There are falsehoods that mislead, falsehoods that injure and then falsehoods so vast they expose a moral collapse inside the institutions that utter them. The recent decision by the US Department of Homeland Security to declare Myanmar “safe” for the forced return of Myanmar nationals belongs squarely in the third category.
It is not a policy miscalculation. It is a breach of conscience so egregious that it becomes a geopolitical act of complicity. For an American agency to certify “safety” in a nation engulfed in civil war, governed by a regime that has imprisoned the country’s elected leaders in solitary confinement and ravaged by military leaders who routinely commit war crimes, is an abdication of moral and factual integrity.
The assertion that Myanmar has made “notable progress” toward stability and “national reconciliation” is not an analysis; it is utter propaganda. It recycles the junta’s talking points, rebrands them as federal assessment and presents them to the world with the imprimatur of the United States.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s claim that the country has improved sufficiently for the return of its nationals—supported, she says, by “plans for free and fair elections,” “governance improvements,” and “enhanced service delivery– reads less like an intelligence brief and more like a document prepared for the junta’s own diplomatic campaign.
Myanmar today is experiencing the gravest humanitarian emergency in its modern history. The military continues to employ air power against civilian areas, including schools, places of worship, clinics and emergency shelters. Entire communities have been displaced, in some cases repeatedly, by a conflict that now spans every major region.
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Millions face acute food insecurity. Essential infrastructure, including medical and educational systems, has collapsed under sustained military assault. The economy, once poised for regional integration and touted as a “last frontier” market, has deteriorated to the point where poverty is rising at a scale not seen in a generation. This is not a nation experiencing “stability.” It is a nation in freefall.
The human rights situation is as dire. More than 22,000 political prisoners remain behind bars—monks, students, journalists, doctors, elected officials, civil servants and countless others who have merely refused to acknowledge or legitimize military rule.
Independent monitors continue to document arbitrary detentions, torture, deaths in custody, systematic intimidation and enforced disappearances. Freedom of expression, movement, assembly and religion is severely restricted.
Humanitarian access is largely blocked. The military’s control of information has grown increasingly sophisticated, particularly in regions where it seeks to manufacture the appearance of order.
At the center of this crisis is the total disappearance of Myanmar’s democratically elected leader and Noble Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Now 80 years old, she has been held in complete isolation for nearly five years. Her health, location and even her survival remain unverified.
Not a single independent observer—not her counsel, not humanitarian agencies, not her own son – has been permitted to see her. Her imprisonment is not peripheral; it is the clearest indicator that Myanmar remains under absolute military rule. To suggest that a nation holding its legitimate leader in enforced isolation is “safe” for return is to normalize authoritarianism.
In this context, the Department of Homeland Security’s decision is not merely contradictory; it is immoral and it’s dangerous. It places thousands of Myanmar nationals in the United States in immediate jeopardy. Those forced to return will face surveillance, interrogation and possible detention.
The junta has a long and well-documented record of treating returnees—especially those who have lived, studied or sought asylum abroad—as political threats. Deporting individuals back into such conditions is not a neutral administrative action. It is the deliberate exposure of vulnerable people to persecution.
What makes this decision especially indefensible is that it directly contradicts the US government’s own analysis. The State Department’s most recent human rights report on Myanmar documents extrajudicial killings, torture, forced disappearances, widespread attacks against civilians and the systematic denial of basic freedoms.
At the same time, the US government warns its own citizens not to travel to Myanmar under any circumstances due to armed conflict, civil unrest and arbitrary enforcement of laws. This is not policy coherence; it is moral schizophrenia.
It is the substitution of political convenience for moral clarity. And it is a betrayal—not only of Myanmar’s people but of every principle the United States claims to defend: democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the protection of those fleeing persecution.
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The truth is unambiguous. Myanmar is not safe. Myanmar is not stable. Myanmar is not progressing toward reconciliation or democracy. It remains under the control of a military that seized power illegally, governs through violence, and continues to terrorize its own population. No diplomatic reframing, no bureaucratic euphemism, no manufactured optimism can alter that fact.
What can alter it is moral courage—the willingness of governments to confront the reality of Myanmar’s catastrophe rather than adopt the fiction crafted by its persecutors. The DHS ruling fails that test. It will be remembered not as a technical decision but as a profound lapse of responsibility – one that endangers lives and undermines the global struggle for human rights.
Unless the United States aligns its policies with its supposed principles, this decision will stand as a warning: even powerful democracies are susceptible to convenient untruths. And in the case of Myanmar—where the stakes are measured in human lives—convenient untruths kill.
Alan Clements is a former Buddhist monk, journalist, human rights activist and author of “The Voice of Hope”, “Unsilenced”, “Conversation with a Dictator” and the forthcoming “Politics of the Heart.
He has spent more than three decades documenting Myanmar’s struggle for democracy and working in close dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi. His work integrates political insight, moral inquiry and the philosophy of nonviolence.
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