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Dokument #2139277
Amnesty International (Autor)
Access to asylum at the border ended and immigration enforcement increased dramatically. Protesters’ rights were violated. Protections were reduced for LGBTI people, especially transgender people. Attacks on reproductive rights intensified. Police use of lethal force disproportionately affected Black people. Progress towards abolishing the death penalty was minimal. Arbitrary and indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay continued. Despite ongoing gun violence, President Trump discontinued programmes to address the issue. The USA continued using lethal force around the world and provided arms to Israel that were used in direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks. Gender-based violence continued to disproportionately affect Indigenous women. Environmental and climate regulations were rolled back.
Immediately following his inauguration, President Trump took an unprecedented number of actions undermining the rule of law. The arbitrary use of power unfolded in a series of authoritarian practices that included attacking the judiciary, legal system and media; retributive targeting of political enemies while granting clemency to his supporters; undermining academic freedom; abolishing and attacking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts; crippling federal oversight; and dismantling USAID and cutting foreign assistance.
In January, President Trump rescinded an executive order (EO) that imposed sanctions on individual Israeli settlers, Israeli settler organizations and a Palestinian armed group for undermining peace, security and stability in the West Bank. The USA attacked organizations, international bodies and tribunals that had labelled the ongoing violence in Gaza as genocide.
The Trump administration implemented a racist, anti-migrant agenda through EOs that dehumanized and criminalized migrants and people seeking safety.1 Nearly all federal law enforcement agencies were deputized to engage in civil immigration enforcement. Masked agents seized migrants and citizens, armoured vehicles patrolled streets, and agents targeted areas near schools, faith centres, hospitals and other previously prohibited areas for immigration enforcement. New state-funded detention facilities such as “Alligator Alcatraz” were built.
The mass immigration detention system expanded, holding thousands of people in overcrowded, inhumane facilities sometimes on military bases, limiting access to bail and resuming the detention and separation of families.2 The administration deported third-country nationals to foreign countries without due process.
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act, the administration illegally expelled 252 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre, subjecting them to enforced disappearance and torture. After months in detention, they were sent to Venezuela, the country many had fled.3
The administration ended the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan Parole Program and Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, putting thousands at risk of unlawful deportation while litigation was ongoing.
The US Refugee Admissions Program was suspended. There was a complete travel ban on nationals from 19 countries and individuals using travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority, and a partial ban on nationals from 19 others.
President Trump declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border. The “CBP One” mobile application’s scheduling system for asylum seekers was terminated and all existing appointments were cancelled, ending access to asylum at the border.4
Repression of widespread campus protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip continued. The Trump administration further targeted universities by rescinding federal funding and research grants, threatening and launching civil rights investigations by the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Education.
The administration targeted international students and faculty members, who became hesitant in voicing opinions or protesting on campus for fear of deportation. Many students stopped attending classes or events on campus. Students were targeted for visa revocation and deportation through social media monitoring, visa status tracking, and automated threat assessments of foreign individuals on visas.5 At least 11 foreign students and protesters were sought for detention and deportation specifically for their activism in support of Palestinian rights. The authorities revoked approximately 8,000 visas, the majority for criminal activity, including minor traffic violations or arrests not leading to convictions. However, 200-300 were identified for “support for terrorism” or expressing “anti-US views”, purportedly for engaging in peaceful protests or posting against the ongoing genocide.
On 7 June, President Trump deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles County following mass protests against immigration enforcement raids, suppressing protesters’ rights to freedom of assembly. The order provoked immediate backlash and a legal battle with Californian officials.6 Local law enforcement used less lethal weapons, including thousands of kinetic impact projectiles and tear gas grenades, to suppress protests near a federal building where immigrants were being detained in Los Angeles, causing six injuries. Journalists were specifically targeted; federal agents also used unnecessary or excessive force against protesters.
Congress and 24 states introduced 62 bills restricting the right to protest, with five bills enacted in five states.
The Trump administration rolled back protections for LGBTI people and used federal agencies to attack LGBTI rights, particularly of transgender people. President Trump issued an EO “restoring biological truth”, defining sex as an “immutable biological classification as either male or female”. In response, agencies cut programmes and funding protecting LGBTI people and erased mentions of LGBTI identity from official materials.
The NGO GLAAD documented 932 anti-LGBTI incidents in 49 states and the District of Columbia in the period May 2024 to May 2025 – the equivalent of 2.5 incidents every day. Violent attacks resulted in 84 injuries and 10 deaths. In July, the administration shut down the LGBTI youth-specific option on the national suicide hotline.
Across the country, 616 anti-LGBTI bills were introduced; 74 become law, restricting healthcare for transgender youth and censoring LGBTI content in schools. Following President Trump’s EO to ban gender-affirming care for people under 19 years, the Supreme Court upheld state bans for minors in June. Twenty-five statewide bans remained in effect.
While revoking parts of a 60-year-old EO aimed at tackling workplace discrimination, the Trump administration declared that DEI’s “foundational rhetoric and ideas foster intergroup hostility and authoritarianism”. President Trump’s anti-DEI measures have led to surveillance by private individuals of Black women, particularly those employed in the federal government. Federal staffing reductions targeted departments where racialized people and women were most prevalent. Removing DEI initiatives resulted in cuts to education funding and threatening investigations and fines against non-governmental entities with DEI policies.
The Trump administration significantly rolled back sexual and reproductive rights, creating a volatile legal landscape. It rescinded prior policies that helped expand and protect access to reproductive care. It cut funding for reproductive care facilities and programmes, forcing clinic closures that disproportionately impacted people living on lower incomes. States further restricted access, and the Supreme Court made it easier for them to exclude reproductive health protections for beneficiaries of Medicaid (health insurance programme providing free or low-cost medical coverage for eligible people living on lower incomes).
Forty-one states had abortion bans of some kind, including 13 with total bans and seven with bans at or before 18 weeks of gestation. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, pregnant people living in states that banned abortion were nearly two times as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth, compared with mothers living in states where abortion was legal.
Additional barriers to reproductive healthcare, including birth control, pregnancy care and abortion, disproportionately affected marginalized and racialized groups.
According to NGO sources, police shot and killed 1,143 people in 2025. Black people were disproportionately impacted by the use of lethal force, comprising more than 23% of deaths from police use of firearms, while representing 13% of the population. The government continued to fail to fully implement the Death in Custody Reporting Act to document the number of people killed by law enforcement officers every year.
On 28 April, President Trump issued an EO that directed federal resources to promote aggressive policing tactics and further militarized local law enforcement agencies; provided greater protections for law enforcement officers accused of misconduct; and threatened possible federal prosecutions of government officials who “wilfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law” through their policies. The DOJ halted federal oversight over a number of local law enforcement agencies engaging in a “pattern or practice” of rights-violating policing by rescinding or ending active lawsuits and investigations.
The administration deployed the National Guard to cities with Black mayors and large populations of racialized groups, such as the District of Columbia and Chicago, Illinois. The president also threatened National Guard deployments to additional cities based on false claims of rising crime.
President Trump issued an EO that ended the Biden administration’s federal execution moratorium. The EO instructed the US attorney general to re-establish as a policy the pursuit of death sentences at federal and state levels in every eligible federal crime, especially where the victim was a police officer or the perpetrator of the crime was a migrant; to support states to obtain lethal injection drugs; and to pursue cases that would overturn Supreme Court precedent limiting the use of the death penalty. It also ordered the attorney general to evaluate the placement of each of the 37 men whose federal death sentences were commuted by former president Joe Biden in December 2024, and to work with prosecutors to determine whether these individuals could be charged with state-level capital crimes.
Unable to obtain lethal injection drugs, states continued to expand the use of other methods of execution. For instance, after enacting legislation in 2024, Louisiana executed a person in March for the first time in 15 years, using nitrogen hypoxia. Arkansas enacted legislation in March allowing nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution. Also in March, South Carolina carried out the first US execution by firing squad in 15 years. Idaho passed legislation making firing squad its primary method of execution. States also sought to reinstate the death penalty, such as a bill pending in Iowa, or enact laws to expand the crimes subject to capital punishment in Oklahoma and Idaho, despite being unconstitutional.
Although the Biden administration transferred 11 detainees out of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in January, the prison continued to hold 15 detainees without access to a fair trial. Three had never even been charged with a crime. The only charges brought have been in the Guantánamo military commissions, in violation of international law and standards regarding fair trials. Detainees could face the death penalty if convicted. Three defendants in the 9/11 military commission case in 2024 reached an agreement with military prosecutors to plead guilty and avoid the death penalty, but the secretary of defense reversed that agreement, and the case remained in legal limbo, with the death penalty still an option. The use of capital punishment in these cases, after proceedings that did not meet international standards and after the detainees were systematically tortured, would constitute arbitrary deprivation of life. After 24 years, there had been no accountability for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
The Trump administration detained at least 700 migrants and asylum seekers at Guantánamo during 2025.
On 19 January, former president Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Native American activist Leonard Peltier to home confinement due to serious concerns about his conviction, sentencing and appeals process. He had spent nearly 50 years in prison on two life sentences relating to the deaths of two federal agents in South Dakota in 1975.7
According to government statistics released in 2025, 46,728 people were killed by gun violence in 2023, the most recent year for which data exists. There were 408 mass shootings in 2025, including 233 school shootings. Gun violence was the leading cause of death among US children and teenagers. Rising political extremism and violent rhetoric led to several incidents of political violence and fatal shootings of public figures and politicians via firearms.
The Trump administration enacted and implemented various pro-gun policies including EOs, regulatory changes, reversals of prior policies and creation of task forces to protect gun owners’ rights. These actions rolled back prior efforts to address gun violence.
Since March, hundreds of people had been killed and injured by US air strikes in Yemen. In April, a US air strike on a migrant detention centre in the city of Sa’ada killed and injured dozens of migrants. Amnesty International found no evidence that the detention centre was a lawful target and called on the USA to investigate the strike as a potential violation of international humanitarian law.8 In May, the USA and Yemen reached a ceasefire deal, pausing the conflict.
There was no accountability or reparations paid for previous killings of civilians by the USA, documented by Amnesty International, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.
Since September, the USA used drones to strike 35 boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that were allegedly carrying drugs, killing at least 123 individuals.9 The USA claimed the boats were used by drug traffickers to ship narcotics and attempted to justify the actions as “self-defence” or as part of a widespread “war on drugs”. Based on all available reporting, these lethal strikes lacked legal justification and amounted to extrajudicial executions because the boats posed no immediate threat to the USA or to the life of any person.
The USA continued to supply arms and other military and security equipment to Israel in violation of US laws and policies intended to prevent arms transfers that risked contributing to civilian harm and violations of human rights or international humanitarian law.
Sexual violence against American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women remained alarmingly high. Government data suggested that they were 2.2 times more likely to experience sexual violence than non-Indigenous women. Only a limited number of Indigenous Tribes could legally prosecute non-Indigenous perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women (though most perpetrators were non-Indigenous men). AI/AN survivors continued to face barriers to accessing post-rape care, including forensic examinations necessary for criminal cases.
The Trump administration revoked executive measures addressing environmental impacts on marginalized communities, including eliminating environmental justice offices in federal agencies and terminating funds for local organizations to tackle environmental and climate harms. On 20 January, President Trump signed an EO to initiate the USA’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement – the global treaty to combat climate change – annulling the Biden administration’s emissions reduction targets.
In January, the Trump administration issued an EO declaring “energy dominance” a national emergency and put forth policies to increase energy production, including reviving the coal-mining industry despite its known harmful environmental and health concerns. Simultaneously, the administration issued an EO prioritizing AI development despite the extensive amounts of energy required by AI data centres. The International Energy Agency reported that by 2030 the electricity consumption for AI globally would be slightly more than the total electricity consumption of Japan, with the USA using more than half of this.
In June, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff urged the Trump administration to stop politicizing the EPA and prioritize science-based environmental protections for vulnerable communities. In July, the Department of Energy issued a report discrediting the scientific community’s consensus that greenhouse gas emissions were major drivers of climate change and adversely impact health, concluding that climate change was not an urgent concern.
© Amnesty International
Amnesty Report 2025/26: Zur Lage der Menschenrechte weltweit; USA 2025 (Periodischer Bericht, Deutsch)
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