Report: State Department to remove LGBTQ references from human rights reports

Advocacy groups have sharply criticized the State Department over its reported plans to remove references to anti-LGBTQ discrimination from its annual human rights reports.

The Washington Post on Wednesday reported it obtained drafts of human rights reports for El Salvador, Russia, and Israel.

“They strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them, and the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened,” reported the Post.

Andry Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker, said guards at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum-security prison known by the Spanish acronym CECOT, sexually assaulted him after the U.S. “forcibly disappeared” him and hundreds of other Venezuelans to the Central American country in March. The Post publ