USA: People Seeking Safety At Risk In The USA

United States President Donald Trump’s first term was marked by bigotry, xenophobia, white supremacist rhetoric, and extensive and serious human rights violations. His administration was responsible for untold damage to human rights in the U.S. and abroad, further damaging the very institutions that are supposed to be responsible for ensuring that all people can live freely in safety and dignity. The Biden administration then continued and expanded Trump’s cruel immigration policies, leaving people on the move inside the U.S. and at the U.S.’s border in increasingly precarious situations and at high risk. This second Trump term must change course, and Amnesty International will continue to fight for everyone’s human rights to be respected. 

President Trump has promised in his second term to implement a mass deportation campaign reaching millions of immigrants and people seeking safety in the United States. Such a campaign would include a national emergency, raids and racial profiling, mass arbitrary detention, and deportations without due process and in disregard of risks upon return. 

This reckless disregard for people’s dignity, well-being, and human rights will jeopardize millions of people who sought refuge and shared opportunity in the U.S. and devastate towns and cities across the country where they built new lives, raised families, and contributed to the shared prosperity of their communities. As of 2024, there are approximately 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and millions more living under temporary statuses that Trump has promised to terminate.

The U.S. government has an obligation under international law to ensure that its laws, policies, and practices do not place migrants and people seeking safety at an increased risk of human rights abuses. While the U.S., like all countries, has the power to regulate the entry and stay of non-nationals in its territory, it can only do so within the limits of its human rights obligations.  

The U.S. is trading fear and cruelty for human rights, pushing the country even further away from the decades’-old international obligations to uphold the human right to seek asylum and not send people back to the very harms that they fled. All people have the human right not to be returned to a country where they would be at real risk of torture or other serious human rights harms. To protect against that, people have the right under international law to seek and enjoy asylum – regardless of their manner of entry. Detention and deportation procedures must be in accordance with due process of law and include guarantees that human rights will be respected and protected. All people have the human rights to be free from discriminatory practices and to family unity.  

Human rights are universal principles that transcend politics and offer a roadmap to a better future. The incoming administration of President Donald Trump must ensure that the U.S. government meets its human rights obligations, uses its influence to advance human rights globally, and engages other governments to do the same. It must denounce language around immigration and asylum grounded in racism and white nationalism.