As ICE and Border Patrol made their assault on Minneapolis, public attention turned to the clouds of tear gas, abductions of people from smashed cars, the flash bangs and the shootings of protesters. With the viciousness and made-for-TV militarization of under-trained immigration officers, it was easy to forget that Operation Metro Surge was just the next step in the Trump administration’s extensive project to remove immigrants in defiance of human rights and international law.
When the administration took office in January 2025, they immediately started cutting key programs and dismantling protections for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, enacting a sweeping set of executive orders those very first couple of days that had restrictive and punitive measures.
The rhetoric around this new project was that “migration is an invasion” and the government needed to prioritize an “America First” agenda over humanitarian obligations and international human rights standards.
When the administration took office in January 2025, they immediately started cutting key programs and dismantling protections for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.”
-Yumna Rizvi, senior policy analyst
This included suspension of the U.S. refugee admissions program, increased security vetting requirements, an intense focus on deportation and detention, halting asylum, and reinstating things like the migration protection protocols. At the same time, the administration began using wartime authorities like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – which hadn’t been used since World War II. All of this steadily pushed the America First agenda to get as many immigrants as possible out of the country.
However, it’s important to note that at this same time, the administration also shifted its position on human rights quite broadly: withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, altering its country reports practices, not funding UNRWA, and refusing to attend the periodic review of its human rights record.
These are significant, and meaningful, changes: withdrawing from treaties, withdrawing from multilateral institutions and organizations, dismantling the entire human rights, international human rights apparatus that the U.S. built after World War II.
In essence, we’ve seen that the United States created the system but is actively withdrawing from it and dismantling it to the point that the UN is now in a fiscal crisis, having to push back meetings, canceling important human rights reviews of countries. They are having systematic problems because of the lack of funding.
And that brings us to critical engagements the United States had on the global stage but has halted: the administration made immediate and sweeping cuts to U.S. foreign aid, including USAID and State Department programs, which abruptly halted nearly 75% of CVT’s overseas programs. In addition, they fundamentally altered the State Department’s congressionally mandated annual human rights reports, removing references to marginalized populations, fair and free elections, universal and equal suffrage. The reports in 2025 did not mention anything about restrictions on freedom of assembly or government corruption.
Alternatively, they wrote really nice things about countries with whom they are newly partnering in their anti-immigrant actions: El Salvador received a nicely written report at a time when the administration was sending immigrants to CECOT. Abuses there have been widely documented, and the government’s claim that the men they sent were violent criminals was not true.
Additionally, it is against international law to send people to places that are known to use torture – this is the principle of non-refoulement, a prohibition found in the Convention against Torture and the Refugee Convention Act of 1951. It’s also against U.S. domestic law under the Foreign Affairs and Reforms Restructuring Act. But again, the United States is doing this.
So now we’re in a situation of blatant defiance by the administration. And it matters not only in the United States but around the world. For example, the human rights reports are critical for global accountability: human rights activists in other countries rely on them; UN systems also look at them; U.S. immigration judges look at them with respect to asylum cases to understand forms of abuses in countries from which someone is seeking asylum.
So now we’re in a situation of blatant defiance by the administration. And it matters not only in the United States but around the world.”
When these guardrails are no longer there, you have a vacuum. And comparatively, the U.S. still has a stronger civil society than many countries: we still have our freedoms, for now we are able to speak out against injustice as the protesters in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities have shown. But two protesters were shot to death by ICE agents in Minneapolis, and others have been threatened, followed and harassed. And in many other countries, there is no right to speak out. That is where global activists have been able to rely on these reports, describing human rights violations and stamped by the U.S. government. It means a lot to activists.
When I was working in Pakistan on the death penalty and torture, we looked at those reports and used them in our submissions to UN mechanisms: they have a certain amount of credibility. And when we don’t have that, how do we hold other governments accountable for their human rights abuses?
None of this is new. Many Americans are waking up in 2026 and going, “Oh, my God.” But this is not new. I think of the 1960s when this was happening as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Even more recently in the post 9/11 era, you saw the U.S. starting to chip away at its international human rights obligations, its domestic obligations. We saw this rise of Guantánamo detention, rendition, torture. Abu Ghraib, Bagram. Use of force outside of active areas of hostilities, drone strikes.
The lack of reckoning and accountability for past abuses led directly to what we see currently taking place. It has been allowed to take place.”
The lack of reckoning and accountability for past abuses led directly to what we see currently taking place. It has been allowed to take place. This is not a situation where Donald Trump came in and simply decided to do this. It has been a slow erosion over time, with the U.S. turning back on its responsibilities and obligations. It has brought us to this place where an administration has declared that it’s okay to do this.
So much of the rhetoric and the narrative is the same.
Look at what has happened with Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific. If you listen, we’ve heard this rhetoric before: “This is Al-Qaeda in the Western Hemisphere.” “We have to get these boats out.” The tactics are the same, and it’s because this was allowed to take place before. There was no meaningful accountability for it. I think this was bound to happen at some point.
I mentioned the abuses long documented at Guantánamo, but now we have Alligator Alcatraz, where reportedly the conditions there in some cases amount to torture. Several years ago, when the UN Special Rapporteur was able to go to Guantánamo, she also said that conditions there amounted to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and could also meet the threshold for torture. We know that about CECOT as well.
So, all types of violations of the ICCPR, UDHR, CAT and various Articles are taking place. And what can we do about it? The U.S. was up for its universal periodic review at the UN in 2025. But they didn’t show up.
The U.S. was up for its universal periodic review at the UN in 2025. But they didn’t show up.”
There’s a lot of introspection that needs to happen in U.S. politics if we’re ever going to move forward from where we are today.
Thinking about the implications on international law really saddens me. When I first came back to the U.S. to work at CVT, I came from robust UN advocacy and experience in places like Pakistan where it counts a lot. And everyone here told me, oh, no, we don’t care about the UN here. I remember thinking it’s great that Americans have that experience. But it’s clear the U.S. really doesn’t care that much. And we’re seeing it play out now.
The U.S. doesn’t care enough about the fact that they’ve crumbled an entire institution designed to support worldwide human rights. For advocates and activists globally, that matters a lot. Under very repressive governments, the only institution that they do have is the UN. It’s the only place you can look to. So for the world, it’s a dark, dark place when those systems aren’t functioning.
About The Author
Yumna Rizvi
is Senior Policy Analyst at CVT
