The State Department released its long-awaited reports on international human rights on Tuesday, eliminating entire sections on discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, women and racial and ethnic minorities in countries with long track records of human rights abuses.

Former State Department employees who oversaw the reports, which cover human rights for the 2024 year, said on Tuesday they were deeply disturbed by these omissions. The exclusion of LGBTQ+ rights in particular could make it more challenging for LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers around the world to prove their experiences of abuse before immigration courts domestically and abroad.

Jessica Stern, the former U.S. special envoy to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons under the Biden administration, told reporters at a press briefing that she was “horrified” and “couldn’t believe how systematically LGBTQ+ people were deleted.” 

Stern is the second person to hold the special envoy for LGBTQ+ rights role, which remains vacant under the Trump administration. She is also one of the co-founders of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, a new initiative of former ambassadors and special envoys within the State Department who are fighting Trump’s cuts to foreign assistance. 

In the Trump administration’s report for Uganda, there is no reference to LGBTQ+ people or the country’s anti-homosexuality law, which penalizes same-sex conduct between adults with the death penalty and life imprisonment. Instead, there is one mention of Ugandan government officials committing “acts of sexual violence,” including forcing people to undergo “anal examinations following their arrests.”

“I know that refers to the victims who were targeted based on their [LGBTQ+] identity, but it does not say that they were targeted based on their identity,” Stern said. By contrast, the 2023 report includes 45 references to abuses against LGBTQI+ people.“Obviously, that much progress is not possible in a year,” she said, “it shows the systematic removal of this area of concern.” 

Similarly, the Trump administration’s report for Brazil, which has the highest number of murders of trans people in the world, does not include any reference to trans people.

The reports, which have been mandated by Congress since 1977, were due to be released in March. Historically, they document the state of human rights worldwide and have helped determine foreign assistance efforts, informing diplomats and foreign leaders alike. But this year, the release was stalled for months because the Trump administration decided to “adjust” the reports that were compiled during the Biden administration.

The State Department said the reports “were streamlined for better utility and accessibility,” but former State Department employees believe that they deliberately exclude specific accounts by survivors and witnesses of abuse for political reasons.

The reports don’t only exclude mentions of LGBTQ+ rights, but remove reference to Indigenous people, people of African descent, people in lower castes and  “anyone who is not white, Christian, male or straight,” saidDesirée Cormier Smith, the former special representative for racial equity and justice under President Biden. The Hungary report, for example, says there is “no credible evidence of significant human rights abuses,” despite the country’s long track record of discrimination against the Roma people and the passage of a ban on LGBTQ events by the far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is a friend of Trump.

“That to me shows who this administration values,” Cormier Smith said. 

The White House and the State Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from HuffPost.

In the section about El Salvador, the State Department also determines that there were “no significant changes in the human rights situation.” Yet in 2024, human rights advocates were drawing attention to the 261 people who died due to torture and unhealthy conditions in El Salvador’s prisons. Trump went on to secure a multimillion-dollar deal with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to house 252 Venezuelan men at the country’s notorious CECOT prison after they were deported from the U.S. One man detained in CECOT recounted to HuffPost his experiences of physical and psychological abuse.

“Clearly, the Trump administration is willing to pull punches when it comes to governments that we’re friendly with, cooperating with, or who are cooperating with us, and where the Trump administration has political axes to grind, it has ramped up its criticism,” Scott Busby, a senior advisor at Human Rights First, told HuffPost. Until January, Busby was the deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the State Department.

Former State Department employees — many of whom oversaw and drafted these reports under the Biden and Obama administrations — said the erasure of these abuses against LGBTQ+ people and women, and the easing of criticism for countries where Trump has close political relationships, reflects the politicization of what constitutes human rights under this administration.

“This is deliberate erasure, and it’s erasure that undermines the credibility of U.S. human rights reporting, abandons survivors and really just tells perpetrators that their crimes will go unreported and unpunished,” Stern said.

Stern noted that the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in these human rights reports was relatively new. In 2011, under the Obama administration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began including updates about LGBTQ+ human rights in the annual reports, alongside taking other diplomatic actions to investigate human rights abuses.

Over time, the reports have come to be used as evidence in asylum proceedings to determine whether LGBTQ+ people fleeing discrimination and harassment had reasonable grounds for their petition.

“The standard for determining whether someone deserves asylum or is a refugee is if they have a well-founded fear of persecution. So these reports historically have been critical in documenting the conditions that people are experiencing in their countries,” Busby said.

Earlier in Busby’s career, he served as an asylum officer and said that other democracies, including Canada and the United Kingdom, would use these country reports to decide the outcome of asylum cases. In some instances, Stern said, the United States’ human rights reports were the “only source considered trustworthy” in asylum proceedings.

Now, with the omissions on LGBTQ+ human rights, Stern said that she believes LGBTQ+ asylum seekers are going to have their claims denied.

“More LGBTQIA+ people are going to be forced to stay in dangerous situations,” she said. “LGBTQ people are not going to disappear just because they are erased from these pages, but unfortunately, as a result of the reports, justice will be delayed and lives will be lost when their suffering is buried. “

Geeta Rao Gupta, the former U.S. ambassador for global women’s issues, said that the Trump administration’s cuts to the reports should alarm not only the international diplomatic community, but also everyday Americans. 

“This is not just about what happens abroad, this is about how this comes back to us as Americans, how it affects our national security, our economy,” Gupta said. “All of these things have repercussions for us.”