Trump’s First 100 Days an Assault on Rights

By Human Rights Watch

WAHINGTON DC | 27 April 2025 (IDN) — The Trump administration’s first 100 days in office have been a relentless barrage of actions that violate, threaten, or undermine the human rights of people in the United States and abroad, Human Rights Watch said today. To illustrate the breadth and depth of the damage done since Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2025, Human Rights Watch released a list of 100 harmful actions during these 100 days.

 “In just 100 days, the Trump administration has inflicted enormous damage to human rights in the United States and around the world,” said Tanya Greene, US program director at Human Rights Watch. “We are deeply concerned that these attacks on fundamental freedoms will continue unabated.”

The Human Rights Watch compilation of harm from the first 100 days of the Trump administration includes attacks on free speech; the rights of asylum seekers and immigrants; health, environmental, and social protections; education; foreign aid and humanitarian assistance; and the rule of law.

Since January, the administration has unlawfully transferred Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national to his home country, deported other immigrants to El Salvador under circumstances that amount to enforced disappearances, and removed asylum seekers with various nationalities to Panama and Costa Rica in violation of international law.

The administration has also attacked the rights to freedom of speech and assembly, including by arbitrarily detaining and seeking to deport noncitizens because of their activism related to Palestine.

These damaging policies are reverberating globally as the Trump administration has slashed support for human rights beyond US borders. The administration abruptly ended US foreign aid programs, putting many people who were benefitting from them in life-threatening peril.

The administration cut life-saving assistance for hundreds of thousands of people in conflict zones and walked away from longstanding efforts to support human rights defenders, independent journalists, and fact-finding groups, including those documenting unfolding atrocities.

Human Rights Watch is also tracking efforts by the administration that will enable racist practices. The Trump administration is putting new pressure on important work to ensure people have access to the truth about US history and has carried out sharp new attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, which are important tools to promote equality of treatment, enshrined in human rights law and the 14th amendment of the US Constitution.

Many of the administration’s actions are being challenged in court. Ordinary people in the United States and abroad are also expressing their opposition to them.

 “Protests across the country point to the critical importance of basic rights and freedoms,” Greene said. “People in the United States and abroad will need to rely on the same fundamental freedoms that are under attack to demonstrate their resistance and resilience.”

Diminishing Health, Environmental, and Social Protections

Health

• 1. Eliminated over $1 billion worth of food assistance for school lunches and food banks in food insecure school districts and communities across the United States.
  2. Eliminated staff responsible for setting standards for health programs, creating impediments to receipt of Medicaid benefits, food assistance, childcare, and other services.
  3. Rescinded a policy barring immigration agents from raiding churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals, leaving immigrants, including domestic violence survivors, afraid to go to health care facilities.
  4. Reduced workforce at the US Department of Health and Human Services, which is likely to result in reduced food assistance provided by Meals on Wheels.
  5. Fired 10,000 Health and Human Services employees in the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, depriving them of staff to protect public health and safety.
  6. Paused grants from the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hampering the development of new medicines to address health conditions.
  7. Disrupted the work of federal agencies vital for monitoring and responding to public health concerns, making it harder for public health agencies around the country to address measles, HIV, and other outbreaks.
  8. Cut enrollment periods and assistance for people who rely on public and private health insurance acquired through the Affordable Care Act’s government-operated marketplace.
  9. Ordered medical institutions, including hospitals and medical schools, that receive federal funding for education and research to stop providing gender-affirming care for those under age 19.
  10. Rescinded Executive Order 14112—Reforming Federal Funding and Support for Tribal Nations—delaying or reducing health education programs for Native Americans.
  11. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) terminated grant funds under the Fair Housing Initiative Program.

Reproductive Freedom

• 1. Abandoned a federal lawsuit to ensure healthcare providers in Idaho, a state with a total abortion ban, will be required to offer lifesaving abortion care in emergencies, sending a message to Idaho and other states that they need not do so.
  2. Ended travel reimbursement and leave benefits for military members to go across state lines to seek abortion care.
  3. Renewed enforcement of the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds from being used for abortion care.
  4. Cut US aid programs and reinstated the Mexico City Policy and the Geneva Consensus Declaration, making it harder for people around the world to get contraception, maternal care, and other health services.

Environmental Human Rights

• 1. Withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, which will contribute to the acceleration of global climate change.
  2. Issued an executive order and froze funding under the Inflation Reduction Act for some renewable energy projects, a retreat from emission reduction commitments.
  3. Cut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget by 65 percent, significantly reducing the agency’s ability to protect the environment.
  4. The EPA announced on March 12 a deregulatory action to weaken key regulations on the fossil fuel industry, including regulation of toxic pollutants released into air and water, and issued an official statement that grants certain coal plants permission to bypass EPA regulations on toxic pollutants.
  5. Decided to close the Environmental Justice offices and end related programming, eliminating the EPA’s ability to address environmental harm disproportionately concentrated within Black, poor, and/or minority communities.
  6. Dismissed 400 staff members from the Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service, crippling the agency’s ability to enforce crucial legislation banning the import of illegally felled timber, affecting Indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities around the world.
  7. Eliminated funding to make affordable housing across the country more energy efficient and climate resilient.

 Social Protection

• 1. Sweeping cuts in staff and rushed recoding of data at the Social Security Administration is causing people to experience delays and disruptions in accessing critical benefits.
  2. Reinstatement of an overpayment “claw back” fee of 100 percent of monthly entitlements may leave older people or those with disabilities unable to buy food or pay their rent.

Labor Rights

• 1. Cut two-thirds of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) workforce, putting miners, meat packers, firefighters, and child farmworkers at risk.
  2. Rescinded a November 16, 2023 memorandum—called Advancing Worker Empowerment, Rights, and High Labor Standards Globally—which will result in lower labor standards and fewer efforts to protect working people’s rights.
  3. Cancelled grants through the Department of Labor’s International Labor Affairs Bureau, which fights child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking in 40 countries.

Attacking Fair and Equal Treatment

Rights of Immigrants

• 1. Issued a memo for a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule with new designations for expedited removal of immigrants, providing almost no access to lawyers or judicial review and almost no time to defend their cases.
  2. DHS decided to authorize federal agencies and other law enforcement to investigate, determine the location of, and apprehend undocumented migrants, and an executive order expanded the use of state and local police “to the maximum extent permitted by law…to perform the functions of immigration officers.” The administration has also sought to authorize the involvement of the US military in immigration enforcement.

Nondiscrimination

• 1. Issued an executive order that terminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, programs, and activities in the federal government.
  2. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau urged a court to undo a settlement that stemmed from a lawsuit initiated during the first Trump administration that pointed to racial discrimination in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
  3. Rescinded the Equal Employment Opportunity executive order signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, during the Civil Rights Era, to bar discrimination against federal contract workers.
  4. An order placed on paid leave people who worked against racial discrimination and on behalf of basic constitutional and human rights to equal treatment in the federal government.
  5. Issued an executive order that required the government to no longer recognize transgender and nonbinary people. The administration now only recognizes two genders, male and female, which it defines as fixed at conception. People in federal custody will be housed according to their sex assigned at birth, putting them at risk of physical and sexual violence.
  6. Rescinded an executive order that aimed to prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity abroad in programs funded by the federal government.
  7. Eliminated DEI programs in the military, putting anti-discrimination gains in the military at risk.
  8. Revoked an order and policies that strove for fair and accountable artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and directed all federal agencies and partners to remove any considerations of “fairness,” “safety,” and “responsibility” in training and deploying AI, even as the government expands its use of AI.
  9. Rescinded 11 nonbinding guidance documents providing businesses with recommendations on accessible parking, hotel accommodations, and retail maintenance for disability access, and terminated federal programs mandating accessibility by the federal government, directly affecting people with disabilities.

Law Enforcement Accountability and Criminal Sentencing

• 1. Rescinded an executive order that mandated a national federal register of police officer misconduct and violence to prevent the rehiring of abusive officers.
  2. The Justice Department eliminated its use of consent decrees with police departments, compromising efforts to ensure rights-respecting policing in cities throughout the country.
  3. Issued an executive directive to bring “capital charges for all capital crimes,” which will subject more people to the death penalty.
  4. Threatened US citizens convicted of crimes with unprecedented and rights-violating incarceration in El Salvador’s prisons.

Access to Justice

• 1. Issued a series of executive orders aimed at prominent law firms, imposing severe sanctions that were widely perceived as retribution for those firms’ involvement in prominent cases against the president.
  2. Severely curtailed “know your rights” legal information programs to help immigrants represent themselves or find legal representation.
  3. Terminated funding through which the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement had provided legal representation services for unaccompanied immigrant children.

Voting Rights

• 1. Issued an executive order on elections to impose new documentary requirements for voter registration, set deadlines for mail-in ballots, and give intrusive authority to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to check voter registration.
  2. Modified longstanding US Census Bureau policies and methods aimed at ensuring political power and federal funding is fairly distributed in the United States.

Threats to Freedoms of Speech, Assembly, and Access To Information

Free Speech

• 1. Used the cancellation of federal grants to attempt to pressure and curtail nonpartisan organizations Vera Institute for Justice and Estrella del Paso’s programmatic independence.
  2. Initiated arbitrary arrests and deportation orders of international students and scholars in retaliation for their political viewpoints and activism related to Palestine, using illegitimate and false justifications.
  3. Eliminated vital news programs, including Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, as part of the termination of the US Agency for Global Media and Voice of America.
  4. Cut US funding for secure digital communications relied on by journalists, human rights defenders, and dissidents.
  5. Banned the Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to adopt the administration’s nomenclature change on the Gulf of Mexico.
  6. Banned certain words and terms from use by the US government on official documents and websites.
  7. Initiated social media monitoring and surveillance of protests.

Access to Information

• 1. Issued an executive order that threatens schools and school systems with loss of federal funds for virtually any mention of racial or ethnic discrimination or any recognition of gender identity in schools.
  2. Rescinded a policy barring immigration agents from raiding churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals.
  3. Paused active Office of Civil Rights investigations and opened the way to new investigations that turn the legitimate purpose of federal anti-discrimination protections on its head.
  4. Issued an executive order directing a near-complete shutdown of the Department of Education, an agency created by Congress in part to end discrimination and inequality in education, and shut down the National Center for Education Statistics, which determined funding allocations to high-poverty and rural schools.
  5. Censored content at federal museums, including the country’s premier Smithsonian Institution.
  6. Rescinded Executive Order 14112, which reformed federal funding to Native American Tribes, along with layoffs at the Bureau of Indian Education.

Deporting People to Danger

Ignoring Rules against Return to Harm

• 1. Summarily arrested and deported 137 Venezuelans without any due process or protection against return to harm under US immigration law and the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
  2. Sent a Salvadoran national, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting his deportation there, in what the administration acknowledged as an error but has made no effort to remedy.
  3. Placed people from Venezuela who have been living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) into expedited removal proceedings and deported some to face abusive treatment and conditions at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Some have been subsequently sent from Guantánamo to Venezuela.
  4. Put people from Haiti living in the United States, some with legal status, in removal proceedings and deported them to Haiti.
  5. Issued an executive order to end the “parole” legal status for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, with some already being placed in expedited removal proceedings.

Preventing Access to Asylum, Refugee, and Protected Status

• 1. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have prevented hundreds of asylum seekers, including families with children, from countries with problematic human rights conditions from accessing asylum procedures and summarily deported them to Costa Rica and Panama. Many then returned to their home countries under conditions that call into question whether their decisions to return were voluntary.
  2. Issued an executive order that prevents people fearing persecution in their home countries from accessing asylum procedures, claiming there is an invasion of the United States by noncitizens.
  3. Issued an executive order that suspends entry into the United States for anyone posing a public health risk, without specifying what that risk might be.
  4. Shut down an app for making asylum claims and sent thousands of people who entered the US legally warnings that they should leave.
  5. Issued an executive order indefinitely suspending the US refugee admissions program, claiming admitting refugees is “detrimental” to US national interests and abandoning the 125,000 refugees authorized to come to the United States annually. A later order made a single exception for white Afrikaners from South Africa.
  6. Another executive order suggests that renewal of TPS for people from Somalia, South Sudan, Myanmar, Nepal, Syria, Yemen, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Ukraine is uncertain, and the administration has announced an intention to end TPS for people from Cameroon and Afghanistan.
  7. Denied resettlement of refugees, including those with family in the US, under the “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program” executive order.

Putting the Executive Above the Law

Accountability and Transparency

• 1. Officials have made statements signaling that the executive branch is above the law, including DHS Secretary Tom Homan’s statement that he did not care about a judge’s orders seeking to block the deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador and President Trump’s public denial of the judge’s authority and calling for his impeachment.
  2. Fired 17 inspectors general across several executive branch agencies.
  3. Stripped the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of its staff, reduced staffing at the DHS’s immigration detention ombudsman’s office, and at the ombudsman of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ office.
  4. Fired freedom of information officers across government agencies, including the entire Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) department of the Office of Personnel Management.
  5. Removed thousands of government web pages and datasets, such as demographic health surveys, AIDS information pages, surveillance dashboards, data on racial disparities, and social vulnerability and environmental justice indexes.
  6. Ordered historically independent agencies, led by experts in their fields, to submit their regulations to the White House for review and coordinate legal positions with the administration.
  7. Discussed classified military actions on the messaging app Signal, indicating that the administration may be using it to sidestep federal laws meant to preserve government records and review of their communications under the FOIA.

Ability to Seek Remedies and Justice When Harmed

• 1. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum instructing Justice Department attorneys to “zealously defend the interests of the United States,” entirely as defined by the president, and to focus on Trump’s “priorities,” including prosecuting officials who have opposed him.
  2. DOGE used AI to execute sweeping cuts to federal agencies, making it difficult to track the cuts or challenge them.
  3. The administration has been trying to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an oversight agency created to protect the public from fraud by the finance industry.

Privacy

• 1. Issued an executive order that aims to facilitate the extensive sharing of people’s sensitive personal data between government agencies, which could fuel abuses against vulnerable people.
  2. Made a data sharing agreement that puts US taxpayers and people included in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) databases in danger of the information being accessed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and DHS officials, as part of the administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.

Undermining Human Rights Globally

US Support for Human Rights Abroad

• 1. Decided to sharply reduce US government coverage of specific human rights issues, including prison conditions, rights of women and LGBT people, and elections in the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

US Foreign Aid Freeze and Cuts

• 1. Cut US foreign aid that provided financial support, training, and protection to independent media across the globe.
  2. Eliminated the Famine Early Warning System Network and terminated many lifesaving US food aid programs.
  3. Suspended the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, undermining or eliminating treatment for millions of people who live with HIV and AIDS and putting millions of others at greater risk of HIV infection.
  4. Halted US-funded reconstruction to damaged civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and cut many programs focused on strengthening Ukraine’s democracy.
  5. Suspended online courses for women in Afghanistan and their ability to pursue a college degree through a scholarship program funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Terminated funding for other programs in Afghanistan supporting women’s empowerment and education.
  6. Cut funding for medical treatment and emergency care for children and older people around the world.
  7. Froze aid for demining programs, leaving people in Colombia, Laos, Sudan, and other countries contaminated by landmines or explosive remnants of war, such as cluster munitions, in more danger.
  8. Cut funding to the Lifeline Embattled Civil Society Organization Assistance Fund, which provides emergency grants to organizations and individuals.
  9. Rolled back US foreign assistance for civil society groups in countries around the world, some of which, including in countries like Venezuela, may now have to limit or shut down operations.

US Weapons Transfers and Civilian Harm

• 1. Rescinded the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, leaving civilians in conflict zones at increased risk of US weapons being used for rights abuses.
  2. Rescinded National Security Memorandum 20, putting people in places where the US sends security assistance at greater risk of rights abuses.
  3. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made plans to dismantle offices and programs focused on preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm, including the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (COE).

Victims/Survivors’ Right to Remedies for Grave International Crimes

• 1.  An executive order authorized asset freezes and entry bans on International Criminal Court (ICC) officials and others supporting the court’s work.

Multilateral Organizations and Agreements

• 1.  Decided to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), triggering a financial crisis in the already underfunded institution.
  2. 2. Issued an executive orderprohibiting US funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), ending the access of millions of Palestinian refugees to vital services.

Image: Protestors hold signs as they march towards the White House during a Free Kilmar Abrego and a nationwide “Hands Off!” protest against US President Donald Trump’s policies and executive actions, in Washington, DC, April 19, 2025. © 2025 RICHARD PIERRIN/AFP