond.

Step back from the chaos of the past 24 hours. The broader picture here is regime change.

Netanyahu said as much in his Friday speech, calling for an internal uprising. He ignored history – which suggests people tend to rally round their flag – but more than that, that foreign air strikes alone don’t work.

Look at Libya in 1986, Iraq in 1991, or Yugoslavia in 1999.

Netanyahu wants to go further. Will he take out the supreme leader? Trump does not want another full-scale conflict in the Middle East. Of all the things he is accused of being, a hawkish warmonger he is not.

But there are plenty of politicians on Capitol Hill – on both sides of the divide – who support regime change in Iran.

I was at an event in Congress in December organised by Iranian exiled opposition leaders. I was struck by the cross-party support for regime change in one form or another.

Israel this weekend announced that its military had achieved total air superiority from western Iran to the capital Tehran. That’s remarkable.

Could Trump be persuaded to pursue regime change? Peace, eventually, through strength? His motto adapted.

We are at yet another unsettlingly tense moment for the region.

US

Minnesota: US politician shot dead and another wounded – as suspect named

Published

22 hours ago

June 15, 2025

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Minnesota: US politician shot dead and another wounded - as suspect named

A manhunt is under way after a US politician and her husband were shot dead in their home in a “politically motivated assassination” – and another politician and his wife were also shot.

Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed at their home, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, confirmed.

State senator John Hoffman and his wife were also shot in their home but are expected to survive. The senator, according to officials, is in a stable condition after emergency surgery.

Authorities have confirmed that the suspect they are looking for is 57-year-old Vance Boelter – who, in a press conference, was described as a 6ft 1in white male, with brown hair and brown eyes.

Members of the public have been urged not to approach him as he may be armed.

The suspect was reportedly posing as a police officer, and officials said the alleged attacker escaped after an exchange of gunfire.

Both politicians are members of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

US President Donald Trump, in a statement, said: “I have been briefed on the terrible shooting that took place in Minnesota, which appears to be a targeted attack against State Lawmakers.

“Our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the FBI, are investigating the situation, and they will be prosecuting anyone involved to the fullest extent of the law.

“Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America.”

Authorities have urged residents of the Champlin and Brooklyn Park areas to stay in their homes.

In an earlier Facebook post, Mr Walz said: “I’ve been briefed this morning on an ongoing situation involving targeted shootings in Champlin and Brooklyn Park.

“The Minnesota Department of Public Safety and local law enforcement are on the scene. We will share more information soon.”

At a subsequent news conference, Mr Walz said: “We must all, in Minnesota and across the country, stand against all forms of political violence.

“Those responsible for this will be held accountable.”

He has also urged those in Minnesota not to attend political rallies until the suspect is caught.

Police evacuated the Texas State Capitol and grounds in Austin ahead of an anti-Trump protest on Saturday – citing a credible threat to politicians.

Post-mortem examinations will be conducted to determine the extent of their injuries.

However, it is clear that both Ms Hortman and her spouse died from gunshot wounds, Drew Evans, superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said.

Ms Hortman, a mother of two, was first elected in 2004 – and was the top house Democratic leader in the state legislature. She also served as speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Mr Hoffman, also a Democrat, was first elected in 2012 – and ran a consulting firm called Hoffman Strategic Advisors.

Hakeem Jeffries, House Democratic leader, has described the shootings as “deeply disturbing” on X, adding that “violence is never acceptable”, and that he is “praying hard” for the victims.

Former Arizona representative, Gabby Giffords, described her friend Ms Hortman as a “true public servant”, who “dedicated her life building a better, safer Minnesota”.

Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the US House of Representatives, said she was “heartbroken” by the news.

She added: “Unfortunately, we know the tragedy of when political violence hits home very well.

“All of us must remember that it’s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalise it. This climate of politically-motivated violence must end.”

In a tribute, Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin said: “Melissa, Mark, John, and Yvette – these are not just names, and this is not just politics.

“These are people. They’re longtime friends to me and Jenn and so many others in Minnesota. They have children, loved ones, neighbors, and friends.”

Mr Martin added: “Today, we recommit ourselves to fight harder for the values that Melissa and Mark embodied – building a kinder, more just, and loving world. If this murderer thinks we will be silenced, he’s wrong.”