Trump Administration Guts State’s Human Rights Reports
On August 12, 2025, the US Department of State released the 2024 human rights reports, covering 198 countries and territories. State’s annual reports were previously well respected for their impartiality and thoroughness and have long served as an important resource for US policymakers, lawmakers, and activists worldwide, as well as for foreign governments seeking to bolster their human rights reputations. Statutorily required by Congress, the reports have informed US decisions on foreign aid, arms sales, and trade agreements, among other aspects of foreign policy. But the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back and weakened the reports, which are now a shadow of their former selves.
The 2024 reports were completed by the Biden administration in January, before President Donald Trump took office. But the Trump administration ordered the Department of State to revise the completed reports, delaying their release well past the typical March or April publication date. The Department described the new version of the report as “streamlined” and emphasized that it was aligned with “the administration’s executive orders.” The revised report introduced categories such as “Life,” “Liberty,” and “Security of the Person” and removed entire sections covering gender-based violence, environmental justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, interference with privacy, government corruption, restrictions on political participation, harassment of human rights organizations, and violence against minorities and LGBTQ individuals.
The revised report […] removed entire sections covering gender-based violence, environmental justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, interference with privacy, government corruption, restrictions on political participation, harassment of human rights organizations, and violence against minorities and LGBTQ individuals.
In addition, the Trump administration removed from the revised reports coverage of important human rights violations in countries that it considers close US partners, including El Salvador, Hungary, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Because of all these changes, the reports are noticeably shorter than in previous years.
The release of the reports came during the Trump administration’s major reorganization of the Department, which has included slashing foreign aid for democracy and human rights and firing hundreds of staff, many from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), the office responsible for drafting the reports. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio attacked DRL, stating that the bureau “became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes.” Traditionally, the secretary writes a preface for the reports and presents them in a public briefing; Rubio did neither.
Reduced Coverage of Rights Abuses in MENA
Significant changes appear in the country reports for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, home to many close US partners as well as to some of the world’s most repressive regimes. The Trump administration has scaled down the reports on many countries in the region, particularly on issues related to political prisoners, torture, corruption, and severe restrictions on civil society.
The Trump administration has scaled down the reports on many countries in the region, particularly on issues related to political prisoners, torture, corruption, and severe restrictions on civil society.
Meanwhile, reports from human rights organizations covering abuses occurring in 2024 tell a different story. Amnesty International’s reporting on the UAE, for example, documents the government’s unfair mass trials and continued support for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, which have committed atrocities in Darfur. The Biden administration’s 2023 report mentioned these rights violations, but Trump’s version omitted them. Marginalized communities in Saudi Arabia, including migrant workers, continued to face grave human rights violations in 2024, including abuses linked to “giga-projects” such as Neom, notably the forced displacement of local residents and use of lethal force against those resisting eviction—but all this was omitted from the 2024 report on the Kingdom. Trump’s report also downplayed Morocco’s crackdown on dissent and protest. As Human Rights Watch noted, in 2024, the Moroccan authorities violently dispersed peaceful demonstrations, including protests by disability rights groups and health care workers.
Furthermore, Trump’s 2024 reports fail to detail MENA governments’ violations against refugees or asylum seekers. For example, in 2024, the Egyptian government carried out mass deportations and arbitrary arrests of refugees. It also adopted a restrictive new asylum law, which critics argued would severely undermine refugee rights, particularly for those fleeing conflicts in Sudan, Syria, and Gaza. But the 2024 reports do not discuss these troubling actions. Similarly, the 2024 version left out Tunisia’s “mass desert dumping” of migrants at the borders of Algeria and Libya and ignored Jordan’s forced deportation of Syrian refugees.
Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
The 2024 report on “Israel, West Bank, and Gaza” is a particularly notable example of Trump’s watering down of US human rights policy. Not only is this section significantly shorter than in previous years, but it fails even to mention the humanitarian crisis and death toll of Israel’s war in Gaza. It also ignores Israel’s abuse of Palestinian prisoners, despite continued documentation in 2024 of prisoner deaths resulting from physical assaults and lack of medical care, and testimonies from released prisoners describing horrifying treatment in custody. Instead, the summary states that the Israeli government “took several credible steps to identify officials who committed human rights abuses, with multiple trials pending at year’s end.” The sections on war crimes and crimes against humanity only mention Hamas and Hezbollah, noting that they “continue to engage in the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians in violation of the law of armed conflict.” The 2024 report also omits any reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, which was mentioned in the 2023 report in the section on corruption.
The 2024 report on “Israel, West Bank, and Gaza” is a particularly notable example of Trump’s watering down of US human rights policy.
While former President Joe Biden generally avoided criticizing Israeli human rights abuses, his administration’s 2023 report did not ignore them entirely. It cited Israel’s “significant human rights issues,” including “arbitrary or unlawful killings,” “enforced disappearance,” and “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment by government officials.” It also documented “serious restrictions on freedom of _expression_ and media freedom, including violence or threats against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecution of journalists, and censorship.” It noted that Israeli authorities had taken “no publicly visible steps to identify and punish officials” implicated in violations in Gaza.
The 2023 report also covered abuses by Palestinian authorities and included a section on crimes committed by Hamas and others during the October 7 attack. Its executive summary explicitly stated that Israel’s war in Gaza had resulted in tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths and many more injuries, displaced the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza, and caused a severe humanitarian crisis. The detail provided in the 2023 report makes its omission in 2024 all the more striking, revealing a shift to a watered-down account that overlooks Israeli abuses, despite the severe worsening of the humanitarian crisis last year.
Democratic Pushback
Democratic lawmakers have criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the 2024 human rights reports. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) said that this year’s human rights reports were “a shell of previous years’ reports and stripped of critical information about serious human rights abuses around the world,” adding that the reports are “required by law to ensure American taxpayer dollars do not support autocrats who violate the rights of their citizens.”
On May 15, 2025, Sens. Shaheen and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), along with 13 colleagues, sent a letter to Secretary Rubio expressing concern over the administration’s efforts to dismantle offices and scale back reporting on human rights conditions. They accused President Donald Trump and Secretary Rubio of using human rights as a “political cudgel” against adversaries and criticized plans to subject 20 country reports, including Egypt’s, to political appointee review, warning that this “risks bias and erodes the impartiality” that long defined these reports. Such changes, they argued, would undermine their value as tools for accountability. On August 1, 2025, Sens. Shaheen, Van Hollen, Chris Coons (D-DE), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced legislation to safeguard the annual human rights reports and to ensure that they “remain robust and free from political influence.”
Administration Defends Changes
On August 7, 2025, Department of State Principal Deputy Spokesperson Thomas Pigott defended the revisions, saying that they were intended to make the reports “more readable” and were “not political.” On August 12, Spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the reports had been restructured to improve clarity and were no longer an expansive list of “politically biased demands and assertions.”
Asked about concerns that the reports were softened for governments aligned with the administration, Bruce responded that they reflected the administration’s general perspective, adding that “there’s no country that is singled out for condemnation or singled out for praise.”
Other supporters of the changes included Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch (R-ID), who described the refashioned reports as “easier to read” and more accurately reflecting “recognized human rights reporting.”
Conclusion
Critics warn that failing to adequately document human rights violations undermines US credibility in shaping policy and guiding diplomatic engagement.
Ultimately, critics warn that failing to adequately document human rights violations undermines US credibility in shaping policy and guiding diplomatic engagement. These reports are used by governments and advocates around the world in support of asylum claims, and are mandated by Congress to ensure meaningful oversight and prevent taxpayer money from supporting abusive regimes. The Trump administration’s stripping of content describing major human rights violations, and removal of criticism of certain Trump allies, suggests that the reports now serve more to reward governments aligned with the Trump administration’s policies than to uphold international law and human rights norms.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.