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refugees
Insiders Say Trump Foreign Aid Cuts Causing 'Violence and Chaos' in Fragile Nations
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," said one former senior State Department official. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
May 28, 2025
U.S. State Department officials in at least two countries have recently warned that the Trump administration's sudden foreign aid cutoff is fueling "violence and chaos" in some of the world's most vulnerable nations, according to a report published Wednesday.
Internal State Department communications viewed by
ProPublicarevealed that U.S. Embassy officials in the southeastern African nation of Malawi sounded the alarm on cuts to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which have "yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking" in the Dzaleka refugee camp.
Meanwhile, dramatically reduced U.S. funding to feed refugees in Kenya has sparked violent protests and other incidents, including the trampling death of a pregnant woman during a stampede for food in which police opened fire on desperately hungry people.
"In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before...The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day." Just unbelievable suffering as U.S. withdraws foreign aid.
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— Lisa Song (@lisalsong.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 1:15 PM
This, as President Donald Trump's administration—spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its de facto leader, Elon Musk—has taken a wrecking ball approach to vital offices and programs including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where contracts for programs including those that fed and provided healthcare for millions of people and fought diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS have been slashed by up to 90%.
Republicans have attempted to justify the cuts under the guise of tackling the staggering U.S. national debt, even as they push a massive tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the ultrarich and corporations while adding trillions of dollars to the deficit, according to a nonpartisan congressional committee.
Although a federal judge ruled in March that Musk's moves to shutter USAID were likely unconstitutional and ordered a halt to the effort, much damage has already been done.
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and National Security Council member, told ProPublica. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
"I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world," Schwartz added. "It keeps me up at night."
It is unclear if any of the cables were sent via the official dissent channel set up during the administration of then-President Richard Nixon in an effort to allow State Department personnel to voice opposition to U.S. policies and practices—especially in regard to the Vietnam War—and stop leaks to the press.
The State Department responded to the ProPublica exposé in a statement saying: "It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on Earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human."
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed during a congressional hearing that "no one has died" due to USAID cuts, an assertion refuted by Congressman Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who displayed photos and harrowing stories of people who have, in fact, died since funding for vital programs was slashed or eliminated.
"It's clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it's difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies," according to a Washington Post analysis by Glenn Kessler published on Tuesday. "The death certificates, after all, aren't marked, 'Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.'"
Last month, the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that there will be "more preventable deaths and untold suffering around the world" due to the Trump administration.
"These sudden cuts by the Trump administration are a human-made disaster for the millions of people struggling to survive amid wars, disease outbreaks, and other emergencies," Avril Benoît, who heads the U.S. branch of MSF, said last month.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025."
On the ground in Kenya, WFP country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica that her organization is cutting daily aid rations to less than 600 calories per person—far less than the standard minimum 2,100 calories per day under agency guidelines.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025," Landis said, describing children who look like "walking skeletons" due to severe malnutrition.
Meanwhile, enough food to feed more than 1 million people in some of the world's most fragile places through most of the summer is moldering in storage as USAID funds run dry and workers are laid off.
This,
warned WFP last month, "could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation."
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Don’t Let Trump Toss Human Rights in the Dustbin of History
If America is to be more than a garrison state that bullies other countries and takes a what’s-in-it-for-me approach to international relations, the concept of human rights will have to be preserved and revived.
May 28, 2025
The Trump administration seems intent on undermining America’s ability to make human rights a significant element of its foreign policy. As evidence of that, consider its plan to dramatically reduce policy directives and personnel devoted to those very issues, including the dismantling of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor. Even worse, the Trump team has attacked a crucial global institution, the International Criminal Court, and put it under crippling sanctions that have ground its operations to a halt—all for telling the truth about Israel’s illegal and ongoing mass slaughter in Gaza.
The Trump administration’s assault on human rights comes against the background of years of policy decisions in Washington that too often cast aside such concerns in favor of supposedly more important “strategic” interests. The very concept of human rights has had a distinctly mixed history in American foreign policy. High points include the U.S. role in the Nuremberg prosecutions after World War II, its support for the United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and President Jimmy Carter’s quest to be the “human rights president” in the late 1970s. But such moments have alternated with low points like this country’s Cold War era support for a series of vicious dictators in Latin America or, more recently, the way both the Biden and Trump administrations have backed Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, actions that a number of reputable independent reports suggest constitute nothing short of genocide.
The Trump administration’s position couldn’t be clearer. It seeks to permanently undermine the ability of this country to promote human rights in any form.
Amid such ups and downs have come some real accomplishments like support for the democratic evolution of the government in the Philippines, the passage of comprehensive sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and the freeing of prominent political prisoners around the world.
Some critics of the human rights paradigm argue that such issues are all too regularly weaponized against American adversaries, but largely ignored when it comes to this country’s autocratic allies like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and El Salvador. The solution to such a critique is not to abandon human rights concerns, but to implement them more consistently across the globe.
The Transactional President
In the short-term, forging a more consistent approach to supporting human rights is a daunting task. After all, the Trump administration’s position couldn’t be clearer. It seeks to permanently undermine the ability of this country to promote human rights in any form by gutting the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor and making other changes that will further shift foreign policy toward the transactional and away from anything that has a hint of the aspirational. Discussions about incorporating Greenland into this country, turning Canada into our 51st state, further militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, cutting a coercive mineral deal with Ukraine, seizing the Panama Canal, or building tourist hotels in a depopulated Gaza—however farcical some of the notions may seem—have taken precedence over any discussion of promoting democracy and human rights globally.
Donald Trump relishes building closer ties to autocrats, typically embracing Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and, at one international meeting, on seeing Egyptian leader Adel Fatah El-Sisi in the hallway, shouting, “There goes my favorite dictator!” In addition, strongmen like Nayib Armando Bukele Corteaz of El Salvador have helped enable his administration’s most egregious human rights violations to date, snatching up U.S. residents and sending them to a horrific Salvadoran prison without even a hint of due process.
The Trump administration has also proposed shuttering dozens of embassies globally and plans to slash State Department bureaus that disseminated expertise to areas plagued by crisis and war; worked to combat human trafficking; or advised the secretary of state on human rights issues relating to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Sweeping Trump administration proposals have even included replacing the Foreign Service Institute, the nation’s center for diplomatic learning, with an office devoted to “global acquisition.” Meanwhile, even as the administration dismantles America’s basic diplomatic infrastructure, it has made no moves to close a single one of America’s more than 750 overseas military bases or scale back the Pentagon’s bloated budget, which is now heading toward the trillion-dollar mark annually.
Under the Trump administration’s current approach, the face of America—already long tilted toward its massive military presence globally— is likely to be slanted even more toward military threats and away from smart diplomacy. Trump’s crew is also seeking to shut down the collection of basic data on human rights by restricting the kinds of abuses covered in State Department human rights reports. Over the years, those reports have evolved into standardized, reliable sources of information for human rights advocates and activists seeking justice in other countries, as well as political figures and journalists operating under repressive regimes.
Such objective human-rights reporting, now increasingly missing in action, had also served as an early warning system in determining which U.S. partners were more prone to engaging in reckless and destabilizing behavior that could draw this country into unnecessary and intractable conflicts.
By diluting such critical evidence-gathering mechanisms, successfully used in the past to turn other states away from violations of human rights, the administration is undermining its own future international influence. It’s also weakening critical domestic legislation meant to guarantee that this country doesn’t contribute to gross violations of such rights. While U.S. human-rights policies have at best been inconsistent in their execution, when this country has moved to protect the rights of individuals abroad, it has indeed contributed to global stability, curtailed the root causes of migration, and reduced the ability of extremist groups to gain footholds in key nations.
The Trump administration, however, has it completely backward. This country shouldn’t be treating human rights as, at best, a quaint relic of a past age. Creating a genuine policy of promoting them is not only the right thing to do, but also a potential tool for enhancing this country’s influence at a time when economic and military tools alone are anything but sufficient and often do more harm than good.
Washington’s role in enabling Israel’s destruction of Gaza brought human-rights hypocrisy front and center even before the second Trump administration. For the next nearly four years, count on this: Jettisoning human rights from U.S. policy will be the order of the day.
The American Human Rights Record Over the Last Half-Century
Jimmy Carter campaigned on a platform promoting human rights, which was seen as a breath of fresh air in the wake of the lies and crimes of President Richard Nixon’s administration at home and abroad. Under that rubric, Carter called out repressive regimes, made it easier for refugees from such countries to enter the United States, and elevated the human consequences of denying such rights above narrowly defined strategic concerns. Unfortunately, once he became president, he also abandoned his principles in key cases, most notably in his support for the Shah of Iran to the bitter end, opening the door to the rise of the Islamic extremist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and decades of enmity between the United States and Iran.
As president, Ronald Reagan had supported democracy movements like Solidarity in Poland, while funding and arming right-wing, anti-democratic movements that he labeled “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. The biggest human rights achievement during his two terms in office arrived despite him, not because of him, when Congress overcame his attempt to veto comprehensive sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
On balance, this country has all too often employed human-rights rhetoric as a justification for the use of force rather than as an actual force for democratic reform.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush would play an active role in the reunification of Germany, while supporting democratic transitions from communist states throughout Eastern Europe. At the same time, his administration used human rights as a tool of warfare, as when it invaded Panama to depose dictator General Noriega. At the time, that intervention was rationalized as an effort to restore democracy and protect the human rights of Panamanians. That operation, however, sparked an outcry from, among others, the U.N. General Assembly and the Organization of American States, both of which condemned the invasion as a violation of international law.
Over time, the State Department indeed expanded the range of rights it recognizes and defends—an expansion that is now under relentless attack. The Clinton administration was the first to grant asylum to gay and lesbian individuals facing persecution in their homelands. At that time, the U.S. also enacted the International Religious Freedom Act, which established an ambassador and a commission focused on protecting and promoting religious freedom internationally. Even so, that administration’s human rights record proved mixed at best. Bill Clinton himself has expressed regret over his tepid response to the Rwandan genocide and his refusal even to describe that atrocity as a genocide while in office. Still, no previous president of our times could have imagined an American asylum or immigrant policy geared only to White South Africans, as is now being implemented by the Trump administration.
The idea of humanitarian intervention—military action to prevent atrocities—has backfired in some prominent cases, causing instability and chaos, death and destruction, rather than improvements in the lives of the residents of the targeted nations. Meanwhile, the devastating American wars of this century, from Afghanistan to Iraq, caused staggering death tolls and devastation.
The 2005 Responsibility to Protect doctrine epitomized the double-edged sword of human rights rhetoric. The leading role of Barack Obama’s administration in the 2011 NATO-led “humanitarian” intervention in Libya, which was soon transformed into a destabilizing regime-change mission, marred his presidency. At the same time, Obama did help promote international rights and protections for LGBTQ+ peoples, while his administration’s work on the U.N. Human Rights Council also helped develop commissions of inquiry to investigate human rights violations in Syria, North Korea, and Muammar Qadhafi’s Libya.
On balance, this country has all too often employed human-rights rhetoric as a justification for the use of force rather than as an actual force for democratic reform. Still, as imperfect as the implementation of human rights principles has been, that’s hardly a reason for it to be abandoned outright, as seems to be happening now.
Human Rights as an Early Warning System
Regimes that engage in systematic human rights abuses domestically are also more likely to engage in reckless, destabilizing behaviors in their own regions and beyond. Such was the case with Saudi Arabia, which spearheaded a brutal invasion of Yemen that began in March 2015 and lasted for more than seven years. That war resulted in nearly 400,000 direct and indirect deaths through bombing and the devastating effects of a blockade of Yemen that slowed imports of food, medicine, and other vital humanitarian supplies. (And mind you, as is true of Israel’s ongoing horror in Gaza, that war in Yemen was carried out with billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-supplied arms.)
The Saudi regime has never been held accountable for its campaign of slaughter in Yemen. If anything, it has been rewarded. During his recent visit, in fact, President Trump announced a $142 billion arms deal with that nation, a multi-year arms package for Riyadh that the White House described as the largest defense cooperation agreement in history. If the past is any guide, that deal could end up being considerably less than the present sum suggests, but the very existence of such a deal represents a vote of confidence in the Saudi government and its reckless de facto leader, Mohammed Bin Salman, that could get the United States entangled in another Saudi-initiated conflict.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which partnered with Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war, ran a series of secret prisons in that nation where its personnel and their Yemeni allies engaged in widespread torture. More recently, the UAE has been supplying weapons to rebel forces in Sudan that have committed systematic human rights abuses. And it supported opposition forces attempting to overthrow the internationally recognized government of Libya. Not only did the U.S. impose no consequences on its frequent arms client, but it declared the UAE a “major defense partner.”
Restoring Human Rights as a Policy Goal
If America is to be more than a garrison state that bullies other countries and takes a what’s-in-it-for-me approach to international relations, the concept of human rights will have to be preserved and revived in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Advocates of “hard power” should think twice before throwing U.S. human rights commitments into the dustbin of history. At a time when rights at home are under unprecedented assault, Americans need all the allies they can get if they are to help build a world grounded in responsive governance and a spirit of pragmatic cooperation. Values-based cooperation will be essential for tackling our most pressing existential crises, from climate change and pandemics to the ascendancy of arbitrary and repressive regimes.
Unfortunately, the current administration has shown no interest in speaking up on behalf of human rights, much less using them as a tool to promote more responsive governance globally.
Throwing rights overboard in pursuit of narrow economic interests and a misguided quest for global dominance will not only cause immense and unnecessary suffering but it will undermine U.S. influence around the world. The “pragmatists” who denigrate human rights in favor of a transactional approach to foreign relations are promoting a self-defeating policy that will do great harm at home and abroad. A better approach will, unfortunately, have to await a new administration, a more empathetic Congress, and a greater public understanding of the value of a foreign policy that takes human rights seriously with respect to allies and adversaries alike.
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How Will We Respond to Immoral Laws Targeting Refugees Today?
The Republican Party now seeks to criminalize every aspect of helping a person who has fled a life of torture, violence, and suffering. Will we obey?
May 25, 2025
A person escapes slave labor, torture, rape, and murder, and illegally crosses a border to a land where such crimes are outlawed, to a land where people have the right to work for wages and are protected by the law. Anyone in this “Free Land” who harbors or aides such an escapee is subject to federal prosecution, fines, and imprisonment. Yet to turn them over to federal authorities returns these people to a life of wanton violence and suffering.
This was the United States in 1850 when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, legislation requiring that all escaped slaves be returned to the slave owner and that officials and citizens in free states must cooperate. Aiding or harboring a slave meant prison and steep fines. Habeas corpus was suspended under this law. Citizens were required to return a runaway slave to the chains of bondage or face the wrath of the federal courts.
Americans in 1850 had to decide where they stood, with the newly passed federal law or with their conscience. The risk was great, for both the runaway slaves and those Americans who might help them.
Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.
Today, the Republican Party, the very party which grew from the outrage over the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Act, now seeks to criminalize every aspect of helping a person who has fled a life of torture, violence, and suffering. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has been updated and amended for the fleeing refugees of 2025.
On April 25, 2025, U.S. officials arrested Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, and charged her with helping a man in her court evade immigration authorities. It is alleged she hindered immigration agents who appeared in the courthouse to arrest the man without a judicial warrant. She faces numerous federal charges.
We are only four months into Trump’s Second Term of Cruelty. Where will we be a year from now? Two years from now? How draconian will the laws be then?
Americans living in the border states of the 1850s were called upon to answer the question of what they would do when a runaway slave appeared in their community. Would they violate federal law and help, or would they turn the desperate families back over to the slaveholders, to the “manstealers,” as the bounty hunters were then called.
Many in the border state of Pennsylvania—Quakers, Amish, Brethren—followed their faith and funneled these runaways to freedom. In Lancaster County, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens allegedly hid slaves in a cistern in his backyard as he facilitated their road to freedom. He was an oathbound member of Congress violating U.S. law to save lives.
In retrospect, it is easy to know what the right thing to do was in the case of slavery and The Underground Railroad. That issue today is clear for us. We know where we would stand: for freedom, for those fleeing slavery. But back then the issue was not so clear. Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.
Will we help or hinder a person in need?
Will we violate immoral law to save a life?
Will we risk fines and imprisonment?
These questions were asked and answered by many Americans in 1850. How will we answer them today?
So often we wish to be part of a moment of great historical importance, a moment when we have to take a risk to save another, to take a stand when others wouldn’t. We feel certain we would know the right thing to do. If only such a moment would come our way.
Today, that moment comes not in the form of storming a beachhead or taking a hill in battle. It is not marching for civil rights in Birmingham or Selma. And it is not hiding a runaway slave in your attic, though the similarities to that particular act of conscience are striking. Today it is whether to provide shelter and safety to a refugee fleeing violence in their home country, a person illegally in the United States.
How will we respond this time? In this century? In this historic moment?
Is a refugee illegally entering this country to flee institutional violence different than a slave illegally entering a free state to escape slavery? Especially when that institutional violence has been precipitated by the U.S. repeatedly intervening and destabilizing the home country of the refugee?
In 1958, legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan asked a youth retreat group the following question: “What's it going to be with you? Are you going to go through life playing both ends against the middle, playing cozy, not committing yourself, sitting on the fence?”
That question is as potent, and as dangerous, today as it was then. For us, and for the victims in the breach.
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