The administration of President Joe Biden and the Congress have registered slow progress on human rights protection in the United States, Human Rights Watch has commented in its World Report 2022, Events of 2021.
They have been upholding the rights of women and LGBTI people, which had diminished under the previous administration, and have also engaged in addressing racial equity. However, the President and the Congress have continued to fail to meet racial justice commitments by not bringing to an end systemic racism, abusive prison structures, immigration enforcement, and social control that affects racial and ethnic minorities. This accompanies the wealth gap that has persisted through economic inequality with 8.2% whites in poverty and 17.0% Hispanics while blacks had the highest poverty rate of 19.5%, the report noted
Black, Latinos, and indigenous communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 which has deepened the racial disparities in health care, access to safe and accessible water, housing, jobs, education, and wealth accumulation. Economic inequality has remained high although poverty had declined due to increased government benefits.
Among the failure to secure rights related to systemic racism, despite a reduction in the incarceration rates of people of color, blacks remained highly overrepresented in prisons and jails at nearly five times the rate of whites. Blacks accounted for 41% of the death row population, despite representing only 12.4% of the U.S. population, and people of color were killed by the police at a rate three times higher per capita than whites.
“The Biden administration has made some big-picture pronouncements on key issues like racial and gender equity with little evidence so far that the words will translate into real impact for people whose rights have been systematically and historically ignored or trampled,” said Nicole Austin-Hillery, U.S. Program Executive Director at Human Rights Watch.
The Biden administration has also maintained the Title 42 border policy under which it expelled asylum seekers to unsafe conditions in Mexico or to their countries of origin on alleged public health grounds. In a particularly distressing example of this policy, U.S. Border Patrol agents threatened about 15,000 Haitian border crossers in Del Rio, Texas in September last year, later deporting approximately 10,000 Haitian migrants from within the United States to dangerous conditions in their home country after it had been hit by an earthquake.
According to TRAC Reports data, the United States issued decisions on 23,827 asylum cases in the fiscal year 2021 (which ended on September 30), of which 63% were denied asylum, 37% were granted asylum, and 1% were granted a different status. Despite the administration’s decision to increase the limit to 62,500 refugees, only 11,445 were admitted to the United States during 2021 which it stated: “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest.”
The Human Rights Watch urged the U.S. presidential administration to put an end to the abusive Title 42 policy and to take concrete action on making progress with its racial and gender equity policy statements. State and local governments should end abusive policing against people of color and instead invest in communities so as to address structural racism. State policies that threaten the right to access abortion and reproductive freedom should cease in order to address the rights of women and girls.
“The US government needs to take bold and concrete actions to protect the human rights of all people in the United States – black and white, citizen and non-citizen alike, as well as to promote human rights globally through its foreign policy,” Austin-Hillery said.
