(Washington) The NGO Human Rights Watch warned Wednesday that President Donald Trump is transforming the United States into an authoritarian state while democracy and human rights are under attack from all sides.
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In its annual report, the New York-based human rights organization (HRW) said the Republican billionaire’s return to the White House had intensified a “downward spiral” in human rights, already under pressure from Russia and China.
“The rules-based international order is collapsing,” the group warned.
In the United States, HRW judges that Trump has shown “blatant disregard for human rights and committed egregious violations”.
In descriptions of the United States that would have been unthinkable in previous annual reports, the group, for example, highlighted the deployment of masked and armed federal immigration police (ICE) agents, who carried out “hundreds of unnecessarily violent and abusive raids” notably in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“The administration’s designation of scapegoats on a racial or ethnic basis (…), repeated acts of retaliation against perceived political enemies, as well as attempts to expand the coercive powers of the executive and neutralize democratic checks and balances, underline an assumed slide towards authoritarianism in the United States,” underlines the report.
Human Rights Watch also repeats its findings that the United States committed enforced disappearances – a crime under international law – by sending 252 Venezuelan migrants to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
“Wrong sense”
For the organization, democracy has retreated to the level of 1985, when the Soviet Union still existed.
“Russia and China are less free today than 20 years ago. The same goes for the United States,” the report said.
“With Trump’s first year (of the second term) in power, history is accelerating in the wrong direction: all the achievements, the progress that has been hard-won over the last decades are now threatened,” alarms Philippe Bolopion, executive director of HRW, in an interview with AFP.
For HRW, the response must come from “a new alliance, a strategic alliance” of “middle powers”, united around a “common core of democratic values” and respect for international law, such as Canada, the countries of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, and even Australia.
The 529-page report contrasts with that on human rights recently published by the US State Department, which watered down the sections devoted to countries friendly to Donald Trump such as El Salvador.
Human Rights Watch specifies that gang violence has “significantly decreased” in this country, but that the authorities have committed “widespread violations in 2025, including mass arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment of detainees, as well as violations of the right to a fair trial”.
Concerning Israel, the group once again denounces “crimes against humanity, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing” against the Palestinians in Gaza.
According to him, Israeli authorities have “escalated their atrocities” in 2025, including “killing, mutilating, starving and forcibly displacing Palestinians and destroying their homes, schools and infrastructure on a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine.”
Israel, with support from Washington, angrily rejected the accusation of genocide first made by Human Rights Watch in December 2024.
