U.S. Has Seen ‘Decided Shift Toward Authoritarianism’, Rights Group Claims

The United States has taken a “decided shift toward authoritarianism” in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The group’s annual World Report 2026, a survey of the global state of human rights, finds that the past year in the U.S. was marked by a “blatant disregard for human rights and egregious violations.”

It singles out immigration, health, the environment, labor, disability, gender, criminal justice, and freedom of speech as areas of human rights in which the Administration had taken “significant steps backward.”

Read More: Will Human Rights Survive the Donald Trump Era?

The report criticises what it describes as “unnecessarily violent and abusive raids” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across the country, and the use of “violence by federal agents and local police forces” against protesters.

“The administration’s racial and ethnic scapegoating, domestic deployment of national guard forces in pretextual power grabs, repeated acts of retaliation against perceived political enemies and former officials now critical of him, as well as attempts to expand the coercive powers of the executive and neuter democratic checks and balances, underpin a decided shift toward authoritarianism in the U.S.,” the report says.

HRW’s annual report collates research from around the world to review human rights practices in more than 100 countries. The report covers events in 2025, and this is the 36th edition. 

In an essay written to accompany the report, HRW’s Executive Director Philippe Bolopion also criticized Trump’s impact on human rights around the world.

“Under relentless pressure from US President Donald Trump, and persistently undermined by China and Russia, the rules-based international order is being crushed, threatening to take with it the architecture human rights defenders have come to rely on to advance norms and protect freedoms,” he wrote in the essay, which was published in TIME ahead of the report’s launch.

Here are the key human rights issues the report identifies where the United States is falling short.

Immigration: ‘Terrorizing entire communities’

Immigration has been the flagship issue of Trump’s second term, as he attempts to make good on his promise of the largest mass deportation effort this country has ever seen. HRW says that the effort has led to extensive human rights abuses.

“Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has imposed broad anti-immigrant policies, utilized racial profiling in immigration enforcement, limited asylum claims based on intimate partner violence, and sought to preclude newly arriving asylum seekers from lodging claims, despite their right to do so under U.S. and international law,” the report says. “The administration arrested and summarily deported an increasing number of primarily Black and Brown immigrants, violating due process rights and fomenting fear.”

The rights group claims many abuses have been carried out during immigration enforcement raids across the country, from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. to Chicago, many of the places that Trump and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head, Kristi Noem, have deployed large numbers of federal agents.

“Federal guidance that had limited immigration enforcement in ‘sensitive locations’ such as schools, hospitals, and places of worship was revoked, extending arrests to such locations,” it says. “Many raids were violent and abusive, terrorizing entire communities.”

The report argues that immigration enforcement has infringed upon freedom of speech, noting that immigrant university students were detained by federal agents for protesting in favor of Palestinian issues. Though not named, the story of Mahmoud Khalil was a spotlight issue early on into Trump’s second term after the Columbia University graduate student was arrested in March 2025 following his participation in campus protests against the war in Gaza.

It also looks at how the Trump Administration has rolled back protected status and legal pathways for immigrants from many different countries, and the “inhuman and degrading conditions” for those deported to CECOT, the notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador, and those who were detained in immigration enforcement camps in the United States.

“New detention facilities were opened at military sites and in states including Florida. Abusive conditions—including gross medical neglect, overcrowding and lack of sanitation—were reported in facilities,” the report says. “By late August, ICE had already detained more than three times as many people as in all of 2024. “

Structural Racism: ‘Drastic backsliding’ 

The report laments what it calls “drastic backsliding” on racial justice and “dismantling civil rights mechanisms” since Trump’s inauguration day, pointing specifically to the elimination of federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts (DEI).

“It aggressively sought to erase Black history, including Harriet Tubman’s legacy, and to downplay or obscure racial injustice and resist accountability,” the report says of the Trump Administration.

Multiple Executive Orders in Trump’s first days in office directed all federal agencies to end all DEI activities, while another sought to dub all DEI programs as “discriminatory” and called on the private sector to end their own programs as well.

In a separate section on the criminal legal system, HRW also notes the continued structural racism within the justice and incarceration system.

“Children continue to be prosecuted as adults in all 50 states with racial and ethnic disparities persisting throughout the criminal legal system, including at arrest, detention, and sentencing,” it says. “This year, the president called for harsher punishment of children and Congress advanced legislation to increase the prosecution of children as adults in Washington, DC. The United States remains the only country in the world that sentences children to die in prison.”

HRW argues that the Trump Administration has “downgraded” human rights as a focus of U.S. foreign policy, instead prioritizing transactional deals and tariffs.

“Beginning in February, the administration abruptly terminated nearly all US foreign aid, including funding that supported human rights defenders, local civil society groups, and life-saving humanitarian assistance for populations facing conflict, displacement, or famine,” the report says. “Those cuts are having widespread impacts around the globe, including limiting human rights organizations’ ability to operate and undermining access to health services and emergency care, including for LGBT people, women, children, and older people.”

It points to staffing and funding reductions at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, its abolition of the Department’s Global Criminal Justice Office, a “sanctions regime” against the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the State Department’s “badly distorted” annual human rights report, which is mandated by Congress. 

“The 2025 report omitted key categories of violations and whitewashed the conduct of certain allied governments. Reports downplayed grave violations in countries such as El Salvador, where the U.S. government sent deportees, including Venezuelan nationals, who were subjected to torture,” HRW says.  “This selective approach undermined the credibility of the reports, long considered a flawed but important resource for civil society and policymakers worldwide.”

HRW also argues that the U.S. has “undercut” the United Nations (U.N.) ability to support human rights operations and peacekeeping missions by withholding dues and withdrawing from human rights protection groups like the U.N. Human Rights Council.

On the Trump Administration’s lethal military strike campaign on small boats in the Caribbean, the organization said the operations were “brazenly unlawful extrajudicial killings under international human rights law.”

Democracy and the Right to Vote: ‘Silence critics’ 

HRW argues that “important pillars” of democracy came under attack by the Trump Administration in 2025, while independent organizations were politicized and critics of the government’s decisions were intimidated.

“The administration launched sweeping measures to weaken core pillars of civil society it associates with opposition to its policies, including executive orders cutting university research funding over purported ideological disagreements, restricting government access for law firms engaged in certain legal work, threatening the tax-exempt status of some nongovernmental organizations and misusing the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice in attempts to intimidate and silence critics,” it said.

The organization links to a report from the Center for American Progress that maps federal funding terminations targeting “woke” institutions, notably Harvard University, that bolster their own DEI programs. The CAP report, using federal data, found that the Administration targeted more than 4,000 grants for termination at more than 600 universities and colleges nationwide.

It also points to the firing of independent officials and federal agency officials over ideological differences, including the dismissal of at least 17 inspectors general across major federal agencies in January 2025 and the firing of FBI officials who reported that their terminations were tied to investigations that might affect Trump or his allies.

Gender, Sexuality, Reproductive Rights: ‘Escalated attacks’

HRW’s section on reproductive rights traces much of the backsliding to the repeal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and the subsequent repeal of abortion rights in states across the country. But, these new laws that have “devastating impacts on young people’s health and lives,” the new Administration

“The current administration blocked Planned Parenthood from receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, the public health insurance program for people with low incomes,” it says. “As a result, more than a million people lost insurance coverage for health care they were receiving from the nonprofit organization, the single largest provider of reproductive health care in the U.S.”

As the Trump Administration financially cuts reproductive health programs and fires staff working on family planning, HRW says that 2025 saw deep rollbacks in protections for pregnant people and reproductive rights.

The report also argues that 2025 saw “escalated attacks” on the rights of transgender and LGBTQ+ people as a whole in the U.S.