The Trump Administration recently made it easier for U.S. suppliers to export firearms abroad by relaxing restrictions on exports to dangerous actors, including repressive governments and cartels. This is devastating news for human rights.
Firearms exports should be carefully supervised, given their inherent potential to threaten U.S. interests and foreign policy. Guns in the wrong hands can enable human rights abuses, stoke political violence, empower narcotics trafficking, foment regional instability and spur forced migration as people seek refuge outside their own country. Until recently, it seemed that Washington was adopting a targeted approach to address the greatest risks.
Back in 2023, U.S. government reports indicated that the majority of U.S.-made guns retrieved from crime scenes in other countries were illegally smuggled out of the U.S.—and are often illegally acquired within the U.S. But there are still a significant number of legally exported firearms used in crimes, including human rights violations. A 2022 GAO report found that nearly 20% of recovered U.S. crime guns in Central America were traceable to licensed exports. From 2017 to 2020, following a two-year surge in firearms imports to the Dominican Republic, for example, more than 40% of recovered U.S. crime guns in that country were traced to legal exports. In Belize, more than 60% of the U.S.-made guns retrieved in 2021-24 from crime scenes started as licensed exports. Public information is scarce about most of the crimes committed abroad with U.S.-exported weapons, but in one prominent case, a U.S.-origin firearm—legally exported to Peru under license from the Commerce Department—was used to assassinate a presidential candidate in Ecuador.
At the end of a lengthy policy review in 2024, the Commerce Department offered assurances about the work of its Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS):
BIS will increase scrutiny on a transaction-by-transaction level to help prevent firearms from ending up in the hands of foreign criminals, gangs, terrorists, or other malign actors [and] is implementing regulations that list a clear set of national security and foreign policy factors to consider when reviewing a license application, including terrorism risks, human rights concerns, state fragility, corruption, the nature and capabilities of the firearm, and past instances of diversion and misuse.
In April 2024, the Biden Administration significantly tightened the rules on U.S. firearms exports, and AIUSA welcomed those changes. As we said at the time, “Firearms occupy a unique place on the Commerce Control List. As the only lethal weapons on the entire list, they are incredibly dangerous, exported in large volume, have a long shelf life, and include various end users, many of whom contribute to violence and human rights abuses. Amnesty International has long sought to curtail irresponsible exports of these deadly weapons.”
The 2024 rules required U.S. exports of sniper-rifles and semi-automatic rifles, like AR-15s, to receive heightened scrutiny for their human rights risks, alongside tear gas, shotguns, water cannons, and police equipment. They also marked 36 countries as generally ineligible to buy U.S.-supplied civilian firearms because of their governments’ poor human rights record. These included Nigeria, where more than 10,000 people have been killed in attacks by gunmen since 2023, and Pakistan, where the number of deaths from insurgent attacks in 2025 reached their highest level in decades, and religious minorities live under threat of armed violence from assailants and violent mobs.
One of those countries was Guatemala, which by 2023 had become the largest importer of U.S. firearms in Latin America. AIUSA had noted this trend as it emerged in 2022 (after the first Trump administration loosened export rules initially in 2020). In subsequent months, we raised some concerns with government officials in the Biden Administration. Eventually, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would report that while firearms to Guatemala were peaking, they were also showing up at local crime scenes. Two-thirds of U.S.-sourced weapons recovered from Guatemalan crime scenes in 2024 were traceable to U.S.-exported firearms. In that same period, Homeland Security reported that more than 200,000 Guatemalans were seeking refuge in the United States. In stark contrast to that period, after the 2024 rules took full effect in July last year, exports of handguns and semi-automatic rifles to Guatemala fell to near zero.
Policy reversal in late 2025
At the end of September 2025, BIS abruptly reversed course and rescinded the very rules it had promulgated the previous year.
Now the regulatory regime has changed, and in one fell swoop, the 2024 guardrails have been removed. The Trump Administration reversed almost all the provisions of the 2024 rules in September 29, effective immediately. Gone are the provisions imposing enhanced scrutiny on questionable firearms sales, and gone is the list of countries presumed too risky for most commercial firearms exports.
Statements of Protest
While public and media interest was focused on other crises, several Senators, led by Elizabeth Warren, sent a letter of protest to the Commerce Department soon after. More than 80 non-governmental organizations—including Amnesty International– signed a statement the following day, strenuously opposing the new rules.
The 2024 rules appeared to be having a positive effect, at least insofar as the flow of licensed firearms exports to high-risk destinations was concerned. From July 2024 (when the revised rules took effect) to September 2025 (when they were revoked), sales at risk of diversion in the 36 designated countries slowed to a trickle.
It is a policy puzzle why BIS, after detailing the lack of information that impaired its ability to evaluate national security and foreign policy risks effectively, would summarily reverse the rules it had so carefully justified some 15 months earlier. As outlined in the Federal Register, its September 2025 explanation leans heavily on complaints from industry that the new rules were burdensome. BIS dismissed but did not engage with national security arguments it had put forth just a few months earlier: the decision smacks of the kind of “arbitrary or capricious” regulatory decisions the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act was specifically intended to prevent. There is still an opportunity for Congress to restore the April 2024 rules under their 1996 Congressional Review Act authority, but the clock is ticking.