Leaked State Department drafts show significant omissions of abuses, including against LGBTQ+ people and political corruption, in reports on key U.S. allies.

Leaked drafts of the State Department’s 2024 annual human rights reports reveal that the Trump administration is preparing to sharply scale back criticism of certain allied governments with extensive records of abuse.

The draft reports for El Salvador, Israel, and Russia—reviewed by The Washington Post—are markedly shorter than those compiled last year by the Biden administration and remove entire categories of violations historically documented by the U.S. government. All references to LGBTQ+ individuals and crimes against them have been struck, and descriptions of abuses that remain have been softened.

The changes come as the administration faces criticism for reorienting America’s approach to global human rights advocacy, aligning assessments more closely with statutory minimums and executive orders issued by President Donald Trump. Internal guidance circulated earlier this year instructed staff to truncate reports, remove references to government corruption, gender-based crimes, and other abuses, and focus only on “core issues.”

Major reductions and softened language

In the draft for El Salvador—whose government has agreed, at the Trump administration’s urging, to incarcerate migrants deported from the United States—the report states there were “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in 2024. The 2023 report compiled under the Biden administration described “significant human rights issues” including government-sanctioned killings, instances of torture, and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”

Several Venezuelans deported by the U.S. to a Salvadoran prison told reporters they were subjected to repeated beatings. Yet the current draft emphasizes an “overall reduction” in prison violence, with purported deaths described as “under government review.”

The draft report on Israel, reduced from more than 100 pages last year to 25 pages, omits mention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial and his government’s judicial overhaul plans, which critics warned could threaten judicial independence. The report also removes references to Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, including Amnesty International’s finding that Israel used “an experimental facial recognition system to track Palestinians and enforce movement restrictions.”

In the Russia report, all references to the Supreme Court’s ban on LGBTQ+ organizations—labeling them “extremist”—and subsequent raids and arrests last year are absent.

Former State Department official Keifer Buckingham, now managing director at the Council for Global Equality, called the Russia omissions “a glaring omission” and said, “Secretary Rubio has repeatedly asserted that his State Department has not abandoned human rights, but it is clear by this and other actions that this administration only cares about the human rights of some people … in some countries, when it’s convenient to them.”

Internal direction to remove key content

The internal guidance directing these changes was written by Samuel Samson, a Trump political appointee at the State Department who was assigned to review the reports for El Salvador, Israel, and Russia. Samson, little known when he joined, attracted attention after writing in May on the State Department’s Substack that Europe was becoming “a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”

According to The Washington Post, Samson’s instructions told diplomats to eliminate references to abuses such as deportations to countries where torture is likely, crimes involving violence against LGBTQ+ people, and government corruption.

The drafts for El Salvador and Russia are marked “finalized,” while Israel’s is labeled “quality check.” All were edited within the last few days, the documents show.

Administration’s defense

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, defended the restructuring: “The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report. The human rights report focuses on core issues.”

The official also said the Trump administration will bring a new focus to “backsliding on freedom of expression” in certain allied countries. That stance comes as the administration faces its own criticism for seeking to deport foreign students who criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

Amnesty International condemnation

Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA’s national director of government relations and advocacy, condemned the revisions: “The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe.”

She said her organization understood “that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was… to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations.”

Klasing accused the administration of turning the reports “into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices” and warned, “it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world.”

A broader policy shift

The changes to the reports align with a broader shift in U.S. foreign policy on democracy promotion. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed diplomats not to publicly comment on other countries’ elections—including whether they were “free and fair”—unless there was a “clear and compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.”

This represents a departure from decades of U.S. practice, including Rubio’s own record. In 2012, as a senator, Rubio said, “The State Department’s annual human rights report sheds light on foreign governments’ failure to respect their citizens’ fundamental rights,” adding that it was important for the world to know that “the United States will stand with freedom-seeking people around the world and will not tolerate violations against their rights.”

The administration has continued to selectively apply human rights sanctions, including using the Magnitsky Act to target Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes over the prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro for his alleged role in a 2022 coup plot.

Congressional mandate and credibility concerns

The annual human rights reports, produced for nearly 50 years, are congressionally mandated and relied upon by courts in the U.S. and abroad. Their reduction and omission of entire categories of abuses raise concerns over whether they still meet legislative intent.

Amnesty International and former State Department officials have warned that politically motivated omissions could undermine U.S. credibility in advocating for human rights globally and erode the reports’ historical integrity as a reference for policymakers, legal bodies, and human rights defenders.

The State Department has yet to officially release the 2024 reports, and it is unclear whether the final versions sent to Congress and made public will match the leaked drafts.

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SANTIAGO – Copper miner Codelco has asked Chile’s mining regulator for permission to reopen a part of its flagship El Teniente mine after a collapse last week that killed six people, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Codelco suspended mining operations at El Teniente, the world’s biggest underground copper mine, which produced more than 300,000 metric tons last year, on Thursday evening.

Chilean mining regulator Sernageomin later imposed a formal suspension, and instructed Codelco to present four reports related to the cause and impact of the accident so it could evaluate lifting the measure.

In a statement on Wednesday evening, Codelco said it had responded to three information requests from mining regulator Sernageomin and Chile’s labor inspection office.

The company also said it was doing cleaning and maintenance at El Teniente’s processing plants and smelter, as well as operations in the smelter’s anode furnaces every two hours to keep the equipment in working condition.

A third person familiar with Codelco’s operations said the switch to maintenance was due to the lack of copper to process.

After the accident, Codelco initially continued its processing and smelting operations despite halting underground mining activity. REUTERS

During US President Joe Biden’s administration, the US military carried out waves of airdrops of food into Gaza, delivering some 1,220 tons of assistance.

But the option hasn’t been seriously considered by Donald Trump’s administration, US officials and other sources say, even as he voices concern over starvation in Gaza amid Israel’s nearly two-year-old military campaign against Hamas.

One source says it is seen as an unrealistic option because airdrops would not come close to meeting the needs of 2.1 million Palestinians.

This comes even as close US allies, including Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Britain, have carried out airdrops of assistance to Gaza.

Humanitarian aid groups have long been critical of airdrops of aid, calling them more symbolic than truly effective when the scale of the need in Gaza requires open land routes for large amounts of aid to enter the enclave.

The heavy packages could also present a danger to civilians on the ground rushing toward the parachuting aid.

“It just hasn’t been part of the discussions,” says one US official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Trump administration deliberations.

A source familiar with the issue says: “It hasn’t been a serious consideration because it’s not really a serious option at this moment.”

Some US officials war-gamed the option and found “it’s absolutely unrealistic,” says the source familiar with the matter. The source says it is unknown how “big a lift capacity” could be managed even if the Israelis approved US use of the airspace.

A diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says he is unaware of any US interest in participating in the airdrop effort.

Another official in a US-allied country which is taking part in the airdrops says there have been no conversations with the United States about Washington taking part in the effort.

The official adds that the United States is not providing logistical support for the airdrops being carried out by other countries.

Asked for comment, a White House official says the administration is open to “creative solutions” to the issue.

“President Trump has called for creative solutions ‘to help the Palestinians’ in Gaza. We welcome any effective effort that delivers food to Gazans and keeps it out of the hands of Hamas,” the White House official says.

Israel began allowing food airdrops in late July, as global concern mounted about the humanitarian toll in Gaza from the war.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has significantly changed the State Department’s annual report on human rights worldwide, dramatically reducing any claims of abuses in allied countries such as Israel.

Instead, the US State Department in its widely anticipated 2024 Human Rights Report released on Tuesday sounded an alarm about the erosion of freedom of speech in Europe and ramped up criticism of Brazil and South Africa, both of which Washington has clashed with over a host of issues.

Any criticism of governments over their treatment of LGBTQI rights, which appeared in Biden administration editions of the report, appeared to have been largely omitted. Washington referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine mainly as the “Russia-Ukraine war.”

The report’s section on Israel is much shorter than last year’s edition compiled under the Biden administration and contains no mention of the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The report was delayed for months as Trump appointees dramatically altered an earlier State Department draft to bring it in line with “America First” values, according to government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Explaining the changes, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said during a Tuesday briefing that the reports focusing on 2024 “remove redundancy, increase readability, and are responsive to the legislative mandates that underpin the report, rather than an expansive list of politically biased demands and assertions.”

Settler violence, Palestinian attacks besides Oct. 7 omitted

In previous versions of the report on Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — including ones compiled during Trump’s first term — claims and figures from UN organizations and rights groups regarding alleged abuses were incorporated, though they were almost completely removed in the 2024 report.

Concerns of rights abuses by Israel were kept general, and there was no mention at all of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has gone largely unchecked and even taken the lives of several US citizens. Palestinian attacks against Israelis — beyond those related to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror onslaught — also went unmentioned.

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On the brief section about press freedom, the report states, “NGOs and journalists reported authorities restricted press coverage and limited certain forms of expression, especially in the context of criticism against the war or sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza.”

“Israel occasionally ordered the closing of Palestinian radio stations in the West Bank for ‘inciting behavior that could harm public safety or public order,’ including support for terrorism,” it adds.

In the section on torture, the report highlights the abuse that Israeli hostages testified to having endured during their captivity in Gaza.

As for the alleged torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israel, the report says that Jerusalem “acknowledged [that the] Shin Bet and police used violent interrogation methods that it referred to as ‘exceptional measures,’ but the Ministry of Justice did not provide information regarding the frequency of interrogations or the specific interrogation methods used.”

The country reports introduced new categories such as “Life” and “Liberty,” and “Security of the Person.”

“There were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses,” the 2024 report said about El Salvador, in sharp contrast with the 2023 report that talked about “significant human rights issues” and listed them as credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, torture, and harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.

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Washington’s bilateral ties with El Salvador have strengthened since Trump took office, as the administration has deported people to El Salvador with help from President Nayib Bukele, whose country is receiving $6 million from the US to house the migrants in a high-security mega-prison.

Differing assessments

The Trump administration has moved away from the traditional US promotion of democracy and human rights, seeing it as interference in another country’s affairs, even as it criticized countries selectively, consistent with its broader policy towards a particular country.

One example is Europe, where Trump officials repeatedly weighed in on European politics to denounce what they see as suppression of right-wing leaders, including in Romania, Germany, and France, and accused European authorities of censoring views such as criticism of immigration.

This year’s report was prepared following a major revamp of the State Department, which included the firing of hundreds of people, many from the agency’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which takes the lead in writing the report.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April wrote an opinion piece that said the bureau had become a platform for “left-wing activists,” saying the Trump administration would reorient the bureau to focus on “Western values.”

In Brazil, where the Trump administration has clashed with the government, the State Department found the human rights situation declined, after the 2023 report found no significant changes. This year’s report took aim at the courts, stating they took action undermining freedom of speech and disproportionately suppressing the speech of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, among others.

Bolsonaro is on trial before the Supreme Court on charges he conspired with allies to violently overturn his 2022 electoral loss to leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Trump has referred to the case as a “witch hunt” and called it grounds for a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods.

In South Africa, whose government the Trump administration has accused of racial discrimination towards Afrikaners, this year’s report said the human rights situation significantly worsened. It stated that “South Africa took a substantially worrying step towards land expropriation of Afrikaners and further abuses against racial minorities in the country.”

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In last year’s report, the State Department found no significant changes in the human rights situation in South Africa.

Trump, earlier this year, issued an executive order that called for the US to resettle Afrikaners, describing them as victims of “violence against racially disfavored landowners,” allegations that echoed far-right claims but which have been contested by South Africa’s government.

Amnesty International USA’s Amanda Klasing said the report sent a “chilling message” that the United States will overlook abuses if doing so suits its political agenda.

“We have criticized past reports when warranted, but have never seen reports quite like this,” she said.