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Activists for human rights are concerned about the way the Trump administration is changing the U.S. focus on what had previously been a bipartisan foreign policy issue. In its latest country reports, the State Department downplayed women's and LGBTQ rights, while focusing more on free speech for conservatives in Europe. As NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, the State Department is also being reorganized to reflect this change in priorities.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Desiree Cormier Smith was the one and, so far, only special envoy for racial equity and justice. She was bracing for big changes to the annual Human Rights Reports on countries around the world, but it was worse than she imagined.
DESIREE CORMIER SMITH: It just boggles my mind how awful these reports are and their attempted erasure of anyone who is not white, Christian, male or straight.
KELEMEN: The State Department not only deleted sections in the country reports that focused on women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people, it's also closed offices on these issues. There's one new Office of Natural Rights, which the State Department says is based on Western traditions and America's founding documents. That concerns Cormier Smith, who has joined with other former special envoys who saw their offices closed in the reorganization.
CORMIER SMITH: I think the signals are quite loud and quite clear of who they value and who they don't.
KELEMEN: Officials say the reforms are part of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's efforts to streamline a bureaucracy that they say has become bloated in the post-Cold War era. They say the regional bureaus can cover these issues just as well as a special envoy. They also have a new area of focus on allies in Europe. Some of those countries are fighting Russian disinformation and hate speech, but Trump's State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce calls it censorship.
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TAMMY BRUCE: No matter, really, how disagreeable someone's speech may be, criminalizing it or silencing it by force only serves as a catalyst for further hatred, suppression and polarization.
KELEMEN: As for the Human Rights Reports, Bruce said they had to be rewritten to make it easier to read and more focused on Trump's priorities.
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BRUCE: We weren't going to release something compiled and written by the previous administration. It needed to change based on the point of view and the vision of the Trump administration, and so those changes were made.
KELEMEN: Jessica Stern, who was the Biden administration's envoy for LGBTQ+ people, was shocked to see all of the sections that she worked on deleted. She says there are real risks to activists who helped U.S. embassies compile the reports and asylum-seekers who won't be able to rely on these documents for their court cases.
JESSICA STERN: My assumption, unfortunately, is that more LGBTQI people that are fleeing violence and seeking asylum in the U.S. are going to have their claims denied.
KELEMEN: Stern says the administration has been using marginalized and vulnerable groups to justify other big changes in America's foreign policy institutions.
STERN: So for example, we saw in the takedown of USAID that they repeatedly cited a couple of tiny grants to support LGBTQI programming that had no impact whatsoever on the bottom line.
KELEMEN: The U.S. Agency for International Development has been dismantled, and the State Department has taken over what remains of U.S. foreign aid. Republicans who supported the move often cite what they see as egregious examples of waste, mostly programs that supported LGBTQ+ communities abroad. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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