The State Department released its annual reports on human rights around the world on Tuesday, and revealed an administration set on whitewashing the records of some of the world’s worst violators of human rights.
The hollowed-out reports on roughly 200 countries and territories omit references to LGBTQ+ discrimination and curtail information on government abuses, including gender-based violence and government corruption. They no longer include sections focused on systemic racial or ethnic discrimination and violence, child abuse, or child sexual exploitation.
The congressionally mandated human rights reports, which are used to guide U.S. decisions on diplomacy and aid, have been turned into wholly political documents that target countries with whom the Trump administration has clashed and soft-pedal abuses by the administration’s allies.
Israel, and countries like El Salvador, South Sudan, and Eswatini, which have agreed to accept and in some cases imprison U.S. deportees as part of Trump’s growing global gulag, got a soft touch. South Africa, which has led the war crimes case against Israel at The Hague, received a more pointed report.
The page count of the report on Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, for example, dropped by more than 91 percent, plummeting from 103 pages last year to just nine. While previous editions — including reports from President Donald Trump’s first term — included significant material on abuses documented by the United Nations and human rights groups, such accounts were almost entirely omitted from the new report.
The Israel report, while egregious, is no outlier.
The new report on El Salvador shrank from 44 pages last year to just 11. The report released in 2024 detailed overcrowded prisons and reports of “arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; [and] arbitrary arrest or detention,” among other abuses.
This year’s report on El Salvador says there “were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses,” while incongruously claiming “there were no significant changes in the human rights situation in El Salvador during the year.”
Local and international human rights groups have documented mass arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence against women and girls in detention, and enforced disappearances in El Salvador. A recent Amnesty International report, for example, chronicled human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, serious failings in the judicial system, prison overcrowding, inhumane detention conditions, and torture, among many other abuses.
State Department spokesperson and former Fox commentator Tammy Bruce offered a tortured defense of Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s influence on watering down the reports on Tuesday, framing it as a laissez-faire attitude toward human rights. “I would ask that people view this as an indication of our point of view in general, that there’s no country that is singled out for condemnation or singled out for praise. It’s the nature of the consistency of how — of our diplomats, how President Trump and Secretary Rubio view the nature of what’s happening in those countries,” said Bruce, claiming that the cuts increase “readability” while eliminating “politically biased demands and assertions.”
“The State Department under Secretary Rubio has shamelessly turned a once-credible tool of U.S. foreign policy mandated by Congress into yet another instrument to advance MAGA political grievances and culture war obsessions,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Meeks added, “This administration continues to do irreparable harm to America’s credibility and global leadership as it retreats from defending human rights abroad and attacks the rule of law and civil liberties of Americans here at home.”
Officially called “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” the annual documents are required by law to be “a full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights” in nearly 200 countries and territories worldwide. They are used “by the U.S. Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches as a resource for shaping policy and guiding decisions, informing diplomatic engagements, and determining the allocation of foreign aid and security sector assistance,” according to the State Department.
“With the release of the U.S. State Department’s human rights report, it is clear that the Trump Administration has engaged in a very selective documentation of human rights abuses in certain countries,” said Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA’s national director of government relations and advocacy. “Failing to adequately report on human rights violations further damages the credibility of the U.S. on human rights issues. It’s shameful that the Trump Administration and Secretary Rubio are putting politics above human lives.”
Instructions issued earlier this year to the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which has been eviscerated under an “America First” reorganization by Rubio, took specific aim at non-refoulement — derived from a French word for “return” — which forbids sending people to places where they are at risk of harm. It is a bedrock principle of international human rights, refugee, and customary international law, and is embedded in U.S. domestic law.
State Department employees were specifically instructed that the upcoming country reports should “remove any reference” to “refoulement of persons to a country where they would face torture or persecution,” according to the memo, which was obtained by The Intercept prior to the release of the new reports.
The absence of refoulement in the new human rights reports comes as the Trump administration is building a global gulag, pursuing deals with around a third of the world’s nations to expel immigrants to places where they do not hold citizenship. Once exiled, these so-called “third-country nationals” are sometimes detained, imprisoned, or in danger of being sent back to their country of origin — which they may have fled to escape violence, torture, or political persecution.
Last month, the administration expelled five men — from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen — to the Southern African kingdom of Eswatini, an absolute monarchy with a dismal human rights record. The move closely followed the U.S. deportation of eight men to violence-plagued South Sudan, one of the most repressive nations in the world. The administration also recently struck a deal to expel 250 people to Rwanda, another perennial violator of human rights.
All saw a significant decrease in documentation of their human rights violations. The page count of the State Department’s human rights report on South Sudan was slashed by 65 percent, plummeting from 57 pages last year to 20. Eswatini saw a 57 percent drop, from 40 pages to 17, while the department catalog of Rwandan abuses shrank by 54 percent, from 52 to 24 pages.
State Department officials did not respond to repeated questions by The Intercept concerning the role the Trump administration’s own third-country deportations played in the change in focus.
While laundering the human rights records of nations with like-minded leaders, the State Department took aim at nations with whom the Trump administration has clashed, criticizing the erosion of freedom of speech in Europe, for instance, including the United Kingdom.
This year’s report on South Africa, whose government the Trump administration has accused of racial discrimination toward white minority Afrikaners, claims that the country’s human rights record “significantly worsened.” It called out South Africa for a “substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country.” Trump has long claimed that land seizures from white South Africans were commonplace, a falsehood pushed by right-wing groups in South Africa.
Trump and Rubio have repeatedly criticized South Africa’s racial equity laws this year, particularly a recent measure that allows the government to take privately owned land without providing compensation when it is deemed to be in the public interest. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said earlier this year that his country had not, in fact, seized any land.
In February, Trump cut aid to South Africa, accusing the government of discriminating against the country’s white minority by enacting “policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education and business.” Trump issued an executive order that called for the U.S. to resettle Afrikaners as refugees, casting them as “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” Experts have said there is no evidence white farmers are being targeted because of their race.
The new State Department report on South Africa claims that Ramaphosa’s government “did not take credible steps to investigate, prosecute, and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, including inflammatory racial rhetoric against Afrikaners and other racial minorities, or violence against racial minorities.”
Amnesty International’s Klasing said the new State Department reports were unprecedented in putting politics squarely ahead of human rights. “We have criticized past reports when warranted, but have never seen reports quite like this. Never before have the reports gone this far in prioritizing an administration’s political agenda over a consistent and truthful accounting of human rights violations around the world,” she said. “Secretary Rubio knows full well from his time in the Senate how vital these reports are in informing policy decisions and shaping diplomatic conversations, yet he has made the dangerous and short-sighted decision to put out a truncated version that doesn’t tell the whole story of human rights violations. This sends a chilling message that the U.S. is willing to overlook some abuses, signaling that people experiencing human rights violations may be left to fend for themselves.”
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