The Trump administration’s refusal to engage with UN human rights monitors risks undermining standards around the world and will embolden repressive regimes such as China and Russia, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee has charged.

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Robert Menendez, US senator from New Jersey and the committee’s ranking member, has written to the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to condemn the Trump administration for its apparent boycott of UN human rights investigators. Since 7 May last year the state department has failed to respond to any of the UN’s official complaints – a silent treatment never before seen in American history.

In his letter, Menendez points out that the US government has also failed to respond to all requests for official visits to the US by UN monitors, known as special rapporteurs, since Donald Trump entered the White House in January 2017. The visits are seen as a crucial way of holding all countries – including the US – to account for their treatment of vulnerable populations.

By shutting out the monitors, Menendez says, the US “risks undermining human rights globally and will be seen as empowering repressive regimes, like China and Russia, who seek to delegitimize internationally accepted human rights norms”. He notes that monitors “play an important role in advancing the fundamental human values traditionally championed by every previous US administration”.

The effective US boycott was introduced by stealth in the absence of any public announcement. It appears to be an act of pique by the White House after Trump was heavily criticized last June by the UN monitor on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, who accused him of deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin.

Is there a policy, either formal or informal? What is that policy? Robert Menendez

The then US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, responded angrily to Alston’s report, not only disputing its findings but arguing it was “patently ridiculous for the UN to examine poverty in America”. She said the UN should focus instead on “the world’s worst human rights abusers” such as Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In his letter, Menendez calls on Pompeo to explain the lack of cooperation. “Is there a policy, either formal or informal? What is that policy?”

Over the past 12 months some 24 official complaints have been lodged by UN monitors without a single reply. The subjects they address include:

• The death of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection at the southern border.

• The five-year prison sentence imposed on Reality Winner for leaking classified material relating to Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

• The pending execution of a prisoner in South Dakota who jurors decided to put on death row because he was gay.

• Violence and intimidation against a transgender activist who faced such intense death threats she fled to Sweden.

Further pressure on the Trump administration over its refusal to engage with human rights inspectors has come from a coalition of 89 American human rights groups who have written to Pompeo urging him to allow the UN monitor on racism to visit the US. The coalition, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the NAACP, points out that George W Bush agreed to a similar visit with bipartisan support in 2008.

Yet under Trump no official visits have been permitted.

Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s human rights program, told the Guardian that more accountability, not less, was needed in the wake of the “troubling rise in hate crimes and resurgent of white supremacy in the United States, as well as this administration’s failure to acknowledge and address it. Inviting the UN expert on racism to conduct an official visit would be a good start.”

The joint letter said there was an urgent need for a new investigation into racism in America, given “credible reports indicating a frightening resurgence in white supremacy, which has led to a rise in racism and hate crimes in the US”.