The Great Human Rights Cover Up Begins
The State Department is axing key sections of the annual Human Rights Reports, including key information about violence against women and people with disabilities. Bukele and Orban stand to benefit.
When the Trump administration flew people to El Salvador a few weeks ago, I shared evidence of the dangers that these prisoners faced from the Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
I cited the US government’s own conclusions that the country is characterized by a long list of serious human rights concerns. These include arbitrary killings, forced disappearances by the government, abhorrent prison conditions, arbitrary arrest and detention, political prisoners, and attacks on freedom of expression.
According to NPR, The Trump administration is scrubbing this information from the latest Human Rights Reports, due out any time now.
The changes we know about so far amount to the wholesale erasure of well-documented patterns of human rights violations around the world. Worse, the Trump administration is specifically removing information that is critical of Salvadoran President Bukele and Hungarian President Orban—both of whom are widely considered to share Trump’s authoritarian approach to political power.
Gone from the Human Rights Reports are mentions of attacks on peaceful assembly, political prisoners, concerns about free and fair elections, forcibly returning migrants to places where they will be tortured (i.e., non-refoulement), harassment of human rights organizations, and violence against women, people with disabilities, and other minorities.
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The new report on El Salvador will remove information that I cited in my previous post about use of prisons in that country. This is likely being done to conceal evidence of the unlawfulness of sending migrants there under the Alien Enemies Act. The new report on Hungary hides substantial evidence of Orban’s corruption.
Information about human rights is not being withheld because it isn’t happening—it is being withheld for purely political reasons to advance the Trump administration’s narrow agenda.
Every human rights abuse the Trump administration stops reporting in other countries is something it wants to normalize in the United States. What Trump hides abroad, he likely plans to unleash at home.
It is a dark day for human rights.
The US’s Human Rights Reports have never been perfect. They have always functioned, in part, as political documents, characterized by selective omissions and inclusions that amplify the country’s soft power around the world. Even so, the reports have also been a crucial source of information for lawmakers, attorneys, and non-profit organizations working domestically and internationally.
The State Department is not the only source for human rights information. Reporters, researchers, and NGOs have always provided more granular and less US-centric analyses of human rights violations.
As the US loses legitimacy on human rights—and we certainly will—others will have to step up to fill the gap. Yet when they do, these NGOs may also face new attacks from the Trump administration, which appears to be preparing to go to war against nonprofit organizations by seeking to eliminate tax exempt statuses, cutting funding, and blacklisting organizations so that even private funders are discouraged from philanthropic giving.
Additionally, asylum seekers in immigration court will have an even harder time proving persecution if judges decide to (or are instructed to) treat absences in the human rights reports as evidence of absence of those forms of violence in sending countries.
It is a dark day for human rights.
But information about human rights is not the only type of information the administration is hiding.
The Trump administration is also preventing the release of crucial immigration enforcement data published by the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS). OHSS is a top-notch agency, the kind of place that integrates academic-level methodologies and analysis with crucial public reporting about our immigration system.
Everyone, no matter your political persuasion, has a right to know what your government is doing—and access to objective government data is a key part of that.
The Trump administration does not seem to share this belief. OHSS’s monthly immigration enforcement data tables would provide crucial data that would allow the public to evaluate the administration’s claims about the arrest, detention, and deportation of non-citizens.
If the Trump administration is being honest, OHSS’s tables will help confirm that. If they aren’t, the data will also show that.
But OHSS hasn’t released a single monthly report for January, February, and now March. Alec MacGillis from ProPublica tells us why. Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told him: “While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review.”
I interpret this to mean that the administration is squashing data that doesn’t fit Trump’s narrative and perhaps trying to manipulate the data released by OHSS—just like it is doing with the Human Rights Reports. It would be a tremendous shame if OHSS ceases to be a source of rigorous, independent, factual data on immigration enforcement.
I mentioned above that the U.S. government is hardly the only source of information about human rights, migration, or other policy issues. Take, for instance, the excellent article for NACLA published by my colleague Elliott Young at the Migration Scholars Collaborative about the Tren de Aragua. Elliott lays out one of the best-cited arguments I’ve read anywhere for why Tren de Aragua is dangerous—yes they are a gang—but they are not a terrorist group. Definitely check out that article if you’re interested in understanding more.
Law professor Matt Boaz and I were clearly on the same page this week. We are both trying to prompt a wider discussion about the fact that the line is not being drawn at citizenship, which means that all of us could be at risk. Matt’s article “Could You Be Deported?” was published in Newsweek.
Matt highlights the simple yet disturbing truth that “The Trump administration is laying the groundwork that could easily be used against U.S. citizens.” Read his article for the receipts.
“The Trump administration is laying the groundwork that could easily be used against U.S. citizens.” —Matt Boaz
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Terrifying!!
Thank you, Austin, for articulating the link between the government suppressing information about human rights abuses and preventing the release of data on immigration enforcement. It’s all connected and is, indeed, part of the groundwork the government is laying to remove anyone it considers a threat, including US citizens.