Bernie Sanders and a group of top Democrats are calling on the Trump administration to present a plan to Congress to combat “massive levels of deprivation and the immense suffering this deprivation causes”, following an excoriating United Nations report into extreme poverty in America.



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In a congressional letter delivered on Tuesday to Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, the group said the UN report was “a call to action that we must heed”. They stand ready, the signatories say, to work with the Trump administration “to address appalling rates of child poverty, destructive economic policies that benefit the wealthy over the working poor … and lack of access to basic necessities in rural and underserved communities”.

The group specifically urges Trump to put the convention on the rights of the child before the Senate for ratification. The US is the only country in the world that has failed to ratify the treaty and the letter writers say “it is shameful that more than 13 million children live in poverty in this country and that, on any given night, more than one in five homeless individuals are children”.

The signatories include many of the most outspoken critics of inequality and poverty in America today. In addition to Sanders, an independent from Vermont who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, the senators in the group are Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Patrick Leahy, Dianne Feinstein and Jeff Merkley.

The signatories from the House of Representatives, led by Terri Sewell, are: John Lewis, Yvette Clarke, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, James McGovern, Raúl Grijalva, Earl Blumenauer, Danny Davis, Ro Khanna, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Frederica Wilson and Mark Pocan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders is leading the group. Photograph: Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock

The congressional intervention comes in response to the official report of the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, who acts as global watchdog on the human rights implications of deprivation. Following a two-week tour of the US in December that took him to several of the most poverty-stricken parts of the country, he issued a scathing critique of the fact that 40 million Americans live in poverty and more than five million experience levels of absolute deprivation associated with the developing world.

Alston will present his findings to the UN human rights council in Geneva on 21 June.

The joint letter suggests Alston’s report is starting to gain traction in Washington. So far the White House and federal government departments have remained studiously silent over his findings, though Sanders and his fellow signatories express the hope that Haley will relay the key conclusions to Trump.

The UN report and the Democratic response to it act as a timely corrective to self-congratulatory noises coming from the White House over the state of the US economy. After this month’s jobs report showed a net increase of 223,000 jobs, Trump tweeted that under his presidency the US had achieved the “best economy & jobs EVER”.

But the UN report exposed the extent to which millions of Americans remain locked in penury exacerbated by the growing gulf between rich and poor. Sanders, Warren and their colleagues say the existence of such suffering in a rich country like the US is “an affront to any notion of the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Given the breadth of poverty outlined in the report, these rights are simply illusory for millions in this country.”

Pressure on Congress to do something to counter the stubborn endurance of ill health, homelessness, lack of food and unsanitary living conditions has been given a further boost by the Poor People’s Campaign, the movement led by the Rev William Barber and the Rev Liz Theoharis that has swept more than 30 states. Barber and Theoharis were set to join Warren for a forum on poverty at the Capitol on Tuesday.

Following Alston’s lead, the letter writers accuse Trump of taking hardships that have been decades in the making and “making things worse. We agree with the report’s conclusion that the administration’s $1.5tn in tax cuts ‘overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality’.”

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They lament the narrow definition of human rights adopted by the US over successive administrations. Quoting Alston, they say the US “is alone among developed countries in insisting that, while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare or growing up in a context of total deprivation”.

Sanders and his peers conclude that Alston exposed “horrendous conditions” across the nation. From Alabama, where endemic diseases of poverty are making a comeback, to hurricane-racked Puerto Rico and the jobless strife of West Virginia, “Americans are suffering”.

But they end on a positive note: “The good news is, these are problems we can address. We agree with the special rapporteur that ‘with political will, extreme poverty could readily be eliminated’.”