Watching The Trump Administration Violate Basic Human Rights with Impunity

“Immigrants at Florida Detention Facilities Faced Life-Threatening Delays, Report Says,” reports the HuffPost.

“Report Finds ‘Dehumanizing’ Conditions in Florida Immigration Centers,” reports the Miami Herald.

“Migrants at ICE Jail in Miami Made to Kneel to ‘Eat Like Dogs,’ Report Alleges,” reports The Guardian.

Pick your headline from yesterday’s news. The story is the same. Every day, the Trump administration is transforming the U.S. government into more and more of a police state. And Human Rights Watch, a long-respected NGO that monitors the most egregious human rights violations throughout the world, from Darfur to Teheran to Gaza to Florida, has just published a carefully documented and judiciously written 98-page report, ’You Feel Like Your Life Is Over’: Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025. The report’s summary is worth quoting:

Between January and June 2025, thousands were held in immigration detention at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome), the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC), in Florida, under conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards. By March, the number of people in immigration detention at Krome had increased 249% from the levels before the January inauguration. At times in March, the facility detained more than three times its operational capacity of inmates. As of June 20, 2025, the number of people in immigration detention at the three facilities was at 111% from the levels before the inauguration.

The change was qualitative as well as quantitative. Detainees in three Florida facilities told Human Rights Watch that ICE detention officers and private contractor guards treated them in a degrading and dehumanizing manner. Some were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.

Based on extensive interviews, the report also draws on a number of other sources, including a 2020 ACLU Report, done in collaboration with HRW and National Immigrant Justice Center, entitled Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration, and an April 2025 report on immigrant detention abuses done by Americans for Immigrant Justice. It notes that two of the three Florida facilities investigated are operated by private contractors under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision; that all three operate under the public radar and without any regular public oversight; and that all three refused to comment on the extensive abuses outlined in the report.

Human Rights Watch, as its website notes, began, in 1978, as “Helsinki Watch.” Originally centered on human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc—whose countries had all signed on to the 1975 Helsinki Accords yet routinely violated its human rights provisions—the NGO eventually extended its remit to document human rights abuses across the globe, establishing “watch” committees in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes?

I first encountered the organization in connection with its first offshoot “watch” committee, America’s Watch, which was established in 1981 to document the extensive human rights violations by Central and South American regimes that were strongly backed by the Reagan administration. During those years I assiduously read the organization’s reports on Salvadoran and Guatemalan imprisonment and torture of dissidents, and on the police-and-military-linked death squads that regularly assassinated peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and priests, and solidarity workers. A young assistant professor at Fordham University, I taught courses on the human rights violations in Central America and the Caribbean, and on Reagan-administration support for violent rebel groups seeking to overthrow the very new Sandinista government that has just overthrown the repressive Somoza regime in Nicaragua. And together with a handful of other junior colleagues, I helped to organize teach-ins and special lectures on the atrocious human rights violations regularly documented and publicized by America’s Watch.

A child of the 60s and 70s, during these years I never viewed any aspect of U.S. politics through “rose-colored glasses.” I well understood that the U.S. was plagued by its own forms of injustice. I also understood that much of the U.S. Cold War rhetoric about “human rights” and “defending democracy” was hypocritical, and masked very bad things done both at home and abroad. At the same time, it was clearly abroad—in the American “near abroad,” and well beyond it—that the most egregious human rights abuses were being committed. Groups like Helsinki Watch and its adjuncts, Amnesty International, and others, played an important role in documenting the abuses and in motivating solidarity work intended to end them.

And for Americans, this was primarily a matter of foreign policy.

Obviously, it was never simply a matter of things “foreign.”

Just as obviously, the damage that was done by U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere, has had enduring effects, for which the U.S. has never assumed responsibility. And the “immigration crisis” at the Southern border is in large part a consequence of the legacies of U.S. foreign policy choices, as millions upon millions of people have fled violent and unjust situations, and headed north, seeking refuge, asylum, and simple opportunity in the U.S. (see the writings of Greg Grandin, especially his 2025 America, America: A New History of the New World; William Connolly has recently underscored the importance of climate change in driving the migration crisis from the South).

And, in a way, what we in the U.S are now experiencing can be viewed as “chickens coming home to roost,” as the awful human rights conditions to our south—the consequence of a combination of U.S. malign intent and benign neglect—are now staring us directly in the face.

And, irony of ironies, the U.S. electorate has responded to this situation by returning to office a man, President Donald Trump, who emulates foreign dictators and is determined to emulate some of the worst forms of human rights abuse such dictators regularly inflict on their populations:

• The suspension of legal due process.
• The disappearing of thousands of individuals by armed, masked agents of “law enforcement” who operate without proper identification and beyond the law.
• Mass deportation, preceded by mass detention under the most cruel and degrading conditions.
• The deliberate promotion of a climate of intimidation and fear that operates indiscriminately in the society at large, rendering precarious the situation of undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, and indeed all citizens—all human beings who reside within the territorial boundaries of the U.S.

Here are a few of the many recent reports documenting Trump’s repressive measures:

• Amnesty International’s April 30, 2025 report, Chaos & cruelty: 10 Compounding Assaults on Human Rights, a Review of President Trump’s First 100 Days in Office.
• Human Rights Watch report, 100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days.
• Physicians for Human Rights, The First 100 Days: What Trump’s First Moves Mean for Health and Human Rights.
• Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks.

The Trump administration, animated by a White, Christian, ethno-nationalist vision, is currently threatening human rights in every conceivable way.

But at the heart of its authoritarian agenda is the idea that many millions who live among us are “illegals,” rightless individuals whose presence and thus very existence is in question, and that these millions of human beings, and the scores of millions of citizens who offer them sanctuary or support or who merely defend the constitutional rights of all, are under suspicion as “enemies of the people” and haters of “American Greatness.”

How far will this go?

Regarding Trump’s illegal deportation of immigrants to El Salvador, where they have been detained in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center, human rights experts recently wrote forThe Guardian that “Trump’s lawlessness is emboldening El Salvador’s brutal regime,” noting that the detention of a leading Salvadoran human rights lawyer “is part of a wave of repression sweeping the country under Nayib Bukele.”

That Trump likes and admires Nayib Bukele, the brutal and autocratic elected president of El Salvador, has long been a matter of grave concern for those who care about human rights and constitutional democracy. That Trump has enthusiastically made “deals” with Bukele to turn El Salvador into an offshore detention facility for “illegals” represents a real synergy of lawlessness that accentuates the concern.

As I read the new Human Rights Watch report about Florida’s ICE facilities, and as I think about Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz,” and his so-called “Border Czar’s recent comments on how ICE officers don’t need probable cause to detain people and how he plans to “flood the zone” in “sanctuary cities,” and about the Trump administration’s recent deployment of National Guard troops and active duty Marines to suppress Los Angeles protests, I wonder how long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale.

Things would of course look and feel very different here in the U.S., given the country’s overall wealth, consumerism, and at least the patina of “democracy.” But how different would it really be, especially in a political sense? Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes? Can such a force be mobilized? Will it be mobilized? Or will the U.S. become the El Salvador of the North?