Human Rights Crisis in the U.S.: A New Chapter

This blog is part of a series exploring how increasing authoritarian practices impact human rights across a variety of issues.

The U.S. is at a precipice in our history where we face a president backed by a powerful anti-rights coalition carrying out a full-on assault on a broad range of human rights. President Trump and his administration, with the full backing of a powerful and organized anti-rights coalition of actors who benefit, have unleashed cruelty and chaos, plunging the United States into an era of rampant authoritarian practices, policies, and rhetoric that are recklessly gutting human rights protections and endangering people’s lives.

We’re witnessing a dangerous, full-scale embrace of authoritarian practices.

These practices include efforts to intimidate, silence and punish any opposition. The speed and cruelty of attacks have been staggering.

We have already seen:

• Brutal attacks on the rights of immigrants, asylees, and others with enforced disappearances, mass deportations, family separations, and more, tearing families apart and creating a reality in which whole communities are living in fear.
• Crackdowns on student protestors, including through arrest and unlawful detention or visa revocation and deportation threats for international students. These actions violate the rights to free speech and peaceful assembly and are meant to have a chilling effect on all dissent.
• Undermining the rule of law, disregarding court orders, threatening impeachment of judges, attacking law firms and lawyers.  
• Continued attacks on freedom of the press, targeting journalists, suing media outlets, pulling funding that supports free press globally, and abusing regulatory power have undermined the role of media in fostering debate, discussion, and dissent.
• Attacking the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ communities with anti-trans policies and executive orders that contribute to a climate of discrimination and attempt to erase transgender people’s existence under the law; and the weakening of sexual and reproductive rights protections for all people, particularly the right to abortion for women and people who can get pregnant.
• Undoing racial justice gains and targeting Black and other racialized communities, forcing closures of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and threatening to defund universities for their policies and programs promoting racial equality
• Removing checks on corporate accountability and slashing efforts to fight corruption.
• Fostering hate by scapegoating marginalized groups.
• Undermining international systems that support human rights around the world.

And so much more.

The Trump Administration’s attacks have been relentless, and they have sown cruelty and created chaos in people’s lives across the country—and across the globe.

The alarming rise of authoritarian practices by the Trump administration is central to the administration’s goals to decimate human rights protections. The administration isn’t just flexing power; it is actively reshaping the rules so that they can commit abuses unchecked. They have sought to entrench power, avoid accountability, instill fear, and silence dissent. At the same time, they have aimed to curb those rights needed to fight for other human rights—such as freedom of expression, free press, and peaceful assembly—purposefully dismantling protections and systems that allow us to speak out, dissent, and fight for our human rights.

There’s no doubt about it. If this administration can succeed in these areas, we will lose our collective ability to fight back against any human rights abuses. And that, of course, is the point of these actions.

When governments operate without accountability, human rights suffer.

What we are seeing in the United States is neither unique nor novel. Across the globe, human rights abusers have been increasingly emboldened to roll back rights and silence dissent– attacking the people and systems that defend and advance human rights.

And Amnesty International is no stranger to these practices or to fighting against them. From Hungary to China, or from Venezuela to Iran, and anywhere else leaders think they can act with impunity—we have fought back at every turn. And now is no different.

No government is beyond scrutiny. No situation is beyond hope.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be exploring how authoritarian practices are unfolding across a number of areas in the United States, such as national security, gun violence, human defenders’ rights, racial justice, migrant rights, and what we—collectively—can do to fight back and claim our human rights.

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