Marco Rubio’s State Department Redefines What It Calls “Human Rights”

The State Department under Marco Rubio seems to think little of human rights and seeks to change the term’s definition.

NPR reports that the department will no longer include criticisms of poor prison conditions, government corruption, or political processes that are restrictive, in its reports on international human rights. That means government repression, such as restricting peaceful assembly or preventing free and fair elections, will no longer be documented by the agency.

The news outlet cited an editing memo and other documents showing that department employees have been ordered to “streamline” the reports to meet the minimum legal requirements. State Department reports are required by law to be a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights” for every country.

The reports are usually released every year in March or April, and 2024’s reports were completed this year in January but are now being re-edited by the Trump administration, delaying them until May, sources in the department told NPR. Last month, Politico reported that references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, would be removed from the reports.

Some of the changes appear to reflect the Trump administration’s foreign relationships. For example, the report on El Salvador had its section on prison conditions erased, raising questions as to whether the administration’s deal with the country to send undocumented immigrants to Salvadoran prisons, which are accused of flagrant human rights abuses, had something to do with it.

The report on Hungary, whose President Viktor Orbán enjoys high esteem from President Trump and many leading conservatives, had its section on “Corruption in Government” crossed out. Orbán has restricted press freedoms and civil liberties in the country. Experts say that the changes to the reports will undermine the State Department’s credibility.

“You can’t overstate the value in the real world of the annual State Department human rights reports being credible and impartial,” said Christopher Le Mon, who worked in the agency’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor until January.

“You also can’t overstate the damage it will do to that credibility if the Trump administration’s edits are seen to diminish—not just the scope of what are defined as human rights, but also if those edits are seen to play favorites,” Le Mon added.

The Trump administration has already been disregarding human rights here in the U.S., whether it’s the lack of due process in its mass deportation efforts, its use of El Salvador’s questionable prisons to house deported immigrants (or possibly soon U.S. citizens), its use of masked, plainclothes officers to grab people off the street, its restrictions on the press, or its attacks on academic freedom or many other actions. Maybe the administration is realizing it can’t speak credibly when it comes to basic rights and freedoms.

Donald Trump’s administration won’t stop making horrific jokes about Senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garica, whom the government wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month.

Van Hollen was able to meet with Abrego Garcia Thursday, after El Salvador’s government refused to release him and the Maryland Democrat was initially denied access to the prison where he was being held.

In a post on X Friday, the White House wrote that it had “fixed” a New York Times headline about the meeting.

The original headline, “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Man in El Salvador” had been edited in red pen so that it read, “Senator Meets with Deported MS-13 Alien in El Salvador Who’s Never Coming Back.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wednesday that it was up to El Salvador’s government to return or keep Abrego Garcia, but she was adamant that he was “not coming back to our country.”

Bondi also said that the media should apologize to Trump for calling Abrego Garcia a “Maryland man,” even though that’s just a simple description of who he is and where he lives.

This post follows another cruel joke from the White House earlier Friday, where Trump staff compared Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia to a meeting between Trump and Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a woman who was raped and killed by a Salvadoran man in 2023. The Trump administration has repeatedly trotted out Morin as a means of justifying its decision to send brown men who had nothing to do with that crime to a foreign prison.

The Trump administration has claimed that Abrego Garcia, who has no criminal record, was not only a member of MS-13, but that he was a “top leader” and “engaged in human trafficking,” while only providing thin evidence that he was even affiliated with the group.

This story has been updated.

Senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting with wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador was stage-managed by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, right down to the table settings.

Bukele used the meeting to mount a propaganda campaign on X, posting photos from their meeting and claiming that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”

In reality, those “margaritas” were glasses with cherries and salted rims, placed on the table in front of Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia by a Bukele aide in the middle of their meeting to stage a photo. The photo was quite different from the one Van Hollen shared.

Abrego Garcia’s attire of a button-down shirt with jeans and a baseball cap was also different from what he was photographed wearing when he arrived at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses. Gone were the white shirt and pants uniform of the prison’s inmates, and the cap covered Abrego Garcia’s newly shaved head, a practice that every inmate at the facility experiences.

It all seems to have been choreographed by Bukele to refute the reports of what life is really like in the prison, as well as the rumors that Abrego Garcia may have been in poor physical condition or deceased.

Clearly, El Salvador’s president is using the visit and propaganda photographs as proof that Abrego Garcia is safe in his government’s custody. But the facts are that the building trades worker was mistakenly deported and should be immediately returned to the U.S. as ordered by the Supreme Court and lower court judges. But both the White House and Bukele continue to ignore the rulings and the law.

Donald Trump’s administration is moving forward with more expedited deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—despite a Supreme Court ruling that requires it to provide advance notice and a court hearing.

In a new filing Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that “dozens” of Venezuelan men held at the Bluebonnet Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, had received forms to expedite their removal from the United States under the AEA.

In a declaration, Attorney Karene Brown said that her client at Bluebonnet, who has a pending asylum claim and no removal order, had been approached by ICE agents Thursday and asked to sign a form that was only available in English.

Brown’s client only speaks Spanish, and he refused to sign the form. ICE agents informed him that the form was “coming from the president, and that he will be deported even if he did not sign it.”

An English-speaking Venezuelan man told her client that the form was a notice that he had been designated as a member of Tren de Aragua, and that he “must be removed” from the United States. He told her client that ICE had said he would be deported either Thursday or Friday to Venezuela.

Another man, Luis Yoender Mercado, who had a hearing scheduled for April 23, received a similar notice. He was told by ICE agents that he would be removed to El Salvador, according to a declaration from Michelle Brané, the executive director of an immigration nonprofit organization, who spoke directly with Mercado’s sister.

Brané said she had received messages from several people indicating that individuals at Bluebonnet were given notices that they were about to be removed.

In another declaration, attorney Travis John Collins said that his 18-year-old client at Bluebonnet had been “taken away” by ICE agents Thursday night, after being transferred to the facility earlier this week. Collin’s client’s father, who was also moved to Bluebonnet, saw his son through a window, who was crying as he held up a piece of paper.

“Another detainee who spoke English was able to read that the paper said, ‘Deportation.’ The country of removal was not visible,” Collins said. “Because he has no final immigration order, the government could only be seeking to remove him under the AEA, not the immigration laws.”

Collins’s young client and his relatives had originally been detained by ICE agents in March. Agents questioned the 18-year-old about a photograph of him holding a gun on Facebook, which they said proved his connection to TdA. According to Collins, the gun was actually a water pistol.

The ACLU’s filing stated that Brown’s client, “like other men against whom the Alien Enemies Act has already been used, does not have a final order of removal and is therefore not removable under the immigration laws.”

“There is no indication that, as with past AEA removals, lawyers were being provided with the form or told that their clients were being designated under the AEA,” the ACLU’s filing stated.

The ACLU asked the court to “certify a class” and grant a broader restraining order to prevent the removal of multiple individuals under the AEA.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that while the Trump administration could continue deportations under the AEA, it needed to provide detainees with the opportunity to file habeas corpus challenges, a complex and rarely successful legal procedure. The court also ruled that these needed to be filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA-aligned court in Texas where the deportation flights are staged.

But crucially, detainees must be given the opportunity to “actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the high court ruled. It seems the Trump administration is once again ignoring the order.

Members of the Trump administration have continued to insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t actually require them to give due process to detainees.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized this crucial point in her dissent, writing that “the government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025,” and that it could not “immediately resume removing individuals without notice.”

“To the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court,” she wrote.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration has ordered another American citizen to leave the country immediately.

Pamela Rioles Saeed, an immigration attorney in Arizona, received an email from Customs and Border Protection telling her that her parole was revoked and she must leave the United States within seven days, she told KNXV-TV. Rioles Saeed is a Boston-born American citizen and is not on parole.

“I thought this was for one of my clients, but then I saw that it was addressed only to me,” she told KNXV-TV.

Rioles Saeed is at least the second American immigration attorney to report receiving an email from the Department of Homeland Security in the last week. On April 11, American citizen and Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni received an email telling her to leave the country immediately or risk being “subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Micheroni also thought the email was meant for one of her clients, she told NBC Boston.

The DHS recently sent out a number of parole termination notices in an effort to get immigrants to self-deport as soon as possible, a number of news outlets have reported. Saeed said that another attorney in her chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association had told her other lawyers in his office had received similar notices.

Some of the emails may have been sent to “unintended recipients,” such as lawyers representing those immigrants, by mistake, DHS said in separate statements to NBC Boston and KNXV-TV.

Rioles Saeed said she will ignore the statement for now and urged other American citizens who receive the message to do the same. “There is a true recklessness coming from the government and shows an intimidating attitude towards our immigrant clients,” she told KNXV-TV.

The threatening messages come amid the Trump administration’s aggressive and unlawful deportation efforts, which include revoking nearly 1,000 international student visas and disobeying court orders to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison. The president has even publicly pondered the possibility of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—an illegal (and terrifying) but increasingly imminent possibility.

Americans are starting to see through Donald Trump’s economic promises as he continues to tank the economy with his volatile approach to global trade.

A new poll from The Economist/YouGov, conducted April 13–15, shows that Trump’s economic approval is at an all-time low. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the economy is getting worse, up 5 percent from “Liberation Day,” when Trump implemented reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent or more on about 90 countries, sending stock markets plummeting to a generational low. He then rescinded the majority of those tariffs days later (but increased the ones on China), causing confusion and chaos for consumers and small-business owners.

Three-quarters of voters said they thought tariffs “will increase the price of goods they buy,” and about two-thirds of Americans think the state of the stock market is Trump’s fault, according to the YouGov poll.

As data journalist G. Elliott Morris pointed out Friday in a Substack post, Trump’s average net economic approval in YouGov polls over the last month is -6 percent, the worst he’s ever polled as president. While handling the outbreak of Covid-19 during his first term, Trump’s net economic approval rating was 3 percent, Morris noted.

Trump ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the promise of economic prosperity and change for millions of Americans fed up with inflation and the high cost of living. He pledged an “end to the devastating inflation crisis,” lower prices, tax cuts, and a tariff scheme that would bolster American manufacturing. But as the likelihood of a recession inches closer, just three months into Trump’s term, people are clearly starting to lose faith in the president’s disastrous economic plan. Forty-two percent of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat oppose” Trump’s budget, and the percentage of Americans who say the economy is their top concern has increased since Trump took office, the poll found.

The president’s performance isn’t flailing in just the Economist/YouGov poll, either. Investor sentiment has only been lower a handful of times since this data started being recorded, including post-9/11 and during the 2008 global financial crisis, according to a review of economic polls from The Independent.

In a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents conducted April 4–9, nearly two-thirds of people said they don’t think Trump is handling inflation well and 58 percent think he is mishandling trade policy.

“Three months into his second administration, the honeymoon might be over for President Donald Trump,” Tatishe Nteta, the poll’s director, said in a statement. Hopefully he’s right.

Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was pressed Thursday on CNN about the administration’s efforts to bring back wrongly deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Are you personally aware of any steps that have been taken to facilitate his return to the United States?” Kaitlan Collins asked Homan, citing Judge Paula Xinis’s assertion in federal court that the Trump administration has done “nothing” to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. Homan dodged the question and repeated the same lies.

“Look, I think he’s a citizen of El Salvador. He’s in El Salvador, he’s home. He’s a illegal alien with a final order of removal. He’s a MS-13 member, which is now classified as a terrorist,” Homan replied.

“So should I read that as to say nothing has been done to bring him back to the United States? That’s what it sounds like,” Collins said.

“I can’t speak to everybody in the administration. I can just tell you what my stance is, and uh, I think we did the right thing, I think he’s where he should be,” Homan said.

Homan’s response says everything about the intransigence of the Trump administration. They keep repeating that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member, despite the fact that he has no criminal record and is a member of a building trades union. The administration claims he’s been sent “home” when his U.S. citizen wife and children are in Maryland.

At this point, the Supreme Court has ordered the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., Xinis has ordered the government to provide her regular updates on the steps it is taking, and an appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to halt these proceedings. It’s clear that the White House is intent on ignoring every judicial check on its power, refusing to acknowledge that it has to abide by due process and return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

Donald Trump is furious that Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to meet with a man his administration wrongly deported to El Salvador.

In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, Trump attempted to mock the Maryland Democrat, who traveled all the way to Latin America to find Kilmar Abrego Garcia, after the Trump administration had him placed in a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error.”

“Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!” Trump wrote.

But Van Hollen’s public crusade to reunite with his deported constituent was precisely what allowed them to meet. Although Van Hollen was initially denied access to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses, he’d made a strong case for being allowed access to Abrego Garcia. It’s still unclear exactly how the two were able to meet, but Van Hollen has promised to provide a “full update” on his return to the U.S.

The White House also took a shot on Van Hollen—in the most grotesque way possible.

In a post on X, Trump’s staff made a side-by-side of a photograph of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia and one of Trump meeting with Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a woman who was raped and killed by a Salvadoran man in 2023.

“We are not the same,” the post read.

The Trump administration has repeatedly trotted out Morin as a means of justifying its decision to send brown men who had nothing to do with that crime to a foreign prison.

But no one seemed more mad than El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whom Trump paid $6 million to keep Abrego Garcia (and other deportees) in prison. He also attempted to ridicule Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garica.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote on X.

“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody,” Bukele wrote in a separate post.

The Trump administration has falsely claimed that Abrego Garcia was actually a “convicted” criminal and “top leader of MS-13,” despite only presenting thin evidence of Garcia’s gang affiliation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a blistering ruling Thursday smacking down the White House’s latest attempt to stall Abrego Garcia’s return.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the three-judge panel wrote in its unanimous ruling.

“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

The White House’s attempt to halt proceedings in the case of mistakenly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia was smacked down by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a blistering ruling Thursday.

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the panel wrote in its ruling. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.

“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” the ruling concluded.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration appealed a court order from U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordering the government to go through an expedited discovery process, allowing Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to question officials and make requests for documents about what federal officials are actually doing to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. In an unusually quick turnaround, the Fourth Circuit issued its ruling the next day,

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador despite a 2019 immigration court ruling barring his removal from the United States, and the government has already admitted in court that his removal was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government has to “facilitate” his return to the U.S., but the Trump administration has stonewalled, calling Abrego Garcia everything from a gang member to the equivalent of Osama bin Laden.

Now the Trump administration has the option of appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court. But since they’re already ignoring one ruling from the high court, what do they expect if the ruling doesn’t go their way? The easiest way to make the case of Abrego Garcia go away is to follow the law and return him from the El Salvador gulag where he is being held.

Read the Fourth Circuit’s ruling here.

Donald Trump may be trying to shield his old buddy Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, from being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, The Washington Post reported Thursday. 

David Eisner, a senior presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Treasury, wrote to senior staff at the IRS that Lindell, a “friend of the president,” was “concerned he may have been inappropriately targeted” after receiving his second audit in as many years, according to two people familiar with the request and records reviewed by the Post.  

Eisner’s inquiry was then referred to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. 

Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019, told the Post the request from the Trump official was “so inappropriate.”

“In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case,” she said.

Lindell claimed that the Treasury had “misconstrued” his request and claimed he had been trying to ask about an employee retention credit he’d received from the IRS. He said he’d already emailed the agency weeks ago and been referred to the Treasury. 

Lindell, a former millionaire, spent months after the 2020 presidential election pushing theories about a grand conspiracy between electronic voting companies to keep Trump out of the White House. Lindell is facing a series of expensive lawsuits for not only allegedly defaming these companies but attempting to profit from his conspiracies. 

During a hearing in U.S. District Court Wednesday, Lindell refused to pay the more than $50,000 he owes to Smartmatic, after filing a frivolous counterclaim against the electronic voting company he smeared. The MyPillow CEO insisted that he couldn’t pay because his company was already $70 million in debt and was already paying garnishments to the IRS.  

“I’m in ruins,” he claimed, tearfully.