Trump Is Undermining Policies Against Transnational Repression

As part of the 2025 Group of Seven (G7) Summit, on June 17 leaders released their joint statements outlining key international priorities. Amid statements on Israel and Iran, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, and migrant smuggling, leaders took time to issue a separate statement on a far less prominent issue: transnational repression. Transnational repression (TNR) refers to the state practice of reaching across borders to harass, threaten, harm, or coerce individuals or communities. It is most often, but not exclusively, used to describe situations in which the targets—referred to as “diasporas” or “exiles”—have a national connection to the state perpetrating the attack. Notable examples include the murder of a Sikh activist in Canada by India, the kidnapping of “Hotel Rwanda” hero Paul Rusesabagina by Rwanda, Iranian attempts to kill a journalist in Brooklyn, or the beating of protesters against Xi Jinping in the streets of San Francisco. 

TNR became a hot-button issue among democratic allies in the past several years due to a convergence of factors: a desire from the Biden administration and allied countries to “defend democracy” after the first Trump administration’s assault on it domestically and globally; the knowledge that Russia and China, in particular, were bent on undermining democracies through whatever tools are available; and the growing realization that authoritarian states were acting with impunity abroad, especially after Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. 

As the senior director of research at the international human rights organization Freedom House until recently, I had a front row seat to the successes of the TNR agenda. In February 2021, my colleagues and I released a major report on TNR that documented for the first time its global scale and scope, using a new dataset we had designed and built over three years. Eager to define a new agenda on democracy after the first Trump administration and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the Biden administration seized on the report and launched a whole-of-government policy initiative against TNR. 

Major English-language news outlets, such as the Guardian and the Washington Post, took up the topic and launched entire investigative projects around it, as did media in many other countries. The virtuous flywheel between human rights groups, media, and governments started spinning, and soon there were significant policy results in multiple countries—new legislation passed, new areas of focus for law enforcement, new diplomatic and multilateral initiatives, and unusually frank official consultations with affected communities. Going into 2025, Canada made TNR a priority issue for its chairmanship of the G7, and was working to coordinate allies for new commitments ahead of the June summit. One of the last significant things I did at Freedom House was spend two days in January in Ottawa in a room with a few dozen researchers, civil society activists, and senior policymakers developing recommendations for how the G7 could address TNR.

Progress in the U.S. has now been undone by the second Trump administration. Though the United States formally signed on to the G7 statement, in every other possible way the government has destroyed the infrastructure that was being built to make the U.S. a leader in counter-TNR policy and to support other democracies in tackling the problem. Key personnel at the Department of Justice have been driven out or reassigned; Department of Homeland Security offices that were trying to bring some thoughtfulness and care to a delicate issue have been stripped, and many staff fired; programs for working on TNR at the State Department have been dismantled and staff fired or forced to resign. I—along with over 200 other staff at Freedom House—lost my job when U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and State Department foreign aid grants were terminated, among them a multimillion-dollar project I had designed to work on TNR policies around the world. Finally, with its overwhelming hostility toward immigrants, the second Trump administration is undermining the trust that TNR experts have emphasized as the key to addressing the problem. 

The consequences for counter-TNR efforts will be far-reaching. The work of other governments will continue, but because of the U.S.’s leading role in promoting the issue, driving attention, and providing funding, an opportunity for significant progress is being lost.

The Counter-TNR Policy Space

To understand the damage inflicted by the Trump administration, it’s useful to first lay out what counter-TNR efforts looked like before the cuts. At Freedom House, my colleagues and I divided these efforts into three main areas: foreign policy, security policy, and migration policy. Foreign policy efforts included sanctioning perpetrators, mobilizing diplomatic interventions to acute incidents, and advancing a multilateral agenda to promote the norm against TNR. In security policy, counterintelligence work and law enforcement prevented TNR through investigations and prosecutions. Migration policy helped build resilience against foreign manipulation within migration systems (e.g., by ensuring they could not provide false information in asylum cases, or that translators were not sharing information about asylum cases with origin states) and ensured that migration systems were sufficiently resourced and responsive so that people were not stuck in liminal statuses that left them vulnerable and less likely to engage with law enforcement. Across all pillars, training for personnel and developing protocols for identifying and addressing TNR were essential. 

Foreign Policy

Starting in 2021, the U.S. government led globally in counter-TNR foreign policy and security policy. The State Department conducted various interventions behind the scenes in third countries to help protect dissidents. Some of these resulted in people being freed from imprisonment who might otherwise have been illegally returned to their country of origin. New training was introduced at the Foreign Services Institute, and a new point of contact was set up at the Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor (DRL). At the multilateral level, the U.S. helped organize events at the UN Human Rights Council and later facilitated a joint statement supported by 45 other governments. 

On sanctions, the U.S. government also rapidly announced the “Khashoggi Ban” to punish officials involved in TNR-type schemes with visa restrictions, though implementation was a significant problem. With the usual time lag associated with such efforts, the State Department also began issuing calls for proposals for civil society to initiate complex global programs on TNR.

Security Policy

In security policy, while the counterintelligence elements remained opaque to someone like me, there was plenty of evidence that active efforts were underway—demonstrated both by the level of interest expressed by parts of the intelligence community and by specific plots that were disrupted. For instance, the Indian government plot that resulted in the 2023 murder of a Canadian citizen in British Columbia also targeted an American citizen; the Justice Department has since extradited someone allegedly working with Indian intelligence for organizing the plot. 

The law enforcement element of counter-TNR was visibly strong. The Department of Justice National Security Division made TNR one of its priorities, and the FBI tasked staff down to the field office level with understanding the issue, developing leads, and building cases. From personal interactions, I can say that there was deep interest in the topic at the leadership level of these institutions. 

I also know that many exiled communities facing threats had positive interactions with law enforcement, in which they felt respected and their issues were treated with seriousness. Law enforcement actively worked to build trust with these communities: for example, a new FBI reporting tip line for TNR, informational resources in multiple languages, public advertising campaigns in key cities or regions, and a digital guide prepared by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Perhaps most important, there were dozens of cases brought to prosecution and conviction.

Some in the Justice Department and the national security community surely viewed TNR in pragmatic terms. It seems likely, for example, that many saw it as a way to pursue the same goals as the discredited China Initiative in terms of countering in particular Chinese foreign interference. That effort—a high-profile attempt under the first Trump administration to combat economic espionage that focused on Chinese-origin researchers—ended with some prominent failures in court and allegations that it amounted to racial profiling. Counter-TNR work was in design and in practice much more “actor agnostic,” meaning it did not focus on a single state threat. 

It was also clear that TNR framing shifted the focus and the discourse from national security exclusively toward the protection of peoples’ rights as well as national security. This is clear in the statements about TNR by people like Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Even more important, it was sustained by the engagement of activists from targeted communities, who used the vocabulary of TNR to draw the focus to their priorities and their needs. Targeted communities emphasized the importance of TNR to policymakers across different departments and used it to stress the ways in which states could better protect their rights. 

Migration Policy

There was little progress on migration policy, however, even under the Biden administration. Though my colleagues and I always prioritized it as an issue—and ensured that when we convened policy stakeholders they heard from communities where the inability to receive permanent status was a major obstacle to countering TNR—it was clear that there was far less political appetite to make changes regarding migration or within the sprawling apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security. The department’s head, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, was apparently engaged on the issue, and some new resources were made available for addressing it, like tentative and low-profile outreach to some communities. But with the exception of a relatively minor (though welcome) change in policy regarding Interpol notices, there was little concrete action to point to. And the administration did absolutely nothing to build guardrails into the system against the abuses that we see now.

The State of Counter-TNR Under the Trump Administration

Counter-TNR work might seem like a relatively minor casualty of the past five months in the grand scheme of things, and most likely not a purposeful one. The new administration, after all, has not released a statement or a press release abandoning TNR work as a priority, and as noted above, it signed the G7 leaders’ statement on the topic. Nevertheless, counter-TNR efforts have effectively been dismantled. 

Elimination of Institutional Capacity

The first factor in the destruction of the counter-TNR agenda has been the elimination of institutional capacity at the Justice Department and State Department. At the Justice Department, Trump’s forced resignation of Director Christopher Wray continued his pattern of undermining the formerly bipartisan tradition of FBI independence and removed a high-profile advocate of work on TNR. The appointment of Kash Patel to head the FBI—along with the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—also raised concerns. Both Patel and Gabbard have expressed support for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government has engaged in overt, violent TNR plots, including in North America. Consequently, the appointments have caused some India-origin diasporas to question their ability to safely engage with law enforcement.

The evisceration of the National Security Division hasn’t—as far as I know—targeted Justice Department or FBI staff for working on TNR explicitly, but it has spilled over to many of those who did, regardless. Key people who had led work on this portfolio were reassigned to less influential and favorable assignments, presumably in retaliation for their work on issues like official corruption, the Jan. 6 attacks, and international affairs. A number of high-ranking National Security Division prosecutors have left the Justice Department altogether for private practice. Meanwhile, Justice Department and FBI resources that had been used for TNR are being redirected toward immigration enforcement or other administration priorities such as punishing universities.

At USAID and State, TNR capacity has been eliminated in the course of the sweeping layoffs and “fork in the road” resignations affecting both agencies. USAID has been eliminated, and its staff have been fired; DRL is experiencing layoffs and resignations as staff choose not to work for an administration openly hostile to the bureau’s human rights framework. The gutting of USAID and of foreign assistance more broadly led to extensive terminations of grants for working on TNR. In normal times, DRL grants like the one I had been working on would have led, over several more years, to the development of larger, even more complex projects at USAID and State, which would have produced more knowledge and better policy approaches to countering TNR. Those will no longer happen. The administration’s budget request for the State Department drastically slashes personnel, eliminating global capacity that had helped address TNR in third countries. At the level of foreign policy, the administration has made clear it is not interested in promoting liberal norms globally, in working with allies at multilateral institutions, or in advancing human rights as a universal principle. 

Hostility Toward Migrants

The second factor is that, reflective of this illiberal policy direction, the administration is implementing across-the-government policies of overt hostility to migrants and migration—making it as precarious, dangerous, and hard as possible for even migrants with legal status to remain in the country. This involves increasing scrutiny of travelers, targeting migrants for removal at court hearings, mass-revoking temporary protected status, mass-revoking student visas (including for communities vulnerable to TNR like Chinese students), and conducting ever more raids, detentions, and removals, all seemingly with the goal of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge of “mass deportation.” At State, the proposed budget request envisions an “Office of Remigration,” making an official foreign policy priority out of a far-right trope.

In the course of this hostile policy, the administration has suggested that noncitizens do not have a right to free expression in the United States—or perhaps even to any rights at all. The administration has explicitly said it is undertaking deportations based on speech, as in the cases of Rumeysa Öztürk, Mahmoud Khalil, and others. Secretary Rubio has conceded in court filings that Khalil’s speech is “otherwise lawful” but that the national interest in his deportation for that speech overrides any rights he may have. This argument cuts to the core of TNR as an issue, which is premised on the idea that people who are outside of their country of origin are still entitled to rights, including expression, assembly, and association. In claiming that noncitizens do not have those rights, the administration is aligning itself with authoritarian governments around the world.

Hostility to migrants as a policy also opens the door wide to witting or unwitting collaboration for transnational repression. A significant portion of TNR occurs when origin states are able to manipulate a host state into detaining or deporting someone, whether by abusing international notices, submitting prejudicial information, or corrupting local officials. More detentions and deportations, conducted without oversight or regard for the rights of migrants, increase the odds of inadvertently cooperating in an origin state’s attempts at TNR. The administration’s dismissive attitude toward the idea of habeas corpus rights for migrants embodies this problem: If you can’t even have an opportunity to challenge your removal before you are removed, how can you protect yourself against a foreign state targeting you through the immigration system?

It would not be surprising if we soon see purposeful collaboration by the U.S. government for TNR purposes. “Swap mart” behavior between states is a common phenomenon, which trades actions against dissidents for reciprocal actions in other states, or other favors. The case of Kseniia Petrova, a Russian Harvard biomedical researcher detained for months for not declaring frog embryos she brought into the country, shows the direction this may be headed. Petrova fears return to Russia because she publicly opposed its invasion of Ukraine; the United States is currently engaged in negotiations with Russia over the war, and it is not far-fetched to imagine the administration including her deportation (or that of other, more prominent, activists) in any bargain. 

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Throughout the years I have worked on counter-TNR policy, it has become clear that host states must build trust with affected communities, listen to their explanations of the threats against them, and learn what kinds of responses they hope to see. This is how you develop policies that protect people’s rights—by recognizing and addressing their perspectives, including the well-earned fears they have of immigration and law enforcement. Policymakers in the U.S. and other democracies before this administration were working to take this into account, even if they had still not gone far enough in building protections.

There will still be a need for counter-TNR work, because the issue is grounded in a problem fundamental to modern societies—namely, how people from many different countries can form one polity, at a time when authoritarian governments have more capacity and more willingness to exert control over their nationals beyond their borders. There remain other democracies, like Canada, that are committed to working on TNR as a problem through patient, comprehensive work across the multiple policy areas raised here, and in cooperation with vulnerable communities. Their leadership on the issue will be essential to sustaining a global agenda.

But the second Trump administration, with its policy of overt hostility to migrants as a class of people, has shattered any trust that had been built with communities in the U.S. and rolled back whatever progress had been made. The damage will only compound over time. It will be up to activists and researchers to continue the work with subnational state actors and with governments outside the United States, and to rebuild a U.S. agenda when the political winds turn.