Under Trump, the U.S. Is on a Path to Committing Grave Human Rights Atrocities in America

By Ross Pomeroy | November 13, 2025 | 11:19am

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Under Trump, the U.S. Is on a Path to Committing Grave Human Rights Atrocities in America

How do governments end up committing violent atrocities against their own people? New research finds that they follow a path of least resistance.

The past four decades have unfortunately provided plenty of data with which to scientifically examine the matter. Brutality-based atrocities – large-scale, intentional acts of extrajudicial violence against noncombatants perpetrated by states – have occurred in more than thirty countries each year for the past seven years. There were 47 in 2022 alone, by far the highest number ever recorded since researchers started tracking them in 1981. Amongst these heinous acts: Ethiopian troops systematically killed Tigrayan minorities. Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion shot civilians – including women and children – during public protests. While Nicaragua disappeared union members, students, and LGBTQ citizens.

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Political scientists Dr. Skip Mark at the University of Rhode Island and Dr. David Cingranelli at Binghamton University systematically analyzed the human rights abuses that preceded atrocities. Both Mark and Cingranelli are investigators at the CIRIGHTS project, which tracks human rights data from across the world.

Mark and Cingranelli found that authoritarian governments tend to initially attack rights that can be eroded with little state effort, in which despotic actions can be concealed and often don’t elicit widespread blowback. The rights to a fair trial, to not be tortured, to collectively bargain, to an independent judiciary, and to unionize are typically the first to go.

After these rights are degraded, governments move on to those that require money, manpower, and public acquiescence to do away with. Free speech and freedom of association might disappear at this stage. Governments then move on to more nefarious actions: political imprisonment and rigging elections or doing away with them entirely. At this point, the stage is finally set for a state-committed atrocity.

Why have mass atrocities grown more commonplace over the past four decades? It’s possible that researchers and human rights groups are simply paying more attention, pointing out heinous acts that were once lost in the noise of a repressive status quo.

But there is a more primal and disquieting explanation: migration. Migration has steadily risen since 1990 as humans have grown more mobile. When people who look, think, and act differently mix together, all too often the collective response of majorities is to denigrate newcomers and minorities. Populaces are frequently willing to turn blind eyes to immoral state actions if they are carried out for the purpose of preserving social order.

“When people believe that the level of social order in their society has exceeded a certain threshold, they are willing to authorize the government to do all kinds of horrible things,” Cingranelli observed in a statement.

Given the immigration surge over the past few years and the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed response, it makes sense to gauge where the United States currently sits on Mark and Cingranelli’s sequence to atrocity. It would seem that we are in the early stages. The Trump Administration has sought to erode America’s bedrock principle of habeas corpus, as evidenced by rapid deportations without trials. ICE and Border Patrol have detained both immigrants and citizens in torturous circumstances for days or longer. The independence of the judiciary is challenged daily. There are countless examples to cite in the United States right now.

Figures in the administration and those closely aligned with it have downplayed these intrusions on individual liberty, partly because they were performed in order to maintain a cohesive society steeped in Christian values.

How far will our country travel on the road to atrocity for the cause of maintaining ‘social order’? It remains to be seen.