Rights Groups to UN: Trump Tactics Bear 'Hallmarks of Fascist Regimes'

A coalition of human rights organizations on Wednesday submitted a report to the United Nations warning that U.S. President Donald Trump's far-right administration is exploiting a decades-long erosion of American democracy to consolidate power and undercut basic freedoms.

The report—crafted by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Muslim Advocates, and other organizations—argues that a "central feature" of the Trump administration's intensifying repression of dissent "is a metastasizing 'terrorism' framework that escalated in the aftermath of September 11th."

The report points to the administration's invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants en masse without due process and its use of the notorious Guantánamo Bay military prison to detain potentially thousands of migrants.

"The methods deployed in the name of 'counter-terrorism' and 'national security' evolved from emergency measures to common practices, ensnaring new populations and cannibalizing a broader range of issues," the report states. "Today, university students and professors that challenge support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians are being targeted. Environmental activists that oppose the plan to build a police training facility in a clear-cut forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia have been prosecuted as 'domestic terrorists.' And key to the administration advancing its anti-democratic and anti-rights agenda is the expansion of a vast surveillance infrastructure of law enforcement agencies with the aid of unaccountable tech magnates."

The report, which was submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council ahead of a formal review of U.S. compliance with human rights obligations, calls on the international community do whatever it can to push back against the Trump administration's agenda, including by pressuring the White House to end its use of the Alien Enemies Act and cease targeting Palestinian rights advocates.

"In just 100 days, the Trump administration has inflicted enormous damage to human rights in the United States and around the world."

Nadia Ben-Youssef, advocacy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement that "the human rights violations described in the report make clear that the U.S. is in an authoritarian political reality where the Trump administration, Congress, and state governments have fully suspended international human rights and are engaging in tactics of repression that are hallmarks of fascist regimes."

"Our hope is that the report sounds the alarm for the international community to act with greater urgency to challenge this administration and its belligerent efforts to dismantle constitutional protections and international norms," said Ben-Youssef.

The coalition delivered its report to the U.N. as human rights organizations took stock of the Trump administration's devastating assault on civil liberties, the climate, workers, public health, immigrants, and more during the first 100 days of his second term.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Thursday that "since January, the administration has unlawfully transferred Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, to his home country, deported other immigrants to El Salvador under circumstances that amount to enforced disappearance, and removed asylum seekers with various nationalities to Panama and Costa Rica in violation of international law."

"The administration has also attacked the rights to freedom of speech and assembly, including by arbitrarily detaining and seeking to deport noncitizens because of their activism related to Palestine," the group added. "These damaging policies are reverberating globally as the Trump administration has slashed support for human rights beyond U.S. borders. The administration abruptly ended US foreign aid programs, putting many people who were benefiting from them in life-threatening peril."

Tanya Greene, U.S. program director at HRW, said that "in just 100 days, the Trump administration has inflicted enormous damage to human rights in the United States and around the world."

"We are deeply concerned that these attacks on fundamental freedoms will continue unabated," Greene added.