December 10 marked International Human Rights Day, commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It’s a day meant to celebrate the fundamental dignity and rights belonging to every person. Instead, we mark it amid what Amnesty International has called a “global human rights crisis” accelerated by the Trump administration’s policies—policies that continue America’s long history of race-based immigration enforcement.
Last week, the Trump administration added another painful entry to this record: pulling people out of citizenship oath ceremonies and halting all immigration processes for individuals from 19 predominantly non-white countries. The impact in Massachusetts has been immediate and devastating.
“At least 45 people MIRA has been supporting for months as they navigate the complicated and extensive American immigration and naturalization system have been impacted by these latest abrupt changes by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Five of those individuals found out last week that, after extensive vetting, interviews and tests, their oath of citizenship at historic Faneuil Hall had been cancelled while at least 40 who had begun the process now face further uncertainty and delay. This decision and the process is as crass as it is cruel and arbitrary. People are disheartened, devastated and rightly outraged.” Liz Sweet, MIRA’s Executive Director
A Pattern, Not an Anomaly
These actions aren’t isolated incidents. They fit a pattern that stretches back more than two hundred years. As documented in Mapping Deportations, “U.S. immigration enforcement has favored Europeans and their descendants while targeting non-white migrants for exclusion, removal, and punishment. Although U.S. immigration law and policy have shifted over time, the nation’s immigration enforcement regime has consistently produced this result.”
From the Chinese Exclusion Act to Operation Wetback to the Muslim Ban, U.S. immigration policy has repeatedly used national origin as a proxy for race—creating barriers, delays, and humiliation specifically for people of color seeking to build lives in America. Each generation’s version looks slightly different, but the underlying architecture of exclusion remains the same.
Human Rights Violations in Real Time
The violations aren’t abstract or distant—they’re happening here, now, to us, to our families, to our neighbors. Human Rights Watch has documented systematic abuses across immigration enforcement, including ICE abuses in Los Angeles that are setting a dangerous precedent for other cities. Amnesty International’s recent investigations have revealed human rights violations in Florida detention centers at Alligator, Alcatraz, and Krome facilities—places where people seeking safety are instead subjected to inhumane conditions.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law” and that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” These aren’t aspirational principles. They’re supposed to be guarantees.
Yet current U.S. immigration policy systematically violates these rights: separating families, detaining people in dangerous conditions, denying due process, and using nationality as grounds for exclusion and punishment. The people waiting to take their citizenship oaths in Massachusetts had fulfilled every requirement imposed on them. They’d studied, paid fees, passed tests, attended interviews, and cleared extensive background checks. They were ready to pledge their allegiance to a country that, at the last moment, told them they weren’t welcome after all—not because of anything they did, but because of where they were born.
The Cruelty Is the Point
This is not about security. This is about sending a message about who belongs and who doesn’t. It’s about maintaining a hierarchy that has always placed whiteness at the top and everyone else somewhere below. And it’s about using the immense power of the federal government to enforce that hierarchy, one cancelled oath ceremony at a time.
On International Human Rights Day, we must name what’s happening for what it is: a human rights crisis unfolding in real time on American soil, rooted in centuries of racist exclusion. The documentation from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch makes clear that these aren’t isolated incidents—they’re features of a deliberately cruel system with deep historical roots.
We must recommit to the principle that human rights aren’t conditional on citizenship status, country of origin, or the political winds of any given administration. Everyone means everyone. That’s what human rights are supposed to mean.
“Our clients are in shock that after complying with all the steps to become citizens of this country, they were pulled from their naturalization ceremony. After interviews, vetting and tests, and an approval from a Citizenship and Immigration Services official, what should have been a joyful day became one of devastation. Pulling individuals out of this final step to take their oath of citizenship was simply cruel.” Liz Sweet, MIRA’s Executive Director