Five Ways Trump Has Shanked International Human Rights
And we’re only one month in.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
The first month of the Trump administration has been dangerous and even deadly for refugees, victims of war and people in developing countries overall. Basically, Trump has been the worst thing to happen to people with little privilege globally in a very long time.
Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based organization I’ve worked with on stories for years, published a blog entry outlining some of the actions that will most affect their global work, which is the kind of work I cover. So here’s what I can tell you about some of the drastic measures taken in the name of what PHR calls Trump’s “shock and awe” agenda.
1. Detention and deportation of accused migrants
Named after a murdered 22-year-old Georgia nursing student, the Laken Riley Act puts immigrants — many of whom are in the U.S. seeking asylum — at risk for immediate detention and deportation over nothing more than accusations.
Riley’s murderer was committed by a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally, giving fodder to fear-mongering conservatives who believe that all people who have crossed into the U.S. illegally are madmen. A large 2015 study found that, in fact, immigration “is consistently linked” to decreases in violent and property crime.
The Laken Riley Act now requires Homeland Security to detain and deport immigrants in the country illegally who are convicted of or accused of theft or violent crimes. Accused of. Meaning, there will be no due process for such people. “In this bill,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, said, “if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they would be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court.”
Speaking of private detention camps, more than 170 migrants are now being held at Guantanamo Bay. Trump has called them “high threat” and “the worst of the worst,” but two families of men at Guantanamo told ABC News that their relatives had no criminal record.
2. Death of foreign aid
First off, there’s the shuttering* of USAID, which has left millions of people around the world without food, shelter or medical services they desperately need. (*There is still a nominal staff of 300 people out of the more than 10,000 that were previously employed.) But billions of dollars are not only not reaching people in war-torn or impoverished areas, money has been cut off from groups like PHR, which are carrying out critical human rights work, like forensic investigations of war crimes around the world.
Within the $30 billion the agency usually doles out for foreign aid is a subset of $4 billion of terminated contracts and grants that a digital development entrepreneur named Wayan Vota has been tracking on a spreadsheet. The invalidated contracts, many of which were with international development consultancies — like one called Palladium International, which lost a massive $196,495,847 grant — included grants for education programs in countries like Kenya and Afghanistan. Others were for sustainable development, or election monitoring.
The Center for Global Development, a nonpartisan research group, ran some word counts from Vota’s spreadsheet. Their findings:
the words “elections”/“electoral”/”elected” appearing 64 times in cancelled agreements totaling about $533 million. Election-related contracts make up about 4 percent of USAID spending in FY24 but about 12 percent of cuts. The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, the umbrella organization of the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, had $745 million in USAID agreements in operation in FY2024. It has already lost $361 million in cancelled agreements.
In the word count, “women’s rights” and “youth” both appear 15 times and “gender” appears 4 times. (Notably the words “orientation,” “sexual,” and “transgender” don’t appear at all). There are a number of health projects among the cancelled agreements, but they appear underrepresented given the share of USAID financing that goes to health. And the health projects that do appear focus on governance and institutions rather than specific conditions: the words “TB”/“Tuberculosis,” “HIV”/“AIDS,” “malaria,” “infant,” “maternal,” and “nutrition” are all absent from this set of cancelled agreements.
And, bizarrely, the center notes that “it appears Moldova comes in for special attention. Agreements covering activities in the country lost $163 million, compared to $309 million obligated to projects in the country in 2023, according to foreignassistance.gov.”
Overall, it appears the administration is severely cutting the civil society work American does to beef up democracy around the world. Because…Trump.
3. Global Gag Rule
The Global Gag Rule, which prohibits U.S. groups receiving government money from offering legal abortion services or referrals abroad, has been reinstated and broadened by Trump. Additionally, the State Department announced it would rejoin the “Geneva Consensus Declaration,” which claims there is no international right to abortion, says the Center for Reproductive Rights. The center also says not to be fooled by the declaration’s name: “it intentionally misrepresents itself as an official international agreement and attempts to undermine the broad legal basis for reproductive rights as human rights.”
On a practical level, the move harms millions of women and girls, many of whom have no safe access to contraception or abortion services without U.S. aid. The cut in funding closes down what are often the only women’s health clinics in a country or region, depriving women of their basic right to health care.
When Trump reinstated the Global Gag Rule in his previous term in office, “There was a spike in pregnancy-related deaths, reproductive coercion, and gender inequality worldwide,” said Rachana Desai Martin, chief government and external relations officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
4. Withdrawal from critical international bodies
Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization is a disaster in waiting for not just the world beyond the United States, but for the United States itself. Infectious diseases jump borders. Not just bird flu and Covid, but Ebola has jumped borders. And walking away from the body that coordinates global response to these diseases is mind-boggling.
The U.S. contributes between 12 and 15 percent of WHO’s budget — about $2 billion yearly since 2020. The loss of this investment puts a strain on already stretched global health resources. On top of that, WHO provides health care in places that are not always political allies with the U.S., and that has important ramifications.
“Since World War II, the U.S. has developed a reputation around the world as a country that supports others, and that has important consequences for global diplomacy,” said Judd Walson, Johns Hopkins’ Robert E. Black Chair in International Health. “We are known in the health space as a country that provides assistance to many countries. In fact, many countries with whom we have very poor diplomatic relations, and that we don’t see eye-to-eye with politically, still reach out to us for support around health.”
Trump also pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council. “UNHRC has protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny,” the White House said in a statement.
Trump’s funding freeze has also crippled the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, of which the U.S. is the largest donor. UNHCR had been assisting 122 million people forcibly displaced from their homes by conflict and persecution in 136 countries with health services, food, shelter and clean water. Asylum seekers are vetted by UNHCR for third-country resettlement — for instance, a Sudanese woman who arrives by boat in Italy but wants to make a home in Sweden with other family members already there.
5. ICC sanctions
Trump issued sanctions against officials at the International Criminal Court in his first term. Then Biden revoked them. Now Trump has gone ahead and put them in place again. Specifically, the sanctions are “against individuals and their families who assist the ICC in investigations of citizens of the United States or its allies who are not a state party to the Rome Statute,” according to PHR.
To clarify: The U.S. is not a party to the ICC or the Rome Statute. The generally accepted reason why among international legal experts I’ve spoken to is because the U.S. does not want to be held responsible by an international body for its own war crimes, genocides and crimes against humanity.
“Sanctions against the ICC will impede victims’ access to credible and independent justice and are an affront to victims and survivors globally,” said the Coalition for the ICC, an independent group of human rights organizations. “Sanctions are a tool to be used against those responsible for the most serious international crimes, not against those seeking justice.”
Adding to this, the coalition said: “Sanctions will see the U.S. engaging in the same kind of obstruction carried out by the Russian Federation in retaliation for the court’s arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin. This included arrest warrants against the ICC prosecutor and judges, as well as a law criminalizing cooperation with the court.”
Of course, Trump wouldn’t want to appear to be a strongman oligarch like Putin, right? And on with these four years we go.
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Never been so ashamed to be an American. That anybody can be ok with any of this is galling.
The damage being perpetrated by this narcissistic man is almost incalculable, some of which will take many years to repair.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Lord John Acton, 1887