When the second Donald Trump administration began, many worried that it would abandon America’s long-standing, bipartisan commitment to human rights around the world.
This was the concern during the first administration, too, but career foreign affairs professionals continued much of the day-to-day work that has supported human rights for decades.
This time around, however, President Trump’s team ousted or undermined anyone who might try to stay the course and has taken an even more nefarious approach. Rather than ignore human rights, the administration is twisting the concept in support of a political agenda that undermines equality, justice and human security in the world by reinforcing only the rights of the strong at the expense of the weak.
Two recent examples are particularly alarming: the rewriting of the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights reports and the proposed plan for refugee admissions.
Since 1977, Congress has mandated that the State Department report on the human rights record of countries around the world to inform U.S. policy decisions on everything from foreign economic and military assistance, to sanctions, immigration and asylum. We didn’t want our assistance to prop up bad actors, so we needed to know how our partners acted. As a career diplomat, I updated the annual report in each country where I served.
Political realities occasionally influenced some reports, but for the most part, they were widely recognized as accurate and fair, assessing internationally recognized categories of rights and researched and written by professionals on the ground. Lawyers, rights groups and foreign governments anticipated their release each year and used them to support court cases, asylum claims and advocacy. Congressional staff relied on them heavily. I was proud to be part of this effort.
Sections deleted
This year’s reports, just released this month, will not carry that credibility. Several key sections were deleted wholesale, including those addressing the world’s most vulnerable: women, LGBTQ+ communities and minority groups in general. The only area of discrimination retained is on antisemitism, and the reports equate any critique of Israel’s government as such. References to government corruption were dropped entirely. Most reporting on political rights and inclusion, including free and fair elections, was also deleted. The rights of the most vulnerable, and their tools for fighting back, were all left on the cutting room floor.
The sections that remain are manipulated to reflect a world of fiction in which Germany and the United Kingdom pose greater threats to human rights than El Salvador, which was reported to have literally “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.” Only last year, the State Department reported a laundry list of El Salvador’s offenses, including lethal prison conditions — a convenient about-face for an administration using these same prisons as gulags for its deported immigrants. The grave offenses of our European allies included prohibiting hate speech and Nazi propaganda and preserving safe perimeters around abortion clinics.
In this imaginary world, the gravest human rights offense in South Africa is land reform to address historic inequities that persist from the apartheid era, which the report lists under its section on “Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.” The law in question is complicated but measured— nothing akin to the land grab Trump has claimed it to be, and his allegations of a “ white genocide” are not only false but offensive.
Which leads me to my second example: refugee admissions. Each year, the president determines how many refugees we will admit and designates allotments per region. This is typically based on humanitarian need, national interest considerations, and the ability to process and integrate them.
This administration is reportedly planning to set the limit to 40,000 (less than one-third of last year’s allotment), with 30,000 of those slots reserved for Afrikaners, the Dutch-descended white minority in South Africa. But white South Africans as a category do not meet the basic legal requirements for refugee status, since they are not, in fact, victims of targeted violence or political persecution. This means only 10,000 actual refugees could qualify for admission to the United States in the coming year — a historically low figure when refugee numbers are at a historic high.
‘Blatant racism’
Countries are not mandated by law or treaty to take in refugees, so the low numbers are disappointing but not legally questionable.
What is both legally and morally objectionable, however, is the blatant racism in the administration’s refugee admissions. South Africa is a country of violent crime, but white South Africans face far less of it statistically than Black South Africans do. The idea that they are politically and economically targeted is also false. White South Africans make up about 8% of the population but hold about 75% of privately owned land, and they earn on average almost five times as much as black South Africans. Apparently, Trump believes they are entitled to maintain this superiority.
The through line here isn’t pretty, but it’s clear. This administration is manipulating human rights platforms, not to promote rights and justice for all but in furtherance of a world where those who have historically held the most power can continue to wield it against everyone else.
Elizabeth Shackelford is a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat. ©2025 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.