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human rights watch
Human Rights Watch Calls Out 'Troubling Conditions' in Trump Health Aid Agreements With Africa
“After the sudden and devastating pullback from US assistance in 2025, governments are now being pressured to accept agreements with contingencies that jeopardize human rights."
Jun 08, 2026
The Trump administration is requiring African nations to agree to a series of "troubling conditions" to restore lifesaving health aid, according to a Human Rights Watch report on Monday.
The administration's abrupt shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year shut off billions of dollars and caused havoc across Africa's healthcare system, resulting in what public health models project could be hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
But under what has been dubbed the “America First” Global Health Strategy, the administration has negotiated secretive agreements with dozens of these countries to restore some of the funding. Most of them have been kept under lock and key by the US.
Those that have been made public have come with terms that Human Rights Watch said "raise concerns that health aid is being inappropriately leveraged to extract terms beneficial to the US in negotiations around natural resources and access to sensitive health data from recipient countries."
In March, a draft memorandum of understanding with the government of Zambia was revealed to have conditioned $1 billion for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and other disease prevention for millions of people, on the country's acceptance of a separate bilateral treaty that would have given US companies greater access to the country's minerals.
A leaked State Department memo, prepared for Secretary Marco Rubio, put the exploitative terms plainly: “We will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”
After the details of that agreement were met with backlash, the text of agreements with several other countries—Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda—were suddenly removed from the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act Library.
A Human Rights Watch assessment of the agreements with those five countries—as well as agreements with Rwanda and Liberia that were leaked—revealed that in order to restore a portion of the more than $800 million collectively stripped from them by the US, they'd have to agree to several coercive measures that jeopardize the reproductive and privacy rights of their citizens.
“The agreements show the US intends to condition vital health assistance for millions of people on acquiescence to troubling conditions,” said Julia Bleckner, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch. “After the sudden and devastating pullback from US assistance in 2025, governments are now being pressured to accept agreements with contingencies that jeopardize human rights.”
All seven of the agreements require the governments to provide the US with "broad access to data and information" to monitor compliance with the Helms Amendment, which forbids the use of US foreign assistance to pay for abortion care.
The agreements with Mozambique, Rwanda, and Liberia require them to provide “any data” requested by the US to ensure compliance with the amendment, while Uganda's permits the US to conduct unannounced spot checks of health facilities and clinics.
"By making a broad package of health aid contingent on broad and potentially invasive surveillance of Helms compliance, the agreement could encourage a more restrictive regulation of abortion than national law mandates and give rise to further violations of the right to healthcare,” says the report.
The agreements also give the US permission to directly audit clinics, laboratories, and health programs to ensure compliance with the conditions. Six of them require clinics to provide access to "any data" requested by the US at a sample of facilities it chooses.
Agreements with five countries also mandate that they share biological specimens taken from patients and associated information related to novel infectious diseases, which HRW described as part of an effort to undermine a global pathogen access and sharing system being created by the World Health Organization, from which Trump has removed the US.
HRW said in a news release:
The agreements raise serious concerns about use of people’s private health data, without clear limits, uniform safeguards, or meaningful protections for patient confidentiality, including in several countries with weak or absent domestic data protection laws. The agreements contain no prohibition on this data being shared with US pharmaceutical companies without patient consent.
“Governments negotiating health assistance agreements with the United States face difficult choices,” Bleckner said. “They should be wary of terms asking them to sign away their populations’ rights and push for the inclusion of civil society representatives and multilateral global health organizations like the Global Fund in deliberations.”
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ICE Sued Over 'Civil Rights Catastrophe' at West Texas Concentration Camp
“The conditions here in this ICE tent camp in a desert are inhumane and cruel," said one Cameroonian plaintiff in the suit. "No human being should ever have to go through this."
May 30, 2026
A group of legal advocacy groups on Friday sued US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies and officials over "inhumane" conditions at the country's largest concentration camp for immigrants detained during the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, Human Rights Watch, and the law firm Farella Braun + Martel LLP filed suit against ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and associated officials, in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four people seeking to represent a class action for all others held at Camp East Montana, a 60-acre facility located in the Chihuahuan Desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base and the site of one of the concentration camps where Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were imprisoned during World War II. Approximately 2,500 immigrants are being detained there.
Citing “a Civil Rights catastrophe,” a group of legal and civil rights organizations in Texas sued the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday over conditions at Camp East Montana in El Paso, the country’s largest immigration detention facility.More: substack.com/@shero/note/...
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— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule.bsky.social) May 30, 2026 at 10:03 AM
The lawsuit documents accounts of what the ACLU called "horrific rights violations" at the facility, including:
- Severe medical neglect and disease outbreaks, including a months-long measles outbreak that infected at least 14 people;
- Violent uses of force by officers against detained immigrants and coercive threats of deportation;
- Excessive and arbitrary use of solitary confinement to punish people for requesting basic needs like medical care or hygiene;
- Inadequate and rancid food that have caused detained people to lose extreme amounts of weight;
- Exposure to dust storms through openings in tent walls that subjects people to respiratory disease; and
- Dangerous and unsanitary living conditions in the tent camp, among other rights violations.
“These conditions are longstanding, pervasive, and well-documented, and defendants’ continued inaction in the face of known risks shows their deliberate indifference—not mere negligence—to detainees’ constitutional rights,” the lawsuit states.
At least three detainees have died at Camp East Montana, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban who, according to witnesses, died after being handcuffed and placed in a chokehold by guards. The El Paso County Medical Examiner's Office ruled Lunas Campos' death a homicide by asphyxia.
Detained immigrants have reported beatings and sexual abuse, medical neglect, hunger and insufficient food, and denial of access to attorneys at the facility.
“The conditions here in this ICE tent camp in a desert are inhumane and cruel. No human being should ever have to go through this," case plaintiff Gerald Akari Angye said in a statement Friday.
I have already experienced torture in my home country of Cameroon and I never thought I would experience such severely violent treatment by guards here in the United States of America," he continued. "I have been beaten here and even today, I still have a brace on my hands and wrist. I am in pain and I am scared to be here."
"No one deserves such cruel treatment," Akari Angye added. "We are all humans and deserve to be treated like it.”
Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, called Camp East Montana "nothing short of a civil rights catastrophe."
“Since the day it opened, the facility has repeatedly made headlines for horrific rights violations and even the deaths of three detained people, yet ICE has still evaded accountability for its conduct," Virgien added. "We’re suing to ensure that no other human being has to endure the inhumane treatment that the Trump administration has inflicted on our clients.”
Another case plaintiff, named in the suit as Navdeep, said, "It feels like we are just political pawns taken from our jobs and families and forced into a temporary tent that is not designed for human life."
“We could die here, and it feels like no one here would care," they continued. "With everything happening behind closed doors, I worry the people running this place might cover up the truth about a death or the other injustices that happen here."
"It’s important for people to know the truth of what is happening here," Navdeep added. "Being part of this lawsuit is important to me because many people are vulnerable or they become weak because of the conditions here. Even though we come from many different places, we are all human. I want to be a voice for everyone here.”
After receiving "numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment" of detainees, 35 Democratic Texas state lawmakers earlier this year demand a probe into alleged abuses at Camp East Montana.
Democratic members of US Congress have also sounded the alarm over conditions at Camp East Montana. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) has also called out profiteering by the private contractors running the camp.
Amentum Services Inc. took over operations from Acquisition Logistics LLC earlier this year. The latter was never registered to operate in Texas and the former "has a history of health, safety, and other violations of federal law," according to the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen.
The Trump administration is currently moving forward with a plan to convert industrial warehouses into more ICE concentration camps. The agency has already purchased or contracted for at least 11 warehouses in eight states as part of the $38 billion plan.
While some critics take exception to the concentration camp description, the ICE facilities fit the dictionary definition of the term. The US has a long history of operating concentration camps, with imprisoned peoples ranging from Indigenous tribes during the Trail of Tears and Long Walk to escaped and freed slaves—officially called "contraband" in the Civil War—to Filipinos, Okinawans, and Vietnamese during three different 20th century wars, to Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II.
“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem," talk show host and author Thom Hartmann wrote earlier this year for Common Dreams. "And that’s exactly what ICE is building now. History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”
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World Cup or Global Spectacle of Repression?
The US and FIFA have turned the world’s greatest football celebration into a human rights crisis.
May 23, 2026
The 2026 World Cup was supposed to be a symbol of global unity, cultural diversity, and a shared celebration among nations; an event that would place football beyond politics, borders, and ideology. Yet the closer we move toward the start of the tournament, another image is taking shape: one that speaks not of football’s excitement, but of the heavy shadow of securitization, anti-immigrant hostility, discrimination, and a crisis of human rights legitimacy. Human Rights Watch’s recent warning that the 2026 World Cup could turn into a “human rights disaster” is not merely a publicity-driven statement; it is a sign of a deep rupture between the West’s moral claims and the political reality of the United States today.
The 2026 World Cup is set to be jointly hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico; three countries presented in FIFA’s official publicity as symbols of “multiculturalism,” “freedom,” and “diversity.” In practice, however, the tournament will be held in an environment shaped by hard-line immigration policies, the securitized atmosphere following President Donald Trump’s return, the rise of far-right currents, and intensifying cultural wars—an environment that displays a very different face of these countries.
The remarks by Minky Worden, director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch, are highly significant because she points to an issue that FIFA and the US are trying to sidestep: the possible role of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the security environment of the World Cup. The central concern is not merely the presence of immigration officers in stadiums; the issue is that the World Cup may become a platform for normalizing harsh immigration policies and securitized control. In a country where images of migrant detentions, mass deportations, family separations, and violent treatment of asylum-seekers have repeatedly made headlines in recent years, it is only natural that many human rights activists would be concerned about the psychological and social safety of migrants, Muslims, Latinos, and even foreign fans.
The reality is that the US today is no longer able to preserve the uncontested image of the “land of freedom” as it did in the 1990s, or even during the Obama era. Trump’s return, the intensification of domestic polarization, and the radicalization of the political atmosphere have pushed the United States into a stage in which “security” has prevailed over “freedom” more than ever before. The 2026 World Cup will be held precisely in such an atmosphere: one in which football is not merely a sporting event, but part of the US' internal political and identity struggle.
Perhaps the greatest danger for US and FIFA is precisely this: that the world may remember the 2026 World Cup not for its goals and matches, but for images of migrant detentions, a police-state atmosphere, culture wars, and human rights contradictions.
One of the most important dimensions of the crisis is the issue of the “culture war,” a concept Worden also references. Today in the US, issues such as migrants’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, race, religion, and cultural identity have become the main battlefield of political confrontation. Under such conditions, the World Cup can no longer claim that “sport is separate from politics.” On the contrary, the tournament is likely to become a stage for displaying these very ideological fractures.
This issue is especially significant when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. The fact that only the city of Atlanta has referred in its official programs to support for LGBTQ+ rights shows that even among the US host cities, there is no clear consensus on human rights standards. This comes as FIFA has repeatedly claimed in recent years that it has made human rights one of its strategic principles. The glaring contradiction lies here: An institution that took positions on minority rights in Qatar is now acting with greater caution and silence in the face of potential human rights crises in the US.
At this point, the main issue is no longer only the US; it is the crisis of FIFA’s own legitimacy. FIFA has tried for years to present itself as an institution above politics, but the reality is that global football has long since become part of the structure of power and geopolitical interests. The granting of the so-called “peace prize” to Trump, at a time when his immigration and security policies face widespread global criticism, became so controversial precisely for this reason. Critics believe FIFA is less concerned with human rights than with preserving its relations with the political and economic powers of the host countries.
This crisis is not merely a moral issue; it is directly tied to the future credibility of international institutions. If FIFA remains silent in the face of discriminatory policies, a securitized environment, and civil restrictions, how can it continue to claim that it defends universal values? Are human rights standards applied only to non-Western countries? And if human rights violations in the US are ignored, does the very concept of the “universality” of human rights not fall into crisis?
The US itself, meanwhile, faces a profound contradiction. For decades, Washington has used human rights as a tool for producing global legitimacy and has pressured many of its rivals through this very discourse. But now, the same country that accused others of violating freedoms is facing warnings from human rights organizations about its treatment of migrants, minorities, and its internal security environment. This development is a sign of the erosion of American soft power—power that was once Washington’s most important instrument of global influence.
From this perspective, the 2026 World Cup is not merely a sporting event; it is a test of the gap between the US' official narrative and its domestic reality. If the tournament is accompanied by an intensely securitized atmosphere, the control of migrants, discriminatory treatment, or the suppression of protests, the image of the US that forms in the minds of millions of global viewers will be very different from the traditional narrative of a “free American society.” In the age of social media, even one violent encounter around the stadiums could turn into a global crisis for the credibility of both the US and FIFA.
In the meantime, the more important point is that football is no longer merely a tool of entertainment as it once was. Today, the World Cup is part of the competition of narratives and the war of images. Countries try to use this event to display their stability, legitimacy, and cultural appeal. But if the US cannot manage the contradiction between its human rights slogans and the reality of its domestic politics, the 2026 World Cup may become a symbol of crisis in the very values the West has claimed for decades to defend.
Perhaps the greatest danger for US and FIFA is precisely this: that the world may remember the 2026 World Cup not for its goals and matches, but for images of migrant detentions, a police-state atmosphere, culture wars, and human rights contradictions. In that case, this tournament will not merely be a failed sporting event; it will become a symbol of an era in which even the greatest celebration of world football could not conceal the rupture between power, politics, and human rights.
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