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Rights Groups Detail “Authoritarian” Reality of US Surveillance in Report to UN

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25.04.2025

A new report from human rights experts urges the United Nations to condemn the “evaporation of fundamental rights” in the United States, where the Trump administration is using high-tech surveillance tools and a nebulous “anti-terrorism” legal framework that has ballooned since 9/11 to weaponize law enforcement against social movements that challenge state power.

While the legally dubious arrests of pro-Palestine student activists and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego García along with other immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador have received the most media attention, these cases provide only a peek into the expanding surveillance dragnet President Donald Trump and his appointees have at their disposal, which includes tools capable of sucking up an unprecedented amount of online personal data.

“The human rights violations described in the report make clear that the U.S. is in an authoritarian political reality where the Trump administration, Congress, and state governments have fully suspended international human rights and are engaging in tactics of repression that are hallmarks of fascist regimes,” said Nadia Ben-Youssef, advocacy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement.

Released on April 24 by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology; the University of Dayton Human Rights Center; the University of California, Irvine School of Law; and a coalition of civil liberties groups, the report highlights alleged violations of international human rights law under the Trump administration and outlines a vast surveillance apparatus used to repress freedom of expression. The report was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, which is scheduled for a regular review of U.S. human rights commitments in November. The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the council in February, as he did in his first administration.

The report points to Trump’s jailing of migrants at the Guantánamo Bay offshore prison camp and his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of people to a notorious prison in El Salvador as clear violations of due process rights under U.S. and international law. Courts have attempted to block Trump’s immigration spectacle, and officials were forced to return the migrants flown to Guantánamo Bay, but the administration has courted a constitutional crisis by refusing to return García and other men sent to El Salvador despite court orders.

However, it’s the disappearing of student activists, legal U.S. residents, and even U.S. citizens into the byzantine system of immigration jails that has most alarmed the broader public, particularly after Trump said that he hopes to deport U.S. citizens accused of crimes to El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison as well.

After a police crackdown on pro-Palestine protests during the Biden administration led to the arrests of more than 3,000 people on campuses nationwide, the Trump administration revoked visas of

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