Overview
- Human Rights Watch says the United States is undergoing widespread rights violations and democratic backsliding under President Trump, characterizing 2025 as a dangerous slide toward authoritarianism.
- HRW reports large-scale immigration raids, mass arrests, and punitive summary removals to third countries, including the alleged enforced disappearance of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison where they were tortured.
- The group alleges efforts to undermine accountability and civil-rights protections, alongside steep cuts to health care subsidies that it says will strip millions of insurance coverage.
- Abroad, HRW cites the termination of most U.S. foreign aid, withdrawals from the UN Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, and the Paris Agreement, sanctions on accountability bodies, and lethal maritime strikes that killed dozens.
- Framing the global rights system as in peril, HRW links U.S. choices to emboldened autocrats, highlights grave abuses by Russia in Ukraine and accusations against the IDF in Gaza, and calls for a new alliance possibly led by the EU and other democracies.