The State Department released its annual reports on human rights around the world on Tuesday, and revealed an administration set on whitewashing the records of some of the world’s worst violators of human rights.

The hollowed-out reports on roughly 200 countries and territories omit references to LGBTQ discrimination and curtail information on government abuses, including gender-based violence and government corruption. They no longer include sections focused on systemic racial or ethnic discrimination and violence, child abuse, or child sexual exploitation.

The congressionally mandated human rights reports, which are used to guide U.S. decisions on diplomacy and aid, have been turned into wholly political documents that target countries with whom the Trump administration has clashed and soft-pedal abuses by the administration’s allies.

Israel, and countries like El Salvador, South Sudan, and Eswatini, which have agreed to accept and in some cases imprison U.S. deportees as part of Trump’s growing global gulag, got a soft touch. South Africa, which has led the war crimes case against Israel at The Hague, received a more pointed report.

The page count of the report on Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, for example, dropped by more than 91 percent, plummeting from 103 pages last year to just nine. While previous editions — including reports from President Donald Trump’s first term — included significant material on abuses documented by the United Nations and human rights groups, such accounts were almost entirely omitted from the new report.

The Israel report, while egregious, is no outlier.

The new report on El Salvador shrank from 44 pages last year to just 11. The report released in 2024 detailed overcrowded prisons and reports of “arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; [and] arbitrary arrest or detention,” among other abuses.

This year’s report on El Salvador says there “were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses,” while incongruously claiming “there were no significant changes in the human rights situation in El Salvador during the year.”