Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know how the U.S. government is performing in terms of human rights.

Some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government inside and outside its borders in the past two years.

And yet President Donald Trump recently called the country “the home of freedom” and “the land of liberty,” saying, “We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before.”

Governments rarely convey accurate information about their own human rights abuses, so the task of measuring them typically falls to advocates and scholars. According to many of the human rights data sources available, the U.S. lags behind most other high-income democracies — countries that are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and classified as high income by the World Bank. The U.S.’ poor performance spans civil and political rights, such as the right to be free from torture and the right to political participation, as well as economic and social rights, including the rights to health and food.

In fact, the U.S. has been a relatively poor performer across many of these rights for quite some time, regardless of the political party in power.

Even accounting for the U.S.’ prior poor practices, however, new data from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (which I co-founded) show that in 2025 the country’s civil and political rights performance deteriorated even further. These data raise serious questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights.

Recognizing the problems with public reports, we collect information directly from researchers for human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and others, asking them about governments’ practices across several rights and using a statistical model to assess their information and ensure that the resulting metrics are comparable across countries. The result is a robust dataset that includes information previously missing from public reports.

According to the Human Rights Scores dataset, which uses publicly available information to score more than 190 countries on physical integrity rights — such as the rights to be free from torture, killing, forced disappearance and political imprisonment — the U.S. never ranked higher than 81st from 2001 to 2021 or higher than 109th from 2010 to 2021.

Indeed, from 2003 to 2021, the United States’ score was either the worst or the second-worst every year among high-income OECD member states.

The U.S. has also frequently been rated by the Human Rights Measurement Initiative as the worst performer on “empowerment rights,” or the rights to assembly, association, opinion, expression, political participation, religion and belief.

Even starting from this poor position, the U.S.’ civil and political rights practices dramatically worsened in 2025. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative measures nine civil and political rights, and the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of them.

These were not small changes. The U.S. showed the largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from forced disappearance and for the right to freedom of religion and belief.

The U.S. showed the second-largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from arbitrary or political arrest and for the right to opinion and expression.

The U.S. also showed major declines in the rights to be free from torture and extrajudicial killing, and the right to political participation— that is, the right to participate in one’s government via free and fair elections, to take part in public affairs and to have access to public service. U.S. scores likewise fell in the right to assembly and association, which is the right to peacefully gather in public or private and to form or join groups and organizations.

Human rights experts point to several issues that led to these declines. For instance, the U.S.’ worsened scores for the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture were tied to the expanded use of practices such as incommunicado detention and warrantless arrest by immigration agencies.

While several killings occurred during ICE operations in 2025, the worsened extrajudicial killing score was also tied to the country’s use of airstrikes against boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, which caused the deaths of at least 123 people in 2025 alone.

Other changes enacted in 2025 contributed to large declines in the U.S.’ rights scores, including crackdowns on anti-ICE demonstrations and government pressure on universities, including limits on free speech and class subjects.

Last year also saw threats to television networks over political expression, restrictions on mail-in voting, state measures targeting American Islamic organizations by labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and an executive order focused on eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”

Early indicators about 2026 are not promising, with continued abuses by ICE, further killings in international waters and allegations of attempts to use government powers to punish critics. If you ask the human rights experts, the U.S. is clearly not “doing better now than we’ve ever done before.”

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K. Chad Clay is the director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues and an associate professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia. This article was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.

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