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The State Department<\/span> is gutting its human rights reporting by excising information detailing abuses by foreign governments from the department\u2019s\u00a0annual reports<\/a>, The Intercept has learned.\u00a0<\/p>\n Officially called \u201cCountry Reports on Human Rights Practices,\u201d the annual documents are required by law<\/a> to be a \u00a0\u201ca full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights\u201d in nearly 200 countries and territories worldwide. They are used<\/a> \u201cby 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,\u201d according to the State Department.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) which, itself, has been eviscerated<\/a> under an \u201cAmerica First\u201d reorganization<\/a> by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s nations to expel immigrants to places where they do not hold citizenship. Once exiled, these so-called \u201cthird-country nationals\u201d are sometimes detained, imprisoned, or in danger of being sent back to their country of origin \u2014 which they may have fled to escape violence, torture, or political persecution.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A recent Intercept investigation<\/a> found that the nations that the Trump administration is collaborating with to accept expelled \u201cthird country\u201d immigrants are some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet, according to last year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The memo also instructs the agency to \u201cidentify and delete references to discrimination or violence against \u2018LGBTQI+\u2019 persons, \u2018transgender\u2019 persons, or similar framing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPeople will suffer. Immigration courts in the United States and asylum claim adjudicators around the world look at these reports for guidance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cDonald Trump has made it his personal mission to limit transparency and accountability, and the State Department\u2019s upcoming human rights report \u2014 or what remains of it \u2014 will certainly reflect that,\u201d Senator Peter Welch, D-Vt., told The Intercept. \u201cHe\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The State Department did not respond to repeated questions from The Intercept regarding the human rights reports.<\/p>\n Annelle Sheline, who served as a Foreign Affairs Officer in DRL\u2019s Office of Near Eastern Affairs until last year and previously worked on annual country human rights\u00a0reports, expects the forthcoming documents to be completely hollowed out.\u00a0In 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<\/a>, had been slashed down to only 20 pages.\u00a0She said she heard that a 60-page Tunisia draft report submitted early this year had been stripped down to just 15 pages.<\/p>\n The instructions to<\/span> DRL issued earlier this year take specific aim at non-refoulement<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 derived from a French word for return \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n State Department employees were specifically instructed that the upcoming country reports should \u201cremove any reference\u201d to \u201crefoulment of persons to a country where they would face torture or persecution,\u201d according to the memo. State Department officials did not respond to repeated questions by The Intercept concerning the role the Trump administration\u2019s own third-country deportations played in the new directive.<\/p>\n Experts say that watering down the human rights reports will cause real harm. \u201cPeople 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,\u201d said Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy with Amnesty International USA.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. government has an obligation of non-refoulment \u2013 that is to ensure it isn\u2019t sending or deporting people back to torture,\u201d Klasing said. \u201cIf 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 fa\u00e7ade of plausible deniability of allowing refoulement for individuals it is deporting, and that\u2019s dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n More than 8,100<\/a>\u00a0people 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 roughly 91 percent \u2014 were rebuked for human rights violations in last year\u2019s State Department human rights reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n The newest additions to America\u2019s global gulag are among the least free countries on the planet.\u00a0Last month<\/a>, the administration expelled five men \u2014 from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen \u2014 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\u00a0to\u00a0violence-plagued South Sudan<\/a>, one of the most repressive nations in the world.<\/p>\n The State Department\u2019s 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 \u201csecurity forces mutilated, tortured, beat, and harassed political opponents, journalists, and human rights activists.\u201d\u00a0 The human rights report<\/a>\u00a0on 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Experts emphasize that the State Department\u2019s record on calling out human rights violations has been imperfect at best \u2013 and has suffered a severe crisis of credibility over Israel\u2019s war in Gaza. Still, even critics have commended the DRL\u2019s annual reports.<\/p>\n Sheline, who resigned in March 2024 to protest the Biden administration\u2019s support for Israel\u2019s war in Gaza, referenced the longtime disconnect between the State Department\u2019s rhetoric and action in terms of human rights and its selective outrage over violations. \u201cAll 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,\u201d she told The Intercept, noting that even last year\u2019s report on Israel\u2019s human rights abuses \u201cwas pretty damning, even with some material stripped out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Sheline added: \u201cWhat 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 \u2018United States is watching you.\u2019 Even if it didn\u2019t impact U. S. policy, it still carried the weight of a U.S. government document.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u00a0resigning in 2023<\/a>\u00a0over\u00a0U.S. military assistance to Israel<\/a>, echoed these sentiments.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n