Critics of President Joe Biden's administration have attacked the State Department for reporting what they say is too low a number of Iranians killed by security forces during November 2019 protests against higher gasoline prices. The department’s annual country report on human rights in Iran in 2020 has lower figures than the 2019 report published last year under the Trump administration.

The new annual report, released on Tuesday March 30, omitted mention of a Reuters story of December 23, 2019 claiming three sources “close to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's inner circle” and a fourth official had all confirmed deaths of around 1,500 people in under two weeks of unrest.

The new State Department country report in one place cites both Amnesty International and Reuters for a figure of "between 300 and 1,500 persons across the country” and uses the Amnesty figure of 304 killings in all other instances. The last figure is drawn from a report published by Amnesty  on May 20, 2020, which compiled what the NGO called "credible information indicating the place, circumstances of the deaths recorded, and their exact or approximate date." The State Department says that its country reports on human rights practices are “based on a wide variety of credible sources” with NGOs “particularly helpful for citation.”

Gabriel Noronha, a Trump administration appointee who ran Persian-language social media channels as a State Department Special Advisor, tweeted on Wednesday that Amnesty’s figure was "initial and incomplete."

"I spent weeks poring over mortality figures from towns, cross-checking them against the ‘official figures’," Noronha wrote. "The figure of 1,500 Iranians killed stands up to scrutiny. So why is the State Department now ignoring the broad evidence of the regime's abuses against Iranians? Whatever lawyerly response they give doesn't really matter. What matters is that the U.S. needs to keep up pressure on the regime that slaughtered those 1,500 innocent Iranians."

Noronha found it "deeply troubling" that officials – an apparent reference to Acting Assistant Secretary Lisa Peterson taking reporters’ questions – had not yet explained why the new report had used the Amnesty figure. Under the Trump presidency officials often quoted the higher Reuters' figures, although Brian Hook, the US Special Representative for Iran, in December 2019, said Iranian security forces might have killed "more than 1,000 people" in the protests.

Iran has never announced a death toll for the protests or for numbers detained. According to Amnesty, at least 7,000 were arrested. Amnesty recorded the names and details of over 500 protesters and others, including journalists and human rights defenders, it said were subjected to unfair criminal proceedings over the protests.

The new State Department report criticized the Iranian government for a lack of action investigating or prosecuting officials over abuses during suppression of widespread protests in November 2019 and over suspicious deaths in custody in previous years. The report said many abuses were "perpetrated as a matter of government policy" and that impunity remained pervasive throughout all levels of the government and security forces.