(https://www.npr.org/2025/04/18/nx-s1-5357511/state-department-human-rights-report-cuts)

The Trump administration is substantially scaling back the State Department's annual reports on international human rights to remove longstanding critiques of abuses such as harsh prison conditions, government corruption and restrictions on participation in the political process, NPR has learned.

Despite decades of precedent, the reports, which are meant to inform congressional decisions on foreign aid allocations and security assistance, will no longer call governments out for such things as denying freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. They won't condemn retaining political prisoners without due process or restrictions on "free and fair elections."

Forcibly returning a refugee or asylum-seeker to a home country where they may face torture or persecution will no longer be highlighted, nor will serious harassment of human rights organizations.

[...]

The documents NPR reviewed confirm reporting by Politico that reports of violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people will be removed, along with all references to DEI.

Among other topics ordered to be struck from the reports:

Involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices.
Arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy.
Serious restrictions to internet freedom.
Extensive gender-based violence.
Violence or threats of violence targeting people with disabilities.


[...]some deletions are more noteworthy than others. The Trump administration recently negotiated the transfer of immigrants from the U.S. into El Salvador's notorious prison system. In a draft of the forthcoming report on that country reviewed by NPR, the section on prison conditions is erased. The only remnants of those violations are reports on prison deaths that fall into the category of "extrajudicial killings" and a mention of abuse by prison guards in a legislatively mandated section on "Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment."

In the report on Hungary, a marked-up version of which was distributed as a model for how to apply the new directives, the section titled "Corruption in Government" is struck out. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been called an authoritarian, and previous reports have noted restrictions to civil liberties. President Trump has called him "a great man and a great leader in Europe."
[...]

(https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/us/venezuela-immigrant-disappear-deport-ice.html)

In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald's. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful.

The U.S. authorities took Mr. Prada into custody when he attempted to re-enter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela.

That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world.

But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on a list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.

[...]

On Tuesday, after the story published, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that Mr. Prada had been sent to El Salvador on March 15.

The failure to list his deportation and location on any publicly accessible records may have been a simple oversight, but the matter continues to raise alarm among immigrant advocates and legal scholars, who say Mr. Prada's case suggests a new level of disarray in the immigration system, as officials face pressure to rapidly fulfill President Trump's pledge of mass deportations. While hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been deported under various administrations in recent years, it is extraordinarily unusual for them to disappear without a legal record.
[...]