The State Department is gutting its human rights reporting by excising information detailing abuses by foreign governments from the department’s annual reports, The Intercept has learned. 

Officially called “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” the annual documents are required by law to be a  “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.

The reports will no longer call out governments for abuses like restrictions on free and fair elections, significant corruption, or serious harassment of domestic or international human rights organizations, according to instructions issued earlier this year to the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) which, itself, has been eviscerated under an “America First” reorganization by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The undated memo from earlier this year, reviewed by The Intercept, says the reports will also turn a blind eye to the forcible expulsion of refugees or asylum-seekers to countries where they may face torture or persecution. This 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.

A recent Intercept investigation found that the nations that the Trump administration is collaborating with to accept expelled “third country” immigrants are some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet, according to last year’s State Department human rights reports. The new country reports, expected to be released within days, will effectively launder abuses by nations that the administration is targeting as potential deportee dumping grounds.

The memo also instructs the agency to “identify and delete references to discrimination or violence against ‘LGBTQI+’ persons, ‘transgender’ persons, or similar framing.”

“People will suffer. Immigration courts in the United States and asylum claim adjudicators around the world look at these reports for guidance.”

“Donald Trump has made it his personal mission to limit transparency and accountability, and the State Department’s upcoming human rights report — or what remains of it — will certainly reflect that,” Senator Peter Welch, D-Vt., told The Intercept. “He’s more concerned with denying human rights here and abroad, and cozying up to dictators and authoritarian leaders, than he is with fighting for those who need it most.”

The State Department did not respond to repeated questions from The Intercept regarding the human rights reports.

Annelle Sheline, who served as a Foreign Affairs Officer in DRL’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs until last year and previously worked on annual country human rights reports, expects the forthcoming documents to be completely hollowed out. In conversations with former colleagues, she heard that a working draft on human rights in Egypt, which in past versions has run 70 or 80 pages, had been slashed down to only 20 pages. She said she heard that a 60-page Tunisia draft report submitted early this year had been stripped down to just 15 pages.

The instructions to DRL issued earlier this year take 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 “refoulment of persons to a country where they would face torture or persecution,” according to the memo. 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 new directive.

Experts say that watering down the human rights reports will cause real harm. “People will suffer. Immigration courts in the United States and asylum claim adjudicators around the world look at these reports for guidance. If you redefine what persecution looks like in a particular country or what fear of retribution means, it can do real damage to real people,” said Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy with Amnesty International USA.

“The U.S. government has an obligation of non-refoulment – that is to ensure it isn’t sending or deporting people back to torture,” Klasing said. “If theTrump administration ignores or rewrites the extent to which torture or other threatening conditions are happening in a country, it can create at least the façade of plausible deniability of allowing refoulement for individuals it is deporting, and that’s dangerous.”

More than 8,100 people have been expelled to third countries since January 20, and the U.S. has made arrangements to send people to at least 13 nations, so far, across the globe. Of them, 12 have been cited by the State Department for significant human rights abuses.

But the Trump administration has cast a much wider net for its third-country deportations. The U.S. has solicited 64 nations to participate in its growing network of detainee dumping grounds for expelled immigrants. Fifty-eight of them — roughly 91 percent — were rebuked for human rights violations in last year’s State Department human rights reports. 

The newest additions to America’s global gulag are among the least free countries on the planet. 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 State Department’s 2024 assessment of South Sudan catalogs an enormous range of serious abuses, including reports of extrajudicial killings; disappearances by or on behalf of government authorities; and instances in which “security forces mutilated, tortured, beat, and harassed political opponents, journalists, and human rights activists.”  The human rights report on Eswatini from last year refers to credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; and the incarceration of political prisoners. 

Experts emphasize that the State Department’s record on calling out human rights violations has been imperfect at best – and has suffered a severe crisis of credibility over Israel’s war in Gaza. Still, even critics have commended the DRL’s annual reports.

Sheline, who resigned in March 2024 to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, referenced the longtime disconnect between the State Department’s rhetoric and action in terms of human rights and its selective outrage over violations. “All that said, there still was a certain expectation there that the United States cared about human rights. So now to have totally abandoned that is significant,” she told The Intercept, noting that even last year’s report on Israel’s human rights abuses “was pretty damning, even with some material stripped out of it.”

Sheline added: “What we would hear on the ground in foreign countries is that the reports mattered to human rights groups who could point out to their governments that the ‘United States is watching you.’ Even if it didn’t impact U. S. policy, it still carried the weight of a U.S. government document.”

Josh Paul, who spent more than 11 years as the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department bureau that oversees arms transfers to foreign nations before resigning in 2023 over U.S. military assistance to Israel, echoed these sentiments.

“For all the failings of the U.S. government when it comes to policy decisions, the Human Rights Report has long been a key and trusted annual snapshot of the state of global human rights whose conclusions, although often hard-fought within the bureaucracy, have rarely pulled their punches,” he said. “Sadly, that is not what we expect this year, in which it is clear that Secretary Rubio has demanded a more politicized approach that will result in a report that lacks credibility.”

Last Friday, a group of senators including Welch introduced the Safeguarding the Integrity of Human Rights Reports Act,which aims to “ensure that the Department of State’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights remain robust and free from political influence” and mandate inclusion of abuses that the Trump administration ordered DRL to strip away like restrictions on participation in the political process and violence or discrimination against LGBTQI+ individuals, persons with disabilities and indigenous people, among others.

“The original purpose of these reports is to inform Congress about how to ensure taxpayer funding is not going to countries that undermine human rights,” said Klasing. “It’s a check on the executive. It’s Congress holding the president – any president – accountable to making good long-term human rights-centered decisions instead of short-term diplomatic wins.”

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