Amnesty International demanded that US President Trump respect human rights during his term as president on Monday. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, the group alleged that Trump committed “extensive human rights violations” during his first term, and dangerous rhetoric targeting journalists, immigrants and transgender youth utilized during his campaign.
Amnesty International highlighted that the increasingly unstable international environment in which President Trump’s second term will begin could exasperate human rights violations due to the risk of displacement from climate change, increasing levels of political instability around the globe, growing inequality, corporate power and authoritarianism. Amnesty International highlighted that human rights could be impacted by the administration’s policies both at home and abroad, claiming that a US withdrawal from multilateral international systems could undermine global stability and “create a dangerous vacuum [that] severely undermine[s] the systems we have built to protect human rights.”
For President Trump, and Americans more generally, immigration is one of the most prominent issues facing the country. Trump has promised the mass deportation of immigrants and reforms to immigration law that would end the right to citizenship by birth on the campaign trail. However, these reforms would likely require constitutional amendments. The outgoing Biden administration granted 937,000 nationals from El Salvador, Ukraine, Sudan and Venezuela an 18-month extension on protection from deportation through the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program last week, which exempts immigrants from being deported due to conditions in their country of origin that prevent their safe return. This action may provide temporary protection from being deported by President Trump.
On Saturday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established under the Obama administration violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. Trump attempted to abolish the program during his first term in office, which allows individuals who immigrated to the US as children to defer deportation. Given the court’s finding that DACA is illegal, President Trump’s administration may have an impetus to abolish the program, which could subject individuals who immigrated to the US as children to deportation proceedings.
