Rights of migrant persons and ethno-religious minorities

General Overview

This section seeks to show how the current Argentine government deploys policies and discourse with a racist and xenophobic component, replicating a pattern visible in other right-wing and far-right political forces around the world. Prior to the arrival of Javier Milei, Argentina had progressive legislation protecting migrants and had achieved certain advances in protecting the rights of the indigenous peoples of its territory. The cutting or dismantling of public policies and legislation is in this case accompanied by a discursive endorsement that stigmatizes and at times criminalizes migrant groups from Latin American countries and indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Peoples: Evictions and International Isolation

In October 2024, the government repealed Decree 805/2021 and ended the emergency regarding the possession and ownership of lands occupied by indigenous communities, originally established by Law 26,160. This law had been successively renewed since 2006 and constituted the primary mechanism for protecting communities’ territorial possession while technical and legal surveys of their territories were being conducted. Its repeal opened the door to evictions. For example, in the Patagonia region, on January 9, 2025, the Lof Paillako Community was evicted; on June 3, 2025, the Lof Quemquemtrew Community was evicted from Cuesta del Ternero, and the Lof Buenuleo Community was forced to leave 90 hectares in dispute at the foot of Cerro Ventana, where an eviction court order was in place.

On the international stage, in November 2024, Argentina was the only country at the UN to vote against a resolution on the rights of indigenous peoples in the General Assembly — a position that, like the vote against the resolution on violence against women, does not modify the domestic normative framework but globally projects the government’s agenda and signals to international human rights bodies that Argentina has abandoned its traditional role as a promoter of protective standards.

Migrants: The Regressive DNU of May 2025

In October 2024, DNU No. 942/2024 modified the composition of the National Commission for Refugees (CONARE) and regulated the Refugee Law in a manner regressive with respect to international standards, introducing a national security perspective that affects the right to seek and receive asylum recognized in the American Convention on Human Rights. In May 2025, DNU 366/2025 encroached upon the full range of migration rights: it restricted migrants’ access to health services and enabled the possibility of charging fees for access to education — a measure that, if consolidated, would imply the exclusion of migrant communities from essential public services previously guaranteed on a universal basis.

General overview

The area of racism and xenophobia in Brazil exhibits, as with the previous areas, a tension between the progressive advances pursued by the federal executive and the persistence of structural phenomena of discrimination and violence. The Lula government reactivated the demarcation of indigenous lands — entirely halted during the Bolsonaro government — and promoted a national migration policy through democratic debate and participatory construction. But at the same time, violence against indigenous peoples worsened under the legal framework created by restrictive legislation, and religious intolerance — especially against African-derived religions — reached record levels.

Indigenous lands: demarcations and structural violence

The Lula government recognized the territorial rights of Brazilian indigenous peoples over five new lands during the analyzed period: Aldeia Velha (Bahia) and Cacique Fontoura (Mato Grosso) in April 2024; Potiguara de Monte-Mor (Paraíba), Morro dos Cavalos, and Toldo Imbu (Santa Catarina) in December 2024, bringing the total to 13 territories demarcated since the beginning of his third term. Many of these recognition orders dated back to 2007 and 2008 without ever having been executed. The government also reactivated the National Council of Indigenous Policy (CNPI), which had been dismantled during the Bolsonaro administration.

However, these advances coexist with a picture of structural violence worsened by Law 14,701/2023, which establishes that indigenous peoples only have rights over lands that were in their possession at the time of the promulgation of the Constitution in October 1988. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN warned in July 2024 about growing violence against indigenous peoples in Bahia, Paraná, and Mato Grosso do Sul, in the context of the legal uncertainty generated by this law. In August 2024, the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB) withdrew from the STF’s Conciliation Chamber, denouncing it as “forced conciliation” over fundamental rights. The 20th edition of the Acampamento Terra Livre, held in June 2024 in Brasília under the motto “Indigenous Emergency: Our Rights Are Non-Negotiable,” brought together thousands of indigenous people in a massive demonstration along the Esplanada dos Ministérios.

Religious intolerance: a growing phenomenon

As relevant contextual data, the records of Disque 100 — a service for disseminating information on the rights of vulnerable groups and for reporting human rights violations — for 2024 show a picture of growing religious intolerance: 2,472 violations due to religious intolerance, representing an increase of 990 cases compared to 2023. African-derived religions — umbanda and candomblé — were the most targeted, with attacks on religious centers (terreiros), assaults during rituals, and hate graffiti. In the Federal District, 50% of recorded religious intolerance crimes were directed against these religions; the Respeite Meu Terreiro report found that 76% of terreiros had suffered some form of attack that can be interpreted as religious racism. This phenomenon reveals the persistence of discriminatory practices with deep historical roots that government policies have not been able to reverse.

Migrants: between participatory policy and xenophobia

In the area of migration, the Lula government promoted between 2023 and 2024 a participatory process for the construction of the National Policy on Migration, Refuge, and Statelessness (COMIGRAR), which culminated in November 2024 with a national conference that produced 60 priority public policy proposals, with the participation of 14,000 people including migrants, civil society organizations, and international bodies. The National Committee for Refugees (CONARE) also recognized 13,409 asylum applications through October 2024, expedited through the use of artificial intelligence. As contextual data, the regional report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES) (2025) identified that defenders of migrants’ rights face threats, stigmatization, and xenophobia in Brazil, with an exponential increase of 874% in xenophobia cases between 2021 and 2022, a trend that continued during the monitored period.

Police violence: the structural context of repression

Two situations recorded in our database provide elements for understanding a context of structural racism in Brazil. Police lethality in the Baixada Santista increased by 71% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, as a result of Operações Escudo and Verão. In the Conjunto de Favelas da Maré (Rio de Janeiro), 37 police operations in 2024 left three dead, more than 30 raids, and affected the right to free movement of 140,000 people. The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, who visited Brazil in August 2024, noted that police violence in favelas is directly linked to structural racism. The 2024 Brazilian Public Security Yearbook revealed that 82% of deaths from police intervention involved Black people, who are 4 times more likely to die at the hands of the police than a white person. These data constitute a pattern of racialized state violence that federal government policies have not been able to halt, and which represents one of the most serious human rights deficits of the period in Brazil.

General overview

Around this set of rights, the political dynamics of the German case during this period are particularly clear: the setbacks in migrants’ rights and the rise of racist and xenophobic positions are not the product of a far-right government, but of the pressure the AfD exerts on traditional parties, which have progressively adopted a more restrictive migration agenda as a strategy to win back votes from the far right.

Tightening of migration controls

In September 2024, the “traffic light” coalition government announced plans to introduce stricter controls at all border crossings, extending a policy that had already been in effect since October 2023. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser justified the measure on the need to “further reduce irregular migration,” adopting language and an agenda that only a few years earlier had been the exclusive preserve of far-right political positions. This measure, adopted by a center-to-center-left government, is a telling indicator of the shift in German political debate on migration.

In August 2024, Germany carried out its first deportation to Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in August 2021. A flight carrying 28 Afghan nationals — described by the government as “convicted criminals” — departed from Leipzig/Halle airport. Human rights organizations criticized the measure, noting that Afghanistan under the Taliban regime does not meet the minimum safety conditions required to receive deportees. In September of that same year, the government also proposed deportations to Rwanda — following the model of the plan abandoned by the United Kingdom — as a mechanism for managing irregular migration flows.

In January 2025, the Bundestag passed a motion for stricter migration policy. The vote on this motion is particularly significant for understanding the political moment: it was the first joint vote between the CDU and the far-right AfD. The measure passed contemplates permanent border controls, the rejection of all irregular asylum applications, and greater facilitation of deportations. The measure sparked intense debate over whether the CDU had “broken the cordon sanitaire” separating mainstream parties from the far right.

Resistance and new threats

In response to this shift, civil society responded with notably large-scale mobilizations. In January 2025, tens of thousands of people protested in Berlin — and in other cities across the country — against plans to restrict immigration proposed by the conservatives with AfD support. That same month, 15,000 people blocked access to the AfD’s national congress in Riesa. These demonstrations constituted one of the broadest expressions of rejection of the political debate’s shift toward anti-migrant positions, and are an indicator of the democratic vitality sustaining civil society’s counterweight to the far right’s advance.

In April 2025, Berlin’s migration authorities moved forward with deportation proceedings against four young foreign residents on account of their participation in solidarity protests with Gaza. These proceedings, still ongoing, would — if confirmed — set a grave precedent. The exercise of the right to protest could have direct consequences on the migration status of foreign nationals, linking political repression with the violation of migrants’ rights.

General Overview

In this area, the Spanish government is advancing migrants’ rights from the executive branch, while the right and far right use the migration issue as a central axis of political mobilization, particularly at the regional level. The case of the migrant minors from the Canary Islands is the most representative episode of this dynamic during the period under analysis.

Advances by the Central Government: Regularization and Immigration Law Reform

The period records three significant advances in the rights of migrants. In April 2024, Congress approved — with 310 votes in favor and 33 against — a Popular Legislative Initiative backed by more than 600,000 signatures for the extraordinary regularization of 500,000 undocumented migrants, with the PP voting in favor. In November 2024, the government approved a new regulation of the Immigration Law providing for the regularization of 300,000 migrants per year, facilitating labor, educational, and family integration. In April 2025, Congress approved the reform of the Immigration Law to establish the mandatory distribution of migrant minors among autonomous communities when capacity exceeds 150% — a measure that the PP and Vox voted against.

The Instrumentalization of Migration: The Case of the Canary Islands Minors

In July 2024, Vox and PP dissolved coalition regional governments in at least one autonomous community after refusing to accept the 347 migrant minors who had arrived in the Canary Islands and whose distribution had been approved by Congress. This episode — which MIDA records as a setback because it involves the coordinated rejection of a measure to protect migrant minors and the collapse of governments over an anti-migration agenda — clearly illustrates the use of migration policy as an instrument of far-right positioning in Spain. The image of unaccompanied minors turned into political bargaining chips is one of the most eloquent indicators of the state of the migration issue in Spain.

Hate Speech: Relevant Context

As contextual data — not computable on the MIDA scale but significant for the diagnosis — the OBERAXE 2024 report documented 2,095 cases of racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, anti-Roma, and Islamophobic hate speech on social media, with North Africans being the most affected group (33.7% of cases) and Islamophobia the most frequent type of discourse (26.2%). The report also noted that officials from right-wing parties maintain these discourses in the public sphere. This persistence of hate speech in institutional political debate is an indicator of the climate within which the central government’s measures advancing migrants’ rights are situated.

General Overview

The set of rights addressed in this section presents a particular feature within the period under analysis: it was the only one in which the Biden administration already recorded significant setbacks, which were then drastically deepened by the Trump administration. Migration policy constitutes the central axis of this area, with measures of first-order humanitarian impact.

Biden Administration (June – January 2025)

Restrictions on the Right to Asylum

In June 2024, Biden issued an executive order enabling the apprehension and expulsion of migrants entering through the southern border without processing their asylum claims. In September 2024, this measure was ratified and strengthened. These restrictions were characterized by human rights organizations such as the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as “harmful and illegal” and were challenged in court. In May 2025, a federal District Court overturned key parts of these measures at the initiative of the Immigrants’ Rights Advocacy Center of the Americas.

Advances in Religious Freedom

In parallel, in December 2024 the Biden-Harris administration launched the first National Strategy to counter Islamophobia and violence toward the Arab community in the United States, including measures against discrimination in access to employment and housing.

Trump Administration (January – June 2025)

Migration Policy: An Escalation of Setbacks

The Trump administration’s migration policy in its first six months constituted the set of measures with the greatest direct humanitarian impact of the period under analysis:

Executive order to enable Guantánamo Bay as a mass detention center for up to 30,000 migrants (January 29). On February 4, a first group of Venezuelans was transferred to Camp IV, previously used for detainees from the “war on terror.”

ICE memorandum for the re-detention of persons with deportation protection, with the aim of deporting them to third countries (February 2).

Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelans to the CECOT prison in El Salvador without due process (March 14) — the first time this law has been used since World War II.

Termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals of eleven countries: Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela. Secretary Kristi Noem ordered the “self-deportation” of those affected (May 1).

Signing of agreements with El Salvador and Guatemala to accept deportation flights of people of other nationalities in exchange for financial compensation (April 13).

New travel ban for nationals of 19 countries, with a total ban for 12 of them and a partial one for 7 (June 4). The measure represents an expansion of the travel ban implemented during Trump’s first term.

The set of these measures — which combines the use of military facilities for immigration detention, the application of wartime legislation, the elimination of historical protections, and the use of third countries as destinations for forced deportation — constitutes a pattern of rights deterioration without precedent in the recent history of U.S. immigration policy.

Resistance and Defense

The D.C. District Court overturned in May 2025 key parts of the asylum restrictions implemented by Biden (May 9). This decision, driven by the Immigrants’ Rights Advocacy Center of the Americas, also has implications for the continuities of that policy under Trump.

Federal Judge Brian Murphy in Boston issued an order limiting rapid deportations from Guantánamo, requiring that migrants be given the opportunity to express concerns about safety in destination countries (April 30).

Mass protests in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities against ICE raids and mass deportation policies (June 2025).