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The State Department issued a cable in November instructing employees not to cite reports on human rights abuses from organizations or media outlets that don’t comply with President Donald Trump’s orders on racial justice or restrictions on trans rights, new reporting finds.
“Do not use any information from a non-government source (e.g., an NGO, even if it is or has been funded by the U.S. government, or media) that advances policies inconsistent with presidential executive orders, including promotion of ‘racial justice,’ ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ and gender ideology,” the cable says, per Politico.
“The department deems such sources not to be credible,” the cable goes on.
The extraordinary instruction could be applied widely, as Politico points out. Many major human rights groups like Amnesty International tout their investment in initiatives like DEI, as do many large news outlets like The New York Times.
At a basic level, any companies that maintain policies of not illegally discriminating against marginalized groups in hiring practices or otherwise could be found by the administration to be in violation of Trump’s extremely broad orders against inclusion. Many federal employees purged last year observed that Black women were disproportionately represented among their numbers; a lawsuit was even filed alleging violations of the Civil Rights Act.
Further, groups that report on human rights violations are more likely to embrace policies promoting racial justice or trans rights because those are human rights issues. In other words, not citing these groups’ human rights reports would mean that the Trump administration is disregarding a wide variety of human rights violations.
This is by design. Under Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has gutted the State Department’s human rights reports. Last year’s annual report was one-third the length of the previous year, and eliminated many topics considered to be human rights abuses, like poor prison conditions and violations of freedom of assembly rights.
In November, the Trump administration instead told the State Department to focus only on rights “given to us by God, our creator,” condemning medical treatment like abortion and gender-affirming care.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s rhetoric of “white genocide” in South Africa has alarmed critics, who charge that he is seeking to put white people at the forefront of human rights discourse.
Regarding the memo, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told Politico that “gender ideology and DEI ideology perpetuate practices categorized by the State Department as human rights abuses.”
Critics have criticized the cable. “State Department won’t cite the work of human rights groups if they affirm the rights of all humans,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former USAID official.
“Nothing says strategic like deliberately blinding our diplomats to on-the-ground conditions, just because the admin is triggered by NGOs mentioning racial justice,” said the X account for House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats, condemning the new human rights reports as “MAGA fanfic.”
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