Lacayo is one of the 4.5 million people on probation or parole on any given day in the U.S., almost twice as many people as are currently incarcerated. Community supervision is often thought of as a positive alternative to incarceration. But for many, the strict requirements and intense surveillance turn it into “a secondary form of incarceration,” says Amy Sings in the Timber, an attorney and executive director of the Montana Innocence Project. The consequences for not adhering to the conditions of parole are harsh: A quarter of state prison admissions nationwide are a result of technical violations such as failing a drug test or missing a meeting with a probation or parole officer. “In many instances, in our client populations, there are survival tactics that are criminalized,” reflects Sings in the Timber.

The issue is acute in rural states such as Montana, and disproportionately impacts tribal communities. Native Americans account for 6.5 percent of Montana’s population, but represent 20 percent of the population in men’s prisons and 34 percent of the population in women’s prisons. An ACLU report found that between 2010 and 2017, 81 percent of Native Americans in Montana who were reincarcerated while on probation were charged with a technical violation, not a new crime.

Technical violations send people back to prison because of a lack of support

Complying with requirements of probation or parole can be a high-stakes experience and the system is not set up to help people navigate the complicated network of needs post-release. The threat of punishment makes some fearful to reach out for help, said Lacayo, who is now a community organizer. “[Probation or parole officers] could easily make your life even harder, so it’s very hard to say how you feel,” Lacayo reflected.

There are also a number of practical barriers.

Many conditions of probation or parole require transportation, and in Montana, people may have to drive over an hour on rural highways to reach the nearest probation and parole office. “To be able to even access your supervisor can be impossible in some instances,” says Sings in the Timber.  These long trips are frequent, especially since the Montana Department of Corrections does not accept most urinalysis and drug testing, evaluations, or treatment programs that take place on reservations. Some tribes, like the Fort Peck Reservation in eastern Montana, have a memorandum of understanding with the state that allows tribal members to utilize the tribe’s probation and parole resources to fulfil state requirements. However, this is not a state-wide standard.

Housing is another common requirement of probation and parole, and Montana has 23 housing-related collateral consequence laws that restrict or ban certain forms of housing for formerly incarcerated people with certain convictions. Even pre-release centers — transitional facilities where formerly incarcerated people live under supervision — can be challenging to access, though they are meant to be a stepping stone to independent housing. All pre-release centers in Montana are in urban areas; none are located on reservations. Lacayo also  notes that they are not always designed to be a supportive transitional environment. “When I got to pre-release, one of the directors said ‘Just so you know, I’m not here to be your friend,’” he says. “They have absolute power over you. That’s a very scary thought.” At the time Lacayo lived there, it cost $14 per day. Montanans earn between just 16 cents and $1.25 per hour for employment while incarcerated.

Montana also has 189 employment-related collateral consequences, including bans on many jobs that require occupational licensing, such as commercial truck driving and selling real estate. (One in four jobs in America requires such licensing.) Some of these consequences are mandatory and lifelong, while others are at the discretion of the employer and time limited. Reservations have a separate set of laws, with their own restrictions. Some, including the Fort Peck Reservation, ban anyone with a felony from working for the tribal government, which is often the largest employer in the area. It can be a confusing system to navigate. “The number of employment opportunities are far and few between,” says Sings in the Timber.

Reentry is also expensive. Costs associated with probation and parole — such as mandatory drug tests, restitution, or GPS monitoring — can quickly add up. Compliance Monitoring Services, one of the companies Montana courts use for surveillance, charges up to $360 per month for GPS bracelets, plus a $50 installation fee. If someone can’t afford rent or other fees of probation and parole, the Department of Corrections can garnish their wages, tax refunds, or a tribal member’s per capita payment.

Reentry supports reduce technical violations and recidivism

Social support can be particularly hard to come by as a formerly incarcerated person. A common condition of probation or parole is that you are not allowed to associate with other formerly incarcerated people — especially challenging in small communities or if family members are formerly incarcerated.

Returning to a reservation presents a separate set of barriers. As sovereign nations, reservations do not fall under the jurisdiction of the state. This means that people on probation or parole cannot legally return to their home reservations without extradition waivers, which allowing the state to extradite someone from tribal jurisdiction if a violation occurs. Not all reservations have extradition waiver agreements, however. The Fort Peck Reservation in eastern Montana does, while the Crow Reservation in central Montana does not. Without an extradition waiver, people cannot live on a reservation until they have completed their probation or parole, which may be years.

“It’s almost impossible for [people on probation or parole] without their support system,” reflected Fort Peck Chief Judge Stacie Four Star. “But we see that a lot.” Four Star is pushing for standard memorandums of understanding and extradition agreements statewide, but these ideas have gained little traction.

Recent policy efforts to increase support for formerly incarcerated Native Americans have been unsuccessful. Two bills were introduced in 2019, which would have created a grant program for culturally-based reentry programs and revised an existing reentry housing grant program to require that a certain percentage of funding was allocated to programs serving Native Americans. Neither bill passed. There has been more success with tribal-led programs. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Holistic Defender Program, for example, assists clients to find employment, housing, healthcare, obtain a drivers license, and connects people with mentors, such as tribal elders, to provide cultural support.

The pandemic has expedited the need for improved reentry support. In spring 2020, Indigenous and Latinx activists in Montana, including Lacayo, organized a campaign called Let Them Come Home to advocate for an end to arrests for technical violations, temporarily waive probation and parole requirements, and reduce the number of people in Montana jails and prisons. Despite their efforts, Montana actually released fewer people from prison in 2020 than they did in 2019.

Without meaningful reentry support, technical violations will likely continue and people will continue to be re-incarcerated. “How can you jump through all these hoops and follow the rules if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or where you can sleep safely?” reflected Sings in the Timber. “We need to take a look at technical violations not as someone willfully doing wrong, but as a strong sign that there is support that is needed.”

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In Minnesota, between 27-54 Indigenous women and girls were missing in a given month between 2012 and 2020, according to the task force report that led to the office’s creation. The task force found that Indigenous people comprised 1 percent of the state’s population, but Indigenous women made up 8 percent of all murdered women. Thirty-four percent of Indigenous and Native women experience a sexual assault in their lifetime and nearly double that experience some kind of violent assault, according to the National Congress of American Indians. Research shows that the majority of this violence is committed by white men, yet on reservations — where Native women are ten times more likely to be murdered — tribal governments don’t have the power to investigate most crimes committed by white perpetrators.

The Minnesota task force found the roots of the MMIWR epidemic are racialized and gender-based violence sanctioned by a series of social-legal patterns: forcible removal of Indigenous children and separation of families; creation of a predatory and racist child welfare system; laws that prohibited Indigenous people from engaging with cultural or religious ceremony; retribution for speaking tribal languages; creation of the social-psychological myth that Indigenous women and girls exist to serve white men’s sexual needs; and the use of police and surveillance agencies to criminalize and intimidate Native peoples, among others.

Minnesota’s MMIWR office, the first dedicated and permanent site to address this systemic violence, was proposed by state Senator Mary Kunesh, whose mother was an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The office will collect and track data, review open and cold cases, draft relevant legislation, maintain communications with tribal governments, and coordinate with other state departments, among other mandates. Most importantly, Kunesh says, the office will be “led by Indigenous women and girls, especially those who have lived those experiences with violence and exploitation.” Ultimately, she says, “we really want to find ways for … survivors, our relatives, our communities, and even the perpetrators to heal and to understand what this is all about, and making sure that it’s culturally responsive and definitely a community led effort.”

This is a crisis. But the Minnesota office exists in a place of contradiction: If violence against Indigenous women and relatives is a product of federal and state government operations, then how and why would a government office be able to address it? 

The MMIWR office is expected to work with state, local, and tribal police to formalize reporting and investigative operations where processes are currently failing. For instance, the task force’s final report found that in many cases, police failed to follow the state’s Missing Persons Act, which demands that a report be filed promptly when Native women go missing. Often, there’s also a lack of communication between investigative teams and families or even a failure to identify the race or ethnicity of a recovered body. But that’s only when reports are filed.

A broad distrust in law enforcement keeps families from reporting instances of violence or providing details to police that might help locate victims, survivors, and perpetrators more easily. Mox Alvarnaz, a Kanaka Maoli and the outreach coordinator at the research organization Sovereign Bodies Institute explained: “It is important that we’re there in the room … you don’t want people or powerful entities who have in the past made dangerous and violent decisions against your community to be doing that in your name without you there.” Rebuilding trust is a central goal of the office, given that accurate reporting data is what will allow state agencies to develop solutions.

Kunesh acknowledges that the office won’t be able to address all of the underlying conditions of violence. For example, while the task force cited extractive industries and “man camps” — temporary housing sites for pipeline workers — as facilitators of sexual and gendered violence, there’s no clear demand of the newly formed office related to them. However, there is a movement at work to demand legislators recognize climate violence as part of and related to gender-based and sexual violence. “I don’t know that at the state level [the office] has any kind of power to address the extraction industry,” Kunesh said. “We would love to make that the priority, but even if it’s not stated, it is certainly one of the one of the efforts that we will continue to address.”

There’s also a limit on what the state can do by itself. The U.S. government has repeatedly chosen not to intervene and abate easily addressed conditions that trap Native people in violence. Strengthening tribal sovereignty, for instance, can allow tribal governments and police to investigate crimes on reservations and hold non-Native offenders accountable. There’s also growing awareness of the ways Native women are punished by the criminal legal system for surviving violence, as in the case of a 27-year-old Colville woman named Maddesyn George.

“The biggest problem is just that nobody knows this stuff,” Kunesh said of her non-Native colleagues in the legislature who were surprised to learn how high the incidence of violence is for Indigenous women and relatives. “As we’re sort of peeling off the layers, I feel like our agencies, the government, our tribes, are all looking for ways to address these historic inequities and traumas.”

“I was given a stack of papers, and I remember on a couple pieces of paper the words were blurry, this is how much copying was going on. They just said, ‘it’s a normal consent form; if something happens to you and the baby, if the baby’s heart stops beating or yours, do you want us to save you?’ Of course I do, so I signed the form, a bunch of forms.”

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Brewington said she was later told those papers included the consent forms that gave her providers permission to drug test her and her child. She said she never saw such consent plainly stated, even when she checked for it after the fact.

Drug testing pregnant and postnatal people and their infants without the patient’s informed consent is a common practice in the United States — but only among certain demographics. Several studies have found that Black women in particular are subjected to prenatal drug testing at higher rates than women in other racial and ethnic demographics, but do not have higher rates of positives. A study published in the February 2004 issue of Child Abuse & Neglect also found several other factors unrelated to drug use that led to higher testing rates, including single motherhood, tobacco use, a history of preterm labor, and a history of child services involvement, among others.

“I provided care in Black and brown communities, so [drug testing pregnant and postnatal patients] was routine, and it wasn’t until I got out and saw the difference in the way care was provided in communities that…were wealthier that it became clear that this is not routine, this is not what everybody does,” said Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN in Washington, D.C., and the president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health. Perritt also recounted that when she was pregnant, she was not drug tested despite being one of the more commonly-tested demographics (Perritt is a Black woman), which she attributed to her status as a physician.

Now activists are fighting back, saying the practice is rooted in racism and classism, and that it denies patients crucial agency over their care.

“Is our consent truly informed? It can’t be in those reams of paper that people are signing,” said Perritt. “What does it mean if we as physicians say informed consent is one of our core values? …Who would think you’re signing a form that could result in such severe consequences? The truth is that it is a violation of trust to not take the time to name that [drug testing consent is included] and its consequences.”

As Brewington’s case demonstrates, those consequences can be devastating. After her newborn son tested positive for opiates and cocaine, which Brewington admits to using once during the last term of her pregnancy, New York child services placed him into foster care. Although her two older children were out of the state at the time on a vacation with their father, child services ordered her to bring them back and placed them into foster care as well. They are home with their mother now, but Brewington is still fighting to regain custody of her son, who was awarded to his father.

“The medical profession, health profession, that is still one of the top three referrants [to child services],” said Jeyanthi Rajaraman, a parental defense attorney at Legal Services of New Jersey. Rajaraman added: “I’ve asked [at hospitals] when do you drug test and when do you not, and the information that comes out is that ‘if mom shows up and we’ve never seen her and she didn’t do a hospital tour and says she’s had no prenatal care and she’s by herself.’ What I really think they are also saying is Black and poor or no medical insurance because that is the majority of our clients who face and experience drug testing.”

Because child removal data is self-reported by the agencies, which do not track how many removals occur due to hospital drug tests, it is difficult to gauge how often these tests lead to severe consequences on a national level. One report by Movement for Family Power estimates that in 2017, in the Bronx borough of New York City alone, 60 babies under one month of age were removed because of maternal substance use. The United States child services system acknowledges that Black and Indigenous children are markedly overrepresented when it comes to system involvement; between 2000 and 2011, one in nine Black children and one in seven Native American children had been removed from their parents’ care, versus one in 17 white children.

Infants who do experience side effects due to in utero substance exposure, which can occur from both prescribed and non-prescribed substances, fare better when they are able to have close maternal contact. Removing newborns from parents like Brewington because of substance use — a common result of pre- and postnatal drug testing — can decrease feelings of bonding and the parenting sense of competence, and has been linked to some infant cognitive and memory impairment in animal studies. It also leads to decreased ability to breastfeed, which normally helps reduce symptoms of withdrawal in substance-exposed newborns and provides some protection against illnesses, including COVID-19.

Rajaraman noted that she often encounters medical professionals who recognize this reality but are shockingly unaware of how their call impacts the family. “I’ve had many doctors say to me that by calling [child services] they don’t know the baby would be taken, they say ‘I was calling because I thought it would help get mom into [a] program, I would never recommend separation.’”

In 2021, New York State attempted but failed to pass a law that would ban drug testing of pregnant and postnatal people and their newborns without informed consent or a legitimate medical necessity.  Activists are planning to push the bill again during the 2022 legislative session. Should it pass, it would require that written consent be obtained at the time of testing and delivered to the patient in a manner that is clear and understandable. It must also include a statement that the testing is voluntary. Activists in Washington State also considered pursuing similar legislation, but decided to table the movement for the time being. Should New York succeed in passing the informed consent bill in 2022, it could pave the way for other states to take necessary action to protect pregnant and parenting people and their infants from non-consensual drug testing.

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A recent nationwide study found almost 28 percent of households with pets experienced barriers to veterinary care, with finances being the most common reason. In low-income households, the researchers found, financial and housing insecurity can increase the risks that animals will not receive the care they need. Sociologist Arnold Arluke, author of Underdogs: Pets, People and Poverty estimates that 66 percent of pets in poverty have never seen a vet at all.

The “why” behind those numbers is complex. Of course, money is the primary problem. Veterinary care is expensive. A majority of practitioners work in for-profit clinics, consolidation in the industry has increased emphasis on profit margins, and vet prices have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation. That has checkups starting at $50, dental cleaning going for $70-$400, and blood work and x-rays at $80-$250. If a dog breaks a leg or eats a sock, surgery costs begin at four figures.

High prices aren’t necessarily about greed. Michael Blackwell, a former Deputy Director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the FDA, is the chair of the Access to Veterinary Care Coalition (AVCC) that was formed in 2016 to study this very problem. Veterinary training, he said, teaches vets to practice a “gold standard” of care, which means running every possible diagnostic test and pursuing every treatment option, even when a client’s budget is limited. (Many pet owners don’t know they can decline a recommended procedure, such as blood work, and even fewer are willing to decline care for fear of looking heartless.)

Some private vets offer struggling clients discounts, added Jeremy Prupas, DVM, Chief Veterinarian for the City of Los Angeles, but they themselves carry an average of $150,000 in student loan debt, so they simply “can’t carry the immense existing need on their own.” Telling clients you can’t help them because they have no money is one of the leading causes of burnout in the veterinary profession, according to Prupas. Pet insurance might help defray costs but requires monthly premiums and comes with such a complicated array of deductibles, co-pays, caps, and exclusions that one how-to guide recommends hiring an attorney to review the policy. Credit cards designed for medical care financing, if one can qualify, can carry punishing interest rates as high as 26.99 percent.

Equally critical is a long-term failure on the part of the animal welfare movement to consider, much less prioritize, the needs of low-income pet owners. Since the 1990s, the rescue/humane world has poured vast amounts of funding and energy into cutting shelter euthanasia through adoption, but far less into helping those without money take care of the pets they have. “If you can’t afford an animal,” the thinking went, “then you shouldn’t have one.”

“Until recently, we focused on shelter-centric challenges,” acknowledged Amanda Arrington, senior director of the Humane Society of the United States’s Pets for Life Program, which assists low-income pet owners. “There was a lot of judgment and making determinations on who was or wasn’t deserving of support and resources that was influenced by what I think a lot of society is influenced by, which is classism and racism. We conflated a lack of financial means and access with how much someone loves their pet or desires to care for it.”

In fact, owners can be punished because they can’t afford veterinary care — “most humane neglect cases stem from an inability to get care for a pet,” said Prupas. In Michigan, for example, failing to provide an animal with adequate care, including medical attention, is a misdemeanor that can carry 93 days in jail and/or a fine of up to $1,000. With a second violation, it becomes a felony.

What exists for pet owners in poverty is a patchwork of low-cost care options, ranging from local efforts — such as Emancipet in Texas and the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society — to well-funded national enterprises such as Pets for Life, which operates in several dozen cities. The great majority, however, offer only basic services like sterilization, vaccination, and flea treatments. “We are not a full-service veterinary clinic and do not treat sick or injured pets,” warns one low-cost option on its website. Another suggests that needy people travel, since “vets in smaller towns may charge lower fees,” or start a GoFundMe. As a result, many types of care are largely unavailable: emergency care (by some estimates one in three pets will have an emergency need each year), management of chronic conditions such as diabetes or kidney disease, medication, dental care (dental disease affects perhaps 80 percent of older dogs), and the mercy of humane euthanasia (which can run $50-$300).

The final piece of the care gap is a practical and cultural disconnect. Because many economically challenged neighborhoods are “vet deserts,” with few if any practitioners, it’s not easy to find care, and reaching it can require wrangling an unhappy animal over distance and/or arranging private transportation. Keeping an appointment at an office with weekday-only business hours or a once a month clinic can mean losing a day’s pay. Paperwork raises the fear of immigration status inquiries. The veterinary profession also remains one of the country’s whitest: Just as people who feel alienated or unwelcome don’t utilize human health care options, pointed out Arluke, they don’t utilize care for their pets.

The result has been suffering: most directly for animals that remain untreated, die from what vets call “economic euthanasia” (putting an animal down because treatment costs too much), or end up in shelters. Fear of a looming vet bill, and the mistaken belief that all shelter animals receive medical care, is a prime cause of owner surrender.

But people pay, too.

Some sick animals can infect their humans. Roundworms, for example, can pass through contact with pet feces and cause lung, heart, and eye problems. Blackwell reports meeting an optometrist who practices in a low-income Florida community who has seen increasing numbers of children with roundworm larvae in their eyes.

The psychic toll is just as real. Families in poverty who love their pets and for whom “they offer an emotional core and possibly one of the only sources of joy” face “mental and emotional” devastation from the unimaginable choice of weighing that love against potential financial ruin, said Blackwell. Professor Katja M. Guenther, author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, called the rupture of an animal-human bond “a kind of community violence” in a 2021 webinar.

Change seems increasingly possible. Covid-19 and the country’s recent racial and economic reckoning has prompted humane organizations to examine their assumptions and biases about who has the “right” to a pet’s love, and, said Arrington, there’s increasing recognition that “racial and economic injustice really impacts animal welfare.” Meanwhile, AlignCare, a new program out of Michael Blackwell’s Program for Pet Health Equity, is trying to create a national model of something like Medicaid for domestic animals. Under the program, families already found to be struggling (because they participate in SNAP or a similar program) and who ask for help at a shelter or veterinary clinic will be signed up and paired with a veterinary social worker or support coordinator. They’ll then be directed to a veterinarian who has agreed to offer preventative, dental, and even critical care, for a reduced fee; AlignCare will pay 80 percent of the cost. After three years of pilot programs in 10 disparate communities, it’s taking on its biggest challenge yet, Los Angeles, where one in five people live in poverty.

AlignCare won’t offer “gold standard” care, instead emphasizing preventative, incremental, and cost-saving measures (such as offering telehealth appointments and limiting diagnostics that won’t change treatment options) when possible. But it will expand the human safety net to include the animals most of us now consider part of our families. And while the effort is currently funded by grants from Maddie’s Fund, the Duffield Foundation, and Petsmart Charities, Blackwell’s goal is “community ownership:” The combined involvement of local vets, city animal services departments, social service agencies, rescue and community organizations, pet food and product manufacturers, and affluent pet owner-donors can make the model self-sustaining.

There is no perfect solution for low-income pet owners who need help accessing veterinary care. But growing awareness of the problem is a big step forward. “What we call ‘animal welfare’ is changing,” said Lori Weise, whose nonprofit, Downtown Dog Rescue, runs the Pet Support Space. “The distorted belief that ‘those people’ don’t care about their pets has never been true. People can’t afford care. Sometimes they don’t even know what’s out there; they themselves have never been in a hospital. As more people are brought into the system, we’ll see the first generation to get proper veterinary care.”

The FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBBP) in May 2021 to help low-income Americans pay for internet access and internet-connected devices. Congress earmarked $3.2 billion in the Consolidated Appropriations Act (passed in late December 2020) to pay for the program, which provides a monthly subsidy of $50 ($75 for participants living on Tribal lands) to help pay for internet access, plus a one-time device discount of up to $100. It is open to people living below 135 percent of the poverty line, participants in safety net programs such as SNAP or Medicaid, those who experienced “substantial” income loss, and certain other eligible groups.

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The program is designed to help bridge the digital divide during the pandemic, and it has helped millions of American households cover the cost of getting connected. However, red tape, technical challenges, and limited Internet Service Provider (ISP) participation have created barriers for some of the people who may need it the most.

“I thought if I could get the [internet access] subsidy then I’d upgrade to a higher level since we were both working from home and my daughter was going to school virtually at that time,” said Gwynn Stewart, a Community Development Educator at Ohio State University Extension, Noble County. Stewart learned about the EBBP subsidy from her daughter’s school and tried to sign up, but her provider, GMN Broadband, said they were too small to participate. “This, again, is another way Appalachian residents are being left behind.”

It likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever applied for a government program that the EBBP, like many federal programs, involves its fair share of red tape and hoops to jump through. Navigating the process can be especially tough for people who don’t have access to a computer with reliable internet access — the very issue that the benefit is trying to solve.

Some participating ISPs have set up an application portal on their website. Households like Stewart’s, who either don’t have an ISP that provides that option or who don’t have an ISP at all, must first enroll in the program and then obtain service from a participating ISP.

The barriers don’t end there.

“Applying over the phone has a long hold time,” said Lauren Cotter of Community Tech Network, a nonprofit with locations in Austin and San Francisco. “For online applications, older adults with limited digital skills face humongous technical challenges when they have to create email accounts, create EBBP online accounts, prepare eligible supporting documents — which may involve taking selfies and snapshots of documents — and upload them for their applications.”

“Some ISPs do try to make it easy but even so it’s a challenge because it’s a multistep process,” said Juliet Fink Yates, digital inclusion manager in the Office of Innovation & Technology for the City of Philadelphia. “You often have to first go to the EBBP website and fill out the form, which of course may be a hurdle if you don’t have internet. Then you have to go apply with a provider and if you don’t already have one, you have to know which is the best provider for you. It can be tough to figure out which provider is your best option, and then which plan is the best. Once you do all of that and start the application for EBBP, it often still involves a few phone calls and some back and forth over the phone to get it all set up.”

The regulations and bureaucracy are a potential obstacle not only for applicants, but also for internet service providers – and in some cases may be preventing them from participating.

Samantha Musgrave is the director of Project Waves, a small ISP in Baltimore City that has connected more than 400 households to free internet service since May 2020. Musgrave said Project Waves elected not to participate in the EBBP or its Maryland counterpart, the MEBBP, for a few reasons, among them “the significant requirements related to FCC licensing for participating providers in the program, as well as the limitations on reimbursable costs allowed by the program.”

ISP participation aside, Musgrave said many people who could benefit from the EBBP may not even know the program exists and notes an ironic aspect to the informational efforts. Because the program is primarily being promoted online, people who don’t already have internet access may not be hearing about it. As for enrollment, Cotter says some simple tweaks — such as eliminating an email address as a mandatory application requirement — could make a big difference in making it easier.

That’s why outreach efforts by “digital navigators” and organizations that serve vulnerable populations are so important. Residents of Philadelphia were fortunate to have a network of helpers available to assist them. Last year, the city launched a Digital Navigators program that placed tech savvy specialists in several Philadelphia organizations that work with low-income residents and vulnerable populations. Throughout the pandemic, these specialists have assisted city residents with tasks such as filling out online forms or arranging telehealth visits — as well as helping people find access to low-cost internet and get signed up for it.

“They’ve really become experts in helping people sign up. They have become familiar with the process and the challenges involved and have also become really good advocates for the people,” said Yates.

In addition to broader outreach efforts, Musgrave said the government could also have a much greater — and long-lasting — impact by providing long-term connectivity solutions for households without existing internet service. In infrastructure-poor communities, from rural America to historically redlined neighborhoods like Baltimore’s Cherry Hill, residents don’t just need help paying for internet service. They need that service to be available in the first place.

Roughly 21 million Americans lack access to broadband internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In the state of Pennsylvania alone, for example, more than 800,000 households do not have access to broadband connectivity. The real picture is likely much worse: Numerous experts and researchers have found fault with the FCC’s data, which relies on ISPs to supply their own information. There are also questions about what qualifies as “broadband” at all. Research by The Center for Rural Pennsylvania found that median speeds across most areas of the state do not even meet the FCC’s criteria to qualify as broadband.

“The program is not inherently designed as a pathway to establish new internet connectivity to those who need it most,” Musgrave said.

President Biden’s Build Back Better calls for a significant investment to support and expand broadband infrastructure, but it’s unknown at this point how much (if any) of that envisioned funding will survive intact in the final legislation. Currently, the Senate infrastructure bill, which could come up for a vote in the House as early as today, provides for $65 billion in broadband investment, including $14 billion dedicated to a benefit of $30 a month in the form of the Affordable Connectivity Fund. Meanwhile, as of October 2021, 6.3 million households were enrolled in the EBB program. The FCC says it has tried to provide as many options as possible for people who want to participate, but $2.5 billion in funds remains unspent.

When Brown and her son met for the second time, the baby cried and did not immediately warm to his mother. Brown said she initially thought “he does not like me,” before conceding that, in reality, “he did not know me.”

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Until this summer, incarcerated people who gave birth in Minnesota had a maximum of 72 hours with their newborns before they were separated. (The length of time depended on the type of birth.) In many other states, the parent and child have as little as 24 hours. As Alysia Santo wrote in PBS Frontline, “giving birth means saying goodbye.”

But recently, stories such as Brown’s and the advocacy of organizations such as the Minnesota Prison Doula Project — an initiative that provides pregnancy and parenting support to incarcerated people in Minnesota — have driven a major policy change. As of August 2021, people who are serving a prison sentence in the state will no longer be separated from their newborns after giving birth.

The Healthy Start Act, which was signed into law by Governor Tim Walz in May, allows the Department of Corrections to place incarcerated pregnant or postpartum parents into community alternatives. These include halfway houses or residential treatment facilities where parents can access treatment for the duration of their pregnancy and bond with their newborns for up to one year after giving birth.

The bill is the next step in a broader push toward improving prenatal and postpartum care for people in prison nationwide. Thirty-two states have passed restrictions on pregnant shackling, seven states have ended solitary confinement for pregnant people, and a few localities have increased the budget for prenatal care. While there are nine prison nurseries in other states across the country that allow children to stay with their parents, the Healthy Start Act is first-of-its-kind legislation because it permits postpartum people to bond with their newborns outside of prison.

According to Safia Khan, Director of Government and External Relations at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, about half of all pregnant people who enter a Minnesota prison will leave while still pregnant. Among the other half that give birth in prison, the majority reach their release dates within six months after giving birth.

Kahn emphasized that while “the separation period is often temporary and short, it is hugely disruptive to bonding and hugely traumatizing for the mother and for the child.” The importance of parent-infant bonding for the early development of newborns and the mental and physical health of postpartum people has been well documented. It impacts everything from the development of connections between brain cells fundamental to learning to the ability to build loving, trusting relationships later in life.

The new law is particularly important for Native American communities: Despite making up only 1.4 percent of the state’s overall population, 34 percent of the people who were pregnant in Minnesota prisons between 2013 and 2020 were Native American. The bill’s passage is due in part to the leadership of Native American elected officials in the state. State Representative Jamie Becker-Finn and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan both championed the legislation. During the discussion of the Healthy Start Act before it passed in the state legislature, Representative Becker-Finn said the legislation represents “an incredible opportunity to disrupt cycles of trauma.”

“At first, it was a difficult transition” when Jennifer initially reunited with Elijah. But “since then, our bond has grown so much,” she said, as she has been able to witness some of his milestones, including crawling and walking.

While Jennifer was in prison, she would often find herself wondering what her son looked like. Now, she can detail the mundanities that come with a shared bond: the types of food he likes (watermelon) and dislikes (tomatoes); the sound of his laugh; and his quickness to smile.

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Though the lawsuit is ongoing, city workers started installing “no oversize parking” signs on nearly all of the city’s streets in August, at a cost of $1 million, severely limiting places where recreational vehicle residents could park in Mountain View. It is just one city among dozens taking action to remove RVs and those who live in them through such bans.

“There were more people against us than for us,” Janet Stevens, 63, a plaintiff named in the lawsuit, said of the November election. “[But] it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with street safety.” For Stevens, who has watched the city change as more tech company employees have moved in, the fight around housing affordability and the RV ban comes down to Nimbyism and “a lack of support and true understanding of who [vehicle dwellers] are to start with.”

The lawsuit underscores Stevens’ analysis. “[Mountain View] is in the heart of Silicon Valley where, in recent years, an economic stratification has yielded significant wealth for some, but skyrocketing housing prices for all,” the complaint read. “As a result, many of Mountain View’s long-time residents have been priced out of the housing market and forced to live in [RVs] parked on the City’s streets.” Most of those living in recreational vehicles, like Stevens, grew up in Mountain View, lived in the city as adults, and rely on city services to survive. Stevens is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and has chronic fatigue syndrome and high blood pressure. In addition to her friends and neighbors, Stevens’ medical team and support group are located in Mountain View. “If I was to leave here I don’t know. [I’d be in] deep, deep trouble being able to find doctors that were understanding and willing to support my treatment for my diseases that have multiple realms of symptomatology,” Stevens said.

Proponents of the ban say it’s not so much the recreational vehicle residency itself, but the eyesore of the oversize vehicles, the waste disposal on city streets, and the lack of regulation. Advocates for equitable housing policy counter by saying Measure C is a proxy ban on poor people: a targeted attack on the city’s residents who can’t afford the increasing rent prices in one of the most expensive regions in the country. While the median household income in Mountain View has doubled in the past twenty years, income inequality in the Silicon Valley has ballooned, growing at twice the state and national rate. Almost 20 percent of the region’s households have no savings. For many, the area rent — now $2,500 per month — is impossible to afford.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” said Nantiya Ruan, a professor of law at the University of Denver. “Inequity and that imbalance of power just means that people become more and more disadvantaged and pushed out of communities and don’t have a voice in government and everything else that stems from that.”

According to Ruan, this leaves wealthy residents with even more authority. “There is a lot of power for communities to regulate how their space is used,” she explains. “And so, what municipalities are doing is making it hostile for those who need to sleep in their car or sleep in their RV by doing all sorts of different zoning code laws.”

The history of targeting and discriminating against undesired community members is baked into the American legal framework. Redlining is the most well-known example of this. In addition to the federally sanctioned segregation that kept Black people from building wealth in well-to-do neighborhoods, so-called “sundown town” laws forbade non-white people from remaining within city limits after the sun set. Oregon banned Black people, and some municipalities required Native, Japanese, and Jewish people to leave by 6:30 each evening. California also maintained an “anti-Okie” law, which banned unemployed people and migrant workers from entering the state in 1937.

Ruan argues these policies live on in the network of bans on RV residency, though — unlike discriminatory laws of the 20th century — vehicle laws don’t explicitly target poor people. Even if they did, given that there’s no constitutional protection for economic status, Ruan says, making these laws difficult to challenge in court. These laws are “really about focusing on keeping people out of public space and therefore out of [public] consciousness,” Ruan said. “[The laws] keep them from being visible, right? [Politicians think] nobody wants to see visible poverty.”

Mountain View isn’t the only city instituting laws on vehicle residency. Los Angeles instituted its own ban against parking for “habitation purposes” in 2017, affecting the then-total of 7,000 homeless people living in their cars. Neighboring suburbs of Los Angeles, such as Culver City, Santa Monica, and Malibu all have bans on sleeping in one’s car overnight. This April, Carlsbad city officials updated their city codes to include a ban on camping within city limits as well as parking oversize vehicles overnight on city streets. Those who want to park their vehicles within city limits overnight are now required to obtain a 24-hour permit and are restricted to acquiring six permits per month. In August, city council members in Flagstaff, Ariz., voted to keep a law on the books that bans camping — including vehicle camping — at the dismay of locals who have been pushed out of their homes by increased housing prices and wildfire. Following the approval of an ordinance that requires residents to move their vehicles every three days, the city of Eugene, Ore., is considering its own parking ban in “industrial commercial areas.” And in Lacey, Wash., plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against the city for effectively banning RVs and those who live in them by way of a city ordinance that limits the number of hours a vehicle can be parked on the street.

In lieu of providing housing, some cities are creating “safe parking” programs with dedicated spaces like church parking lots where vehicle residents can park overnight. Mountain View has one such program, and plays host to a third of all safe parking lots in Santa Clara County, but there aren’t enough spots for every person who needs one. Moreover, Stevens says she applied three times for a safe parking spot but never heard back. Even if she had been approved, she doubts she would have accepted, given the lot’s restrictions.

Katie Calhoun, a PhD student at the University of Denver who studied the efficacy of the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, says it’s common for safe parking programs to have restrictions, such as prohibiting the consumption of alcohol. Designated safe parking lots did make residents feel safer in Denver, though the average duration of stay in the safe lot was three months, after which just under half of vehicle residents continued to live in their car.

The City of Mountain View could address the claims of public safety concerns by establishing a waste disposal site where residents can easily access it and pushing for more safe lots. And, of course, the city could stop exacerbating the housing crisis by, among other things, not approving the destruction of rent-controlled apartments. For those who aren’t able to access a safe lot in cities with vehicle residency bans, there aren’t many alternatives aside from risking a police encounter, potential arrest, or moving to a town that doesn’t have a ban on the books.

As for that eventuality, Stevens says, “There is no preparation for that. Except for maybe, you know, driving around looking for a town where they’ll accept me to live.”

Kofi Assabil, a member of the class of 2020 from University of Colorado Boulder, knows the grim job market all too well. Assabil started his job search in January 2020, months prior to his graduation. But when the pandemic reached the United States and everything went remote, he started to worry. “I realized that things were going to be harder. I was going on LinkedIn and Indeed…calling a few connections every two weeks to see if they had any opportunities,” but “even with internships, it was tough.” Along with several of his roommates, Assabil opted to wait out the labor market crunch in graduate school instead.

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The most recent estimates from Georgetown University indicate that approximately 70 percent of college students work part or full-time during their studies, suggesting 30 percent of new grads — up to 1.2 million recent college students — may be ineligible for unemployment once they graduate, unless they have proof of a rescinded job offer.

As a result, this generation of college graduates is struggling to find work. Coupled with a lack of government support and mounting student debt, personal financial conditions are proving difficult for many. According to the most recent data, among the 69 percent of college students that took out loans in 2019, the average debt upon graduation was $29,900, although numbers are higher for students of color. While Congress placed a temporary moratorium on payments for federal loans, there is still $137 billion in outstanding private student loan debt that is unaffected by the moratorium. Those bills are coming due, whether recent grads are ready for them or not. For the 22 percent of college undergraduates who are also parents, the financial burden is only heightened by the need to care for dependents.

The combination of insufficient economic opportunity and inaccessible unemployment benefits could have serious long-term implications. Elaine Weiss, an analyst from the National Academy of Social Insurance, believes that this will push new college graduates into lower paying jobs, since they cannot afford to wait for an offer that provides a higher wage.

According to a UCLA study, individuals who graduate college during a recession can expect between 10 to 20 percent lower lifetime earnings compared with their peers. According to the Federal Reserve, 40.3 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. Further, this effect has become more amplified over time, as successive graduating classes experience higher and higher post-college unemployment rates.

One potential solution for new grads is a jobseekers’ allowance that could support them while they look for work. The allowance, which could partially replace foregone wages, would allow recipients to support themselves while they continue to look for work. Australia has a similar program dedicated specifically to providing financial assistance to youth and student job seekers with monthly benefit levels ranging from $1,153 to $1,924, depending on financial and family circumstances. While it’s no windfall, a benefit of that size would help cover a large portion of living expenses for many Americans. Other countries, such as Sweden, provide $1,101 per month, while also providing public child care and a child allowance for any families with children under the age of 16.

The results of these stronger unemployment programs have been well documented. One study from Georgetown University found that during the Great Recession, the enhanced unemployment insurance increased workers’ wages by 2.6 percent, with greater benefits for women, people of color, and people with lower educational attainment. This suggests that unemployment insurance programs help facilitate the job search process, allowing workers more time to find a job aligned with their skills.

With another college class soon to graduate into a still-weak labor market, the imperative of stronger unemployment insurance only becomes more important. While the passage of the American Rescue Plan is welcome news for the American economy, the bill failed to include unemployment protections specifically targeted at recent college graduates. The U.S. should take note of the work done by other nations to provide adequate financial stability for recent graduates as they enter the labor market. History tells us that the failure to do so will have lifelong impacts for college graduates.

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In November, Florida joined a long list of cities and states that have increased their minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25. Sixty-one percent of Floridians voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, a move that will bring more than 1 million residents out of poverty. However, the amendment left out a crucial group: the state’s 2 million independent contractors, who don’t fall under federal minimum wage regulations. For decades, Florida’s lack of protections for these workers has led to widespread misclassification and wage theft. Even as the state passes some of its most progressive wage legislation in decades, its exploitative independent contractor system threatens to undermine its endeavors and points to broader weak spots nationally.

Around 10 percent of the state’s population, or 2 million people, work as independent contractors — 40 percent more than the national average. Under the independent contractor framework, employers aren’t required to meet Fair Labor Standards Act requirements for minimum wage or unemployment insurance, or provide benefits. This is appealing to employers — benefits account for up to 30 percent of a worker’s salary, so employers can cut costs by reclassifying their workers as independent contractors. Offloading payroll taxes, which employers aren’t required to pay on behalf of contractors, save employers an additional 8 percent.

In theory, an independent contractor is paid for performing a specific role or completing a project. The payer can only determine the result of the project, not when or how a contractor completes the work. But because labelling workers as independent contractors saves employers so much money, workers are occasionally “misclassified,” or classified as independent contractors when they should be an employee.

While exact numbers of how many workers are misclassified are difficult to obtain, studies are very clear about misclassification’s results: Contractors in several low-wage industries earn less than their salaried peers. In construction, a field particularly prone to misclassification, independent contractors can make half as much as their counterparts on payroll.

Floridians are uniquely vulnerable to employment misclassification. Florida’s service-dependent economy has made it a particularly easy target for gig work companies, according to Alexis Davis, an analyst at the Florida Policy Institute. Roughly 1.3 million of Florida’s independent contractors are “employed” by gig work companies. Gig workers in Florida also belong to some of the state’s most at-risk groups. These workers are disproportionately people of color and 1 out of every 3 is an immigrant. Seniors, attracted by the flexibility and the need to augment their Social Security payments, also make up a large part of the state’s gig workers.

Sherri Wheeler Cliburn, 56, has been driving for Instacart since the delivery app launched in Sarasota four years ago. Like many gig workers, she was attracted to the flexible schedule and good pay that the app initially offered, which allowed her to spend time on tour with her son, who is a musician. But as the app grew in popularity, Instacart began to lower payouts across the board, forcing workers to rely on customers’ tips. And although Instacart sets a default tip for orders, Cliburn says customers will often file fake complaints to get out of paying tips, or even paying for the order at all. This leads to workers getting deactivated from the platform while the company sorts out the case.

“It could take anywhere from five to eight weeks for somebody from Instacart to get back with you,” says Cliburn. “Meanwhile, you’re deactivated. You’ve lost your income.”

Several other workers gave similar accounts to TalkPoverty from working with Uber, Lyft, and other gig platforms. While they appreciate the autonomy that the independent contractor framework grants them, when pay disputes emerge, they find themselves powerless in the face of the companies they work for. Ben E., who drives for Uber in the Tampa area, says that there were multiple occasions where Uber docked his pay without explanation, leading to a long process of negotiations with the company. Uber has not responded to a request for comment as of publication.

State law makes these abuses particularly hard to fight. Normally, a state’s Department of Labor would provide protection from misclassification and other labor abuses for workers, and handle concerns like minimum wage complaints. However, Florida’s Department of Labor was dismantled in the early 2000s by then-Governor Jeb Bush. Today, Florida is one of seven states with no minimum wage investigators.

In 2017, following a $750,000 lobbying campaign by Uber, the state legislature passed a bill that set a statewide regulations for ride-hailing apps. While the bill included limited regulations on insurance, its main goal was to preempt local legislation in Miami-Dade that would have put rideshare apps on the same regulatory field as taxi services. The bill also included provisions that doubled down on classifying drivers as independent contractors.

Cliburn felt this first-hand when she tried to file a complaint about Instacart’s delays and pay reductions, though she didn’t have misclassification in mind. She contacted the state, which told her that she would have to provide a slew of paperwork that proved her case. As Cliburn struggled to navigate through the process, it became apparent that the state had little incentive to assist her and that they viewed her complaint as a burden to be avoided. Cliburn says she struggled to get in contact with the state and that, when she did, they provided little-to-no support for filing her request. “Eventually I just said, screw it, because they don’t care here. I know other states do care about their workers but in Florida, they just don’t care,” Cliburn says.

While the future of federal minimum wage legislation remains uncertain, it’s clear that the current framework fails to address the needs of the large and growing gig worker contingent. That’s not to say there isn’t hope for this next challenge in worker rights. Several states and cities, including New York and Illinois, have passed additional protections for gig workers. In Seattle, drivers working for ride-hailing apps are now eligible for the city’s minimum wage and dispute resolution protections. And California’s landmark AB 5 would have reclassified many of the state’s gig workers as employees, giving them access to minimum wage regulations and unemployment. While the gains made by the law were undone by a ballot measure funded by Uber and other gig apps, the framework created by the bill could serve as a basis for similar legislation on a federal level.

What’s more, the Biden administration has also signaled that it is willing to take a tougher stance on misclassification, suggesting that meaningful change may be within sight.

Powerful floodwaters had destroyed a culvert running under the road, washing a 30-foot section of the highway away. Peterson, 60, drove straight into the ravine and was killed — one of two people to lose their lives there that night. Two other motorists were injured.

“We have other culverts like that that are going to be blown out if we get a bunch of rain,” warned Elliott Ward, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s emergency manager, from his office in Fort Yates. “(R)oads, bridges, culverts, lagoons, housing. Our infrastructure is shot,” said Ward. “A lot of our roads were built back in the ‘50s and ‘60s; they’re dilapidated and need replacing.”

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Tribe administrators on Standing Rock Reservation say having an array of departments and authorities — state, federal, and tribal — in charge of roads and transport infrastructure means that accessing funds to maintain highways and culverts is complicated and riven with bureaucracy. Most federal funding for roads and highways on reservation lands is provided through the Tribal Transportation Program (TTP), which authorized $505 million for 2020 and is co-administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Highway Administration.

But reservations across the U.S. have a backlog of infrastructure projects, a delay referred to as “deferred maintenance.” Repairs were estimated at $390 million for 2018.

Indigenous communities are some of the poorest in the country. The per capita income in Standing Rock’s Sioux County stands at less than $16,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while in Emmons County on the other side of the Missouri River, the figure is almost double that.

In Navajo Nation, home to around 175,000 people spread across New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, three-quarters of the roads on the reservation are either dirt or gravel. In an area larger than the state of West Virginia, drainage systems are easily clogged by expanding and migrating sand dunes, making roads impassable during times of heavy rain or thawing. In 2015, ten days of school in the reservation’s San Juan County were canceled because road conditions made it unsafe to ferry students to and from their classrooms.

In South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, not far from Standing Rock, federal funding for the community’s 310 miles of roads was just $2.2 million in 2019, one tenth of the estimated minimum needed to bring the roads into good repair. Road ploughing alone cost $600,000 that same year, when a combination of failing infrastructure and extreme weather led to a state of emergency being issued by tribal authorities on two occasions.

Dirt roads in poor condition are a growing problem in the era of climate change, with record-breaking late summer and early winter storms and snowfall that have made it even more difficult for residents to get around. In March 2019, a “bomb cyclone” storm flooded homes and businesses on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home to some of the lowest life expectancy rates in the Western Hemisphere. With the ground underneath still frozen solid, rapidly rising temperatures that followed the snowstorm fueled a thaw and several-feet-high floodwaters left whole communities stranded for days.

For vulnerable minorities such as Native communities, the threat presented by the coronavirus has added to the worry. With Covid-19 cases rising in states across the Plains region, being able to safely drive to healthcare and emergency facilities is more critical than ever. Those drives can be long. In Navajo Nation, for example, 12 health care facilities cover 25,000 square miles of land. Early last summer, Navajo Nation reported a higher per capita number of Covid-19 cases than New York state, ground zero for the outbreak last spring. Meanwhile, lost with the passing of 1,152 members of Navajo Nation are generations of the same families and coveted oral histories.

The culvert under Highway 1806 into which Trudy Peterson’s car dived in the summer of 2019 wasn’t repaired because it fell into the “long-range projects and costs list” in the Tribe’s Long Range Transportation Plan for Standing Rock document, published in December 2018. It meant there wasn’t funding set aside to repair the culvert, estimated at costing $1.5 million, or it wasn’t considered high priority at the time. The shortfall facing Standing Rock, according to the Tribe’s director of transportation and planning, Ron His Horse Is Thunder, is down to Congress and the Federal Highway Administration not releasing enough funds. “We go to Congress every year,” he told the Associated Press in August 2019. “They just don’t give us enough money to take care of the issues.”

Nor could the tribe, says Elliott Ward, avail itself of funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to repair the highway, as it comes under BIA jurisdiction. The culvert that killed Trudy Peterson had been identified for replacement seven years before it was washed out, according to an internal document.

Recent months saw some efforts in Washington DC to help ease the crisis. In August 2020, then-Representative Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), now Secretary of the Interior Department — and the first Native American to hold a cabinet position — spoke of how the Invest in America and Moving Forward Acts would result in funding increases for the TTP. In November 2020, four senators including Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would send funds toward infrastructure improvement efforts, including traffic calming and pedestrian facilities on reservation lands. The bill would have seen the opening of a new program within the Department for Transportation with an annual budget of $25 million. It has not been reintroduced in the 117^th Congress.

But throwing money at the problem isn’t a catch-all solution. Interjurisdictional cooperation is key to determining how roads and road safety are managed in many reservations, says Kathy Quick, a co-author with Guillermo Narváez of a University of Minnesota study about improving roadway safety on reservations. “Matters of responsibility and authority — who has it and who may exercise it — are frequently in question and contested in most reservations,” she said.

“The boundaries of reservations and of tribes’ jurisdictions to formulate, implement, and enforce safety-related policies and plans are frequently questioned and contested by federal, state and local government authorities.”

For Trudy Peterson’s daughter, Jade Mound, those issues don’t compare to the raw pain of losing someone to poor road conditions. “I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what my family has gone through,” she told the Bismarck Tribune in September 2020, when Peterson’s and other families filed a claim against the BIA seeking monetary damages and better maintenance of roads.

“There is absolutely no reason that the BIA roads should be in the condition they’re in.”

At the time, however, home solar was something only the affluent could afford. A modest 5-kilowatt system would have topped $30,000 in 2011, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Within a few years, prices had fallen and solar companies were making aggressive sales pitches in her neighborhood. Still, the numbers didn’t work for Jones, who was a full-time student working as an educator in a women’s homeless shelter.

“I couldn’t lay down thousands of dollars for the panels,” she said. “I couldn’t get in the game with a big check.”

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Then one day, at a community event, she ran into representatives from Resonant Energy, a Boston-based solar developer that focuses on projects in low-income areas. Resonant’s staff understood both Jones’ passion for solar and her financial challenges. They introduced her to the Massachusetts Solar Loan, a program that financed residential solar projects, and offered lower-income borrowers fixed, below-market rates and forgiveness of 30 percent of the loan principal.

The solar panels on Jones’ home went up in October 2017 and she hasn’t had to pay an electric bill since the following April. Though her bill was less than $100 – lower than the state average of $126 – the savings have made it easy to afford her monthly solar loan payment of $127.

“When I got my solar panels I just felt like I won the lottery,” she said. “I found it to be very empowering.”

In Massachusetts, the average household spends 3 percent of its income on energy costs, while households with income between 30 percent and 60 percent of the area median — roughly between $32,000 and $64,000 for a family of three — spend 7 percent. For families living below the poverty line, this energy burden jumps to 21 percent.

Solar power could decrease those costs. For renters or homeowners who can’t install solar, community-shared solar — larger developments that sell power to multiple users — can help lower the cost of energy by a few hundred dollars each year. For homeowners who install their own systems, the savings will generally pay off the price in around five or six years. After that, all future savings are pure financial benefit.

These savings could make a meaningful difference to households that routinely have to choose between paying bills and buying medication or fresh food. Nationwide, more than 20 percent of households reported foregoing food or other necessities to pay an energy bill in 2015, the latest year for which data is available from the Energy Information Administration.

So far, however, low-income solar has gotten too little traction for the effects to be realized at any scale, supporters say. These initiatives are undermined by their failure to understand the cultural, historical, and financial realities in the communities they seek to serve, a dynamic Massachusetts is grappling with right now.

The state’s solar targets and policies are widely considered some of the most ambitious in the country. The Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program, or SMART, recently expanded to provide incentives for 3,200 megawatts of solar development, a number that could power more than 300,000 average households. This expansion will more than double the state’s installed solar capacity.

The program pays the owners of solar generation units — anyone from private homeowners with a few panels on their roofs to large-sale solar farms — a set rate per kilowatt-hour of energy produced. The base rate depends on size and location, and increases slightly when the project includes features the state wishes to encourage, such as reclaiming a polluted site or serving low-income customers. The original base rates ranged from 15.6 cents to 35.8 cents, though they have, by design, dropped as more projects have signed up for the incentive.

Though the program includes incentives to encourage developments in low-income neighborhoods, there has been little progress toward this goal since SMART launched in November 2018: Just 4.7 percent of the capacity approved by the program as of late November 2020 has been for low-income projects. According to Ben Underwood, co-founder of Resonant Energy, that’s partially because the incentive doesn’t offer enough money to attract developers, whose main goal is to make a profit: It’s much more lucrative to build solar generation units on open land. At the federal level, a renewable energy tax credit can lower the net cost of a solar installation, but doesn’t make it easier for lower-income consumers to afford the upfront price.

However, the barriers go beyond the purely financial. “A lot of states focus on the monetary barriers,” said Nathan Phelps, regulatory director for clean energy advocacy group Vote Solar. “That doesn’t actually address all of the underlying issues.”

One major stumbling block is the current requirement that low-income solar customers buying energy from community shared systems — the main way renters or homeowners with unsuitable roofs access renewable energy — sign a contract. With a contract on their financial report, it may be more difficult for them to secure a car loan or other needed credit, Phelps said. The decision to go solar therefore becomes another hard choice, rather than an obvious financial boost.

In these communities, there is also often an ingrained distrust of salespeople peddling energy deals. For many years, competitive power suppliers preyed on low-income and minority neighborhoods in the state, promising low electricity prices and hiding expensive loopholes in the fine print. Low-income households often lost hundreds of dollars a year, to the tune of $57 million from 2015 to 2018, reports by state attorney general Maura Healey found. Today, many members of these communities are understandably wary when outsiders show up offering contracts for energy savings.

Environmental justice and clean energy activists are lobbying to change the system, allowing a simplified, no-contract form of payment that will avoid these concerns. So far, the state’s Department of Energy and the Environment, which oversees SMART, has not committed to such a change. Some in the industry, however, say there are hopeful signs that the state will soon start allowing smaller projects to go ahead without contracts.

Looking ahead, environmental justice advocates want more people from low-income and environmental justice communities actively engaged in the conversation next time the rules come up for revision.

“We need to provide benefits to people who live in environmental justice communities, then engage them to help us write the next policy,” Underwood said. “There’s something inherently democratic about solar and it is very important for us in crafting policy to make the most of that potential every step of the way.”

On August 4, 2019, he and his father Derrick Fudge were at a bar in Dayton’s Oregon District. They were taking a break after weeks of reconstruction work on Green’s house, which had been damaged by a severe tornado two months prior. When a gunman appeared out of an alleyway and started shooting, Green and his father got as close to the ground as they could.

“I kept telling him to get up, we got to go,” he recalled. But Mr. Fudge died in his son’s arms that night, one of nine people murdered by a gunman who managed to fire off more than 40 shots in less than 30 seconds.

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Green says he lost more than his father; he lost a dear friend. On top of that came the financial cost of both burying his father, which ran into thousands of dollars.

All U.S. states and territories have a crime victim compensation program that reimburses victims of crime for related costs, funded by a mix of fines, forfeited bail, and other fees. The funds help with funeral costs, counseling, loss of work earnings, and other expenses. However, each state maintains its own eligibility criteria. In Ohio, Fudge was not deemed a “qualifying victim.”

In March 2011, eight-and-a-half years before his death, Fudge pled guilty to a drug trafficking offense and was sentenced to a three-month home monitoring period and three years of probation. Ohio’s victim compensation program denies aid for individuals who’ve been involved in certain felony offenses within ten years, essentially barring people who have paid for the victim compensation program from benefitting from it.

When Green’s application for his father was denied, he was livid.

“It’s like [the shooter] is winning both ways — he’s taken our family members and then you’ve got to worry about how to pay for burying them,” he says. “My dad shouldn’t be held accountable for his own death.”

Six other states — Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Rhode Island — also have laws denying compensation to victims of crimes who are involved in prior or ongoing felony offenses, or are engaged in felonious activity at the time of their victimization. An average of 36 percent of claims in those states are denied as a result, leaving victims or their surviving family members to pay out of pocket. Green says in his case some costs were partly offset by donations and his own health insurance, but much of it he paid himself.

Green isn’t the only one facing this issue.

Alayna Young was shot in her left leg in the same attack that killed Green’s father in Dayton last year. She was in the hospital when she found out her health insurance had lapsed four days before. “I immediately heard the cash registers in my head,” she said, and left the hospital the same day. After missing almost six weeks of work due to her injury, she was also denied compensation from the state. Young had been taking prescription Adderall, and her claim was refused due to a blood test showing the presence of amphetamines in her system.

More than a year later, with fragments of the bullet still in her leg, Young still owes close to $80,000 in medical fees. “I might have to file bankruptcy; that’s not something I want to do but I don’t see any other way,” she said.

“When people are victimized, we should aim to provide them with the services they need to heal and be safe, period,” said John Maki, the author of a 2019 paper detailing Illinois’ experience with crime victim compensation issues. Across the country, there are a wide variety of barriers preventing victims from receiving the support they need, ranging from denials due to drug tests to issues with the aid application process. The result is a patchwork of aid that varies by state: In Montana, nine in ten victims receive aid in an average of 60 days, but in West Virginia, only three in ten applicants get support and decisions can take as long as 210 days.

Maki said recent times have seen a push for possible change. “A growing number of states have begun to reexamine their crime victim compensation program, looking for ways to remove barriers to services. That’s not only the right thing to do for victims, but it’s also smart and cost-effective public safety policy.” Ohio is among them, and in November the state senate approved a bill reducing the disqualification period for those with a prior conviction, increasing compensation to survivors who require counseling, and no longer punishing victims in possession of drugs at the time of the crime.

But for some survivors, the exhaustion and trauma of the last year is still exacting a major toll.

“A letter came and said I could appeal (the compensation denial),” said Green, “but who’s really thinking about that? I’m still in the process of grieving. I said, ‘to hell with it.’”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Young. “There was a lot of back and forth and I already wasn’t in a great state of mind to really deal with any of this,” she said. “It’s like getting kicked while you’re down.”

“If you’re like me, and you’re on food stamps or you’re low income, a lot of the way that you survive is, you have to know which stores to go to and what to buy where, and that option has now been taken away in the era of COVID. Anything that could help and provide food would be a huge boon,” Fox says.

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Jersey City’s poverty rate is 18 percent — that’s more than 47,000 people out of a population of around 265,549 (by comparison, the national average hovers at around 10.4 percent). About 32 percent of those living below the poverty line — around 14,751 people — are African American; another 17,000 people who identify as Hispanic live in poverty.

Google Maps’ distribution of grocery stores throughout Jersey City shows at least 160 places to buy food, many of which are concentrated around the busy, densely populated Journal Square, McGinley Square, and West Side neighborhoods. In areas like South Jersey City’s Greenville, where 53 percent of the population is African American, and Bergen-Lafayette, where that number jumps to 62 percent, the choices thin out considerably, especially if you don’t have access to a car.

That startling lack of food access was the impetus for a new initiative: In partnership with AeroFarms and the World Economic Forum, 10 vertical farms located in senior centers, schools, public housing complexes, and municipal buildings were slated to begin opening at the end of 2020. The pandemic slowed the project’s progress, but Stacey Flanagan, head of the Jersey City department of health and human services, still expects “the first two farms to be ready by the end of [March 2021].”

The farms will grow 19,000 pounds of leafy greens such as kale and arugula annually. Flanagan says the program’s initial rollout focuses on providing nutrient-dense greens to residents, with a wider variety of produce in the future.

The greens will be distributed to the public for free — all that’s required is that the participants register for the program. The three-year contract with AeroFarms will cost Jersey City $1 million — half of the money will go toward building the farms, while the other half will be dedicated to maintenance once the farms open.

On the surface, the program seems like it will be an asset to a city plagued by food inequality issues. Fox tells me that, as a high-risk person during the pandemic, she’s shopping at outdoor farmers markets much more often, despite the expense. She feels that any produce that would supplement her SNAP benefits would be a blessing — especially if the city could find a way to deliver her allotment.

Still, some Jersey City residents are skeptical.

There was immediate backlash to the implication in initial press releases announcing the initiative that participants would be required to take nutritional classes or even attend health screenings. That raised immediate concerns about participant privacy, as well as concerns that it could be condescending to users.

“If there’s a signup table with one person sitting in the corner saying, get a health screening here, that could benefit people who maybe don’t have the ability, or don’t have the time to go to a doctor, but we need to understand how the city is going to use [that data] and where that data is going to be stored and, and how it might potentially be shared,” says Leslie, a Jersey City resident of 13 years  who asked that her last name not be used.

Flanagan told me that residents will not be required to participate in any outside programs in exchange for their allotment of free produce. Instead, there might be what she calls a “point of education,” at the pick-up location, where participants might receive a recipe for a smoothie along with their produce, or an offer to check their cholesterol, through the city’s partnership with Quest Diagnostics. She added that every aspect of the program involving data collection will be conducted by a “city or medical professional,” and that it will be kept “completely confidential as per HIPPA laws.”

Tatiana Smith, a single mother, doula, and founder of the Westside Community Fridge, says she has to travel to other parts of the city for food but she’s still decidedly unenthusiastic about the vertical farming program. She says that the city should drop the education portion altogether, because it feels disconnected from the needs of many low-income communities.

“What would be engaging is to take a community member and have them come in and talk about a recipe from their culture and pass it on. But not to give out random recipes. People already know how to cook,” she says. In fact, nearby community gardens all over New Jersey and New York frequently host community potlucks —  some specifically aimed at the neighborhood’s international community —  in which residents are invited to share a favorite dish, meet each other, exchange recipes, seeds, and vegetables, and ultimately build bonds of closeness between neighbors.

Smith is still undecided if she’ll be signing up for the program herself. If she does, she says she’d ask city officials why they never consulted directly with community members about whether or not they even wanted a program like this.

“It’s typical of these types of initiatives that want to help but don’t bother to tap in into what the community is doing and how they live,” she says. “There is this idea that black and brown people seem to not care about their health, but black people have had a long history of food justice work, and now [the city is] saying, ‘We’re gonna introduce healthy eating to you.’ We’ve been eating like this for a long time, but because of systematic racism, low income people have had to resort to poor quality food.”

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Yet, despite Congress’ concern about the welfare of thoroughbred horses, they have all but ignored the plight of the frontline backstretch workers who are responsible for their training and care. They have spent months facing down coronavirus with little financial or public health support. Backstretch workers are predominantly immigrant workers from Latin America and the Caribbean. Many live on-site with other workers, often crammed two to a room with the kitchen and bathrooms shared communally. Yet, many of the workers who care for these prized animals subsist on low wages despite the fact that in New York State alone, where the famous Belmont Park is located, the thoroughbred industry generates more than $2 billion in annual revenue. And when COVID-19 arrived, they weren’t ready.

Since immigrating from Chile in 2002, Caroline Klicey has spent most of her time in America working at Belmont. As a hot-walker, every morning she would take thoroughbred racehorses out for morning walks to stretch out their tense muscles before a race. The work is challenging and the pay is low but, in addition to her husband’s income, the $450 she earns a week is sufficient enough to raise her four children comfortably.

The track is also more than just a place of work; it has become her community. Most of Klicey’s friends are also backstretch workers, she met her husband at the track, and her children frequently spend time at the track after school and on weekends. Prior to the pandemic, she found it hard to imagine a life away from the backstretch.

“Everyone who works here is like a family. We treat each other well. In the morning everyone greets you with a smile. It’s a beautiful thing to work there.”

Yet, when the pandemic forced New York to temporarily shut down live racing last March, many backstretch workers like Klicey, who took great comfort in their “recession-proof” jobs, suddenly found themselves out of work and on food pantry lines.

“Early on it was really difficult for us. My husband was laid off for a few months and I had to stay home with my kids. We lived off our savings but getting food was difficult, but thank god for the food pantry, we got through it.”

As the pandemic spread like wildfire throughout the New York City metro area, Belmont’s backstretch community proved to be a ticking time bomb. About 800 people are employed at Belmont’s backstretch, with nearly 600 workers living in dormitories on the property, where the cramped quarters created the perfect environment for the virus to propagate. At the peak of the virus, between March and April, 100 backstretch workers were infected.

In response, The New York Racing Association (NYRA) suspended all racing at all New York State tracks in March until it was able to contain the virus. Joe Appelbaum, President of The New York Thoroughbred Horsemen Association (NYTHA), an organization representing horse owners and trainers, found himself with the unprecedented challenge of mitigating a possible public health catastrophe as well as maintaining animal welfare.

“We were presented with a very difficult challenge because it’s not like college dorms where they just shut the doors and send everyone home,” he said. “These are these guys’ homes or their permanent residences might be in Mexico or Guatemala. Plus you had a horse that needed to be cared for.”

Although racing was temporarily suspended, some backstretch workers continued to be employed, as care for the animals was deemed an essential service. But with no races scheduled, workers like Klicey who prepared horses for races were left without work altogether. For those who were still employed, many had subsidized their wages with second jobs at the track, such as concessions. With live racing suspended, and many unable to collect economic recovery payments due to their immigration status, those workers were forced to find other means of supporting themselves.

Karen Chavez, the General Manager of NY Race Track Chaplaincy, which provides services for the backstretch community, saw a sharp spike in need of their services. Chavez saw the toll the pandemic was taking, firsthand.

“When racing was temporarily canceled, financially it was tough for many of the families,” she said. “We saw a lot of men and women with panic attacks and anxiety disorders. Our food pantry services grew from 60 families to 360 families in just a couple of weeks.”

Since last April, NYRA has been able to rein in the virus, with no new cases currently among backstretch workers. Still, they are not taking any chances.

“NYRA is following all New York State Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control guidance regarding social distancing,” said Patrick McKenna, Director of Communications for NYRA. “Facial coverings are mandatory for anyone on the property.”

With the virus under control for the most part, in June, racing resumed throughout New York State, albeit without crowds in the grandstands. In turn, horseracing saw a minor resurgence in popularity. As the pandemic initially brought most professional sports to a halt, with many players such as in the NBA choosing to opt-out, horseracing was able to fill the void. On the first five days racing resumed, Belmont handled $76,264,891 in online wagers, an 84 percent increase from last year. On its opening day in June, Belmont’s handle of $10,972,254 set an opening day record, topping the previous record of $10.7 million from 2010.

Still, with the money rolling in, the army of immigrant, low wage backstretch workers continued to labor behind the scenes with little public recognition. As owners enjoyed federal tax breaks and the horses benefited from increased safety regulations, workers continued to endure low wages, occupational hazards, and wage theft, without the added benefit of hazard pay. However, many are reluctant to work anywhere else. Despite its flaws, the backstretch offers an opportunity for a close-knit immigrant workforce who have few other options; like five million other essential workers, many are undocumented.

Caroline Klicey proudly describes the intimate connections workers have formed with one another in the backstretch. When one worker falls sick, others will bring them soup. When one needs to borrow money, another will be quick to help. Marriages, christenings, and Quinceañeras are performed regularly amongst the stables full of horses. With workers hailing from Central and South America, on the backstretch they form a vibrant mosaic of cultures, creating its own unique cultural identity. Admittedly, Klicey acknowledges that the pandemic has brought with it challenges she had never foreseen, but she’s adamant that because of the culture of self-reliance fostered at the backstretch, they were able to get through it.

“At the backstretch, we always take care of our own.”

President Trump describes the opportunity zone program as a prime example of how his administration has helped African Americans. This June, Trump claimed that since 2017 “countless jobs and $100 billion of new investment, not government investment, have poured into 9,000 of our most distressed neighborhoods anywhere in the country.” Opportunity zones have also been talked up by the few prominent African American Trump allies, including Sen. Tim Scott (one of the bill’s original co-sponsors) and HUD Secretary Ben Carson. Scott called opportunity zones “the first new, major effort to tackle poverty in a generation.”

Yet the program has been troubled since the beginning. Governors were permitted to select their state’s opportunity zones, with few criteria: 95 percent of the zones had to have a 20 percent poverty rate or a median income that is 80 percent or less of the metro area’s median income. Governors could also designate five percent of the zones in areas that are not low income. That latitude resulted in developments ranging from luxury apartment buildings to a ”superyacht” club being designated as eligible for opportunity zone tax breaks. Reporting from the New York Times, ProPublica and other news outlets revealed that friends and relatives of the president — including son-in-law Jared Kushner — stood to benefit from the opportunity zone tax break, and Treasury is already conducting a corruption investigation.

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Governors looking to tout the success of opportunity zones in their state had incentives to pick areas with development projects already planned or underway — such as areas adjacent to or including a college or university. Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, found 33 opportunity zones in areas where 85 percent or more of the population are enrolled in college. The zones meet the low-income threshold, but that’s because students don’t typically earn much while taking classes.

Designating these areas as opportunity zones because of students’ lack of income is a cynical use of an antipoverty program. Universities have been creating pockets of wealth near their campuses for decades, driving up rents without benefitting the long term residents who will remain long after each class graduates.

In West Philadelphia, for instance, real estate investment in areas near universities has already changed the face of the historically African American neighborhood. West Philly is home to the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. The University of Pennsylvania lured professors and students to the area with tactics that ranged from installing streetlights to offering low-interest loans to encourage faculty to buy in the area, and even created a new public elementary school to offer an option for an elite education in the neighborhood. Their tactics were so successful that the average selling price of a home rose from $78,500 in 1995 to half a million dollars by 2018. Drexel is now borrowing directly from Penn’s playbook, including building a new public middle school.

Drexel is just one of the 33 universities mentioned in the Brookings report. In the opportunity zone that includes Drexel, the poverty rate is 66 percent and 88 percent of residents are enrolled in college full time. Those statistics are reflected in college towns selected as opportunity zones across the country. The University of Southern California, surrounded by a historically low-income area of Los Angeles, is located in an opportunity zone with a poverty rate of 88 percent. A whopping 99 percent of residents, however, are full time college students. College students at small private universities (such as Liberty College) and behemoth public institutions alike (such as Texas A&M) are making their towns and neighborhoods eligible for a designation intended to help areas that have struggled with generational poverty.

Mantua and Drexel’s campus are in the same opportunity zone. A $43 million project dubbed the Village Square on Haverford got the go-ahead from the city in late 2019. It will bring 166 new apartments and townhomes to the opportunity zone in Mantua, with 80 units flagged as “workforce housing” with their selling price capped $230,000. That’s significantly higher than Philadelphia’s average home sale price of $188,000, and well out of reach for Mantua residents, whose income is less than half of the city’s median. The development will include 32 rental units of affordable housing, though there has been no word as yet about what definition of affordable the developers will use. The new development is located just a few blocks away from an off-campus housing complex marketed to students at Penn and Drexel.

Mantua residents have organized to have a say in how their neighborhood changes. They settled on a push to rezone most of the neighborhood as single-family housing, which they intended to prevent developers from buying up blocks of Mantua and converting the area into student housing for Drexel. They were successful, but the rezoning may not pay off in the long term. “It’s really a conundrum for the community to be in,” Wright said. “Multifamily [zoning] could potentially create naturally occurring affordable housing in the neighborhood because you can have apartments that might be available to lower-income or moderate-income people.” Focusing on protecting single-family homes means fewer available rentals — and higher rents.

That’s a problem, because people in the rental market may be the most vulnerable to changes in the housing market, according to sociologist Susan Clampet-Lundquist, professor at Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s University and University City resident. Overall, changing neighborhoods are a mixed bag for longtime residents. The changes do bring more amenities to the area. The Village Square on Haverford, for instance, will include a supermarket and a coffee shop. Homeowners will likely see the values of their property go up. But the story is different for renters. When people leave a rental, they are unlikely to find another unit at a similar monthly cost and may have to leave the neighborhood, a process of indirect displacement.

“To me, the most important part is indirect displacement, a reduction in affordable housing,” said Clampet-Lundquist. “That creates the demographic change that you end up seeing.”

Mantua residents aren’t necessarily opposed to college students in the neighborhood, Wright said. They don’t begrudge the developers now showing up because they will turn a profit. They just want to make sure they can stay in their homes and enjoy the benefits of those changes, too.

Politicians ranging from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Biden have proposed changes to opportunity zones, from defunding the program (AOC) to reforming it (Biden). Biden’s reform plans don’t include specific housing protections for people in opportunity zones such as Mantua. And existing local and federal programs could help with this particular problem, including rent control, Section 8 housing vouchers, and assistance programs for long-term residents that subsidize the inevitable rise in property taxes, Clampet-Lundquist said.

Using these programs to help in cities where opportunity zones meet skyrocketing real estate prices could limit the damage to low-income areas. So would an acknowledgment that incentives designed to maximize return on investment for the wealthy may not be the best way to address poverty.

This November, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which will decide whether foster and adoption placement agencies have the right to use their religious beliefs as an excuse not to comply with nondiscrimination protections.

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In 2018, the Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS), the city’s child services department, stopped referring prospective foster and adoptive parents to Catholic Social Services for certification and oversight after a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that the agency was actively discriminating against gay and lesbian couples for religious reasons. When Catholic Social Services refused to change their stance on licensing queer foster parents, the city allowed their foster certification contract to lapse; the subsequent lawsuit, which is now pending before the Supreme Court, claims that the city violated their religious freedoms by ending their contract for this reason.

Barrett has expressed a number of beliefs in her public life that suggest bias against the LGBTQ community. She was a signatory on a letter to the Catholic leadership expressing commitment toward “the significance of sexual difference and the complementarity of men and women…and on marriage and family founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman.” She described the application of Title IX protections to transgender people as a “strain,” and has openly opposed marriage equality. She was also faculty for the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which is run by a law firm whose executive director recently argued for reestablishing criminal penalties for consensual queer sex.

Fulton is not the only way in which LGBTQ rights within the foster system have been questioned this year. An executive order issued by President Trump in late June, titled “Strengthening the Child Welfare System for America’s Children,” does not directly address the upcoming Supreme Court case, but it does seek to solidify the rights of faith-based organizations to work in the child services field, and to clearly solidify their First Amendment rights to engage in this work — the very argument up for debate with the Supreme Court.

The order states: “This guidance shall also make clear that faith-based organizations are eligible for partnerships under title IV–E of the Act (42 U.S.C. 670 et seq.), on an equal basis, consistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution.” It is this same brand of messaging that has surfaced repeatedly in Barrett’s opinions related to LGBTQ rights, and on the rights of the Catholic Church to exact its views on society at large.

“It’s really critical and important to note…the language used,” said Alexandra Citrin, senior associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy. “The language in the Executive Order might appear harmless, but what we’ve seen from this Administration is consistent undermining of certain communities including those who are LGBTQ+, Black, immigrant, etc. and prioritizing who they believe should be foster and adoptive parents. We are likely going to see guidance that emphasizes partnerships for faith-based organizations — including those that use federal dollars to discriminate.”

That creates anxiety for LGBTQ families, who have only recently gained the right to foster and adopt. It was not until 1997 that the first state in the country, New Jersey, officially allowed same-sex couples to adopt statewide. Florida was the last state to overturn its anti-gay adoption policies in 2010.

“The concerns that LGBT adults have about whether or not they’re going to be discriminated against have not gone away,” said Stephanie Haynes, executive director of Philadelphia Family Pride, which is a co-appellee in the Catholic Social Services case. “You can imagine families in same-sex couples would decide not to become foster parents at all because of the risk of being turned away, not only because they do not want to subject themselves to that but also for families with kids already, they would involve their kids in discussions about the possibility of having foster kids in the home, and want to protect their kids from that possible discrimination from the foster care process.”

LGBTQ foster and adoptive parents are not the only queer group who face discrimination in the foster system, though they have received the most attention and study in the field. LGBTQ youth, for example, remain overrepresented in the child welfare system, and are at heightened risk for homelessness. And one study of low-income Black mothers found that those who identified as lesbian or bisexual were 4.19 times more likely to lose custody of their children than heterosexual Black women, a population already subject to racial disproportionality within the system.

Nancy Polikoff, a professor of Law Emerita at American University Washington College of Law, said that discrimination “can be obvious, as in not recognizing who the child’s family members are, but it can also be more subtle.” She cited a case in Kansas in which a lesbian mother was told by her case worker, who was employed by the faith-based agency St. Francis Community Services, that she needed to be “fixed” so that she would not spread her queerness to her child. Ultimately, her parental rights were terminated. While her orientation was not cited as the reason that her children were removed from her home, interactions between her and the case worker indicate that it likely played a role.

Similar concerns exist for transgender children. “We have had a number of cases where parents who have, in particular, trans children end up having their child removed because they are supporting their children’s gender identity,” said Cathy Sakimura, family law director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case. “We recently had a case where a very low income mother lost all of her children; they were all removed because one of her children was gender non-conforming…There really wasn’t anything else other than some vague allegation about the home being dirty, and all of the testimony — everything that was presented — was all about the child and whether the child was given feminine clothing.”

“There are great faith-based organizations that partner with child welfare agencies and do it well; the problem is there are some faith-based organizations that discriminate…against what foster parents they will license, which can limit who can be licensed – for example, if there is only one licensing agency in the community, an aunt might not be able to be licensed to care for their niece if the agency doesn’t agree with her identity. And, it also raises into question how these are supporting the diverse identities of youth in foster care,” said Citrin.

If Barrett’s confirmation is successful, her placement could tip the Supreme Court in the direction of anti-LGBTQ policymaking. The ruling on Fulton v. City of Philadelphia will undoubtedly have dire impacts on children caught up in the foster system, but a broad enough decision could also open the doors for discrimination in any social service setting that contracts with agencies that cite their religion as an excuse to discriminate, including homeless shelters and food banks. It is impossible to predict how Barrett will vote on the case; however, several of her past actions showcase clear bias.

The case is currently pending before the Supreme Court, and arguments are set to begin just after Election Day. In the meantime, Catholic Social Services is still contracted with Philadelphia DHS to conduct case management for system-involved families of origin.

It was explicitly enacted in an attempt to keep poor women, and particularly poor Black women, from having more children. “What this does is give welfare recipients a choice,” Wayne R. Bryant, the former New Jersey Democratic Assembly majority leader who came up with the policy, said in 1992. “They either can have additional children and work to pay the added costs, or they can decide not to have any more children.” He later bragged that the policy had led to an “astounding” drop in the birthrate among women on welfare. In advocating for the family cap, he described “123 blocks where there are no legitimate males” in his city of Camden, by which he meant “men who can rightfully take their place in that community,” thanks to the fact that welfare has taught “all the wrong values.” The family cap, meanwhile, “reinforced the ideas of self-responsibility and investment in the future.”

It’s a “terribly racist and classist and misogynistic policy,” said Jessica Bartholow, policy advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty. “It’s a poor baby penalty.”

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But the policy quickly spread nationally after New Jersey enacted it. Republicans even included a pledge to “discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by…denying increased [benefits] for additional children while on welfare” in their 1994 Contract for America, the precursor for welfare reform. The language never made it into the final version, but 22 states took the initiative to create family caps anyway.

As of September 30, New Jersey is no longer one of them.

“It’s huge. [New Jersey] is the mothership of the family cap rule,” Bartholow said. “It’s a beautiful day when the place that started it all can…reconcile what it’s done.” She noted that her state of California, which got rid of its cap in 2016, had originally followed New Jersey’s lead in creating one in the first place. “You have to wonder, what if [New Jersey] had never done it?” she said. “Would we have had it, would other states have had it?”

Despite Bryant’s early data, research in the decades since shows welfare family caps don’t work. There is no evidence that family caps influence how many children poor families have. It’s not even true that poor families receiving government benefits have huge families. In 1990, only 10 percent of households receiving cash benefits had more than three children. Today, they have an average of 1.8 children, the same as the average for the country as a whole. “The idea behind the law has been really debunked,” said Renee Koubiadis, executive director of the Anti-Poverty Network of New Jersey.

What family caps actually do is deprive families of the extra cash they need to cover expenses that aren’t covered by other programs, such as diapers, baby wipes, and car seats. This just increases their poverty. Koubiadis has heard stories, she said, of parents who only had one extra diaper for their baby for an entire day, and others who couldn’t go to work because they couldn’t afford the number of diapers required to send their children to daycare. Now a family of three that had a child excluded from extra benefits thanks to the cap stands to see an extra $134 a month, according to calculations by Brittany L. Holom, senior policy analyst at New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP).

The campaign to repeal the state’s cap launched in 2016 with a report from NJPP that found that more than 20,000 children had been denied assistance since the cap was enacted in 1992. “Those are 20,000 children who, in the eyes of the program, essentially didn’t exist,” Holom noted. Even in 2018, the cap lowered benefits for 1,235 families. It also disproportionately impacts families of color: About 80 percent of the state’s children on welfare are Black and Hispanic.

The 2016 analysis “really helped highlight those issues for legislators who hadn’t thought about this law…since it was enacted in 1992,” Koubiadis said.

The report was released just months before California repealed its family cap, and coincided with other state campaigns, such as in Massachusetts. As advocates in New Jersey fought to repeal their family cap, the movement gained support from religious groups who were concerned about the impact the policy has on children. Ron Haskins, a prominent Republican architect of welfare reform, has since said he would be “hesitant” to support a family cap today because it “creates hardships for families.”

But even with a growing movement, New Jersey’s repeal hit roadblock after roadblock. Legislation sailed through the state legislature, but Republican Governor Chris Christie vetoed it twice.

Then the state elected Democratic Governor Phil Murphy in 2018. In New Jersey’s last two budgets, the welfare cap was effectively eradicated when lawmakers included extra money to pay families the missing benefits for their additional children. Still, the cap itself remained on the books, meaning that lawmakers would have had to keep including that money each year to keep it from denying families money.

The coronavirus crisis, however, focused attention on the need to get rid of the cap once and for all. “There was a focus on other issues in the last couple of years, up until the pandemic,” Koubiadis said. But “with the exacerbation of these inequities, and certainly racial inequalities, legislators as a whole recognized that this was the moment to repeal this.” With the law no longer on the books, the extra assistance for poor families will be automatically included in each year’s budget.

“The tide certainly has been turning, especially in the last five to ten years,” Koubiadis said. “Other states certainly should take a look at repealing this law as well.” Holom noted this is particularly true for other nearby states, such as Connecticut, that still have a cap now that New Jersey and Massachusetts have done away with theirs.

The fact that “it has been undone in the place where it began will spread across the country and inspire the remaining states,” Bartholow said, “to finally end their use of this very flawed intervention.” She’s heard from people who are interested in doing the same in Tennessee and Virginia.

Perhaps, she suggested, Congress could even consider legislating it out of existence, barring states from having this policy at all. Congress might even go so far as to reconsider the other parts of the current welfare program that similarly punish poor people who need assistance, such as time limits that kick them off after a certain number of years, work requirements that deny benefits unless someone completes frequent paperwork proving they are either working or looking for a job, and pursuing children’s parents for child support money to pay back the benefits.

“These are really disgusting ways to think about a safety net,” Bartholow said. “I hope it can also inspire people to think about what else we have [done] wrong.”

SNAP provides a monthly supplement to low- and no-income residents to purchase groceries. In 2018, the average SNAP recipient received about $127 per month in benefits. The endeavor, operated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is the largest federal nutrition program in the United States. Last year, SNAP fed 38 million Americans, the vast majority of whom are children, the elderly, and disabled adults.

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USDA launched the online SNAP pilot in April 2019 in New York  — a state with more than 2.6 million residents enrolled in the federal nutrition safety net program — with three retailers: Amazon, Walmart, and ShopRite. Although rollout to other states wasn’t planned to begin until after the two-year test pilot, by March 2020, administrators faced pressure to fast-track implementation nationwide to allow SNAP recipients a safer, socially distanced way of shopping during the pandemic.

With its recent expansion to 44 states (including the District of Columbia), USDA says online SNAP is now accessible to more than 90 percent of users — or around 34 million people — who rely on the social safety net program each year. Another three states were approved to participate and are in the process of implementing the program for their eligible populations.

According to the federal agency, since online SNAP’s widespread implementation due to COVID-19, usership has increased. A spokesperson from USDA noted via written request that in March 2020, close to 35,000 SNAP households shopped online. By June, more than 800,000 households were participating. While that is a dramatic increase, it is only 4 percent of the households receiving SNAP.

Despite recognition of the program’s importance in the face of the pandemic, users, food security advocates, and legislators have raised flags. Experts like Ed Bolen, senior policy analyst at the Washington D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that though extensive research on the impact of online SNAP is yet to be conducted, anecdotally his organization has heard from a number of users about issues with learning about, accessing, and fully utilizing the online purchasing and delivery resource. Additionally, users must navigate order minimums and delivery fees as the USDA prohibits the use of SNAP funding for these costs.

Bolen points to the lack of information available on the program in communities with high SNAP eligibility as one factor for potentially low participation rates. Generally, when a state is added, a press release follows with pick-up by local media. However, the trickle down to users has been spotty depending on state-level implementation and the communication resources at their disposal.

In Massachusetts, food advocate and SNAP user Diane Sullivan said the state generally does a good job keeping in touch with participants about SNAP and has even implemented new ways of doing so during the pandemic, such as texting. However, with the struggle to keep up with a constant flux of changing policy and a growing participant list, Sullivan added that she didn’t recall receiving a text from the state about the online option when it became available in late May.

In addition to finding out about online shopping, sometimes it’s hard to find the foods users want. Joanne referenced the hour and a half she recently spent compiling a cart of only 12 items eligible for the electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards issued to participants. “Looking at Amazon,” Joanne said about one of the program’s two approved retailers in her state, “if you put ‘EBT’ in their search line, you have to go down seven rows before you find something that I consider whole food. Generally, what I find is that most of the things on here are processed food, which are not useful to me.”

Joanne said she prefers to spend her SNAP dollars — which amount to the minimum monthly benefit of $16 per month — in person at stores and farmers’ markets that not only sell whole foods more to her liking, but where she can benefit from EBT matching programs that double her benefits when they are spent at qualifying markets.

Amazon and Walmart currently dominate online SNAP as the only shopping option in 38 of the 44 states approved to participate. The CBPP’s Bolen explained that the lack of diversity in retailers may be discouraging uptake. “Having only those options might not mean a lot if you don’t live near a Walmart and you’ve never thought of Amazon as a place to buy your groceries,” he explained. For this reason, in July, U.S. Senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin of Illinois introduced a bill in the Senate appealing for the expansion of retailers participating in the program.

Additionally, low-income Americans are more likely to lack the technological resources to access the internet. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that 29 percent of adults with household incomes below $30,000 per year do not own a smartphone, 44 percent do not have broadband internet, and 46 percent lack a computer. The Center notes that in nearly all households with incomes over $100,000 per year, these resources are consistently available.

From her lens on the ground, Sullivan said the online option is “on the right track” but it needs amending to ensure challenges facing recipients are addressed with their concerns in mind, not the bottom lines of the billion-dollar corporations currently benefitting from the economic stimulus.

“You have to engage people with lived experience in the process of designing these programs and implementing them,” Sullivan says. “We are on the ground and have information on when these systems work or when they don’t. We need to be brought into conversations around solutions in a more meaningful way.”

Then COVID-19 happened, and everything was canceled.

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Now, Sylvia’s more afraid of the impact of prolonged isolation than of contracting coronavirus. “I’m feeling disconnected. I’m feeling higher levels of depression and anxiety,” she said. “And I don’t feel that there’s anyone to listen to me or understand my needs.”

LGBTQ people, especially those who are low-income and from communities of color, are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate. They’re also more vulnerable to sexual and physical violence, and mistreatment.

Sylvia said she regularly experiences transphobia: Her birth certificate was legally changed to reflect her female gender, yet she is housed at a male facility and said corrections officers call her by her birth name. It took her nearly 11 months to get permission to wear barrettes. She spends most of her time, COVID-19 or not, by herself. Department of Corrections communications director Janelle Guthrie did not respond to any of Sylvia’s direct claims, but did point to an updated policy on treatment of transgender prisoners.

Around the country, COVID-19 cases are rising in prisons and jails as incarcerated people continue to have little outside contact. “A worry that’s widespread among all sorts of organizations is that less access to the facility means less oversight and accountability,” said Biff Chaplow, director of the Portland-based organization Beyond These Walls.

The organization connects LGBTQ incarcerated people in Oregon and Washington with pen pals and facilitates programs like the Transgender Leadership Academy, believing “there’s a Marsha P. Johnson sitting in prison right now.” When they paused their programming at three facilities, Chaplow immediately pivoted to create a prepaid crisis line. The goal is to provide emotional support to incarcerated people in the Pacific Northwest no matter how they identify, and to advocate for them. Every two weeks Chaplow sends a report to a coalition of partner organizations, including ACLU of Oregon, working to keep incarcerated people safe.

Other COVID-19 crisis lines for incarcerated people exist, also limited to state or local areas, for instance in California and Texas. So in Portland, 19 trained community volunteers take turns answering one iPhone that gets passed around door-to-door in a Ziploc bag, complete with Lysol wipes. “A lot of prisoners are surprised that somebody is answering the phone because they’re used to contacting organizations and being totally ignored,” said Chaplow. Given the limitation of one phone, however, volunteers sometimes miss calls.

Chaplow first got the word out about the crisis line to incarcerated people in their network through snail mail. He expected a low interest and response rate, underestimating how much incarcerated people needed to talk. Opening the crisis line to all has uncovered widespread fear in response to how prisons and jails are addressing the pandemic.

Volunteers ask incarcerated people whether they’re experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, what precautions their facility is taking, and if they need referrals. They can choose to remain anonymous, although most don’t. Asking “what’s your biggest concern?” has gotten people talking the most. Answers vary, but common themes have emerged: inability to physically distance, inconsistent mask wearing, and not being given information about the pandemic.

Out of 369 calls so far, some of which are from repeat callers, more than a quarter have been about not reporting COVID-19 symptoms out of fear of having to quarantine in solitary confinement. Solitary, or “the hole,” has a long legacy of being dehumanizing and causing psychological harm. It’s a familiar issue for Beyond These Walls. Often, solitary is used in the name of “safety” for LGBTQ incarcerated people who are subjected to violence and harassment by other prisoners. It’s also a way for staff to curtail sexual intimacy. A 2015 report by the prison abolitionist organization, Black and Pink, found that 85 percent of the 1,200 LGBTQ incarcerated people surveyed spent time in solitary — a stigmatizing practice for an already-stigmatized population at higher risk for mental health issues.

Carlee Roberts, a formerly incarcerated transgender activist and board member for Beyond These Walls, was sentenced as a teenager. Back then, she identified as a “loud, flamboyant queer” male and said solitary was a tactic to keep her in line.

“Not only was solitary used as a tool in the moment to punish me, but for a long time it worked my sense of self… that I was this horrible person who maybe should hide who they are as a person,” she said. “Even to this day, a lot of this stuff has stuck with me.”

Now, using solitary units to separate sick, incarcerated people during COVID-19 has become common practice, affecting more than LGBTQ incarcerated people. David Cloud, research director at Amend, a nonprofit that works to transform correctional culture, explained: “Part of the reason I think it’s used is the physical realities of having a vastly overcrowded, understaffed, overburdened, problematic prison system. These are corrections officials and public safety agencies performing the work of what should be a public health response.”

Amend created guidelines to help correctional facilities distinguish between solitary confinement, quarantine, and ethical medical isolation — the last of which includes sanitary conditions, access to amenities, contact with loved ones, and more. Cloud can’t say, however, how widely those suggestions have been implemented.

James Moffatt, a 56-year-old incarcerated man at Santiam Correctional Institution, said he was one of the first to test positive for COVID-19 in Oregon’s prison system at the end of March. It started with a violent cough, then a fever and chills that shook him like a “washing machine on spin cycle.” After transferring to the infirmary at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility and spending nearly three weeks there, the rest of his quarantine was spent in solitary confinement at maximum security prison Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP).

For Moffatt, who has underlying health conditions and experiences post-traumatic stress disorder, solitary was the worst part. His cell at OSP, he recalled, had fluorescent lights on most of the time and paint peeling off the walls. He slept on a concrete slab without a pillow. Drinking water came from a rusty faucet, and the smell of bleach made it hard to breathe. He had extremely limited access to media or the outside world — he wasn’t allowed to call family much, even though his mom is dying of lung cancer. Officers would yell at him to stop whining.

“Mentally, it was the most draining thing that I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “I kept saying to them, ‘I’m being punished for being sick.’ And they said, ‘Well, we realize you’re in DSU [disciplinary segregation unit], but you’re not being punished.’ And I said, ‘Well, if I’m being treated exactly the same as somebody that’s here on a disciplinary measure, then how is it not punishment?’”

Other incarcerated people said they underwent similar treatment. Oregon Department of Corrections communications manager Jennifer Black said they’re now “making every effort to provide activities to keep [incarcerated people] busy and basic comforts while keeping them safe.” The message that “medical quarantine is not punishment” is also displayed on Santiam’s television for all to see.

Moffatt, whose cough lingers, said he still has conversations with fellow incarcerated people who won’t report symptoms out of fear of going to the hole. He recently called the Beyond These Walls crisis line as a last-ditch effort to implement change and said sharing his story has been vital to his mental health. He was referred to the ACLU of Oregon but when faced with the choice of calling their legal numbers for nine cents per minute or buying toothpaste, his basic needs come first.

Criminal justice reform advocates agree that releasing incarcerated people is the most beneficial thing that can be done right now, although the challenge is balancing the urgency of the pandemic with a slow bureaucratic process.

While incarcerated people wait, the crisis line remains open.

“It’s a safety tool that’s saying to prison staff, ‘Hey, this is a way for folks to communicate with the outside world and let people know what’s going on,’” Roberts said. “Just because we’re not allowed inside doesn’t mean we’re not still watching.”

Officers from the Gainesville Police Department and Florida Department of Corrections announced over a loudspeaker that residents had six hours to vacate before demolition of the camp, in defiance of the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation to leave encampments intact during COVID-19. Florida’s state public health website provides no guidance on protecting people experiencing homelessness from COVID-19. Moultrie left with just one change of clothes.

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When the 37-year-old set up camp in November of last year, she made strong connections with others who lived there, people at higher risk of contracting illnesses even before COVID-19. Since the eviction, she’s been worried about their safety.

“I lost my community, and it’s hard to know if my friends are alright,” Moultrie said. “I can’t pay to keep my phone on all the time and neither can they. I’m so angry at what happened […] I worry about my former neighbors who probably don’t have a place to stay now. At our camp, many of them had houseplants and pets, it was nice. We weren’t a typical community, but we were still a community.”

She holds a handwritten list with her lost friend’s phone numbers as we speak outside of her current homeless shelter, GRACE Marketplace. GRACE, formerly Gainesville Correctional Institution, was converted to a secular shelter in 2014. The shelter does ‘bed checks’ to make sure residents are in their rooms three times a night, which Moultrie is not used to after living freely in her camp.

“If you’re not there for bed checks two nights in a row, they kick you out,” Moultrie said, “You have to be on the street until you’re allowed back in.”

The camp was established in November of last year, after other options had failed. GRACE was at full capacity, so people started camping around the edges of the shelter’s property, which the campers and GRACE called “Dignity Village.” At its peak, the camp was home to around 220 people.

They camped there so they could use GRACE’s hygiene services and other resources. When the City of Gainesville ordered Dignity Village to shut down in January, Moultrie and about 50 others set up a new camp in the woods nearby, on Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) property. FDOC officers were upset by their presence, and asked Gainesville PD to threaten the campers with trespassing charges if they refused to leave.

Many camp members left between March and May, for fear of arrest. Moultrie and the last 20 residents were evicted on May 14th by the Gainesville PD and officers from the FDOC.

According to a 2019 survey, there are an estimated 752 homeless people in Gainesville’s Alachua County, 191 of whom were in shelters. GRACE currently has the ability to house 141 people. Their capacity has been reduced by 25 percent to reduce risk of spreading COVID-19. Those who can’t make it in are often waiting outside of the facility, hoping for a chance at a roof over their heads.

“I think the big question raised by this eviction is, if they can’t be in these places, then where can they be?” asked Kirsten Anderson, litigation director at Southern Legal Counsel. “GRACE doesn’t have enough space for everyone, and you’re going to see more situations like this because people have to exist somewhere. But it’s often criminalized.”

Shelter access is particularly important during the current pandemic.

CDC guidelines specifically state: “If individual housing options are not available, allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are.” This is a precautionary measure meant to control the spread of COVID-19.

“Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers,” the guidelines say. “This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.”

A Southern Legal Counsel press release says that the CDC also encourages federal aid from FEMA and the CARES Act to be used for emergency housing, but that Gainesville officials have not secured housing for the people they are displacing.

Requests for comment were made to the Gainesville PD and FDOC. Shelby Taylor, City of Gainesville Communications Director responded in their stead.

“The Gainesville Police Department has worked compassionately with representatives from GRACE Marketplace over several months to transition people experiencing homelessness into a more stable housing environment,” Taylor said. “But GPD serves to protect the rights and property of all property owners in the city of Gainesville. In May, at the request of FDOC officials, GPD was asked to notify people camping on the property that they were trespassing.”

Taylor went on to say that the eviction effort was coordinated with representatives at GRACE.

“It would be safe to say that the capacity of all the shelters in Gainesville is about half of the homeless population,” said GRACE Executive Director Jon DeCarmine. “For all of the narrative that people are safer at home, it does not make sense to evict anybody in the middle of a pandemic.”

However, DeCarmine confirmed that GRACE worked with Gainesville PD and FDOC to evict Moultrie and other campers from the nearby encampment, claiming that it was done out of fear for residents’ safety after an incident involving a drunk driver nearly hitting people in their tents.

DeCarmine said GRACE offered beds and services to those who were displaced. However, Moultrie said she was only offered a bed at GRACE after she went to the local university’s newspaper, The Alligator, about the eviction. She claimed her fellow campers did not get beds, and said she feels lonely and constantly under surveillance at GRACE.

She still hopes to see her friends again, but doesn’t know if it will ever happen. In the meantime, she’s working on forming a nonprofit that helps fellow homeless people by providing food, first aid equipment and the basic necessities of life. She recently got accepted to Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville to study Public Health. She’s going to stay at GRACE for as long as she can. While it’s not her ideal situation, she knows that it’s hard to survive without shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People aren’t asking for much,” Moultrie said. “Just three meals a day and suitable shelter. This city, any city, should provide that to everyone during a time like this.”

Meanwhile, COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the country. Public health officials recommend isolation, social distancing, and frequent hand-washing to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. They certainly don’t recommend inhalation of chemical agents like tear gas and pepper spray, which are being used liberally against protestors. Protestors put in jail and incarcerated people held in prisons are not given options to isolate or maintain recommended hygiene practices to protect themselves from coronavirus.

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Mutual aid — people coming together to meet basic needs that aren’t being met by our current government or other systems — is a critical part of the response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other Black people. It can include money, time, or resources, and is a political act of solidarity amongst individuals and communities, rather than charity. People on the outside are coordinating rapid-response bail funds; providing jail support to find out where arrested protestors are taken, arranging bail if applicable, and waiting for their release; and fundraising for injured protestors. Monetary support like GoFundMe fundraisers to pay for medical bills, safe houses, and other forms of care are “a way to be there for our people, to build community, and to ensure that people are cared for,” according to Micah Herskind, an Atlanta-based organizer and writer. “I think jail support is another way to live out the abolitionist truth that ‘we got us.’ It’s also saying that there’s a role for everyone in the struggle — some will be in the streets, some will be doing support from home, some will be at the jail to welcome those who are released.”

According to abolitionist Mariame Kaba, “Mutual aid is not new […] It’s basic survival work that relies on the fact that human beings are interdependent.” She pointed to this chart created by Dean Spade as a way to show the important differences between mutual aid and charity, including the fact that mutual aid is an effort to flatten hierarchies without expectation of anything received in return. According to Spade, where charities and NGOs have high costs to operate and must follow government regulations, mutual aid is volunteer-powered, resisting the government’s efforts to “regulate or shut down activities.” K, a Black nonbinary organizer in Brooklyn, echoed this: “Mutual aid is so effective because it works outside of the bureaucracy of the nonprofit industrial complex. People have more control and autonomy over how aid is distributed and used, and also because mutual aid contains a political education component, longer-term relationships are built.” When it comes to mobilizing resources to support detained protestors, it also means having the speed to respond with the urgency the situation demands.

Mutual aid, however, extends beyond short-term, urgent needs. Many protestors and organizers realize that the murders of Black people at the hands of the police are just one part of a very violent system and many of those working to help protestors normally support incarcerated people. Incarceration is another violent — and often deadly — form of oppression for Black and brown people, and as with the protests, K notes, coronavirus has complicated the response.

Due to stay at home orders, mailing checks and visiting the post office have to be done “strategically” and loved ones can’t visit their family or friends in prison. Even when mail can be sent out, K said “prisons are limiting people’s access to mail and lying about it.” Morale is low on the inside, where some people “are being forced to stay inside their cells for 23 hours a day.” People on the outside are struggling with lost jobs and access to resources, but “with the help of our comrades on the inside,” K said they are doing their best. Amani Sawari, the statewide coordinator of the Michigan Prisoner Rehabilitation Credit Act, knows this well. Sawari is fundraising to help incarcerated people access prevention products like hand soap and disinfectant, putting money in people’s commissaries to get around Michigan Department of Corrections’ very restricted mailing. Sawari said it is integral “that the community step up in order to provide these materials to people in prison.” In New York, Survived and Punished NY and the Inside/Outside Soap Brigade similarly began a combined grassroots fundraising effort to send commissary money to incarcerated people while continuing decarceration efforts. They stress the importance of direct monetary aid because of the mail, movement, and other restrictions due to COVID-19.

In addition to bail out funds for protestors, a COVID-19 Bail Out Fund has been organized to get people out of New York City jails if they cannot afford to pay bail. Many people held in jails haven’t even been convicted of a crime, but are trapped inside because bail can often be unaffordable. In fact, the vast majority of people in jails — nearly 500,000 people — are held there in pre-trial detention. Release Aging People in Prison’s Melissa Tanis points out there are a large number of people who could be released immediately, regardless of innocence. Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) Co-Founder and Executive Director, Gina Womack, explains they are advocating releasing youth from detention, where outbreaks have unfortunately already begun. Womack stresses that “[D]uring a crisis, the facilities could be put on lockdown. In the aftermath of Katrina, when prison staff couldn’t get to work, youth went without food and sanitation for days.” If a similar situation arose due to COVID-19, the results would be inhumane and devastating to incarcerated youth.

Rapid-response mutual aid is necessary for the survival of incarcerated people, and taking to the streets to prevent further incarceration and police violence remains of the utmost importance. That said, while the ultimate goal is decarceration, it’s heartening to see the swift action of organizers in response to crises. Faced with unprecedented challenges during both a global pandemic and a national movement, “communities are coming together to act where the government refuses to,” according to K.

The vote is the culmination of a 17-year fight to be granted the same right to organize that is available to their counterparts in 11 other states, including Washington and Oregon to the north. The fight started long before Miren Algorri, a family child care provider in San Diego, opened her family child care center. When Algorri first immigrated to the United States from Mexico, she became an assistant to her mother, who ran her own family child care. Algorri watched the children her mother cared for while her mother went to organizing meetings.

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Algorri took up the mantle when she got her license to operate her own child care. In the more than two decades that she’s run her business, she hasn’t been able to take a single hour of paid sick leave. “That’s inhumane, that is criminal,” she said in an interview. She only has health insurance because she’s on someone else’s plan; when she was younger and a single mother, she had no coverage and paid hundreds of dollars to cover her daughter’s medical issues. “I cried myself to sleep countless nights,” she said.

She still can’t afford to offer health insurance to the assistants who now work for her. For providers like Algorri, who accept children whose parents pay for care with state subsidies, the rates are set by the state. With what the state pays her for caring for an infant, she’s barely making $4 an hour. But she needs to pay her assistants at least minimum wage. “They deserve way more than the minimum wage, because they’re shaping the future of California,” she said. But in order to compensate them adequately, that means that many months, after her other expenses, she doesn’t have enough money to pay herself a salary. So, she goes without.

It’s a common theme among family child care operators in California. In a 2019 survey, the top challenge providers said they faced was low wages, followed by receiving few benefits. Nearly one in five that had closed said it was because of the lack of benefits. Nationally, child care workers make on average less than $24,000 a year.

“Being underpaid, underrepresented, overworked is not something that I wish upon anybody,” she said. “We deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That’s what the union means.”

The union vote result was announced on an emotional Zoom call on Monday, and in reaction child care providers across the state took themselves off mute to cheer and clap. “This election is historic,” said Zoila Carolina Toma, a child care provider in Los Angeles, on the call, with a classroom chalkboard and shelves full of supplies in her background. “Together we are unstoppable.”

“I cannot find the words to describe how I’m doing,” Algorri said. “I have been crying, I have been laughing… I’m overwhelmed with joy because I know that wonderful things are coming for us.”

Even before Monday’s vote, 2,500 child care workers in the state had joined SEIU without having the formal right to organize and bargain. Then, in September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill finally granting providers who receive state subsidies the ability to form a union. “I’m so proud to be a little bit a part of your journey,” Newsom said in a pre-recorded video played on the Zoom call. “You had the moral authority, and…now we have the formal authority enshrined in this historic vote.”

The vote, however, is only the start. “Today the real fight begins,” Algorri said. Now that they voted to unionize, they’ll be able to bargain directly with the state for improvements in the child care system. As they negotiate their first contract, their priorities will be ensuring a livable wage for providers, good health insurance, and a retirement plan. Nancy Harvey, a child care provider of 16 years, said on the Zoom call, “We don’t want to be 78 years old still trying to lead circle time.” They also want to ensure professional development and training.

The child care provider workforce in California is overwhelmingly female and 74 percent people of color, according to the union. “This is not just a victory for union rights and economic justice,” Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME International, said on the Zoom call. “It’s a movement led by women of color. Your win today is an important step toward gender justice and racial justice.”

They also care for many children of color, and as part of their negotiations plan to push the government to expand access to child care. The vision of the union includes “excellent early education for all in California regardless of what you look like, where you come from, where you live, regardless of ability, regardless of language,” said Max Arias, executive director of SEIU Local 99.

All of these things are even more necessary in the middle of the pandemic. Across the country, more than 70 percent of child care providers say they’re incurring substantial new costs for staff, cleaning, and personal protective equipment to operate safely. But they have little wiggle room to cover those expenses. Over 40 percent said they had to close in May. Two out of five say they will have to shutter permanently unless they receive public assistance.

Many of the union members are already sick with COVID-19, some even hospitalized and intubated, according to union leaders who were on the Zoom call. Algorri has kept her doors open throughout the crisis to care for the children of essential workers, even as many of her families lost their jobs and had to keep their children home. She’s had to implement new procedures — such as asking parents to bring their own pens for sign in and having the children change into a child care-specific set of shoes — and spend a lot more on personal protective equipment and extra cleaning supplies. She wants a contract that will ensure providers keep getting paid if they close due to the coronavirus crisis, and will offer them extra support to keep their doors open.

“We’re not asking. We’re going to demand,” Toma noted. “It’s time to demand what we deserve, what our families deserve, what the people in California deserve.”

“I know wonderful things are coming our way,” Algorri said. “I’m just excited.”

Every year, 150 young people age out of the foster care system in California’s Santa Clara County. Statewide, 90 percent of foster youth don’t have a source of income when they leave state care, and between rent, school, clothing, food, and other living expenses, surviving in the Bay Area as a foster youth in transition is difficult.

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The average cost of rent in San Jose, located in the southern part of the county, is $2,790. Up to 50 percent of foster youth experience homelessness when they leave state care, and in Santa Clara County alone, nearly 50 percent of those under the age of 25 who lack access to shelter had spent some time in the foster care system. Statewide, nearly 50 percent of foster youth are chronically absent from school, 60 percent of foster youth in transition don’t have a high school diploma, and most don’t go on to obtain a college degree. As a result, many higher-paying jobs are not accessible.

A new pilot program put forth by the county’s Board of Supervisors aims to make life easier for young people like Hart by providing the country’s first universal basic income for foster youth in transition. A universal basic income has been shown to increase educational attainment, health care coverage, and provide access to healthier food for all people, but results are especially pronounced for people who are low-income.

For a 12-month period that started in June 2020, eligible young adults will receive $1,000 every month, no strings attached. The program is designed for young adults aged 21 to 24 — an age range at which many become ineligible for other social safety net programs — and eligibility is based on a number of factors, with higher priority given to 24-year-olds. Young adults must have been dependents of Santa Clara County between the ages of 16 and 21, and must currently live in the county.

For 23-year-old Bayleen Solorio, the UBI payments she’ll receive through the county will help her address her number one issue: housing. Before the onset of the pandemic, she was “tight on cash,” and now that businesses are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s working one shift per week at her job. The UBI is coming at the right time, but it still might not be enough to last through this economic downturn.

Solorio said the UBI program will offer her “that extra cushion I [need] to afford to pay off my debts.” The program “is going to help me a lot with financial struggles,” she said, and potentially address years of inadequate financial support. Solorio says that her main emotional struggle now is navigating her depression, and the UBI will make it easier for her to manage daily life.

For most, if not all, of the 72 young people enrolled in the program, the UBI isn’t just a guarantee of income, but a pathway to continue school and an opportunity to step back and think more broadly about their lives, rather than just focusing on the day-to-day. Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez said that county staff will check in with the recipients every three months to offer financial guidance that they may not have received elsewhere.

Chavez explained that the UBI program was born out of a long-held belief that young people in the “custodial care” of the county community should be cared for as if they were her own — or any parent’s in the area. It’s not an unreasonable approach to early adulthood: 70 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds nationwide are supported financially by their parents, which is its own informal basic income program that keeps young adults afloat while they find their footing.

“Foster children don’t have networks and support systems that can help them launch,” Chavez said, noting that she has long been invested in the wellbeing of her constituents from a “justice” perspective. “When you’re making investments in justice, you’re launching human beings to reach their highest capacity,” she says. As she sees it, providing a UBI isn’t about charity.

This “justice” framework addresses more than the need for financial support: It speaks to the multi-layered challenges that await foster youth in transition when they age out of the state-run system. States largely get to shape policy including when young people “age out” and what financial and social services are made available to them. For instance, in California, some former foster youth are eligible for educational assistance. Most of these funds have an age limit and aren’t necessarily calibrated with the rising cost of living. What’s universal, however, is the way that the foster youth system disconnects young people from their home communities, suffers from chronic underfunding, and doesn’t address emotional and mental needs of foster youth prior to the onset of illnesses.

Chavez is aware of the UBI’s shortcomings, mainly that a fixed income for a certain period of time can’t solve all of the problems with the foster care system. Still, it may keep youth in transition financially solvent while they work out for themselves what adult life looks like. “This small amount of money offers a little bit of [protection]” Chavez said, “For our foster programming this is a new area, that our success or failure of the Board [is measured] as guardians of our children.”

In addition to providing financial guidance to the youth, county staff will conduct routine interviews with recipients of the basic income to evaluate its efficacy. Chavez hopes that the program inspires action in other counties around California and potentially in other states.

“Being in the foster care system did one thing and one thing only: It helped me become codependent,” Hart says. But initiatives like this one could actually allow Hart to build economic independence. “With programs like these, I’m able to actually be comfortable somewhere.”

Julissa Pineda, 22, has lived in the building, Richman Towers, with her mother and two brothers for three years. In March, shortly after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a state of emergency in the city, Pineda was laid off from her job as a restaurant server. Almost immediately, Pineda, who is the main earner in her family, knew she would not be able to afford her rent without borrowing heavily: The family pays $1,950 per month for their two-bedroom apartment. “Sometimes we need to buy a couple things,” she said. “It is necessary to have money.”

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Other families, some of whom have called the building home for nearly 30 years, were in similar positions, Pineda said. Many worked paycheck to paycheck in the service industry, and after they lost their jobs, had no idea how they could continue to make rent. Along with other families in her building, Pineda began organizing residents to lobby its landlord for rent forgiveness. But five months into a pandemic that has killed more than 550 people in D.C., neither their public pressure nor private lobbying has been successful.

Pineda says that some of those families — including her own — have resorted to increasingly precarious ways to pay rent, including borrowing money from friends and high-interest lenders, or in the case of other Richman Towers residents, by slapping the balance on a credit card.

Renters in D.C. and around the country are struggling to make their way in a city that’s been flattened by the one-two punch of a pandemic and recession. Even in times of relative regional prosperity, D.C. is a difficult city to live in: It consistently ranks as having one of the most expensive rental markets in the country, as well as one of the nation’s highest rates of income inequality, with the top fifth of earners making about 29 times more than the bottom fifth.

So it’s no surprise that renters are underwater. By mid-June, more than 116,000 people — a figure equal to nearly one in every six people who live in the capitol — had filed for unemployment in D.C. By the end of the first week of June, the percentage of people in D.C. who were able to pay all or part of their rent dropped three points from the same period last year, according to data collected by property management software company RealPage, to under 83 percent, one of the highest drops in the country.

As the effects of historic mass layoffs begin to throttle the economy — and renters’ wallets — rental data indicate that more people than ever are relying on their credit cards to make rent. Those who are able, anyway: 8 percent of people in D.C. are unbanked, and 27 percent don’t have access to a line of credit.

“The concern we have is that these effects would snowball. That [renters] would use these alternative methods to pay rent, and then that high interest becomes a vehicle for more debt to incur,” Cashauna Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center, testified during a June 10 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development, and Insurance. “There is a very real risk of people being forced into homelessness because they’re being forced to find alternative methods to cover their rent costs.”

Two widely used rental management software companies, Entrata and MRI, used data from around the country to report spikes in credit card rent payments of up to 7 percent compared to spring of last year. Other initial studies indicate that up to 18 percent of families using their credit cards to make rent have done so for two months in a row. Meanwhile, housing policy experts are beginning to warn lawmakers about the long-term implications of the practice. “Of course the question then becomes, on down the road, how will they pay those credit cards off?” Andrew Aurand, vice president of research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said of lower-income renters. “It’s troubling. It’s concerning.”

Still, in D.C., some local officials are actually encouraging renters to take on this debt. On June 8, the city’s local trial court created an online payment system that suggests people going through eviction proceedings pay the rent they owe with e-checks and credit or debit cards, with processing fees that cost as much as 2.5 percent of the total transaction.  In an emailed statement to TalkPoverty, a spokesperson for D.C. Superior Court said “It is not required that funds be paid online. As the [court’s] June notice indicates, tenants can continue to pay their landlord.” But while paying rent on a card isn’t mandatory, the mere availability of the offer puts pressure on already cost-burdened residents.

“There are transactional costs associated with all of these different things, but having a 2.5 percent transactional cost to pay for rent is very high,” Harrison said. “And it’s just something that, if you don’t have a lot of income, it’s not something you can budget for.” It’s not uncommon for landlords to try and evict tenants over unpaid bills as small as $25 or $50, or about as much as the extra credit card processing fees they’re faced with paying now.

Visa, meanwhile, reported a 7 percent increase in its quarterly revenue — more than $400 million — since this time last year.

This January, that was threatened when she received a letter stating that her benefits would be cancelled if she did not fulfill a 20-hour-a-week work requirement.  When I first met with Ortiz, she stated that “I would have to make major cuts to the food that I get” if she lost her SNAP benefits.

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This letter came at the same time that the United States Department of Agriculture finalized the Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs) rule in December 2019. “Able-bodied adults” — defined as not receiving SSI or SSDI, without children, or who are not the caretaker for an adult — are required to work or volunteer 20 hours a week, or participate in an approved workplace training program, in order to maintain their SNAP benefits. Previously, states had been able to apply for waivers to ease those requirements, but the new rule would take that flexibility away and cost up to 700,000 people their benefits.

The ABAWDs rule is not the only restriction on eligibility requirements for SNAP — according to a spokesperson at the Illinois Department of Human Services, students enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs “more than half-time” are not eligible for the program without a special exemption. Additional restrictions ban SNAP benefits for people who are undocumented, have a drug felony, or have more than $2,250 in assets. Some of these restrictions are established by states, and may vary.

In theory, a social worker like Crystal should be uniquely positioned to navigate this bureaucracy. However, social workers who use SNAP can have just as difficult of a time understanding the requirements to keep their benefits as the clients they assist. Crystal said that in class discussions about policy changes around SNAP eligibility, there wasn’t always an understanding that students were current or former SNAP recipients who were personally affected by these changes. She also said some professors would broadly mention that resources were available if students needed additional support, but specific resources were not mentioned in course materials. “I would like to see acknowledgement from the school…because if we’re not talking about it, we can’t come together,” she said, adding that this lack of discussion means students are “struggling silently.”

Even with her understanding of the SNAP requirements, Ortiz ultimately lost benefits for two months. To get them reinstated, she set up multiple meetings and phone calls with the Illinois Department of Human Services, which included taking public transit in the middle of a pandemic, waiting outside since the office was only admitting one person at a time, offering to translate for another person in line because another staffer was not available, and then meeting with a caseworker and manager to advocate for herself. The root of the issue, it seems, was her unpaid internship — she was under the impression that it counted as work, but her caseworker believed it did not since it was for class credit.

Crystal’s experience highlights the many different restrictions that already existed in the SNAP ruling even before the proposed expansion of the ABAWD requirement, and how challenging it is trying to parse conflicting information from multiple agencies. But still, even in the midst of the coronavirus, many of the restrictions hold.

Currently, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act only partially suspends the ABAWD rule: If recipients are offered a slot in a designated workfare program, they must participate in the program in order to maintain benefits. A representative from the Illinois Department of Human Services stated that all ABAWD requirements, including the requirements in FFCRA, and eligibility requirements for students receiving SNAP, are suspended until a month after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lifts the Public Health Emergency declaration. Navigating these mixed messages from different agencies can be frustrating for a social worker, but can be downright impossible for the average person unfamiliar with public benefits agencies. A page on the IDHS website states that current SNAP recipients will receive the maximum benefit starting the week of April 6.

The framing around these reversals in policy is focused on maintaining food access “during a public health emergency.” However, not having enough food to eat was already a public health emergency before COVID-19, as demonstrated by the patchwork of food pantries and soup kitchens that had challenges meeting the needs of the communities they serve. As we work to ensure that everyone has enough to eat during the immediate crisis of COVID-19, we can’t lose sight of that basic fact. If the USDA and state agencies can recognize how devastating a lack of food is during COVID-19, to the point where they suspend restrictions on one of their most aggressively means-tested programs, then they should be able to recognize this when there isn’t a pandemic magnifying the hunger crisis that existed before it.

Legal services organizations and law firms that provide free or reduced fee representation often work closely with other service providers to secure transportation, food, housing, clothes, and other necessities. But legal organizations can’t typically pay for those things directly, thanks to an obscure rule that exists in many states. They can cover filing fees and some required medical exams, but cannot pay for many of the basic things that would prevent clients from getting to court for their cases.

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“Human services often have client emergency funds, so it seems like a false distinction that legal services can’t do that,” said Amy Barasch, executive director of Her Justice, an organization focused on representation for women living in poverty. “If you can’t come to court because you don’t have enough money to pay for child care while you are coming to court, that’s going to be an access issue.”

The problem lies with the American Bar Association’s Model Rule 1.8(e), which prohibits lawyers from loaning or giving clients money for anything not directly tied to litigation. At least 11 states, including Louisiana, Alabama, California, and Minnesota, have made efforts to loosen their own versions of Rule 1.8(e) so certain lawyers, mostly those working pro bono or in legal services for low-income clients, can pay on behalf of clients for things that fall outside direct litigation costs.

New York is the latest state to alter Rule1.8(e) in favor of providing aid to poor clients. Changes proposed by a committee at the New York City Bar were approved by the Administrative Board of New York courts on June 18. The push to refine Rule 1.8(e) began two years ago, but was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying state of emergency. In March, the bar modified their ask to request an immediate “humanitarian exception” to the rule for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.

The economic fallout from the pandemic may have pushed the courts to take action on the proposal. The modified rule will allow some lawyers to offer “humanitarian assistance to their clients in dire need,” according to the news advisory released by the New York State Unified Court System.

“New Yorkers are experiencing severe financial consequences as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes a previous letter from two New York City Bar committees to members of New York State’s Supreme Court. “Lawyers throughout the state have answered the call to provide pro bono assistance to those dealing with the repercussions of the pandemic.”

Indigent clients — those living in poverty who cannot afford to pay a lawyer nor court-related fees — have always needed more than volunteer lawyers are currently able to provide. Now, with job losses ballooning, more clients could enter that indigent category, and it’s likely that more people will be seeking pro bono services for eviction. The amended rule means that pro bono lawyers across New York preparing to take on cases caused or exacerbated by the pandemic now have one more resource open to them.

“Legal aid programs intersect with so many of these issues, unemployment, increased family violence, family separation or unification, eviction, foreclosure, debt problems, elder abuse. And all the things that come from a dip in the economy,” said Don Saunders, vice president of policy at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA).

The coronavirus pandemic, like natural disasters of the past, has had a catastrophic effect on human lives and human systems. “It’s kind of like what happens after a hurricane, after you have immediate first responders, then a host of legal needs come up. We’re worried about housing, homelessness, food and nutrition and healthcare. These are all issues that people have legal rights around.”

These issues are especially pressing for people of color. The pandemic is infecting and killing New York’s residents of color at higher rates than white people, and the inequities will likely continue through the disease’s aftermath. Assistance from lawyers could also help clients who are ineligible for state supports, including undocumented people who are excluded from the stimulus and unemployment benefits. Hamra Ahmad, Her Justice’s director of legal services expects that clients who could benefit the most are those who are undocumented, minors, and/or victims of human trafficking.

Andrew Kent, Fordham Law professor and the primary author of the bar’s report, explained that clients in a financial bind will sometimes settle claims for less than they deserve. For example, “say there is someone who’s been beat up in jail at Rikers Island. If that client is getting pro bono legal help for their case, and let’s suppose that they have a good claim which might be expected to get decent money, maybe $20,000 or $40,000.”

“But if the city or the state comes to them and says we can give you a check for $2,000 today and that person has rent due, or needs costly medical treatment, or their kid needs diapers or whatever it is, that smaller amount of money might be attractive,” said Kent. If a client can’t manage their living expenses through the long court process, they may forgo a higher amount of damages in the end.

“The challenge of getting out of poverty is that everything you’re supposed to do to get out of poverty ends up costing money,” said Barasch. Good pro bono representation is a proven way to better one’s financial situation for the long term, and yet the minimum amount of participation required from clients can still be too expensive. Providing assistance to stabilize clients throughout the process could alleviate some pains and strengthen the possibility of a life-changing result.

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Generally, in non-coronavirus times, undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits from the federal government, and the current social safety nets of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP (food stamps), and unemployment benefits don’t usually cover them. The pandemic has exacerbated the lack of governmental support and income inequality — undocumented people don’t work jobs that can be done from home, which has either left them entirely without income during the shutdown (as is the case with restaurant workers) or put them at much higher risk of coming into contact with the coronavirus (since undocumented people are disproportionately likely to be essential workers in fields with poor protections, like farmwork or meatpacking).

That means undocumented people are facing a particularly brutal choice: Either continue to work during a pandemic or lose out on money to purchase food and other necessary resources. Vera Parra, communications director and organizer with Cosecha, a grassroots movement that advocates for undocumented people, explained it like this: “There’s a choice that families are having to make between dying of hunger or dying of coronavirus.”

Now grassroots organizations and local leaders are scrambling to build a financial safety net that will help undocumented folks feed and house themselves during the pandemic because — as long as Mitch McConnell refuses to address the issue — no federal institutional support is coming.

The San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, a collective of over 50 organizations, has begun to create a safety net where there previously was none. Demand is high: bills still need to be paid even if there’s no way to pay them. Serrano said the consortium received over 4,000 applications for its $500 grants, and so far they have been able to award 200 of those applications. While local community members and elected officials have offered supplies and some financial support, Serrano said that “Donations are definitely one of our biggest needs: there is more need than there is funding.”

The Cosecha fund is hoping to find some support by redistributing stimulus checks. There are a number of people who received CARES Act checks but do not urgently need the funds, either because they have not lost out on work or they would be eligible for unemployment benefits if they do lose their jobs in the future. The Cosecha fund for undocumented residents is asking individuals who are able to donate their stimulus check, either the full amount or a portion of it, to undocumented folks. Their social media campaign raised $1 million in their first round of fundraising, and they’re currently in the process of redistributing the funds to thousands of families.

Since the economy will likely continue to struggle for months, if not years, many undocumented people will continue to be reliant on donations, advocacy, and organizing to stay afloat. Parra said moving forward will require pushing the state and other governing bodies to make more funds available and “demand to be included” in future economic relief packages. Carolina Martin Ramos, the director of programs and advocacy at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, California, said given the fact that the labor of undocumented folks and people of color helped to create and sustain the state’s wealth, the lack of adequate and well-funded support networks is, “just more evidence that we really treat some people as disposable and less deserving or less important.”

“It’s really hard,” said Autumn Gonzalez, an organizer with Norcal Resist, an immigrant rights organization located in the Bay Area. Because the fund relies mainly on community support and they don’t have any grant funding, “We’re going to see people evicted [and] enter that cycle of homelessness,” Gonzalez said of the worst-case scenario. “Going down that road would be a nightmare for so many thousands of families.”

Moving forward, Gonzalez said Norcal Resist will apply for grant funding, though it’s a competitive process. Other than that, they’re hoping to reach out to other folks in the area who might be sympathetic to the cause; “it’s definitely a constant worry for us.” And even as businesses start to reopen and life enters a new normal, back rent and lost wages will continue to be a concern.

Like the Norcal Resist fund, which has been supported by the local community, Serrano says that San Diego community members have stepped up. Sustaining that progress will be difficult, she said, but those with the capacity to keep donating, like private companies, should. Ramos sees a potential solution in couching mutual aid and grassroots funding work with local political advocacy. Centro Legal has been working with the City of Oakland and officials from Alameda County to negotiate a stipend for their fund and map out what rent forgiveness (as a long-term solution to housing insecurity) might look like.

Either way, Gonzalez said, “We all keep pushing because we see that there’s a need that’s not being addressed anywhere else. We know that we have to keep doing the work.”

The leasing office at Villas Antonio Apartments in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., which is owned by Western National Property Management, a development company that owns more than 160 properties, called her four times asking her to sign a 120-day rent payment deferment agreement. Simpson refused, explaining that she does not know when she will return to work and that she can’t be evicted under current California law. Simpson said the manager replied, “We can’t evict you — yet.”

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Deferment agreements like the one presented to Simpson are commonly used by landlords and property managers when tenants are unable to pay rent. These agreements enter tenants into legally binding contracts to pay their rent owed within the number of days designated by their landlord. In Simpson’s case, if she were to sign her contract and find herself unable to pay when the California eviction moratorium expires on July 28^th, her property owners could file an unlawful detainer case against her, which would forcibly remove her from the property and place an eviction on her record. The property owners would also have the option of suing Simpson for the amount of rent owed.

Representatives at Villas Antonio Apartments and at WNPM’s headquarters did not reply to requests for comment on the deferment agreements they are issuing to Simpson and other tenants.

Before COVID-19, these agreements were used by renters who had fallen on hard times, such as being in between jobs. With a deferment, renters could delay paying rent until they were back on their feet. But in the midst of a massive economic depression, with unemployment at over 13 percent and an estimated 21 million unemployed Americans in May, many people won’t have a steady income for months. This can leave those who sign such agreements vulnerable to eviction as the economy remains unstable for the foreseeable future.

“I’m usually ok with payment deferment agreements like the one in her (Simpson’s) case,” said Joseph Tobener, tenant lawyer and partner at Tobener Ravenscroft LLP in San Francisco. “But in a crisis situation like this, tenants shouldn’t feel forced to sign anything their landlord gives them, and they shouldn’t have an eviction on their record. Tenants have the leverage here.”

Irene Bassett also refused to sign a payment deferment plan in April. On April 20^th, her landlord issued Irene and her husband a “pay or quit” notice at their Hawthorne, Calif., apartment, which threatened them with eviction filings in three days if they refused to pay rent. Bassett responded that eviction paperwork currently cannot be filed due to pandemic emergency laws.

“A few days ago we received another letter from our landlords saying they still expect rent,” Bassett said. “Expecting rent from me in a time like this is immoral. If I have to choose between food and rent, I choose food.”

Bassett reached out to the Eviction Defense Network (EDN), where a team of lawyers like Elena Popp offer pro bono legal help to tenants in need. Popp said the three-day notice is becoming more popular with landlords.

“Some tenants see a notice like that and panic. Especially if they’re like so many Americans who have trouble accessing legal help, they leave out of fear,” Popp said. “And the court is sending false and misleading notices to tenants, notices that violate the State Judicial Council’s orders.”

Maria del Socorro Serrano received such a notice from the Los Angeles Superior Court on April 17^th, which notified her and her husband Jose Garcia that they were being evicted and had five days to respond to the court. They turned to EDN for legal assistance, and are now receiving support for their case.

“I got overwhelmed. We are already under so much pressure because my husband and I lost our jobs in March,” Serrano said. “My heart dropped to the floor.”

EDN and Popp are receiving more requests for assistance than ever, while preparing for what Popp says will be a “tsunami of evictions” when emergency protections are lifted in California. Tenant unions are also trying to keep up with renters who need assistance.

“It’s hard to keep track of the amount of renters that have reached out to us about pressure that’s being put on them to do things against their best interest,” said Jane Demian, caseworker for the Los Angeles Tenants Union. “The landlords should be approaching their lender about mortgage relief during this crisis, instead of this backlash against tenants.”

Without tenant unions and lawyer groups such as EDN, renters who find themselves in dire economic situations are often without resources to help them navigate agreements with landlords. The lawyer operated website Avvo says tenant lawyer fees typically range from $200-$500 an hour. With 58 percent of Americans having less than $1,000 in savings, hiring a lawyer is not an option for most people.

The pressure tactics by landlords can take a toll on the health of their tenants. At the beginning of April, Simpson started suffering from panic attacks. She made it through by talking out her situation with her family and friends, but is still living with the effects. As the eviction moratorium expiration date of July 28^th draws closer, she wonders what her living situation will be like in the coming months.

“It’s so upsetting. My landlords might have to wait on some money, but I could end up homeless if I have an eviction on my record,” Simpson said. “It feels like I’m stuck yelling at a wall.”

This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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The rider is named after Jessica Grubb, a Michigan woman who died at age 30 after being prescribed oxycodone for postoperative pain while only a few months into recovery from a seven-year heroin addiction. The Protecting Jessica Grubb’s Legacy Act was sponsored by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin III and Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito, both from West Virginia, one of the states hit hardest in recent years by an influx of illicitly manufactured fentanyl. Currently, under 42 CFR Part 2, patients engaged in substance use disorder treatment programs that fall under federal purview — which essentially includes any program that utilizes opioid agonist pharmacotherapy like methadone and buprenorphine — must provide informed consent each and every time their records are shared. So when a patient authorizes a methadone program to share medication information with their primary care doctor, that provider can’t disclose the information to a specialist unless the patient signs a new, specific consent. When the act goes into effect in 2021, patients will only have to provide consent once. After that, their records can be re-shared in perpetuity by any health care entity who receives them.

The changes reflect the way privacy and consent are handled for most of health care. The act is effectively changing records disclosure consent rules to match those of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), except that it still preserves the initial consent required by 42 CFR Part 2.

Despite popular belief, HIPAA allows health care workers to share patient records without their consent for a number of reasons related to health care operations. “HIPAA is not a [patient] privacy protection. It’s actually an authorization to share your info as broadly as a health care payor believes they need to share it, which I will tell you is very broad,” explained Danielle Tarino, president and CEO of Young People In Recovery, who previously worked at the Department of Health and Human Services and, while there, drafted the 2017 revisions to 42 CFR Part 2.

Now, instead of special protections for patients undergoing addiction treatment, these programs will have the same privacy standards as all of health care.

The fight for privacy rights has divided key players in the addiction treatment community, many of whom are otherwise aligned. Proponents of the changes include the National Council of Behavioral Health, the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Shatterproof, and several other prominent treatment and health care voices. Those who oppose it, a group that includes the National Alliance for Medication Assisted Recovery, Legal Action Center, Young People In Recovery, and Faces and Voices In Recovery, have successfully thwarted similar proposals in the past.

“It’s just really disappointing to see that bill go through when the political will was, year after year after year, it’s not going to pass because people don’t want it to pass,” said Tarino.

Those who favor the changes say that not only will this make it easier for health care providers to share patient records, it will also allow these programs to be used in the electronic health records programs that are currently designed to meet HIPAA standards. Senators Manchin and Caputo argued that this kind of care coordination would prevent patients like Jessica Grubb from being “thrown back into the nightmare of addiction,” and insinuated that these privacy changes could have prevented Grubb’s death by ensuring all of her caregivers were informed about her addiction history. “There’s emergency glass that could be broken if someone was not able to disclose,” countered Talbott. “The notion Part 2 could cause what happened to Jessica Grubb to happen is outrageous…She disclosed [her addiction status], as most people do with their treatment providers.”

“42 CFR Part 2 said ‘if you go to treatment, we will give you the security and confidence to work on your issues,’” said Westley Clark, Dean’s Executive Professor in the Department of Psychology at Santa Clara University and the former director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) within SAMHSA. “Why would I go to treatment if they are going to blab my business all over town? We have a conundrum: We want people to go to treatment, but we are going to discourage people from seeking treatment by telling them ‘your privacy is irrelevant.’”

Part of what made these protections so strong was the re-disclosure rule eliminated by the Jessica Grubb’s Legacy Act. If a patient signed a consent so that their treatment provider could share pertinent care records with their insurance — a requirement in order to have insurance pay for treatment — then those records could only be shared with the insurance provider. Now, a patient’s insurance can re-disclose those records in perpetuity for a number of reasons, including for the vague and effectively ubiquitous use of “health care operations.” This likewise applies to anyone to whom a patient has granted consent.

The language of the new law explicitly states that patients have the right to revoke consent at any time. The problem is that patients must know they need to do this, and also, once records have been shared widely enough, it becomes virtually impossible to communicate and enforce that revocation. Privacy proponents worry that this re-disclosure license will deter patients from seeking treatment, and could lead to harm for those who decide to engage anyway.

“Some insurers have discriminated against substance use disorder patients, and substance use disorder patients have not gotten life insurance or other key insurance like that because they found out,” said Deborah Reid, senior health policy attorney with Legal Action Center, emphasizing the fact that discrimination against substance use disorder patients is not a thing of the past, but a very real problem her office deals with regularly. She argued that lessening privacy regulations for these patients is likely to increase the problem. Other examples of potential bad case scenarios resulting from the relaxed consent rules that she and her co-worker Jacqueline Setz provided were child custody cases, information spread through small town communities, and law enforcement gaining access to the records.

The new law includes anti-discrimination language, which proponents like Shatterproof say is a big win. “Certainly the illegal nature of using drugs should never be a barrier to someone accessing emergency help or medical care when they need it. That’s something we should hopefully all be working toward. This legislation is consistent with existing federal protections around the treatment of addiction,” said Kevin Roy, chief public policy officer at Shatterproof. Currently, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) covers discrimination against substances use disorder patients — but only if they are not currently using illegal substances. If a patient is engaged with treatment but struggling to maintain total abstinence or does not seek total abstinence as a goal, they are not protected against discrimination by the ADA. But opponents say that the new anti-discrimination language won’t be enough to offset the dangers caused by allowing this sensitive information to move more freely. “It’s in there, you can’t discriminate, but if you do — who’s gonna be able to enforce that? With no patient first right of action, patients can’t stand up for themselves unless they have resources to retain counsel and sue in civil court,” said Talbott, adding, “even the parts that sound good, upon further reflection and digging, seem to be paper tigers.”

Although those who have been involved in the fight for years were disappointed that these changes were slipped through alongside the unrelated coronavirus stimulus bill, they say the fight isn’t totally over yet.

“We still have initial consent…it didn’t remove the complete foundation of Part 2, but it will be a different struggle now,” said Talbott, explaining some early-stage strategies NAMA-R and other groups are discussing in order to ensure addiction patients can still have robust privacy protections in the future.

Then, with a note of sadness, he added: “The 10 year battle to preserve privacy protections in Part 2 is over.”

“These are people’s lives we are talking about,” summarized Tarino. “There are very deep implications to people losing rights and privileges because of their participation in something that was supposed to help them.”

After acquiring TimeWarner Cable in 2016, Spectrum began an attempt to replace its union health insurance and pension plans with a company-run 401(k) pension account and health plan. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3 objected to the plan as “substandard,” preferring to hold on to its existing pension plan, which for decades has been run by an independent board of trustees. Union officials feared that if they gave Spectrum control of their pension fund and health care, they would forfeit any leverage they had in future negotiations. With families to support, workers like Papon couldn’t afford to lose everything they worked so hard for.

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“The strike caught everyone by surprise but my main concern at the time was maintaining our medical and our pension. That was our main goal and something that Spectrum definitely wanted to eliminate. If they wanted to take that away, we had no other choice but to go on strike.”

What Papon and his fellow IBEW Local 3 members couldn’t anticipate was that more than three years later, they would be part of one of the longest strikes in American history. As the strike dragged on, developing into a bitter war of attrition between Charter Communications — which is the largest provider of cable TV, internet, and telephone service in New York State as well as the second-largest cable provider in the country — and Local 3, workers like Papon struggled to make ends meet.

To make up for his lost income, Papon took a job on construction sites, starting at the bottom of the trade union ladder. Despite taking another job, things didn’t become easier. He fought his bank’s attempt to foreclose on his home and his wife and daughter were diagnosed with lupus. His wife became so ill that she is currently awaiting a lung transplant. With legal and medical bills piling up, he quickly saw his life savings evaporate.

“I had to deplete my 401k completely in order to survive and to maintain my family,” said Papon. “That hurts. After so many years you have built this savings and this cushion so you could be able to retire later on. Now all of sudden you have this money gone which is pretty sad. Definitely it has affected me mentally.”

As if being on strike hasn’t been hard enough, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Papon’s family deeper into crisis. With all non-essential construction suspended, Papon has found himself unemployed and without health insurance for the first time in his life.

“With the COVID, my wife and daughter can’t afford to get sick because they don’t have an immune system. So I’m really unsure on what to do.”

Papon is not alone. Troy Walcott, a 20-year Spectrum veteran and a union shop steward, has been one of the strike’s most visible leaders. With many striking workers moving on, Walcott has been desperately attempting to keep the strike’s momentum alive. But amidst a full-blown  pandemic, it has felt like an arduous battle.

“Whatever people are going through before the pandemic, now times are harder for them. So it has been like that for us for basically three years. We have scraped by, barely having enough to hold on to keep going, at the bottom of the barrel, but now we get kicked in the teeth again through this pandemic.”

For his part, Walcott was forced to drive for Uber to sustain himself. Yet, without any health insurance, he can’t afford to put his life on the line and continue driving.

“Between working for Uber and pulling from my savings that has been enough to get by. Now with the pandemic it’s all savings. I know eventually it gets to the point where the balance I’m in will fall through. I’m playing on borrowed time and I can’t really do anything except keep fighting and hoping we get help from somewhere.”

Supporters of the striking workers, such as New York City Council Member Barry S. Grodenchik, are dumbfounded that, after three years, Spectrum has still refused to reach an agreement with Local 3 over their pension fund and healthcare plan, even during the COVID-19 crisis.

“I grew up across the street from the union hall, so I go way back with the union and many of the people that are unfortunately caught up with this,” said Grodenchik. “It’s very, very hard to see this at this time, especially during the pandemic. They have been trying to sustain a strike for over a three-year period of time which is quite unusual to say the least.”

Instead of negotiating with Local 3, Spectrum has hired an army of contract workers to replace the striking workers and has launched a bid to decertify the union. Voting for decertification should be led by workers who choose to either abolish a union or replace it with a different one. Local 3 contends that the vote is being pushed by replacement workers at the behest of Spectrum. In 2019, Local 3 lodged a complaint against Spectrum with the National Labor Relations Board, currently stacked with anti-labor Trump appointees, for unfair labor practices. The case has yet to be resolved. As of publication, Spectrum could not be reached for comment.

Congress, however, has signaled some support for organized labor. This past February, the House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, one of the strongest pieces of labor legislation passed in years. The act would strengthen workers’ ability to form unions by introducing penalties against businesses that block workers from forming unions. It would also require companies like Spectrum to bargain in good faith with unions as well as protect workers’ rights to strike. Unfortunately, the act is unlikely to pass in the Repulican controlled Senate.

At the local level, many New York City officials are vowing to revoke Spectrum’s municipal franchise agreement with the city, which is up for renewal in July, if the company fails to reach a settlement with the union. The agreement gives Spectrum the privilege to provide cable, internet, and other tech services to residents across the city for a fee. Across the country, cable operators pay nearly $3 billion annually in franchise fees to state and local governments. Barry Grodenchik, who sits on the New York City Council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises, has been one of the most vocal in his opposition to Spectrum.

“I stated publicly that I cannot vote to extend their franchise agreement because of how they treat their workers. There are 1,800 families in New York City that have been shown the door. That’s a lot of people.”

Even New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has signaled his support for the striking workers. “Workers deserve a fair contract, and this Administration strongly supports the striking workers,” said Laura Feyer, Deputy Press Secretary for the Mayor. “Like all cable franchise agreements, Spectrum’s is governed by federal law, which has strict guidelines regarding when a franchise can and cannot be renewed.”

Yet, some of the strikers are skeptical. “Many elected officials have stated that they will not vote to renew Spectrum’s franchise agreement, which has to be done as a stance against a company that is blatantly union busting in a union town,” says Walcott. “But the problem is, even after the vote, the cable company is going to lawyer up and just going to fight the city for years without a franchise agreement. So they don’t really give a shit.”

For David Papon, with all his struggles, he has lost what little faith he had in the company.  “After all the years I put into the company I feel abandoned. This company pretty much has nobody’s back. It’s a money company and we are just a number to them.”

Placerville resident and Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC) CFO and COO Lisa McCargar understands this problem all too well. Her organization advocates for broadband access, water rights, and other infrastructure resources on behalf of thirty-seven rural California counties. Now, facing the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of RCRC’s work has never been more apparent to McCargar. With nearly all of the businesses on Placerville’s Main Street closed, she worries rural communities may not have equal access to federal government aid programs that have been touted as crucial to propping up small businesses.

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Although Congress allocated more than $650 billion to lend to small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that is being administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA), accessing an approved lending institution in communities like Placerville is easier said than done. Only 31 percent of the community banks chartered since 1986 remain in the rural financial sector. This has led to a significant challenge in accessing financial services, especially now. “Everyone was flocking to Citi and Bank of America to the point that they couldn’t handle it. It ended up that you needed to be a customer with an outstanding loan or at least an account,” McCargar noted.

Steve Frisch, CEO of the Sierra Business Council, is dealing with the same problem. His group, which advocates for the business community in the mountain region of California, has helped more than 500 small businesses apply for the loan program. Despite their assistance, he estimates that only 10 percent received funding. “If you already had a strong relationship with a bank and your bank was approved to lend, then you got funded. If not, you were out of luck,” Frisch said. This is partly the result of inadequate funding to smaller community banks, who despite providing capital to nearly 1.5 million small businesses in 2018, received 16 percent of second-round PPP funding.

In addition, the quick roll out of the program was a major learning curve for smaller lending institutions. Banks “got the guidelines at 3:00 p.m. and the program opened at 10:00 a.m. the next morning,” Frisch noted. This isn’t to say community banks weren’t able to process any applications. However, community banks reported that the system locked up because of the mass uploads by larger lending institutions. As a result, they had to manually enter applicant information, a process which is reported to take up to an hour.

It is worth noting that businesses owned by historically underrepresented ethnicities have been particularly impacted by these barriers. “COVID-19 exacerbated all pre-existing inequalities” Tara Lynn Gray, the CEO of the Fresno Black Chamber of Commerce said. Her group, which provides technical support to business owners of color, has helped 40 businesses through one-on-one sessions and nearly 330 businesses through webinars. “Not one business got funded in the first round, while seven got funded in the second round” she said.

Research from the Center for Responsible Lending backs this up. Their recently released report notes that banks tend to lend to larger businesses with greater payrolls. Even though businesses owned by people of color employ 7.2 million individuals, the report estimates that 95 percent of Black-owned businesses, 91 percent of Latino-owned businesses, 91 percent of Hawaiian- or Pacific Islander-owned businesses, and 75 percent of Asian American-owned businesses may stand little chance of receiving a loan because of these access issues.

Aside from the difficulty of getting a loan, no one knows how long funding will be available. To date, $669 billion has been allocated to SBA loans. That’s 19.11 percent of last year’s federal tax revenue. And with an estimated 70 percent of all small businesses applying for the program, there aren’t nearly enough funds to go around. Data from COVID Loan Tracker suggests that denial rates are as high as 90 percent, but the denial rate is likely higher in rural communities where there are fewer eligible banking institutions. McCargar and Frisch both noted that there was a lack of capital in these communities, even before the crisis. Many business owners have little more than their homes — or if they are lucky, personal savings — to rely on.

This sort of liquidity crisis has significant implications. During the last downturn and subsequent recovery, regions that had greater access to capital were able to reduce the number of layoffs and in turn, preserve the skill of their labor force. Areas that lacked access to financial resources experienced severe wage atrophy and decreased output.

Not surprisingly, it tended to be rural areas that were hardest hit by this  capital disparity. The results are still obvious today. California’s three most rural counties, Alpine, Mariposa, and Trinity, have seen far slower income growth since the Great Recession began, compared to the state’s three most urban counties of Alameda, Orange, and San Francisco. Nationwide, there are 0.2 percent fewer jobs in non-metropolitan areas since 2007, and labor force participation is over 7 points lower than in metropolitan areas.

The last decade’s decline is largely the result of decades worth of underinvestment in any concerted rural economic development strategy. Now, COVID-19 is stress testing the deteriorating financial and economic infrastructure of these communities. Already, they have lost 14 percent of bank branches in the past ten years, 43 percent more than their urban counterparts. Last year, 1 in 4 rural small businesses cited capital access as one of the biggest barriers to successfully running their business. With so many communities yet to recover from the Great Recession, the shock of COVID-19 only hurts that much more.

While the government’s efforts to prop up small business are a step forward from the last recovery efforts, there still needs to be a conscious attempt to address rural-centric financial issues. Not only did communities like Placerville have less capital going into the COVID-19 pandemic, they now face additional barriers to accessing the government programs intended to help them. No plan to help America can work without supporting financial services to our rural neighbors.

San Francisco enacted a citywide shelter-in-place order on March 17. Prior to the lockdown, Moss was seeing her three children twice a week in supervised settings like the public library or a designated visitation center. Now, she can only see her children through a screen.

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In response to the pandemic, child welfare agencies around the nation have been limiting or completely cutting off in-person visitation between children and their parents, leaving many families wondering when they will be in the same room again. It’s not just the immediate emotional consequences at stake: the extended time apart is bound to weaken some parents’ reunification cases. Experts are concerned it will lead to permanent dissolution of families unlucky enough to have open cases during the pandemic.

Although people unfamiliar with child protective services might believe the term refers to a unified national agency, “CPS” is actually an informal moniker that references a network of individual agencies run at state and jurisdictional levels under a variety of names, which are held together by a loose set of federal guidelines and a complex web of federal and state funding sources.

In some states, like New York and California, there have been no official statewide orders cutting off all in-person visitation; instead agencies have been directed to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. But those on the ground say this is still leaving many parents without a voice in the decision-making process.

Despite state-level guidance that visits take place whenever possible in New York, for example, “in individual cases we are seeing visits being curtailed…you might have a foster mother who has a vulnerability to COVID so she doesn’t want the children in her care going home for the weekends with their parents and coming back,” said Emma Ketteringham, managing attorney for the family defense practice with the Bronx Defenders.

In other states, like Idaho and Illinois, all in-person supervised visitations have been suspended. A few states, like Louisiana, continue to legally allow in-person supervised visitations, but are closing their buildings to the public and directing employees to work from home, which means supervised visitations, which often take place in these buildings and require staff to be physically present, cannot practically take place. While agencies appear to be allowing remote visitation when possible, for some — like parents with newborns and toddlers or children with developmental delays — remote visits just don’t work. In other cases, the parents, foster families, or agencies themselves might not be equipped with the technology necessary to facilitate remote visits.

Even in cases where these factors don’t apply, video communication is a meager replacement for face-to-face contact between a parent and a child, interrupting crucial bonding and raising the possibility of increased anxiety and depression in both parties, according to Richard Pittman, deputy public defender at the Louisiana Public Defender Board. Pittman expressed particular concern that parents might become so dejected by the loss of substantive contact with their children, as well as the loss of therapeutic services and mandatory classes that has gone hand-in-hand with the curtailed visits in many locations, that they might disengage altogether from the case. “Any progress they’ve made healing from the trauma of the initial removal is going to be reversed through all of this,” said Pittman.

Moss’ youngest child turned one shortly before the lockdown but had been in Texas with his foster mom on his birthday. Moss has still not been able to celebrate with him in person, and she’s terrified that she is now also going to miss his first steps.

“[He] had a long hard time learning to sit up and crawl. Luckily before this [lockdown] happened I got to see him to crawl and sit up. Now he’s on the verge of standing up on his own and I should be there for that. [His foster mom] is experiencing all this stuff that I should experience…I think it’s just going to break me if I don’t see my son walking,” she said. Moss also noted that her son has struggled with a recurring bronchial cough, which is particularly stressful during the pandemic, but she is barred from even texting his caregivers to inquire about his health without the social worker’s permission.

In child welfare cases, the consequences go further than feelings. Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), agencies are required to file for termination of parental rights when a child has been living in a non-relative out-of-home placement for 15 of the past 22 months. Some states have shortened that timeline to be as few as 12 months. Although parent attorneys should have a good case for requesting an extension — ASFA allows for consideration of mitigating circumstances and it’s hard to think of a better one than a pandemic — those extensions are neither guaranteed nor infinite. And once a termination petition is filed, bonding between parent and child is a crucial determining factor.

The factors that are used to determine whether or not it is in a child’s best interest to keep them permanently separated from their parent vary somewhat by state, but typically revolve around the ASFA timeline, the parent’s completion of court-ordered services like drug treatment and parenting classes, and the bond between parent and child, which is often measured by the frequency and quality of their visits.

“An agency can say ‘we understand the reason there weren’t visits is because of the coronavirus, but at this point it’s been x many months in foster care and they haven’t made progress and it would hurt the kids to go home now,’” said Amy Mulzer, a family defense appellate attorney in New York and an Elie Hirschfeld Family Defense Fellow at the NYU School of Law Family Defense Clinic.

Shayna, a Native American mother who lives in Wisconsin and asked that her real name not be printed in this story, has two children out-of-home in two different counties. Her youngest child has been on an adoption track, which means Shayna is fighting an uphill battle to have him returned home rather than having her parental rights terminated and her child forcibly adopted to his current caregivers. For her, the issue of bonding is not an abstract future hypothetical; it’s a very real factor she must now find a way to prove without being able to interact with her three-year-old in person.

“It seems like they are using the coronavirus as a reason to keep my son from me because they know the court date is coming up, which is not good because they don’t have observations on me from now to then,” she said. Her son’s foster placement had been in pre-adoptive status, but she was recently able to get her case placed back on a dual track, which means adoption and reunification are both on the table for the next six months. For her, visits could literally make or break her reunification case — but she says the social worker is refusing to use an approved family member as a supervisor in order to continue visits, even though that is technically allowed. “They are not utilizing any other options, just using this coronavirus to stop and hold the visits. I think they should look at the bigger picture: this little boy needs to be back with his mom.”

Less restrictive alternatives exist. For example, Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Welfare reform, suggested moving visits to open spaces like parks when possible, and expediting the return of children who can safely be returned home. San Francisco recently issued an order requiring agencies to make efforts to supply families in need with the appropriate technology to engage in remote video visitation. It also directed agencies to analyze and identify cases in which children were nearing reunification, and to fast-track their return home when possible. Advocates in New York City say similar efforts are being made, though it is unclear (in both locations) exactly how many families are on track to actually receive these benefits. These directives also leave a host of other details unanswered, such as the minutiae of moving a child from one location to the next — suddenly far more complicated when having to also consider infection control.

The Children’s Bureau within the federal Department of Health and Human Services issued a letter in response to the pandemic that included suggestions to state agencies about how to handle a variety of topics, including parent-child visitation. The guidelines discourage courts from “issuing blanket court orders reducing or suspending family time,” and asks agencies and courts to “be mindful of the need for continued family time, especially in times of crisis and heightened anxiety.”

While these suggestions come from a credible source and can bolster arguments in favor of continued family visitations, without Congressional action or agency rulemaking, they are not actual orders. This leaves states and agencies the license to develop their own pandemic protocols.

“If a child can’t see their parents for months at a time, they start to believe maybe their parents don’t love them,” said Michelle Chan, a mother with prior child services involvement, and founder of California Rise, a Bay area child welfare activist group. “I really am worried about the deterioration of the parent-child bond. I feel it should be the most important thing.”

My great-aunt’s workplace hasn’t provided her with any protective gear, even though grocery workers are, as Vogue decreed, “the new first responders” under COVID-19. She had to purchase masks for herself off Groupon for $30, no small expense on her wages. She was excited about her recent COVID-19-induced raise from $11 an hour to $13 an hour, even though the store cut her hours so ultimately she’s making about the same amount.

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“Before I guess I didn’t take this all serious,” my aunt says. “But I am anxious now, because people just keep coming in here. They’re not listening to the stay at home order. People come in there, and they’re not wearing masks.”

My great-aunt has a felony record, so she’s limited in the work she’s able to get. She can’t quit her job, because she went through so much to get this one: working at the temp agency and being driven across state lines to work in factories, getting rides to local hotels to beg for housekeeping work, struggling to make enough to get out of her recovery housing. “I just couldn’t get a job,” she recalls.

Nearly three-fourths of people released from prison remain unemployed a year after their release, and a criminal record can halve the chances of a job callback or offer; those chances are worse for Black applicants than white applicants. Gender complicates it further: Because women often work in fields that require background checks, like retail and caregiving, they may have an even harder time finding employment. In many states, including Pennsylvania, state law bars people with criminal records from caregiving jobs.

Many parole deals include an offer of employment as a requirement of release, increasing the urgency of the job search. It took my great-aunt, who is white, a year to get her part-time job at the grocery store; she’s worked there ever since.

Despite the risks, her position at the grocery store is a blessing. Other re-entry-friendly fields like retail have faced massive layoffs — more than 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment since late March, with Pennsylvania hit particularly hard — leaving more people with records looking for jobs. Grocery stores, on the other hand, are desperate for employees. Since they are considered essential, grocery stores are among the few establishments open, making them the main place for people to purchase household goods.

As a result, grocery stores may be where formerly incarcerated people turn first for work, despite the dangers. My great-aunt says her friend’s son was released from a Philly prison a few weeks ago with no warning — presumably due to COVID-19 concerns, but they’re not sure — and showed up on her friend’s doorstep. After a few days, they were able to get him into a halfway house a few towns away. He got a job at a local grocery store a week later.

People with a history of incarceration tend to be pushed into dangerous jobs, like construction, maintenance, and factory lines, with wages below the poverty line. These are often the jobs that others see as menial work; right now, these are the jobs that are on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, because they don’t allow for social distancing and provide essential services to protect us all.

After all, you need to get your groceries somewhere. And when you get them, my great-aunt will be there, in the deli section, slicing your cold cuts, at great risk to her health. “I’m a little nervous about going, but I don’t have a choice,” she admits. “I need my paycheck. I’m grateful I still have a job, I look at how many people are unemployed and I’m just grateful I have a job.”

I’m not alone: A 2018 study from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that one-third of Muslims in America are at or below the poverty line. In fact, Black Muslim households are more likely than any other racial group to earn less than $30,000 a year. Of course, Muslims are feeling the economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis, such as soaring unemployment. However, the pandemic is also changing how Muslims will practice their faith. This year, Muslims in the United States must adapt to a Ramadan under the shadow of the novel coronavirus.

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In early April, the Fiqh Council of North America, a body of Islamic scholars from the United States and Canada, wrote “masajids and Islamic centers shall strictly follow the health and state official guidelines for social gatherings and distancing.” These necessary guidelines mean Muslims will not have access to some of the usual spaces for community in Ramadan, including the masjid’s iftars. For Black Muslim hubs, like Philadelphia, where community leaders estimate the Muslim population to be at 150,000 to 200,000 — or 10 to 15 percent of the total population — a Ramadan under lockdown can have drastic impacts on the community.

In Philadelphia, five masjids are responding to the pandemic with Philly Iftar 2020 where volunteers will help deliver iftars. It is one way to ensure that those who normally rely on the masjid to provide iftar are able to still access that service. Qasim Rashad, Amir of the United Muslim Masjid (UMM), located ten blocks from Philadelphia’s City Hall, told TalkPoverty, “We do service a low-income population and we rely upon those who have greater resources to help us do that.”

Outside of Philadelphia, Muslims continue to worry about how their communities will fare. Aicha Belabbes, a Muslim living in Boston, shared that she was furloughed due to the pandemic and it has amplified some of her pre-existing concerns for her community.

“In Boston, there were iftars galore. If you needed food, there was always a place to go,” Belabbes told TalkPoverty. “Now, I think for students, for low-income people, for [essential workers like] delivery drivers, Uber drivers, there’s no longer those places of food. Ramadan served as an escape for so many people who had difficult relationships with their families and things like that and were able to find their safe spaces. Now, that’s no longer the case.”

Belabbes said pre-existing organizations who deliver food to Muslims have been “at capacity during the virus.” In addition, a food bank run out of a local Black masjid shut down after the imam showed COVID-like symptoms. Safiyah Cheatam, a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist, also told TalkPoverty that go-to gathering spots in her city are no longer viable. Many in Cheatam’s community rely on masjids or Muslim-owned establishments like Nailah’s Kitchen, a Senegalese restaurant, for iftar and she sees a need for relief like the mutual aid grants popular on social media.

Masjids are not the only ones taking on the issue of food access. In Buffalo, New York, Drea d’Nur, an artist and mother of five, founded healthy and halal food pantry Feed Buffalo in 2018. She was inspired by her own experiences using food pantries where there were no halal options and few healthy foods. d’Nur told TalkPoverty, “In the discussion of building healthy communities, we stand on the truth that no one should be exempt from healthy food access despite health conditions or spiritual practices. It was important to me that Muslims have a space that honors the halal standard and that all are served with love.”

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Feed Buffalo is now functioning as an emergency food relief center for at least four hours every day of the week. In addition, the pantry will hold its second annual Ramadan Healthy Food Giveaway, where d’Nur estimates that Feed Buffalo provides 200 healthy food bags to fasting families, and commits to preparing soups for at least 50 families using ingredients from local farmers once a week.

Support for low-income Muslims in Ramadan extends past food alone. For example, while some Muslims may be able to access community by congregating with their families (or whoever else they’re already social distancing with) in their homes, this isn’t an option for everybody. Both Belabbes and Cheatam raised concerns over reports of rising domestic violence rates during the pandemic. Home may not be a safe space or, like myself, you may live alone and be the only Muslim in your family. Rashad shared that the UMM is conscious of this and will continue making plans to look after the spiritual needs of its community. Rashad said, “We want to keep and maintain that spiritual connection because spiritual mental health is important. We want to maintain their connection to Allah and their connection to the masjid.”

Belabbes hopes that the larger Muslim community understands issues amplified by the pandemic will not disappear when it ends. Belabbes said, “I’ve seen a lot of people saying, ‘I’ve never had to do things virtually.’ But a lot of Muslims who are marginalized had to do things virtually for a long time. I would like there to be an understanding that in the eyes of Allah, everyone’s equal, and everybody deserves to be seen equally in the community.”

He would eventually learn that he had overdosed while using heroin, possibly laced with fentanyl, with a couple of guys who he met during his recent stint in jail. A few days later, Derbyshire woke up withdrawing and confused again. This time, he was in the bathroom of a Wal-Mart, and he had been revived by paramedics — which meant he had to run, because if the police took down his information, he would probably go right back to jail for violating the terms of his release.

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The two overdoses took place within days of each other in early April 2018, both less than two weeks after his release from Atlantic County Jail in New Jersey. Derbyshire, a 40-year-old tile setter with a history of opioid addiction, had been picked up for a bench warrant and a probation violation related to drug use.

He spent two months inside, during which he was involuntarily detoxed from opioids. He described the jail’s withdrawal protocol as two daily cups of a sports drink while being held on 23-hour lock down in a cell with two other men. Every other day or so, someone would check his vitals, and that was it. No methadone, no follow-up care after his release. And Derbyshire isn’t unique. In his case, he was not able to get methadone because he had not been incarcerated enough — one of many requirements at his facility’s program.

David Kelsey, the Atlantic County Jail warden, commented that “since its inception [the methadone treatment program] has provided services and referred to treatment eight hundred individuals.” In most other facilities, evidence-based treatment is not offered to anyone. But unlike Derbyshire, many of those who overdose after release don’t get up again.

As the nation struggles to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, jails and prisons are beginning to release groups of people who are deemed safe for community return. Detention facilities in the United States are notoriously overcrowded, making them transmission hotbeds should the virus find a way in. Already, staff and inmates have tested positive in facilities in Florida, New York, and other places around the nation. California recently announced plans to release 3,500 people from state prisons, and New York City has already released 900. Montgomery County, Alabama, released over 300 people. The majority of people being identified for early release are those who have been accused or charged with non-violent offenses, many of which involve drugs.

A study out of Washington State found that in the first two weeks post-release, the relative risk of fatal overdose among former inmates was 129 times higher than the general population. A longitudinal study out of North Carolina found the risk of fatal overdose was 40 times higher than the general population in the first two weeks after release; for heroin users specifically, the risk was 74 times higher. And a 2019 article published in the journal of Addiction Science and Clinical Practice named post-release opioid-related overdose the “leading cause of death among people released from jails or prisons.”

The reasons behind this dramatic rise in risk are complex. The most obvious factor is that when people are forcibly detoxed from opioids but not provided adequate treatment for the underlying addiction, they return to their communities with significantly decreased tolerance but no more tools to help them deal with cravings than they had when they went in.

“They’re not cured, they’re not treated, they’re not in recovery, they just haven’t been able to use,” said Lipi Roy, a clinical assistant professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and an internal medicine physician who specializes in addiction. “Whether [the period of incarceration] be three months or three years, it doesn’t matter … The brain doesn’t forget.”

But new research suggests it’s not just a matter of simple tolerance. The unique social, environmental, and psychological factors faced by people who were recently released from incarceration also contribute to the enormous elevation in overdose risk. Now more than ever, as community supports shutter or limit their services in response to the pandemic and people are urged to stay home, those being released from incarceration are entering a new world filled with more stress and less stability and support than ever before.

“Decarceration without re-entry support systems is only going to be a halfway measure,” said Sheila Vakharia, the deputy director of research and academic engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance. “You can’t let people walk out the doors and assume they will be safer outside than inside.”

“If you think of a person in this situation, they may not have a place to live or the same social networks as when they went in. They might be more worried than usual of being arrested so they may be more likely to inject in hidden places and alone and to rush the shot,” said Megan Reed, a PhD candidate at Drexel University’s school of public health and the principal investigator in an NIH funded study on overdose risk after release. “Very few of the harms we associate with drug use have to do with the drug itself or the actual drug impact on the body; it’s the conditions in which somebody is using.”

Incarceration is a highly destabilizing experience that carries a host of other potential negative outcomes. While incarcerated, people are at risk of losing employment, housing, and even custody of their children, especially during long periods of detainment. Furthermore, the stigma associated with arrest and incarceration, or simply the difficulty and expense of communicating with the outside world while behind bars, can disrupt important familial and social relationships, leaving people with a smaller and weakened support system upon release.

Reed also pointed out that many people who have criminal justice involvement enter the system at heightened risk of fatal overdose. For example, people experiencing homelessness are at both heightened risk of overdose and incarceration. Rates of HIV and mental illness — both independent risk factors for fatal overdose — are also high in detention facilities. Many of these are also thought to be risk factors for severe cases of COVID-19, adding an extra source of anxiety for vulnerable people during the outbreak.

This pre-arrest susceptibility combined with decreased tolerance and the stress and uncertainty that people are facing after they have been released from jail or prison creates a perfect storm of dangerous vulnerabilities. “You have concentrations of other overdose risk factors already inside, and the communities that people are returning to are the same communities that are most impacted in the first place,” said Reed.

Exacerbating all of this is a lack of access to the most effective treatments for addiction to opioids, methadone and buprenorphine. Both are opioid-agonist medicines that reduce craving and withdrawal by filling the same receptors as short-acting opioids like heroin, but without delivering a euphoric high in patients who are properly maintained. They are both approved by a slew of licensing bodies, including the World Health Organization, which has included them on the list of essential medicines because of their proven efficacy in treating opioid use disorder and reducing harmful consequences of use, such as fatal overdose. Unfortunately, the majority of detention facilities in the United States do not offer these medications to inmates who are not pregnant.

“Because most correctional facilities still don’t offer standard of care treatment for opioid use disorder with methadone or buprenorphine, people are released not on treatment back to the community. Unsurprisingly, recurrence rates for opioid use are high and because people’s tolerance is reduced their risk of overdose increases dramatically,” said Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorders Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard University.

The federal government recently loosened regulations around the prescribing of methadone and buprenorphine during the pandemic, but did not address access to people who are currently incarcerated.

Research has shown that maintaining people on medications for opioid use disorder while incarcerated and providing low-barrier referrals upon release will dramatically reduce the post-incarceration overdose rate. Wakeman and other experts also suggest dispensing naloxone, the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose, to people who are being released back into the community.

Spurred by lawsuits and activism, an increasing number of facilities are beginning to offer access to these medicines, but the majority of detention centers remain reticent. This is unlikely to change without a major shift in the way the criminal justice system views and handles drug use and addiction.

“Our justice system is the biggest houser of people with substance use disorders and mental health disorders in this country,” said Vakharia. “[But] they weren’t built for this…they were built to house the ‘bad guys’ in the most simple understanding of how that works and what that means. They were never built or staffed to think of the long term, nuanced needs of people with these multifaceted challenges.”

The spread of this coronavirus coincides with the greatest number of unsheltered residents living on the streets of San Francisco: about 8,000 adults, 71 percent of whom once had a permanent home in the city. Jacintho, the director of addiction medicine at HealthRight 360, a clinic that has provided comprehensive support to people experiencing homelessness for over 50 years, says health care practitioners who serve those experiencing homelessness are rushing to aid a population that has long been forgotten by the city.

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Physicians and other care providers say what’s notable about the city’s response in assisting the most vulnerable San Franciscans is that the strategies deployed during the emergency are exactly the tools city leaders had been dragging their feet on implementing, such as stopping police sweeps, working with hotels to set up housing, and making sure those experiencing homelessness have access to comprehensive preventative health care.

California’s Bay Area was one of the first regions in the country to institute a shelter-in-place order, which drew ire among advocates. At first, those experiencing homelessness were exempt from the order, and later were advised to “seek shelter.” How exactly were the tens of thousands of those suffering from homelessness supposed to follow the order? And, because sheltering in place is the centerpiece of the public health response to the pandemic, how do we provide everyone with the space and security to follow these recommendations?

These are exactly the kinds of questions that Margot Kushel, a physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the city’s safety net hospital, thinks about. “There is no medicine as powerful as housing,” she says. “Homelessness is completely incompatible with health.” Housing stability has manifold impacts on those experiencing homelessness, and studies have shown that nearly 90 percent of recipients of organization-supported rehousing or rental assistance are housed in permanent homes a year after their initial transition.

Kushel, who has advised on what model policies should look like to help people make the transition from living on the streets to secure housing, says city medical teams are now conducting direct outreach to those living in unstable housing, like tents. Based on age and other medical vulnerabilities, physicians help those living on the streets understand what their options are for locating temporary shelter. Given that shelter is the first priority of physicians and policy makers, the epidemic has exposed how closely tied housing and health are.

Shelters, which typically offer clients housing for a set number of months, have relaxed some of these requirements and the city is working to make 6,555 hotel rooms available. But it’s work that has to be conducted carefully; the city can’t force someone to live in a room that’s not in their neighborhood or is located away from their community. “That’s a huge thing for the homeless population,” Jacintho says, “the shuffling of them to shelters.” This temporary housing is also the first step in seeking permanent housing solutions, not an ultimate solution.

Educating those seeking aid has made some of the everyday care work more complex. In pre-COVID times, Jacintho says, he would sit face to face with a client to go over their needs, symptoms, progress, and concerns, but now he’s communicating with them via a computer or a phone. Telemedicine might be a natural shift for someone who uses devices every day, but for those experiencing homelessness, Jacintho says it’s “definitely a shift for [his clients] culturally.”

The outbreak has meant a downturn in those coming into clinics, for others. Chuck Cloinger, the chief medical officer at St. James Infirmary, an occupational and health safety clinic for sex workers in the Bay Area, says that their mostly-volunteer team has focused on street support in order to aid clients.

Cloinger and his team are focused on making sure that essential health services that may not appear to be directly related to coronavirus management don’t fall through the cracks. Though they’re no longer conducting health screenings in their mobile clinic, the St. James Infirmary van goes out once a week to facilitate needle exchange and deliver other essential goods like hot foods and groceries.

At first, the spread of COVID-19 among unhoused residents was slower than those with shelter, but as of April 13 at least 90 people at a shelter in the city have tested positive. Unsheltered San Franciscans are already medically vulnerable, and with coronavirus testing still lagging far behind the necessary levels, the true number of impacted unsheltered residents is unknown.

If anything, Kushel hopes the recognition of homelessness as a public health crisis in and of itself — and one that can be remedied or even eradicated through systemic change — is a matter of what she calls “political will.”  Even though San Francisco voters passed Measure C in 2018, which would tax large companies to fund services for those experiencing homelessness, the money is still tied up in court. With early action from the San Francisco Department of Public Health and coordination with hotels to mitigate coronavirus as a public health concern, advocates may be right to wonder when it is that living on the streets without shelter will be seen as an issue of public concern as well.

The San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team was unable to respond to a request for comment.

They are considered “working poor,” a classification that simply means they are not paid enough. Many of these families are regulars at CANV, visiting the market-style food bank once a week. Before the coronavirus crisis began in earnest, the organization served about 30 to 40 of these workers and their families a day, three days a week.

Almost overnight, that number has tripled.

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Food banks, like unemployment numbers, act as a weathervane for determining the severity of our current crisis — and the crisis is severe. But they are not built to single-handedly tackle the increased demands these crises create.

As of the first week of April, 17 million Americans have applied for unemployment insurance, shattering a decades-old record and providing a clear look at the unprecedented scale of the current economic and health crisis. According to an early April estimate from the Economic Policy Institute, that number could reach 20 million by summer. Though the President signed a relief bill in late March that bolsters unemployment insurance and will issue direct cash payments to low and middle-income Americans and families with children, it will be months before most people receive that help — and undocumented families will never receive it at all.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which could help people immediately, received relatively little additional funding. Food banks will be, as always, left to pick up the slack.

Food banks in Napa, Contra Costa and Solano, and Humboldt counties all report higher demand than they’ve ever seen, topping last year’s record-setting wildfires. Food is harder to track down since hoarding has decimated supply chains and shelter in place orders have constricted the supply of volunteer workers, most of whom, staff say, are over 65 and more vulnerable to complications from the novel coronavirus. As a result, demand is up, supplies are strained, and the labor needed to distribute them is increasingly unavailable.

At Humboldt county’s main food bank location, nearby construction crews had to volunteer to help manage crowd control, freeing up the remaining regular volunteers and staff to develop and run a drive-thru model that reduced person-to-person contact. Contra Costa and Solano counties in the Bay Area are moving towards a home delivery-only system, but the labor-intensive delivery strategy is only possible with the support of the National Guard, which started providing 1,000 hours of service per week for the food bank at the end of March. Across the state, an increasing number of food banks were looking to do the same, seeking the Guard’s help with deliveries, crowd control, and assembling supplies.

But for many of the people relying on these resources, the sight of uniformed law enforcement is not necessarily a comforting one. Each food bank, regardless of location, noted the profound anxieties that uniformed law enforcement trigger in their Latinx and undocumented communities. In Napa County, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have terrorized the close-knit town. In one particularly traumatic instance, ICE apprehended a father at his child’s school after morning drop-off. To many, gathering as a community at a law enforcement-run food drive-thru feels like a bigger risk than their current desperate circumstances.

Food banks are not intended to be the first line of defense in the fight against hunger, but a place to turn to when other options like SNAP, WIC, free and reduced school meals, and unemployment insurance aren’t enough. When these programs are properly funded, they work. The last time America was on the brink of economic collapse, in 2009, the most successful policy in Congress’ $800 billion stimulus package was its SNAP expansion. For every $1 in additional funding, $1.74 was generated in economic output.

Because SNAP was mostly sidelined in the COVID-19 response, already-strained food banks are now left scrambling.

Each problem these California food banks face is exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, but the problems themselves are not new. Increased demand, dwindling supply, and a lack of capacity to meet their communities’ need has been their daily reality long before this crisis. The overwhelming need they’ve been forced to meet so far definitively shows how catastrophic this crisis already is. The federal government’s plodding and inadequate response to it shows why these communities were so precarious to begin with.

Cities have all but shut down in response to public health advisories. Millions of people are working from home or other non-office locations in order to honor “social distancing,” leading to a surge in home deliveries for app-based workers like Instacart’s Shoppers, who are tasked with shopping and delivering customers’ groceries. Instacart itself reported that Shoppers have seen on average a 15 percent increase in basket sizes.

However, despite the heightened risk that Shoppers are facing by doing the work that is considered too dangerous for the general public, Shoppers say Instacart hasn’t made much of an effort to protect them from potential transmission or incentivized them to cease working despite the risks it poses.

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Instacart initially said it would give two weeks’ paid leave through April 8 to any Shopper who tested positive for the coronavirus, despite the fact that tests are rarely accessible . However, one Shopper TalkPoverty spoke to said that they didn’t know a single person who had received paid sick leave.

In response, Instacart Shoppers nationwide walked off the job March 30, their second strike in four months, and are refusing to return until their demands are met. Because gig workers like Instacart Shoppers work alone, they rarely have face-to-face contact with one another, highlighting how extraordinarily prepared they must be to conduct a large-scale labor action such as this.

In a Medium post announcing the strike, Instacart Shoppers working with labor organization Gig Workers Collective wrote that they were demanding an added $5 of hazard pay per order as well as provision of complimentary sanitation supplies such as cleansing wipes and hand sanitizer, paid time off for Shoppers with preexisting conditions that put them at high risk if they contracted coronavirus or whose doctors advised them to self-isolate, and an extension of these benefits beyond April 8.

“Instacart has turned this pandemic into a PR campaign, portraying itself the hero of families that are sheltered-in-place, isolated, or quarantined,” Gig Workers Collective wrote.

“Instacart has refused to act proactively in the interests of its Shoppers, customers, and public health, so we are forced to take matters into our own hands. We will not continue to work under these conditions. We will not risk our safety, our health, or our lives for a company that fails to adequately protect us, fails to adequately pay us, and fails to provide us with accessible benefits should we become sick.”

Instacart Shoppers can make as little as $7 for up to three orders or $5 for up to five deliveries only, due to the company’s opaque algorithm structure for compensation, and aren’t automatically entitled to employment benefits such as sick leave or health care due to their independent contractor status. Some have argued that they are being misclassified and should be termed employees. In a historic first, the CARES Act, which President Trump signed into law March 27, extended unemployment benefits to gig workers. However, because these benefits are taxpayer-subsidized, they relieve gig companies like Instacart of any legal obligation to provide employee benefits.

Matthew Telles, a veteran Shopper in the Chicago suburbs, said that while he makes himself available on the Instacart app to work for as many as 77 hours a week, the amount of time he actually spends working for Instacart has dwindled since fewer and fewer batches can actually cover his expenses.

“I work anywhere from about zero to eight hours a week for Instacart, and that’s [only] when they pay enough to obtain my secured services,” he said, adding that the pandemic has driven down wages even more.

He explained that since authorities began encouraging people to stay home, Instacart has essentially begun bundling three orders into one by combining multiple “orders” into one batch. That allows the company to elide per-order pricing, leading Shoppers to accept batches that may promise a large amount of money that decreases when they reach the actual register to check.

If a customer asks for, say, 20 unique items, Shoppers are guaranteed a base pay plus tip that’s a particular percentage of the entire order. However, because grocers are now limiting the quantity of particular items one can buy, such as toilet paper and wipes, Shoppers are forced to buy less of a particular item, allowing Instacart to pare down the guaranteed wage and tip for every item a Shopper can’t secure for a customer.

On top of that, Telles added, Instacart is capitalizing upon laid off workers’ desperate need to pay the bills by ramping up their operations. On March 23, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta announced plans to hire 300,000 new Shoppers in response to anticipated customer demand over the next few months.

“They’re not vetting who’s a Shopper now,” Telles said. “It’s pretty much — if you’re alive, you can be a Shopper.”

Vanessa Bain, a Silicon Valley-based Shopper and founder of Gig Workers Collective, agreed.

“It’s going to be a disaster if [Instacart] is successful in hiring 300,000 people,” she said. “Veteran Shoppers are breaking down. The last time I shopped, I had an anxiety attack. And that’s just speaking about veteran Shoppers who are used to the general stress of the job. I can’t imagine what it’s like for new people just getting their footing. It’s really uncharted territory, shopping during the middle of a pandemic. People aren’t respecting social distancing in grocery stores.”

Bain added that because she lives with multiple elderly people who are at high risk of contracting coronavirus, she hasn’t shopped since March 13.

Sarah Clarke, another Gig Workers Collective organizer, said Instacart was capitalizing upon the divide between its corporate employees, who are guaranteed benefits such as health insurance and remote work, and that of Shoppers, whom many cities and local governments consider “essential workers” but aren’t treating as such.

“Instacart knows there are workers who can afford to stay at home and shelter in place, and then there are workers who absolutely need the money and who will work under any conditions because they have to,” Clarke said. “But you can’t really fault someone who’s working while they’re sick if they absolutely need to [to pay their bills].”

Above all else, however, all three organizers TalkPoverty spoke to said that the strike was being conducted out of concern for Shoppers’ customers, who bear the brunt of the risks they say Instacart is forcing them to shoulder by not guaranteeing basic sick leave and protective equipment.

“If [Shoppers] get the virus, most likely we will pass it on to customers,” Clarke said. “Lots of Shoppers are living in fear because they’re terrified they’ll pass it on to customers.”

“We’re the people customers interface with,” Bain said. “Most people who have ordered [from Instacart] are doing so to comply with the shelter in place, and to mitigate the risk of spreading disease. It’s literally now a matter of public health and safety.”

“It’s reckless,” Telles stated, speaking for himself, not the strike organizers. “We’re out here risking our lives. If I were a state official, I’d bar Instacart from my state.”

Following the strike announcement, Instacart almost immediately updated its policies. In an email to TalkPoverty, the company said it had extended its paid leave through May 6 to anyone who had been ordered by a state, local, or public health official to self-isolate or quarantine, but made no mention of Shoppers’ demands for personal protective equipment (PPE) or added hazard pay. Instacart added on Sunday that it would allow customers to set their own default tip payment, but workers said it’s not enough: The company is still refusing hazard pay and expanded sick pay.

But it’s too little too late, Bain said.

“We all have the potential of becoming vectors. Everyone’s a stakeholder. The stakes are very different from normal working conditions. Nobody should be against the idea of workers having safety measures to keep their customers alive and themselves safe.”

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to clarify Instacart’s compensation structure for batch orders. 

He still has to go every single day to get his medication, without which he would go into weeks of painful opioid withdrawal. My husband is one of hundreds of thousands of people across the country who rely on medications like methadone and buprenorphine to curb addiction to opioids and stay out of withdrawal, and who are now wondering whether they are going to continue to have access during the novel coronavirus pandemic, or risk being exposed to the virus by visiting facilities daily.

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The short answer is yes, facilities that prescribe and dispense these medications are continuing to run, and patients should not lose access to medications for opioid use disorder during this crisis. Methadone and buprenorphine are classified by the World Health Organization as essential medicines, which means continued access to them should be a priority. Various government agencies have issued guidelines and legal exceptions to a number of rules and regulations that usually limit access to these medications, in the hope of reducing visits to clinics.

But, of course, there’s a longer and far more complex answer as well.

Although methadone and buprenorphine treat the same disorder in relatively similar ways, they are governed by vastly different sets of rules and regulations. “On the [buprenorphine] side, the minimum you tend to see prescribed is a week. It would be easy in that case to give those patients a two-week prescription or call in an extra script with a refill. On the [methadone] side, that’s where it gets hairy,” said Zac Talbott, president of the National Alliance for Medication Assisted Recovery (NAMA-R), who also has direct experience as a patient and running facilities that provide these medicines.

Buprenorphine can be prescribed by any doctor or advanced practice registered nurse who has taken an eight-hour waiver course. That means patients can access it in a number of settings including primary care, psychiatry, gynecology, or addiction treatment facilities. Methadone, on the other hand, can only be dispensed for addiction treatment from a licensed opioid treatment provider (OTP), commonly referred to as a methadone clinic. It is governed by a complex web of rules, regulations, and policies that come from federal agencies, state authorities, and individual clinic directors. Since methadone is a better option for people with higher tolerances to opioids, and doesn’t require patients to go into withdrawal before starting it, it’s essential that both medicines are available.

“There’s going to be a broad variety in the way OTPs respond,” said Talbott. “Patients need to realize this could vary from state to state because of state authorities.”

Across the nation, State Opioid Treatment Authorities, who make state-level decisions about medications for opioid use disorder, have been looking to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), for guidance on how they can respond to the novel coronavirus outbreak. This agency governs the rules around making medication available to be taken at home, instead of in a clinic (colloquially called “takehomes”), and many other methadone regulations at the federal level. Elinore F. McCance-Katz, the head of SAMHSA and the assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, told TalkPoverty by email that “SAMHSA/HHS are working in an ongoing manner with states and communities facing these issues. We have provided flexibilities to the states to help to assure that those on medications for opioid use disorders continue to get their medication. We have also been working to expand the ability to provide services by telehealth modalities wherever possible.”

Washington state, where the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 appeared in the United States, was the first state to receive the ability to dispense extended takehomes, lasting up to 14 days, to specified populations without first applying for individual permissions like providers must do normally.

“As of the 9th we have essentially put out seven different types of blanket takehome exception requests that programs can request per federal law to allow a large majority of individuals who are considered stable—and that’s determined at the discretion of each program medical director—to allow them to move beyond just daily or close to daily dosing,” said Jessica Blouse, of the Washington State Opioid Treatment Authority. “For buprenorphine there are no federal rules, so [those patients] can be moved to whatever level can be determined as safe.”

But that doesn’t mean all Washington patients will receive these benefits. Tanna, a patient who lives between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, said she has not been offered any takehome doses. The reason, she was told, is because she has been with that provider just over three months, so she is still considered a new and therefore unstable patient—even though she transferred from another clinic where she had earned a month of takehomes.

She is also required to attend four hours of group therapy each month. Last week, her group had eight attendees and she did not notice any special precautions in place due to the virus.

“The only accommodation they’ve made [in the clinic] is at the dosing window there’s now hand sanitizer, the trash is moved a little bit, nurses wear gloves, and the [dosing] window screen is lowered,” she said.

On March 16, SAMHSA updated its guidelines specifying that all states with declared states of emergency could request blanket exceptions in order to provide stable patients with 28 days of takehome medication, and 14 days of takehome medication for patients considered less stable but still able to safely handle the extra medication. In states without a declared emergency status, each clinic is eligible to apply for similar exceptions for their patients.

The updated guidelines from SAMHSA allow states and providers greater flexibility to dispense takehome medication—but that does not mean that every clinic will utilize that flexibility to its fullest extent, nor that they will apply it to each patient.

“It may come down to the fact that patients will need to be given 14 day supplies,” said Mark Parrino, president of the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence. “However it should be case by case …We want to let people quarantine to clearly stop the spread of the disease, [but] remember we are dealing with opioids. Opioids in the hands of unstable patients can be dangerous. We don’t want to flood the community with a lot of methadone in the hands of unstable patients who may not be able to deal with the fact that suddenly they have a two-week supply.”

“People who are least likely to get takehomes are people who are new to treatment and people who have unstable housing, unstable psychosocial situations, people who might be continuing to use other substances, people with underlying health concerns; things that mean they have instability in their life. I would argue they are the people who should get takehomes immediately,” said Keith Brown, a harm reduction advocate currently working at the county level in Schenectady, New York on the COVID-19 response. “This is going to get into the argument about which is more dangerous, giving people takehomes they might sell or whatever—but in a public health crisis, people are going to have to make determinations about what makes sense. Having a few hundred people come into a clinic every day is a transmission nightmare.”

It’s impossible to know what every single state and clinic will do with their expanded discretion. Reports coming in from patients and providers indicate the response is as varied as opinions on addiction.

Justine Waldman, the medical director of REACH, a harm reduction-based buprenorphine clinic in Ithaca, New York, has begun offering one and two month scripts to her buprenorphine patients, giving longer scripts to those who have a harder time getting in to the office or who have a history of missing appointments. Her emphasis is on access and patient health over surveillance. The caveat, she stressed, is that this is an entirely new situation that is evolving each day.

“We might decide tomorrow that the way we’re doing it now isn’t working. We are really having to come together and take it day by day,” she said.

Jana Burson, who is the medical director of an OTP in North Carolina, said that while her clinic is not giving most patients extended takehomes, they are utilizing measures to help keep the facility sanitized, and to enforce social distancing while patients are in the building. For example, the lobby chairs have been spaced to be at least six feet apart, and some counselors with smaller offices are moving individual counseling sessions to larger rooms. They are aggressively disinfecting chairs, door handles, countertops, and other shared surfaces.

Vanessa, a patient in North Carolina, reported that her clinic was not dispensing any extra takehomes. She normally receives takehomes for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but was called in this Monday for a drug test and bottle check, a practice observed by some clinics in which they count patients’ takehome bottles. She described her clinic as “really business as usual” besides seeing staff taking patient temperatures. She noted that her temperature was not taken when she stopped by for the drug test. On Thursday morning she texted me an update that she was going to be given seven takehomes, but would have to pay for them out of pocket.

Stephanie, a patient in Pennsylvania, says she has continued to receive her regular six takehomes, but that group meetings and individual counseling sessions have been canceled until further notice. When she pressed for more information, her counselor replied that for the clinic to shut down “it would have to be the end of the world and there would be zombies,” but conceded that they were giving some extra takehomes to medically fragile patients.

Emily, who has hepatitis C, has not been offered any takehome doses by her Lexington, Ky., clinic, but reported that all patients are being stopped upon entering the building and questioned about potential symptoms. People who report feeling unwell are dosed from their cars, and only five patients are being allowed to enter the building at a time. Groups have been canceled, and individual counseling sessions are being done over the phone.

Samantha, a pregnant patient in Central Florida, reported that she was given 13 takehomes and had a doctor’s appointment canceled so she would not have to go in on an extra day.

In South Florida, my husband Ricardo still goes in for dosing every day, but told me his clinic was advising patients to be prepared to pay two weeks in advance should the need for two weeks of takehomes arise. For my husband, that means shelling out $224. For patients at other clinics, the price can vary in either direction, but not typically by much.

My husband’s experience highlights another concern facing patients on these medications. For some, extended scripts mean more money up front. Some methadone patients who pay out of pocket are only able to do so daily, relying on cash tips or weekly paychecks to pay for their medicine. Buprenorphine patients who are used to paying for one or two weeks at a time might not have additional funds for a month-long script. Patients whose medications are covered by grants or insurance sometimes have caps on the amount of doses that can be covered at one time, leaving them to pay out of pocket for extra doses. If they can’t pay, clinics are not required to dose them.

Because buprenorphine prescribing is not burdened with as many stringent regulations as methadone, it is easier for providers to adhere to social distancing recommendations while still keeping patients appropriately medicated. Many providers have reverted to telehealth. On March 17, the Secretary of Health and Human Services lifted restrictions on telemedicine practices that prevented Medicare patients from engaging by using cell phones in homes or shelters. On the same day, the Drug Enforcement Administration also waived requirements that patients starting on buprenorphine have an initial in-person visit, temporarily allowing new buprenorphine patients to engage via telemedicine from the start.

But even with these changes, economically disenfranchised patients may struggle to utilize telehealth options. “Not all of my patients have the right smartphones to do telehealth, or the minutes. When I asked them about doing telehealth, they said no way,” said Waldman.

Like Talbott stressed, the response to this crisis is going to vary between states and clinics, with wide discretion placed in the hands of prescribers and medical directors. It is a situation that is changing by the day, as states and counties continue to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 in their communities and how they wish to respond.

“I think my biggest duty right now is to reassure patients that they will not be abandoned,” said Burson.

Correction: An earlier version of this articles stated that all registered nurses were able to prescribe buprenorphine. Only advance practice registered nurses can prescribe that medication.

It began with a $90 citation. Willis, who is a construction worker, was living in her car with her baby and parked near the worksite, but often couldn’t move her car to avoid parking tickets due to the demands of the job. She could barely scrape together enough money to put $5 in the gas tank to get to work, much less pay for a $90 ticket. Between taking care of Tobias and trying to find stable housing, the ticket became the last thing on Willis’ mind. She told herself she’d pay for it when she could save up enough money.

Then she received a second ticket, and then a third, and a fourth. Over the next few months, she had multiple tickets and late fees that added up to hundreds of dollars she couldn’t afford to pay.

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One day, when she returned from work, her car — and all of her belongings — were gone. In San Francisco, accruing five or more unpaid parking tickets meant the car would be towed. If she wanted the old 1997 Lexus back, Willis would have to pay a $537 tow fee and all of her parking tickets. Willis didn’t have the money, and a few weeks later, the tow company auctioned off her four-wheeled home.

Willis’ story echoes that of the more than 1,200 homeless San Franciscans who live in their vehicles and face the threat of having their homes towed by the city. With shelter waitlists that are consistently more than 900 people long, vehicles are often homeless people’s last resort for some semblance of safety and shelter before sleeping directly on the streets.

Losing her car was the start of a downward spiral. Willis found herself constantly asking people she knew if she could stay with them, even for just a couple of nights. Some days it was with her godsister, other days a friend that she knew, but sometimes there was no one to take her in.

“When they took my car, I started trying to sleep on the bus or sleep on BART,” Willis recalls. “I didn’t go to sleep for days because I didn’t have anywhere to sleep.”

The instability led to depression, suicidal ideation, and the loss of her job from the mounting stress of street homelessness.

“It started a never-ending cycle of debt and poverty,” Willis says. “If I was able to keep the car, I would have been able to keep my job.”

The tows and parking citations are viewed as a tool to enforce parking regulations by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency; it wants to deter bad behavior, especially for more serious violations, such as blocking a handicapped zone.

However, for those who are unable to pay those tickets, the city’s form of debt collection for sometimes only a few hundred dollars means losing a family’s most valuable asset, their car— or home. According to a 2019 report by the Lawyers Committee of Civil Rights, 50 to 60 percent of vehicles towed for unpaid parking tickets or unpaid vehicle registration are sold by the tow company.

Tori Larson, an attorney working specifically on this issue, says, “I get calls from people every day who are living in their vehicles. When they get their cars towed, they have to start from zero. It’s a disproportionate punishment for an unpaid fine.”

In 2018, the group filed a lawsuit challenging San Francisco’s practice of towing cars for unpaid tickets. The case argues that the practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

San Francisco, which charges the highest tow fees in the country, discounts tow fees for low-income individuals to $238 dollars per tow. After the first four days in the storage yard, an additional $52 fee incurs each day. That’s not including payment for parking tickets or unpaid car registration that may have gotten the car towed in the first place. The money adds up fast and, for many, could total thousands of dollars. SFMTA tows almost 4,400 of these vehicles each year.

SFMTA has proposed lowering the tow fees to $100, but for low-income and homeless communities, “coming up with $100 is like coming up with a million dollars. People don’t have this money,” says Anne Stulhdreher, director of the Financial Justice Project, which works to reduce the disproportionate impact of fines and fees on low-income communities.

Many Americans would struggle with paying that fee. According to a 2018 report from the Federal Reserve, 40 percent of Americans would be unable to cover a $400 emergency expense, such as a car tow or parking citation.

Stuhldreher has been working with community groups to reduce the burden of towing and parking citations on low-income and homeless communities for the past several years. While she notes that this is an important first step, more needs to be done.

What’s more is that the City is actually losing money for enforcing its tow program. Overall, the City’s tow program loses $4.7 million annually with low-income tows representing about $1.4 million of the deficit. Each tow costs around $299 in city administrative labor and $275 to the tow company, Auto Return, which tows and stores the vehicles. It’s a lose-lose situation for both the city and for those most impacted by the tow fees.

Homeless advocates have long called for a moratorium on the towing of vehicles that people live in, but the significance of this demand has heightened in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. A set of guidelines to respond to the pandemic put forth by the Coalition on Homelessness urges the city to end towing, stating that “these individual accommodations make it possible for people to self-quarantine.”

The vehicles also present a form of stability that would allow people to keep in contact with health care workers, maintain their health, and securely store their belongings, including medical documentation and medication, the organization said.

Last November, San Francisco opened its first safe parking program in hopes of alleviating the struggles that those living in their vehicles face after almost a decade of advocacy from community organizations and vehicularly housed people. However, its 30-car program — which will be terminated at the end of this year — far from meets the need of the hundreds of homeless San Franciscans living in their cars.

Those living in their vehicles not only face the threat of losing their homes to towing, but are also subject to harassment from police. In San Francisco, as with many other cities across the country, vehicle inhabitation is illegal — and could lead to a fine of up to $1,000 or up to six months in jail. Although the penalty is rarely enforced, advocates say police use the threat of the law frequently to force people who are vehicularly housed to move from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“They flash lights on the car, hit your window with a flashlight, and tell you you have to move,” Willis says of the police that would come by late in the night while she tried to get a few hours of rest. There were few places where she could park at night without being towed, ticketed, or told to move. “I didn’t know where to park — I’d park by the water, but I was scared. I tried to park where there were multiple cars so I could be safer.”

MiQueesha is still homeless. She sleeps on friends and family’s couches when they’re able to let her stay there. She’s hoping to finish school at San Francisco City College in construction management, earn her real estate license, and have more time to spend with her son.

With the help of her son’s grandmother, Willis has been able to purchase another car that she’s working hard to pay off. This time of year, though, construction work is slow.

She says, “Hopefully, this one isn’t towed.”

My job was to keep people out of jail, but I couldn’t control what kept bringing my clients back into the courtroom.

A common example was a young mother, caught with pills and charged with a felony for possession with intent to sell; loses her job because she couldn’t afford the bail set at $1,500; pleads guilty to the felony in return for probation so she can get out of jail; fails the drug tests on probation and ends up with the felony on her record; loses her driver’s license because of unpaid court costs and fines; and then her children because she cannot afford to provide them with food, clothing, and shelter.

I saw that every week: Someone who entered the courtroom an addict and exited a criminal. According to the North Carolina Second Chance Alliance, more than 2 million people in the state have criminal records, 90 percent of large employers ask about that history, and more than 1,000 different laws in the state deny rights and privileges due to convictions.

And like in many states, it’s difficult to expunge those convictions because of long waiting periods and narrow rules of eligibility, which makes it hard for a person to find a decent job or stable housing, or obtain the education they want. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in 2014 the United States went without an estimated $78 to $87 billion in gross domestic product because of people who were unable to reenter society and participate in the workforce due to their criminal background. And that’s devastating for communities that were hardest hit by the opioid epidemic.

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My hometown in the foothills of North Carolina was once the home of some of the largest manufacturing businesses, including the American Furniture Company. But slowly those jobs left town and went to China, or were lost to automation. From the year 2000, when that company finally closed, to 2014, my county experienced the second worst decline of median income in the United States: from $47,992 to $33,398.

And that’s when the pills came in. Doctors overprescribed Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Percocet to people who were in pain and out of work. Many got hooked and some sold the painkillers on a black market out of their medicine cabinet. In 2007, the county experienced the third highest overdose rate in the country.

Because of a lack of funding at the state level, there’s no public defender’s office. So when I came home to work as a lawyer, I took appointed cases to supplement what I brought into our firm as a young criminal defense attorney. That meant representing as many as 15 clients a day and sometimes as many as 50 in a week. We’d be lucky to meet for more than a few minutes at a time to go over the facts before trial or to run through a plea offer while standing next to a bailiff in one of the holding cells behind the courtroom.

For every case disposed, I’d get appointed to another. Drugs were an underlying factor in almost every fact pattern.

My county wasn’t unique. The same forces of globalization and automation were devastating towns all across the country. But we didn’t discuss what was happening in those terms, and we didn’t learn about these deaths of despair by reading about them in The Atlantic. The stories were personal. It wasn’t uncommon to walk into the courtroom and see the faces of childhood friends, a young man from church, or even a next-door neighbor.

There’s a stereotype that the opioid crisis affects only middle-aged white men, but addiction doesn’t discriminate by age, race, or education level. Where there is discrimination, though, is in access to treatment. If you were from a rich household, or had a strong support system, your family could afford to send you to rehabilitation for as long as it took, up to a couple of years if need be. For everyone else, recovery options were limited and usually led back to the courtroom. (In North Carolina, programs like the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant spend more than $44 million per year on recovery services, but without Medicaid expansion, many in recovery are still on their own and unable to afford inpatient treatment.)

What happened in my town happened before, in the 1970s and the 1980s, when cities hollowed out and the response to a crack epidemic was mass incarceration. Now, because of organizers and advocates in those communities, the urban incarceration rate has declined in recent years. But because of the opioid crisis, since 2013, the incarceration rate in rural America has risen by 26 percent.

Today there is legislation in North Carolina called the Second Chance Act that would expand eligibility for record expungement. Hopefully, lawmakers will get that bill passed soon. What I saw in an Appalachian courtroom wasn’t because my hometown was full of bad people. It was because the factories closed and we treated poverty and addiction by locking up the victims.

That small amount of money didn’t cover her bills and expenses. “So then I just ended up working more,” she explained. She would work six or even seven days a week just to try to make ends meet. “I would just go to sleep and then go to work and then go to sleep and go to work,” she said. She spent three years putting in those kinds of hours. “I felt totally exhausted, physically and mentally.”

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She eventually started working in a different salon in Manhattan where she made slightly more: $50-60 a day for the same hours. It still wasn’t enough to cover her bills. She had to eat “the most basic things,” always at home because she couldn’t afford to eat a meal out. She couldn’t buy herself anything, not even new clothes. “I couldn’t take care of my physical and mental health,” she said.

“You’re working so hard, but at the end of the week you still don’t have enough,” she added. “It makes it impossible to imagine a dignified life.”

Meanwhile, the salon owners never gave her and her coworkers information about how to protect their health and safety when working with chemicals everyday. Salon workers are routinely exposed to the “toxic trio” of formaldehyde, toluene, and dibutyl phthalate, common nail polish ingredients, as well as disinfectants such as alcohol. Exposure can lead to skin irritation and chronic conditions, allergies, and even reproductive problems.

Sefla didn’t realize that she had the right to more pay and better protection until she found the New York Nail Salon Workers Association, which organizes nail salon workers in the state around wages and working conditions. She’s now an organizer there.

“This wasn’t just something that was just happening to me,” she noted. For all of her compañeras in the industry, “This is the reality that we’re living.”

A new report backs her up. In a survey of about 100 nail salon workers in New York City and surrounding counties, the New York Nail Salon Workers Association found that 82 percent experienced wage theft. Employers are failing to pay the state’s tipped minimum wage, aren’t making up the difference when employees’ base wages and tips don’t add up to the full minimum wage, and don’t pay extra for overtime work. The hours are long: nearly two-thirds of nail salon employees say they work shifts that are at least 10 hours. But many aren’t paid time and a half for the extra hours they put in.

That wage theft is costing them, on average, more than $180 a week, or over $9,000 a year—steep sums for the majority immigrant female workers who survive off of little pay to begin with. More than 10 percent of respondents were losing more than $400 a week.

One source of the problem, the report finds, can be traced back to how little it costs to get a manicure in New York. Workers at salons that charge the lowest prices—$9 or less for a manicure—reported experiencing higher rates of wage theft and losing more money, while those at salons that charged at least $16 for a manicure kept more of the money they were due. “Low prices translate into illegal poverty wages,” the report states. But “as service prices increase, wage theft decreases.”

On top of the inadequate pay, the report also found that 86 percent of nail salon workers in New York City aren’t being given paid sick days, as is the law.

In 2015, a New York Times expose shone a light on the rampant mistreatment of nail salon employees in the city, who are often forced to work extremely long hours in harsh conditions for little pay. In its wake, the state implemented health and safety standards dealing with ventilation and protective equipment. It also now requires owners to take financial steps to ensure that workers can recover wages if it’s found they’re being underpaid and created a voluntary recognition process for those deploying best practices. But workers argue that even with some protections in place, they need stronger enforcement to get what they’re due. “While the legislation provided new protections for workers and regulations for employers, workers continue to organize to make those protections a reality,” the report notes.

“We still aren’t really seeing changes,” Sefla said. “We have established better laws, but we’re seeing that a lot of the owners are not complying with the new laws. So we haven’t seen the change that we’re looking for.”

In December, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he would get phase out the tipped minimum wage for a group of workers that includes nail salon employees (although excluded restaurant and hospitality workers), meaning salon owners will be required to pay the full minimum wage regardless of how much customers tip. But as the report notes, many workers weren’t even being paid the lower tipped wage to begin with. So they’re demanding more legislative action.

“We need mechanisms for enforcing those established laws,” Sefla said. “There won’t be any change without consequences and accountability.”

The heart of their demand is that the state legislature pass the Nail Salon Accountability Act, which will be introduced later this month. The law would change the licensing process so that workers’ feedback would be incorporated into the renewal process and owners would have to get certification proving that they are complying with labor, health, and safety laws. It would also mandate training for owners and workers on those laws. “Compliance with the law must become part of the cost of doing business,” the report states.

There are other potential legislative fixes in the works as well. Members of the assembly are considering a bill that would criminalize wage theft. The New York City council is working on a bill that would give salon owners subsidies so they could add proper ventilation.

“Esos son básicos,” Sefla said: These are basic things. “Son derechos que tenemos aquí en este país.” These are rights we have here in this country.

“I love the dollar store,” she said.

As do most dollar store shoppers, according to at least one Morning Consult Brand Intelligence poll that recorded favorability ratings around 60 percent. Even as retail sales decline, the major dollar store brands — Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar (which was bought out by Dollar Tree in 2015 for $8.5 billion) — are experiencing rapid growth, with Dollar General and Dollar Tree adding upwards of 10,000 locations over the past decade and continued plans for expansion. The key to their success is a strategic focus on poverty: Deep discount retailers are uber-accessible to low-income consumers even when there’s a net negative economic benefit to shoppers and the community.

“The core of what dollar stores have done and really capitalized on is recognizing that there are people who really don’t have other options,” said Dr. Sriya Shrestha, who teaches at California State University Monterey Bay. Her work on the dollar store phenomenon, “Dollars to dimes: Disparity, uncertainty, and marketing to the poor at US dollar stores,” chronicles the dueling tensions of a capitalist entity that both aids and exploits the poor. “We know what dollar stores ultimately are: an attempt for a way for very wealthy people to capitalize on poverty.”

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Women with families who earn under $40,000 per year dominate the dollar store model. They purchase only what they can afford to buy now, in smaller packages that often cost more per unit than they would at big box retailers. “Our customer doesn’t buy until she absolutely has to — she’s that stretched,” noted one Dollar General executive, according to Dr. Shrestha’s research.

Clearly, the dollar store fills a need. Stagnant wages have kept purchasing power flat over the past 40 years, wage inequality has grown to levels not seen since the Great Depression, and the richest five percent of Americans own two-thirds of the country’s wealth. As the New York Times reported a few years ago, retail is now split into factions: luxury items and deep discounts, with nothing in between. Where dollar stores succeed — Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, the 99 Cent Store, and local mom and pop shops that follow the same model — is in giving low-income consumers the American Dream for a dollar a day.

Dollar stores attempt to create a sense of abundance, filling their stores with thousands of products placed on shelves that are below eye level. According to Dr. Shrestha’s research, companies will also engage in “downward brand extensions,” developing less expensive brand-name products specifically for dollar stores. When a consumer can walk out of a store having purchased a multitude of brand-name products, it presents them with a positive shopping experience and adds to their self-worth.

“I used to be embarrassed about the dollar store,” said Loretta Brown, “especially when I first became disabled and lost my job and was unemployed for a minute.”

Brown is a 53-year-old  with an ongoing affinity for her childhood home in South Philadelphia, which she calls “that diverse part of the city that we love.” She’s married with three grown step-children, and while her husband works, she no longer does, and has relied on Social Security Disability for the past 10 years.

“My attitude has changed over the years,” she continued. “I’m not embarrassed. I don’t care… I’m making a smarter financial decision when I shop at the dollar store for whatever I get there.”

Feeding America, one of the nation’s largest hunger-relief organizations, co-authored a report with Proctor & Gamble showing more than one-third of families struggled to afford essential household goods. According to the findings, many families will skip out on personal care rituals or substitute products when possible, such as using hand soap as dish detergent. School supplies have become more costly, too, with the Huntington Backpack Index noting that parents can now expect to spend anywhere from $1,000 to $1,600 per child per year depending on their grade level.

“I used to shop sales and just use store discount cards, but as time has gone on, I’ve learned how to clip coupons,” said Kristine, a former social worker who owns her home with her husband. “I will buy hygiene products since they have full-size name-brand items… toothpaste, body wash, shampoo, some medicine,” she continued, “also, cleaning supplies and some food items.”

Though individual consumers can find shopping at dollar stores rewarding, the impact on communities can be more complex. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that works for sustainable community development, found that dollar stores contribute to the economic distress found in urban and rural communities. In 2018, the group put out a report finding dollar stores target low-income neighborhoods, especially Black neighborhoods, and drive out grocers and other healthy eating options. As a byproduct of these moves, local jobs have been eliminated as well.

Criticisms of the dollar store model have pushed local communities to fight back. Tulsa, Oklahoma, placed restrictions on the distance between dollar stores following a brief moratorium on new retail locations in 2017. Small towns in Kansas and Texas passed ordinances limiting the number of stores allowed within their limits.

But efforts to ban dollar stores and replace them with community-centric retailers have, at times, failed to gain traction. In Cleveland, for example, a local grocer received a $1 million subsidy to open up shop but, according to The Progressive, it struggled to find a customer base. Much of the nuance on this issue is lost in translation between reformers and the monied interests who stand to gain from tilting the conversation.

Moreover, as Dr. Shrestha said, in some ways, banning dollar stores misses the point.

“We need to make it so that people have the income so that they don’t have to rely on the dollar store for meeting their basic needs,” said Dr. Shrestha, explaining that wealth distribution, not market-based solutions, could help to eliminate poverty itself. “Eradicating the dollar store isn’t going to really solve that problem.”

Neither will a Whole Foods, Walmart, or local grocer that doesn’t meet the needs of low-income consumers in the here and now. Women-headed households are the primary consumers of deep discount retailers, according to Dr. Shrestha, and those households are disproportionately in poverty.

The real question she said is, “Are we okay with that?”

The bill seeks to make three major changes: It would define illicit drug use during pregnancy as child abuse regardless of actual harm to the infant; remove the state’s obligation to engage in family reunification efforts when a child was exposed to drugs; and significantly shorten the amount of time it takes to begin terminating parental rights.

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Although the bill’s stated purpose is the protection of infants, opponents say it does the exact opposite: Separating infants from their parents causes potentially irreversible trauma to a child’s brain. In addition, this type of bill deters pregnant drug users from seeking much-needed medical care for fear of punishment, and denies families the resources to heal from addiction and parent their children to their best capacities.

The North Carolina Urban Survivor’s Union, a harm reduction organization dedicated to protecting the rights of drug users in North Carolina, is doing everything they can to stop this bill from becoming law. They are reaching out to senators, gathering signatories on a letter of opposition (which I joined), and preparing to implore the governor to veto it, failing efforts to stop it from passing. To them and many other harm reduction and reproductive rights advocates, this bill represents a growing national trend to use fear-mongering as a basis for stripping pregnant people of crucial rights, even well beyond pregnancy.

Aly Peeler, advocacy coordinator for the North Carolina Urban Survivor’s Union, notes that although the bill is written to target drug users, it has the potential to affect a much larger population: “It opens the door for prosecuting people who can get pregnant for anything that can harm a fetus. What if you’re not exercising enough, what if you don’t have healthcare when we know that prenatal care is the biggest determinant of fetal health? We are really invested in stopping the bill.”

Allowing the state to define in utero substance exposure as child neglect would permit child services to remove newborn infants from their parents’ custody at birth. Should this pass, North Carolina would join 23 other states in defining prenatal substance exposure as civil child maltreatment. This has a ripple effect: A recent study from the RAND corporation discovered that areas with punitive policies toward drug use during pregnancy, such as conflating it with civil or criminal child maltreatment, saw higher rates of infant withdrawal. Patients who fear being punished for using drugs avoid medical care, whether that means continuing to use drugs instead of engaging in treatment, or avoiding prenatal care altogether.

It is a measure that invites a host of problems, including the traumatic interruption of the dyad between a birthing parent and newborn. Contact between newborns and the parent who birthed them is crucial during the first days of life; this is especially true for infants who experience withdrawal from substances they were exposed to during pregnancy, whether or not those substances were prescribed and taken as recommended. Nursing and skin-to-skin contact have been shown to reduce symptoms of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), or infant withdrawal.

Many hospitals around the country have begun to change their NAS protocols to be more inclusive of families, implementing “mother as medicine” approaches to treating withdrawal symptoms that have led to dramatic decreases in the amount of time infants diagnosed with NAS require medical intervention. The University of North Carolina Children’s Hospital-Chapel Hill recently implemented a new approach to treating NAS called “Eat, Sleep, Console,” which heavily integrates familial support as part of the treatment for infant opioid withdrawal. House Bill 918, however, would undermine that medicine by denying parents access to their newborns, potentially even while the baby is still in the hospital, despite the new protocol’s positive outcomes.

The absolutist attitude toward drug addiction appears to favor stigma over science. It states that in order for a substance exposure-based neglect charge to be substantiated, child services must be able to demonstrate that the parent is “unable to discharge parental responsibilities due to a history of chronic drug abuse.” This would allow a parent’s history of addiction to be weaponized against them, something which is generally not done with other medical conditions unless there is a similar element of stigma involved, such as that which is seen in some cases of intellectual or physical disabilities.

It also opens the door to using addiction treatment history as evidence of an inability to parent. Addiction is defined as a chronic relapsing disorder. It is not uncommon for patients to attend more than one treatment program before achieving long-term remission, or to require long-term medication management with methadone or buprenorphine in the case of opioid addiction. When these histories become confused with the definition of parental fitness, it labels people with substance use disorders as undeserving to parent simply because of their condition.

In an interview for a story published by The Appeal, obstetrician and addiction medicine physician Mishka Terplan described recovery as “finding community connection, purpose, and meaning…Motherhood fits right into that, and yet we have this system that has labeled certain people and populations as being less deserving of that than others, so we are going to even take that away from them, or make it yet another battle in a grossly unfair universe.”

Stating that child services is not required to engage in reunification efforts further codifies this dismissive attitude toward people with substance use disorders. Normally, when a child welfare department opens a case on a parent that involves the removal of a child from the home, the department is required to pursue reunification efforts before moving to forcibly adopt the child to another family.

This means that the department has an obligation to provide referrals and financial assistance for any services the parent is required to complete in order to regain custody. In cases that involve parental drug use, this typically means that the child welfare department must provide timely and appropriate referrals for addiction treatment, and often must also cover the costs of such treatment. But North Carolina’s new bill would remove this burden from the state in cases that involve “exposure to nonmedical substances in utero.”

“[A pregnant person with an untreated substance use disorder] can’t stop using [solely due to pregnancy] because that’s one of the defining features of having a use disorder, and people with a use disorder — they need treatment,” said Terplan, describing with eloquent simplicity the inherent injustice of removing a child due to parental drug addiction, then refusing to provide treatment.

Amber Khan, a senior staff attorney at National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), has helped oppose bills like this in the past, like a 2017 bill that made substance use during pregnancy civil child neglect in Kentucky and forced mothers to enroll in drug treatment within 90 days of giving birth or face termination of parental rights. Khan said these bills “are counter-intuitive and dangerous and based on misinformation. They certainly do not address a substance use disorder. If the concern is a parent’s substance use disorder, these bills create a punitive system but don’t increase funding for care.”

Finally, North Carolina’s bill also decreases the amount of time it takes to permanently separate parent and child by terminating parental rights, an act that has been dubbed the “civil death penalty.” Currently, federal legislation known as the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) requires states to file for termination of parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months (it does not necessarily apply in situations of kinship care, when children are living with relatives). Some states have opted to shorten that time, and if HB 918 passes, North Carolina will join them. The bill will shorten the requirement to one year. It also gives foster parents the same rights as relatives, allowing them to petition for custody after only nine months.

“People don’t understand substance use,” said Louise Vincent, the executive director of the North Carolina Urban Survivor’s Union. “I find bills like this really manipulative…You start talking about pregnant women using drugs and people lose their mind. People don’t understand that love doesn’t cure addiction.”

Compounding all of this is the fact that these issues will not be faced by all populations equally. In North Carolina, for example, Black children comprise 33 percent of the foster care population, but only 23 percent of the state’s total population. This law would give the system further leeway to discriminate by race and class, issues already embedded into the child welfare system.

“We know that poor women and women of color are more likely to be suspected of drug use, so they’re more likely to be screened and more likely to be reported,” said Peeler. “The bill is really worrying partially because everyone really values trusting and confidentiality with their doctors and it wouldn’t afford that to people who can get pregnant.”

When legislation perpetuates the idea that addiction can be a chronic relapsing medical condition up until the point of pregnancy — when it becomes a moral failing and representative of a lack of appropriate maternal love — it fails to protect the community, which should be the basic function of the law. HB 918 and other similar laws defy science in favor of stigma and move the government one step closer to repealing reproductive agency in the United States. And, of course, it creates a new avenue for punishing drug users even while the criminal justice system finally, albeit slowly, begins to recognize that punitive measures are ineffective against addiction.

“This is certainly another part of the business as usual for the drug war,” emphasized Vincent.

On the spreadsheet, managers and shift leads made the same amount as new baristas. Some entries showed that many baristas worked for companies for years and still made the same amount as those just starting in their careers; the average wage of hourly employees hovered just above $10 an hour, regardless of their role. Over 200 baristas entered their wages into the spreadsheet, which was first reported on by the Philadelphia Inquirer and has inspired similar lists across the nation. Although the spreadsheet isn’t wholly scientific — information, like average tips, benefits, and if they receive federal aid, is self-reported — it does call into question if there’s a correlation between how much experience and knowledge a person has and their ability to move up in their careers and make more money. And in the coffee world, despite the fact that jokes about getting a “real job” run prevalent, a considerable amount of skill, technique, and practice are required just to make a beverage properly, let alone do it well.

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Service work has the potential to equalize. There aren’t a lot of jobs where almost everyone starts at the bottom, and the low barrier to entry means anyone can work their way up. Upward mobility can seem really clear in these types of roles — barista to shift lead to… — but where do these roles lead? If you’re making the same amount of money you were ten years ago, or if accepting a leadership position means you make less money because you lose tips, does the idea of upward mobility actually exist?

“I had been working in various capacities on the cafe side of things for nearly ten years when an opportunity to become a roaster came my way,” said Trevor Szewczyk, a roaster based in Philadelphia. He was working in Oakland when he started exploring positions outside of the cafe. “At the time, I was pretty ready to do something else, as it felt like I had been bumping my head on the ceiling of cafe management in the Bay Area.” He balanced two realities: a barista job that pays a lower hourly wage but collects tips at the end of the day, or a slightly higher wage without tips in a management position, which is a pretty common reality for most baristas.

After oscillating between both options, he decided to pursue a different coffee journey.

Szewczyk interviewed for an open position with a coffee company just outside of Oakland. He said the initial interview went well, and he expected to get an offer that was at least comparable to what he was making in his last position. “As I had been the shift lead for the cafe I was leaving at the time, I was making about $25 an hour — a base wage of $14 averaging $10 an hour in tips. So when the offer letter came I was a little taken aback that I was being offered $17 an hour.”

The position — an associate roaster for a local but large coffee company with multiple locations and wholesale accounts — seemed like a step up. However, Szewczyk never made close to the amount he was making as a shift lead, even though he was learning new skills. After a year and a half with the company, Szewczyk’s wage was bumped up to $18.50, but never matched what he was making at the cafe.

The promise of a career is what drives many to accept positions that, given a closer look, don’t actually deliver on what they promise: a stable life in their chosen field. And often, that means taking jobs that are underwhelming and financially not viable to escape the perceived bottom of the field.

“There have been a few instances where I have really been underwhelmed by promotion promises — the most recent was leaving my management role to go over to a different cafe where I was hired to do beverage development,” says Oodie Taliaferro, a barista working in Austin, Texas. “In that move I was also promised that I’d start at a higher rate than their starting rate…and after it was all said and done I started at the company’s minimum and my non-tipped hours in research and development were just that — full shifts with no tips and making only $10 an hour.”

Taliaferro left that job and did what a lot of baristas do after being let down by seemingly better job: they go back to being a barista. For many baristas attempting to “move up,” barista work often ends up being the best balance between responsibility and wages. Most management and behind-the-scenes jobs pay nominally more than a barista wage, and without tips, jobs with more responsibility are often not worth it. However, that means that there’s nowhere to go when you want to move further in your career.

Essentially, you’re stuck.

Mika Turberville is right in the middle of navigating that messy place — moving from a job that sounded like a step up in their career to working back on the floor.

“I initially took this job because I was working as an intermediate manager at a cafe and had been for several years with no prospects of upward mobility,” they said, even moving from Austin to New York to pursue a new opportunity within the same company. Turberville had ten years of experience, and when they landed the job, was surprised to learn that although their wages were technically higher, they didn’t cover the added cost of living in a city with higher expenses, let alone the fact that their position was technically a promotion.

“My pay as an intermediary manger in Austin was $13.50 an hour with tips, which is almost twice the minimum wage for that area…In New York, I used my savings to move for this job, they paid me $19 an hour, $4 more than the minimum for New York, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been here, but that’s not a living wage at all.”

Eventually, Turberville left, and has since returned to making drinks. “While I feel I have taken a step backwards a bit, I feel hopeful that I can continue to pursue a Q Grader certification [a coffee certification similar to a test a sommelier would have to take for wine] while working there and that they will support whatever next steps in coffee look like for me.” The Q grader certification is a three-day class followed by 17 coffee evaluation tests — the classes cost about $2,000 and people study for months, expecting to fail at least a few of the tests on their first try. Although it’s a helpful certification for roasters and green buyers to have, it’s rare that a coffee company would pay for this course for a barista.

Folks like Szewczyk and Turberville are still fighting to establish a career in coffee, but it’s common for people to walk away from the industry. “I left my last coffee job for a lot of reasons, one of which was not being paid appropriately for my work,” says Meghan-Annette Reida, a former barista working in Milwaukee. After years of being underpaid, Reida decided to leave coffee altogether. “I got a job in insurance; I’m the lowest paid staff member and I’m still paid twice what I was paid to run a coffee shop.”

On Twitter, Taliaiferro asked folks to detail their coffee journeys, charting the ups and downs of their own employment in coffee as an example. Their reason for asking echoes the experiences of a number of baristas: “Feeling like half a dozen lateral moves isn’t what I pictured for my career, but wondering if it’s more common than I think.” When your career is a series of seemingly similar jobs dressed up in titles like “manager” or “shift lead,” which are often codes for “no tips,” it can be difficult to see a clear pathway for baristas to pursue.

An opportunity to move away from barista work is tempting. Along with wage ceilings, service work is both mentally and physically exhausting, and baristas are often not making the same in tips as their other service colleagues are, so the drive to move off the floor and into roles with more responsibilities is enticing, and many baristas are led down a false pathway that often leaves them both stagnant and burnt out. Because of the way tips are ingrained into specific service settings and because coffee is often priced lower than similar food and beverage experiences, it’s much more lucrative to be a career waiter or bartender than it is a career barista.

Documents like the barista wage spreadsheet will hopefully give power to baristas to demand more from their employers. Baristas at Starbucks have already banded together to call for better wages and more predictable schedules after the company added a meditation app to its benefits package while slashing employee hours. If anything, it’s a cautionary tale to the pitfalls of trying to build a career in coffee — what should be an arrow pointing upward often ends up being a web of ups, downs, crashes, peaks, all together writing an uncertain future for many of our most vulnerable service industry members.

“I understand the sheer panic of not knowing what to do, and you want to get your kid off the street because you really honestly believe they’re going to die,” said Cochran. “But I had a thought that, you know, if my daughter gets arrested, she’s gonna have a record.”

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The concepts of “enabling,” “rock bottom,” and other punitive approaches toward addiction are mainstays of the 12 step programs that continue to dominate recovery culture despite a lack of scientific evidence backing their efficacy. It’s not uncommon for parents of people in the throes of addiction to feel compelled to call the police on their loved one, pray for their incarceration, or feel relief when their loved one gets locked up. Cochran still encounters the mentality frequently in “Moms for All Paths to Recovery,” an arm of her nonprofit “Heart of a Warrior Woman,” dedicated to disseminating the harm reduction tools and tenets she wished had been more available when she was desperate for ways to help her child.

“In that moment, [parents] say nothing else is working,” explained Cochran. “They need a reprieve and somehow they think no matter what anyone has told them, [their child’s incarceration] gives them a reprieve.”

Parents, however, are not the only people who uphold the myth that incarceration benefits people struggling with addiction. Many people in recovery credit incarceration with their turnaround. It’s not uncommon to hear people say they would never have stopped using if they hadn’t gotten locked up, or that detoxing felt psychologically easier in jail, where they knew they couldn’t get a hit. Amanda Mansur, a restaurant server and mother living in Massachusetts, told TalkPoverty over the phone that, in retrospect, being incarcerated was a “positive experience.”

“It taught me…about gratitude. You don’t realize how good you have it until you lose everything,” said Mansur.

But incarceration is highly traumatic and embedded with both short- and long-term negative consequences. In the long term, convictions, especially felonies, can follow people for years after their release from jail or prison. People with felony drug convictions face difficulties renting homes, gaining employment, and even accessing public benefits.

Most states no longer enforce a lifetime ban on public benefits like food assistance and cash benefits for families with children, but many still impose temporary bans or reinstatement requirements outside of their criminal sentence. That can mean drug testing, which is costly, invasive, and not always accurate; the more common, less expensive urine drug tests, for example, are prone to false positives, which can result from the use of over-the-counter medicines or even edible poppy seeds.

The negative consequences of incarceration are compounded for people of color. Members of Black and Latinx communities are more likely to be incarcerated for drugs, and one in nine Black children has an incarcerated parent, as opposed to one out of every 57 white children. One study conducted in New York City found that Black men with criminal backgrounds faced harsher employment discrimination than white men with similar convictions. One out of every 13 Black Americans will lose voting rights in their lifetime due to felony disenfranchisement. Over 250,000 immigrants have been deported as the result of drug charges since 2007, according to data compiled by the Drug Policy Alliance.

But all of these consequences hinge on the assumption that a person survives the ordeal of incarceration. For people who are addicted to drugs, survival is not guaranteed.

“Any time someone has to use drugs in a way that’s secret, that’s hidden, that’s rushed, that’s not around people, that’s not in a safe secure network where you can get help, you see increased harms,” said Kim Sue, the medical director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, who also performs clinical work at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and recently published a book titled “Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis,” that examines the use of methadone and buprenorphine within jails and prisons. Those harms can include increased rates of infections and diseases like HIV and Hep C that can result from sharing syringes and other equipment.

Those harms can also manifest as death due to withdrawal. Although opioid withdrawal is not conventionally considered fatal among otherwise healthy adults, a number of people have been found dead in cells across the country. In 2017, Mother Jones reported that although nobody is tracking how many of these deaths are taking place, 20 lawsuits were filed against United States correctional facilities between 2014 and 2016 in response to alleged opioid withdrawal-related deaths. Withdrawal-related dehydration is often cited as a primary factor in these deaths. In more than one of these cases, distressed inmates reported concerns for their life to family members over the phone, or begged staff for water and medical care in earshot of their cellmates. Surveillance cameras caught the excruciating withdrawal and death of a 32-year old Michigan man who was in addiction treatment when he was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in jail for failing to pay a driving ticket.

“If you’re doing a lot of vomiting or a lot of diarrhea…[that] can lead to different electrolyte disturbances which can affect cardiac function, leading to cardiac arrest,” explained Sue, who also noted that many times, medically untrained guards are the only people available to assist incarcerated people in withdrawal. She added that even when inmates are transferred to medical units, most facilities do not have doctors on site full time.

There is a growing awareness among criminal justice authorities that medications used to treat opioid use disorder, like methadone and buprenorphine, are essential for people struggling with opioid addiction. Often prompted by lawsuits, several facilities have begun inducting incoming inmates who are addicted to opioids, or allowing people already prescribed the medications to continue taking them. Regardless, the majority of facilities do not allow the use of these medications, except for people who are pregnant (even then, patients are typically tapered off after pregnancy, sometimes while still recovering from childbirth).

This means that most people who are incarcerated while addicted to opioids will undergo forcible detox. In some cases, even when people are given methadone or buprenorphine as a withdrawal aid or for maintenance while inside, they are not given adequate referrals on the outside. In some areas of the country, these medications are difficult to access or too expensive to pay for out of pocket. For people addicted to opioids, being forcibly detoxed without adequate access to evidence-based treatment like methadone or buprenorphine can be dangerous upon release because it leaves them at risk of relapse, but without their former tolerance. Opioid-addicted people who have been released from incarceration are at significantly heightened risk of overdose in their first several weeks back in the community.

Even in facilities where evidence-based treatment is offered, the risk of trauma remains ever-present. “[People who are incarcerated] get killed by staff, they get killed by other inmates…they get raped, they get sodomized,” said Dinah Ortiz, a vocal harm reductionist and parent advocate at a New York defense firm. “You don’t know how many rapes I saw, you don’t know how many women I saw sodomized during my little six months in Rikers.”

“If you’re the kind of person who needs to take a walk when you’re feeling stressed, you cannot do that [while incarcerated]. If you’re anxious around other people who are loud or fighting, you can’t avoid that. The environment is not therapeutic,” said Jonathan Giftos, who worked as the clinical director of substance use treatment for the Division of Correctional Health Services at Rikers Island. “A lot of the health side works hard to mitigate the harms of the environment, but you can only do so much.”

Even when formerly incarcerated people praise their experience behind bars, they also often share stories of trauma and relapse that didn’t end with jail or prison, but with evidence-based care that they accessed in the community. Mansur, for example, admitted that she relapsed shortly after her release, and continued using for three years before achieving sobriety with the help of a self-referred buprenorphine prescription. She detailed that she’s had difficulty renting apartments because of her conviction, which was for theft that she committed in order to pay for drugs. She’s also unable to work in the medical field or with vulnerable populations like children or the elderly, which she finds disappointing because she had studied psychology in college.

“Maybe if I had been introduced to medication-assisted treatment previously from going to jail, maybe that would have prevented [the need to be arrested],” Mansur stated, before acknowledging that her addiction became “much worse” after she was released from jail.

“If your [child] is out of control there are ways to go about [helping them] that do not involve incarceration,” advised Ortiz. “If you have that mentality that I prefer they be in jail, then that’s the mentality that they are going to have, too.”

Like any curious 14-year-old, I asked, “Why they let you go?” She responded with an undertone of cynicism: “They said they need to downsize, so they let me go.”

“Mommy, what does downsize mean?”

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Since my overly expensive degree in Organizational Behavior from NYU, I’ve learned that not all downsizing is as bad as what happened to my mother.

According to the Harvard Business Review, proponents of downsizing argue that it is an effective strategy, with benefits such as increased performance and sales. Stepping out of Business 101 is decarceration, the downsizing of incarceration to reduce the scale and reach of the criminal justice system. It’s time to start now, especially as violent crime is down in most cities and lawmakers weigh the decriminalization of many offenses, such as drug possession/use and sex work.

Downsizing means police should not be mental health first responders. They need mental health treatment. They need help. Police officer suicides in 2018 were the highest ever, with 228 officers dying by suicide. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, believes the 228 number “is undoubtedly underreported.” Probation and parole officers are not substance abuse counselors or employment specialists.

And all of this is okay because we don’t need them to be. They just need to get themselves healthy, and rightsizing should be an option. We already have proficient social workers, mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors, and employment specialists who are not utilized enough or funded appropriately.

The criminal justice system is a discordant machine of more than 55,000 criminal justice-related agencies nationwide inclusive of police, courts, district attorney offices, jails, prisons, parole and probation boards, and ecarceration. I’m sure I’ve missed a few here, but the point is that America’s criminal justice reform intoxication should include more than reducing the number of people in prisons or the amount of lockups closed: It should mean fewer institutions of incarceration, too.

Downsizing in this context means relieving some institutions of their duties and giving them a severance package that will allow them to take care of their own house.

Our tax dollars pay the bill of more than $270 billion to keep the criminal justice system intact. If the criminal justice system were a country, it would be 41st on the GDP tally of 186 countries. We — and I mean “we,” because “We, the People” allow for this profane, ineffective, and inefficient use of resources — currently have open-air incarceration, where about 4.5 million people live under some form of community supervision, alongside the 2.3 million people in prisons. We spend $29 billion on the federal law enforcement budget (#99 on the GDP tally). We have 70 million people in the U.S., not incarcerated, but living freeish with a criminal conviction.

Amid this display of laissez-faire governance, there is progress to soberly consider. Bail reform in several states is decreasing the debtor’s prison construct. Restorative justice models are sprouting up across the country, effectively decreasing exposure to all points of the criminal punishment system. Progressive judges like Victoria Pratt “sentenced” people who came before her court to write essays, instead of lockup. Law enforcement administrators from across the country have been meeting as Executives Transforming Parole & Probation (EXiT) to operationalize the downsizing of their reach and their caseloads. In their “Statement on the Future of Probation & Parole in the United States,” they assert: “As people who run or have run community supervision throughout the country and others concerned with mass supervision, we call for probation and parole to be substantially downsized, less punitive, and more hopeful, equitable and restorative.”

Several years ago, when I was a violence interrupter for the Cure Violence program in Brooklyn, New York, I spoke at an intimate convening of community residents, police, and elected officials. During my comments, I said my job is to figure out ways to put myself out of work. My work was to reduce shootings in the area of Brooklyn where the violence interrupter program operated. Even then, I understood that any person or institution engaged in intervention work should hope that their interventions are no longer needed. The criminal justice system is an operation of interventions ostensibly created to deal with violations of the societal contract. Because of the disproportionate use of these interventions on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Pacific Islander populations, we understand that we have a racialized system of control.

White supremacy aside for a moment (as if it is ever possible to put the ideology of white supremacy in timeout), the 55,000 agencies of the criminal punishment system, e.g., the courts, law enforcement, and community supervision, should keep a humbling view of themselves.  They should be working to put themselves out of business. They need to see downsizing as a means to community efficacy.

Since my mother’s untimely dismissal from her job, our family figured it out, like most working-class families. We pooled our resources together. My mother still has a few choice four-letter words in her Trinidadian accent to describe the process of being laid off. I assume the 55,000 criminal justice agencies will also have a vulgar reaction to real downsizing. But I am sure those of us in communities that are involuntarily cuffed to the criminal punishment system will also find a way to pool our resources together to create safe neighborhoods we all deserve.

“West of [interstate highway] 83 there is no viable business district, no economic engine or opportunities for young people,” says James Hamlin, the owner of a local bakery.

Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue was once a thriving cultural center for the city’s Black population during the era of segregation. Famous artists like Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington all arrived in the city to play at Baltimore’s Royal Theater.

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But the venue was demolished in the 1970s, and today most of the businesses that thrived during the era of segregation have closed. Most people who know the area think of the drug trade portrayed in the popular HBO show The Wire, or of the 2015 protests that erupted after police killed a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray. Further east on North Avenue, the paint is chipped off the storefronts and the nearby townhouses are boarded up. It’s impossible not to notice the history of economic neglect in these majority-Black neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, residents claim that the city only responds to service requests, calls to change streetlights, or pick up trash in areas of Baltimore where the majority of the population is white. Black neighborhoods, many of which are cut off from other parts of the city by highways and a lack of public transportation, are largely left to fend for themselves.

But an ambitious plan put forward by the President of Baltimore’s City Council, 35-year-old Brandon Scott, aims to change that by tasking government agencies with finding solutions to the deep structural racism that has plagued the city for decades.

In November last year, the city voted overwhelmingly in favor of establishing a permanent Equity Assistance Fund that would be used exclusively to support efforts that aim to reduce race, gender, and economic inequality. The charter amendment that establishes the fund is one of the first in the country that explicitly mentions structural and institutional racism. A separate bill also obligates each government agency to analyze how it can address structural inequalities and come up with an equity action plan.

Scott, who has been working in local government since he was just 27, said his personal experience growing up in Baltimore motivated him to address the city’s longstanding history of inequality.

“I lived in Lower Park Heights, so you have vacant homes, violence, of course, blight, lead paint in houses, and all of that stuff going on. And then right above me you had some of the most affluent areas in the city,” Scott said, describing a scenario that is typical for Baltimore City.

“The area right to the east of us, right across [highway] 83, is Roland Park, which is one of the most affluent neighborhoods. So when you grow up in the city and you are surrounded by what you see, and then you see the opposite not far away from you, it changes the way you look at the world,” Scott continued.

The differences between Baltimore’s neighborhoods even affect how long residents live. In Baltimore’s Greenmount East neighborhood, the average life expectancy is around 66 years. In Roland Park, in contrast, the average life expectancy is 84 years. The disparities mimic the difference in life expectancy between some of the world’s most and least developed countries.

This starkly unequal landscape was created largely through deliberate policies that aimed to separate the city’s white residents from the Black population. At the turn of the century, in 1910, Baltimore passed an extreme ordinance that prohibited Black and white populations from living in the same neighborhoods. Segregation allowed banks and the federal government to exclude majority-Black neighborhoods from their loan programs, making it nearly impossible for Black residents to become homeowners.

The 1910 ordinance didn’t last very long. The Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in 1917. But many of the city’s residential neighborhoods remain segregated over a century later.

Researchers have described Baltimore as having an L-shaped corridor down the center of the city where the white population lives, and a majority-Black, butterfly-shaped area that surrounds either side of the city’s main artery. Today, predominantly white neighborhoods in Baltimore receive between two and four times as much capital investment as majority-Black neighborhoods, according to recent estimates.

With all of this in mind, advocates argue that only robust public policy like the kind proposed by Scott can address the problems caused by nearly a century of racist policies.

But one year after the city’s residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bills, the details are still nebulous. Agencies are currently working on their assessments and action plans, and the first agency budgets to be shaped through a lens of equity will be presented in the late spring and early summer.

Mara James, a legislative lead at Baltimore’s Bureau of the Budget and Management Research, noted that there is some concern about how to finance the Equity Assistance Fund.

“The legislation established the Fund but did not designate a funding source. At this point in time, no funding sources have been identified for the Fund,” James said. “We value the efforts of Council President Scott to put equity at the forefront of the City’s work, but our office is concerned about the impact that any dedicated fund may have on the City’s ability to respond to fiscal emergencies or large future costs and ensure we continue to provide core services to residents.”

One number often floated publicly is $15 million, or roughly 3 percent of the police department’s annual budget. But current Mayor Jack Young has also expressed some concern about where the extra money would come from and whether it would be possible to skim money from the police budget.

“The administration is not focused on that legislation. We’re focused on developing an equity framework,” James Bentley, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said about the Equity Assistance Fund.

Bentley argues that the city doesn’t have the ability to finance the Fund because of a state-mandated policy that will require millions of dollars be invested into public schools over the next decade. But the mayor’s office wants to use data and statistics to find new ways to ensure that the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods get as much attention as the wealthier ones, he says.

“When you look at the data it clearly showed a discrepancy, that some areas get more attention to the detriment of others. Mayor Young wants us to use data to show where there are disparities,” Bentley said.

Young has also suggested that tax incentives could be used to attract business to parts of the city that lack economic investment. But some experts argue that purely economic policies may not be enough to achieve sustainable racial and economic justice.

“I wish there was one policy that would solve the history of a lack of investment or neighborhoods being where they are. Tax incentives alone can’t be the answer to structural racism,” said Leon Andrews, a director of the National League of Cities. “It can complement other things that you want to do, but if you just have tax incentives without thinking about the inequities and what that means for the neighborhood, you can repeat displacement and gentrification as we’ve seen in other neighborhoods. Tax benefits for what purpose? Who benefits?”

For many of the youth living around Pennsylvania Avenue, the government’s plans — mayor’s or council’s — mean little if they aren’t implemented.

“We have assets but we don’t have infrastructure,” says Hamlin, the local bakery owner. “The ideas are good but something has to happen.”

The predominantly Black River Parishes along the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge are overrun with over 150 plants and refineries. This area was once dubbed Cancer Alley by residents and media because of the clusters of cancer patients in the area. Now residents are calling it Death Alley because of the significant amount of deaths by cancer and other illnesses among the residents who live near the industrial pollution.

“You put poison in the land, water and in the air, the result is sickness and death. The planned killing of any group is genocide,” Pat Bryant, the son of sharecroppers and a resident of New Orleans, said frankly. Bryant started Justice and Beyond in 2012 as a response to social and environmental injustice along the Louisiana parishes.

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After Emancipation, in 1863, many formerly enslaved Americans remained in the South, occupied fertile plots of land, and built themselves small shanties along the curvatures of the serpent-like Mississippi River, not far from the plantations that once enslaved them. These communities represented freedom and prosperity long fought for.

Descendants of enslaved Americans who, against all odds, made lives for themselves along the Mississippi have found themselves next door to refineries, chemical plants, and waste dumps in one of the most heavily polluted areas of the country. Cities like Morrisonville, Diamond, Mossville, Sunrise, and Revilletown, all founded by formerly enslaved Americans, have all been erased by environmental racism. Each town was devastated by the toxins emitted into the air, water, and soil surrounding their communities by multinational petrochemical companies like Shell and Georgia Gulf Corp. that inevitably seeped onto their land, into their homes, and poisoned their bodies. Those who didn’t fall ill and die were eventually bought out or moved.

The town of Morrisonville, founded in the late 1870s after the Civil War, was wiped off the map by the 1980s. “Morrisonville is one of the sad stories that had so much promise at the end of slavery and fell to such tough circumstances during Reconstruction. The people were able to make a living. They built houses. They educated their families when there was no public education for African Americans. And some of them were able to send their kids to college to build a better life,” Bryant told me.

Today, Dow Louisiana, the largest petrochemical company in the state, resides there, and the only thing left of the historic community of Morrisonville is the town cemetery and its more than 100 years of familial ties. The exploitation and genocide of Black Americans may look different in the 21st century, but there is no denying that racism, environmental and otherwise, plays a powerful role in the fates of these predominately Black Louisiana parishes, and much of America.

Every family along the River Parishes has lost droves of loved ones to cancer and other pollution-related ailments. Many have joined or created activist groups opposing large petrochemical companies, but their cries are being dismissed and pushed aside while people are getting sick and dying at alarming rates.

Resident Mary Hampton started Concerned Citizens of St. John as a result of the lack of action from public officials and the deadly effects of chloroprene coming from the Denka plant to the residents of St. John. In 2016, the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment revealed that residents living near the Denka Performance Elastomer plant were 800 times more likely to get cancer. Denka is the sole source of chloroprene in the United States. Since rule-making is such a long and strenuous process, the EPA does not prioritize compounds that are not present in more than one community.

“My father had prostate cancer, my two sisters-in-law died with breast cancer, my son-in-law died from bone cancer, my other brother died of bone cancer. So many members of my immediate family that I have lost,” Hampton said of Denka’s legacy in St. John. Her voice broke as she detailed many of those close to her who passed before their time and the children they left behind. “We just want a safe place to live, that’s all.”

According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, in the Environmental Protection Agency’s “22-year history of processing environmental discrimination complaints, the office has never once made a formal finding of a Title VI (prohibits discrimination on the base of race, color, or national origin) violation.” Latinx Americans are exposed to 63 percent more pollution than they create and Black Americans are exposed to 56 percent, in comparison with white Americans, who are exposed to 17 percent less, according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. People of color contribute less to the overall effects of pollution but carry the bulk of the burden.

Stephanie Cooper, a 50-year-old teacher of 29 years, is Vice President of RISE St. James, an activist group fighting to block Formosa Plastics. Cooper’s family has lived in St. James Parish for four generations. Her father, Oliver Cooper Sr., purchased their land when she was just eight years old. During this same time, he challenged the status quo by running for St. James Councilman — a seat that he kept well into his 70s.

Now, Formosa plans to build a massive ethane cracker complex a mile from the local public school which would emit ethylene oxide, a toxic chemical that causes cancers like non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and breast cancer.

“We used to enjoy just sitting outside or with the screen door [open] but you can’t do that anymore. The door has to be closed,” Cooper explained. The pollution in the area is so bad that the beautiful garden her family once had is no longer possible and the critters have all but left. “We used to catch butterflies with butterfly nets and catch dragonflies on the fences, but you don’t see too much of that anymore. Now you’d be lucky if you see a pigeon.”

“If Formosa come in, that’s it,” Milton Cayette told me. Cayette’s great-great-grandfather bought 17 acres of land in the late 1800s, which Cayette tends to and lives on to this day. “They said that if anything would happen people would need to be at least a one-mile radius from the center of the plant. They built it 300 feet from my house and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The Taiwanese Formosa Plastics Group was awarded The Black Planet Award in 2009, an award meant for companies creating the most ecological damage on a global level, by Ethecon Foundation. Ethecon cited “a continuing sequence of social and ecological foul play throughout the world.” In fact, one quarter of Taiwan’s greenhouse gas emissions could be tied back to FPG.

Yet, state and local officials offered FPG an estimated $1.5 billion in incentives to bring the chemical complex to St. James Parish, without disclosing any information to residents.

Ride any train in the city and you’re bound to see the signs — wallpapered across stations and on the insides of trains — warning passengers that they’re better off paying the $2.75 fare than the $100 fine, and directing them to use turnstiles to enter and exit the tunnels, as opposed to gates, which can easily be held open and passed through without paying. If you ride in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens, you’re bound to see fare checks taking place, or to be subject to one yourself.

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Here’s how it happened to me: I approached one of the Metro Transit Authority (MTA) automated ticketing booths at LaGuardia Airport and purchased a fare card with something like 30 dollars on it. When I got on the bus, amidst a pretty typical New York crowd, I didn’t see anywhere to swipe my card. But people were cramming in behind me, so I shrugged it off. I could figure it out when I got off, or pay the same fare at the next stop, where I would have been using a receipt had this fare gone through. In any case, my money had transferred from my bank account over to the MTA — so good enough, right?

At the bus stop in Queens, we were greeted by two burly police officers in full cop regalia — guns and batons at hip, the whole show. There was no crowded shoving now; everyone stepped off single file, flashing a paper receipt to the cops before walking off. A paper receipt I didn’t have. I showed the officers my Metro card and explained the steps I’d taken to pay the MTA. One of them told me I had gone to the wrong machine. He pointed at the display of machines behind us. When I told him I used a machine like that, he replied that no I hadn’t, but the one that I used was almost the same. Almost the same, but not right. Then his partner demanded my ID card and fined me $100.

What happened to me in 2018 is part of a city-wide crackdown by the Metro Transit Authority (MTA) on fare evasion. The crackdown is supposedly aimed at preventing the MTA from hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars they say are lost to people skipping fares. In 2018, the MTA reported that loss at $225 million, but the Office of the Inspector General thinks that was an undercount, and loss estimates for 2019 are closer to $300 million. While subway fare evasions are certainly a major contributor to these financial losses, it’s bus routes that are taking the biggest hit, including Select Service routes used to connect subway systems, like the one I was riding from the airport.

But as my experience illustrates, the crackdown behaves like a Kafka-esque authoritarian overreach. In the best circumstances, authorities fine people for giving money to the MTA through the wrong slot, or for just being unfamiliar with the local nuances of the payment system, which is especially absurd in a city with as much tourism as New York. In the worst light, the fare evasion crackdown targets the city’s most vulnerable populations, criminalizing poverty and giving New York police another excuse to fine and jail Black and Brown people.

The NYPD has been reticent to reveal racial and ethnic demographic information about who is being fined, even resulting in a lawsuit in 2018. But data now available show summonses are being disproportionately distributed to Black and Hispanic (their language) populations. In the second quarter of 2019, 15,280 summonses were issued. Of those, 6,110 were Black, and 5,154 were Hispanic. In contrast, only 2,586 were issued to passengers identified as white, even though non-Hispanic whites comprise nearly half of New York City’s population. 712 summonses were issued to people under the age of 18.

Tickets aren’t the only consequence of fare enforcement stops. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance announced in 2017 that his office would stop prosecuting for “theft of services” on public transportation. The decriminalization of fare evasion in New York led to a sharp decline in arrests related to fare evasion, which saw nearly 10,000 people jailed in 2016.

But as the recent high profile arrest of nineteen-year-old Adrian Napier shows, arrests are still happening — and mostly to Black men. People with outstanding warrants are at particularly high risk of being arrested. But bystanders have been posting recordings on social media of violent subway arrests of “unruly” fare beaters. Reports from around the city are also catching officers stationed around transportation stops making arrests for reasons like unauthorized sales of candy and sweets. In the second quarter of 2019, NYPD reported 682 arrests related to fare evasion. Of those, 414 were Black. Only 76 were white. Ten were minors. The overwhelming majority of people arrested were identified as male, indicating that the new campaign is functioning as yet another excuse for the NYPD to jail men with black and brown skin.

While all this has been going on in the name of saving money, use of public transportation in New York has taken a sharp decline. Subway rides had seen an increase until 2016, when ridership dropped slightly. After 2017, both buses and subways saw a dramatic slope in their ridership stats, with bus ridership dropping by 5.1 percent. In 2018, subway and bus ridership dropped by 2.1 and 4.4 percent, respectively.

Fare evasion is not unique to New York City, but not every city views it as a priority police matter. In Seattle, where I grew up, King County Metro launched a new Fare Violation Program. When I was living in Seattle, prior to the beginning of 2018, bus savvy Seattle residents knew that travels taking place in North Seattle through Downtown would probably not be interrupted by fare enforcement agents. Travel South toward the airport, and you’d need to show proof of payment. This was very much delineated by racial lines. Neighborhoods in North Seattle are divided into affluent sections and very poor areas, but all of them are mostly white. Gentrification has begun to reshape the city, but the South-end has historically been a mostly Black and Latino area. Fare enforcement agents usually began entering just before the International District, which houses a mostly Asian population and several low-income housing complexes. All in all, Seattle’s fare enforcement protocols appeared as racially biased as those in New York. Now, Seattle seems to be trying to correct some of these issues by scaling back punitive measures against fare beaters.

Previously, fare evasion could result in a $124 fine that was handled in civil court, although riders would usually receive one or two warnings before getting the fine. Now, fines are $50, and if paid within 90 days they will be further reduced to $25. Riders also have the option to pay that $25 toward their own ORCA card (Seattle’s kitschy transit card that, yes, does have an orca whale on it). They can also perform two hours of community service or enroll in one of the reduced fare programs offered by the city. The program that serves the largest population is ORCA Lift — which I am still enrolled in because enrollment lasts five years — and is available to all Seattle residents who meet their low-income requirements. Indigent riders also have the option to appeal the citation, which may be overturned based on “extenuating circumstances.”

Seattle’s 2019 program comes on the heels of a similar program rolled out in Portland, Oregon, in 2018. In 2018, a Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge ruled that random fare checks on TriMet, Portland’s public buses, were unconstitutional. The lawsuit, spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was incited by an incident involving Ana Del Rocio, one of the only Latina members of the David Douglas school board. She was arrested after refusing to supply identification, which is her right under state law. The ruling means that TriMet will no longer be able to perform random fare checks, similar to the kind I was subject to in New York City. TriMet also began offering community service and enrollment in reduced fare programs in lieu of paying fines, as well as tiered fines. Repeat offenders will receive increased fines or community service hours before being banned from services for 90 days.

Washington, D.C., recently decriminalized fare evasion and reduced the whopping $300 fine to $100. This was after the Washington Lawyer’s Committee released findings from a data analysis that discovered 91 percent of fare evasion citations were issued to Black riders, even though just under half the population of D.C. is Black. 46 percent of citations were issued to passengers under the age of 25, and one was only seven years old.

But the most radical change comes out of Kansas City, Missouri, which is now poised to offer free city-wide public buses. In December 2019, the city council unanimously voted to pass a resolution that will make public transportation free, once the next fiscal year budget is approved and designs are put in place. The measure, called Zero Fare Transit, is estimated to cost $8 million. This will make it the first major U.S. city to offer free city-wide public transportation in the 21^st century, though a few other cities experimented with it unsuccessfully in the 20^th century. The smaller city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which has a population of approximately 60,000 and operates just 121 buses, has offered free public transit since 2002.

When I returned to New York in December 2019, the first thing I did was load my Metro Card. During a trip downtown to meet a friend for coffee, I swiped my card, but the turnstile wouldn’t budge. The machine directed me to swipe again at the same turnstile, but when I did — no budge. I continued to swipe my card and receive the same error message directing me to swipe again. Finally, exasperated, I moved on to another turnstile. This time it worked — but a swipe at the other turnstile had also been deducted.

Does that mean I can now send MTA a $100 summons?

Earlier this year, Duarte contacted me after reading an op-ed I’d written about the widely used pesticide chlorpyrifos. I’d discovered that the likely reason for each of my three children’s brain malformations was due to my acute exposure, in 1989, to a flea “bomb” containing chlorpyrifos. Duarte believes his ADHD and impulsivity issues are the result of his chronic exposure to chlorpyrifos in his home, school and work environments.

Human and animal studies link chlorpyrifos exposure to structural damage to the brain, neurobehavioral deficits, asthma, diminished IQ, and a wide range of developmental disabilities in children. It has also been linked to heart disease, lung cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and the lowering of sperm counts in adults. Based on my investigative research, and interviews with Duarte along with dozens of other residents in the San Joaquin Valley, I’m left to draw the all-too-obvious conclusion that communities with a higher percentage of residents who are low income are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful pesticides and other environmental toxins. And the issue of race is an inextricable co-factor.

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Duarte’s alcoholic father abandoned the family when Duarte was nine, about the time his mother was diagnosed with leukemia. (Both pediatric and adult leukemias have also been linked to pesticide exposure.) Duarte, the third of four children, became the man of the house and remembers making meals for his sick mother and biking to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions for his mom and younger brother, who had severe asthma.

Both Duarte and his brother were diagnosed with ADHD by a school psychologist at Di Giorgio Elementary School. Duarte does not recall being provided treatment or support from the school, which likely speaks to Di Giorgio School District being highly under-resourced, given the district’s meager tax base. Like their home on Richardson Road, the school abuts an orchard where pesticides are routinely sprayed.

And if exposure at home and school weren’t enough, before leaving the family, the boys’ father was a fieldworker who would have likely brought home pesticide residue on his clothing and shoes. Duarte himself worked as a field hand as a teenager and also at a golf course collecting stray golf balls. (Chlorpyrifos is widely used in non-agricultural settings like golf courses and golf balls are commonly thought to be a source of pesticide residue.)

The EPA banned chlorpyrifos in household products in 2000. However, its use in agriculture was allowed to continue. It’s often small, rural, low-income communities of color that bear the cumulative impacts of pesticide exposure and environmental degradation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in communities like Arvin, located in Kern County at the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley — the most productive agricultural region in the country. Millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos are used each year nationwide. In 2016, 1.1 million pounds were used in California; more than a quarter of that total was used in Kern County alone.

According to the 2010 Census — about the time Duarte would have been taking on the man-of-the-house role — Hispanic or Latinx persons made up 92.7 percent of Arvin residents. Arvin’s average per capita income in 2010 was $9,241, or only 19 percent of the U.S. average of $48,880 at the time. Today, the percentage of families living below the poverty line in Arvin is more than double the national average.

That low-income communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the health effects of chemical toxins such as chlorpyrifos is not news, nor is it an accident. People of color disproportionately hold the most physically demanding, unpleasant, and low-paying jobs. The roots of the problem trace back to the legacy of state-sanctioned racial segregation. For instance, communities with high Latinx representation such as Salinas, Visalia, Santa Rosa, and San Luis Obispo, California, rank among the lowest U.S. metropolitan areas in employment opportunity. Not only have low-income families and people of color been segregated according to residence and work, they’ve consequently been forced to play host to the worst kinds of environmental burdens.

Both of Angel Garcia’s parents worked the fields when he was growing up. He is now the head of the Coalition Advocating for Pesticide Safety. “If you drive through the Central Valley from town to town you will realize the proximity of these homes to the fields,” says Garcia. “You can speak to many community residents who will tell you ‘oh, it’s that time of the year where I have to close my windows, shut my door, not let the kids go outside.’ It’s almost normalized but I don’t want to say it’s normalized because I feel like it not normal. It’s just so common.”

Sacrifice zones are hot spots of chemical pollution where residents live or work immediately adjacent to heavily polluted industries or military bases. The Gulf Coast post-Deepwater Horizon, Cancer Alley in Lousiana, a Tesla plant built on a Superfund site in Buffalo, and polluted neighborhoods surrounding Houston’s shipping channel are but a handful of examples of locales where public officials have turned a blind eye to extreme environmental contamination in minority-dominated areas so that society at large can reap the rewards of a robust economy. This pattern of unequal protection constitutes environmental racism.

The San Joaquin Valley in general and Kern County in particular are examples of sacrifice zones. Here, the burden of the vibrant agricultural economy is carried by those predominantly-Latinx workers who pick and pack the fruits and vegetables that feed America. The health risks associated with these jobs and attendant living conditions have been well documented, but perhaps no more strikingly than by the CHARGE study conducted by UC Davis’ MIND Institute, and led by epidemiologist Irva Hertz-Picciotto, PhD.

Dr. Hertz-Picciotto and her team questioned mothers living in California about what their health was like before and during pregnancy, linking this information to another set of data that the state keeps, a pesticide-use reporting system. Their findings — that the incidence of developmental disability increases significantly in areas where pesticides are applied — bolster previous research and have dire implications for families working and living in agricultural communities near where pesticides are applied.

Garcia and others, such as Nayamin Martinez of the Central California Environmental Justice Network, have led recent caravans to Sacramento to lobby their state representatives and organized an environmental bus tour that highlighted hot spots and problem issues throughout the region. To their credit, the tour was attended by the newly appointed Cal EPA director, his director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), and a lone local agriculture commissioner.

Garcia and Martinez’s organizations also advocate for larger pesticide-free buffer zones surrounding schools, an Amber Alert-like notification system that would notify residents of pesticide applications in their vicinity, and more sustainable agricultural practices. “We will never stop pushing for greater health protections for low-income people of color,” says Martinez, “but the fact of the matter remains that most of the jobs in this region are agricultural.” Martinez, Garcia, and others in the environmental justice movement recognize they must find a win-win roadmap for both the residents who depend on those jobs and the industry that provides them.

Their largest “victory” to date may provide just such a road map. In April, as a result of the overwhelming scientific evidence and intense lobbying from environmental justice groups, the California Environmental Protection Agency, flying in the face of the federal EPA’s example, directed the state’s DPR to begin the process of banning chlorpyrifos throughout the state. After initial resistance, the chemical industry gave up its fight over the ban, which is now expected to go into effect in early 2020. It is the first time in the history of California that a pesticide’s registration has been revoked. To sweeten the bitter pill that industry is being asked to swallow and to help farmers make the transition away from chlorpyrifos, the state is adding $5.7 million to fund research into safer and more sustainable alternatives.

As for Gabrial Duarte, he is currently awaiting trial at Laredo Pretrial Facility in Kern County on charges stemming from illegal gun possession. He has spent two and a half of the past five years in detention, first in juvenile detention, and currently while awaiting trial. After our first conversation at the prison in July, he asked to be seen by a mental health professional and has since been prescribed medication for his ADHD. He is also attending anger management classes.

“Before, I was a reckless renegade,” he told me over the phone. “Now, I think things through. I ask myself, ‘if I were to do this, how would you view it, how would they view it, and how would I view it’? It [the classes] has helped me to learn empathy.”

Minor League Baseball, known as MiLB, is the level where nearly every future big-league player is developed, making it a vital piece of the baseball hierarchy in America. Minor league teams not only feed the MLB teams with which they’re affiliated, they also create thousands of jobs for smaller baseball-friendly communities across the nation, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, or more remote, otherwise baseball-less locales such as Burlington, Vermont, or Keizer, Oregon.

Minor league teams are what truly allows the sport to be considered the “national pastime,” as it manages to make the game national.

So far, we’ve heard MLB’s reasoning for shrinking the minors, we’ve heard some Minor League teams respond, and we’ve even witnessed members of Congress get in on the discussion with a disapproving letter and a task force. But we haven’t heard from the players themselves. What do the players, who lack a seat at the table in all of these discussions, think of the potential loss of more than 1,000 jobs, of severing the connection between MLB and 42 communities, and of their desire for a fair wage being repaid with the loss of a quarter of their jobs?

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The initial reason for shrinking the minors, both in reporting by Baseball America and via MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, is “inadequate facilities.” Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league player with the Giants who is known for both his attempts to unionize MiLB players and his role as a lawyer representing players in a class-action lawsuit seeking unpaid wages, Senne v. MLB, believes this is an excuse “to try to push through a cost-saving measure.”

Broshuis is not alone in feeling this way. An active minor league player (who will remain anonymous to protect his identity) also believes the facilities could use a boost, but that shuttering teams isn’t the way to make it happen. “These MiLB teams are massively profitable in many cases for their owners, and they sink very little of that money back into facilities for players. There ought to be accountability for an organization to give back to the players that earn them their money,” he said.

In fact, players expecting to be paid for the value they create is the real reason behind MLB’s push; it’s using an effort by players to receive fair wages as an excuse to cut costs elsewhere and hurt smaller communities with minor league teams, all in the name of boosting profits a little bit.

In 2018, MLB successfully lobbied Congress to limit the pay of minor league players — who are paid by the major league teams themselves — to the federal minimum wage, and just 40 hours per week in-season. Even though players work more like 60-70 hours per week, they receive no overtime, and also are not paid for spring training, the postseason, or the offseason.

Understandably, there was backlash to MLB’s limiting minor-league salaries to as low as $290 for 40 hours of work, as the league’s lobbying to codify awful living and working conditions was brought to the attention of many fans who were otherwise unaware. So now, you have commissioner Manfred saying 42 teams need to be disaffiliated so that MLB teams can increase minor league pay for the remaining players, as if it’s an either/or proposition for an industry that rakes in $10 billion annually.

The reality is that paying every single minor league player an average of $50,000 per year would cost MLB teams $7.5 million. With $10 billion in revenue pouring in annually, that’s pocket change. It’s the salary of a single year of a good relief pitcher.

Kyle Johnson, another former minor leaguer, played with three of the teams on the disaffiliation list: the Orum Owlz, Burlington Bees, and Binghamton Rumble Ponies. He pointed out that the Toronto Blue Jays already increased pay for players at the lower levels, and haven’t gone broke in the process.

“The Blue Jays have shown that the model works: they’re not bankrupt, they’re not in trouble, and every single one of those guys in the Blue Jays’ organization is extremely thankful and not as stressed as I was every two weeks waiting for my paycheck when the $400 ran out,” he said. “The model can work, it can work at every single level MLB has right now.”

While the Jays’ decision to raise pay was an admirable one, by doubling player salaries they raised poverty-level wages to, well, slightly higher poverty-level wages. This is the kind of thing that happens when the players don’t have a seat at the table, and precisely why MLB is advocating for higher minor league pay now: The league can do it on its own terms, while squeezing the owners of Minor League Baseball teams for more money and concessions.

“That’s the root of the problem,” says Broshuis. “They’re talking about cutting 1,000 minor-league jobs here, and you’re talking about doing it without giving the players a voice at all. The players need a voice at the bargaining table, they need to be represented, and it’s quite unfortunate that they don’t have a voice right now. There are other examples out there of minor league players with representation, like minor league hockey has a union, and in truth those players are treated much better than MiLB players.”

Broshuis isn’t exaggerating about how much better Pro Hockey Player Association players are treated than Minor League Baseball ones: the average salary of a PHPA member in the American Hockey League — the National Hockey League’s Triple-A equivalent — is around $118,000, while the minimum is $50,000. The per diem, too, is about three times what MiLB’s players receive to feed themselves. The NHL does not pull in the kind of revenue MLB does — it has never cracked $5 billion as a league — and yet it has managed to survive while treating players like human beings.

Players are also concerned about what cutting off local communities from affiliated ball will do to the growth of the game. Johnson pointed out that staying with host families who were “super engaged with the teams” was a highlight for him. Broshuis pointed out that teams like his first aren’t located anywhere near other pro ball. “If you deprive those fans of baseball, they just aren’t going to go to a game. That’s a lot of kids that aren’t exposed to baseball games, and if you want to grow the game, and want your fan base to be young, then you would think you would want to continue to provide opportunities for kids to go to games like they do at the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes,” he said.

A study suggests 4 million fans would be cut off from pro baseball if MLB’s plan goes through. The divide between baseball-haves and the have-nots would mirror a rural/urban divide in America, too.

“On the fan side, cutting down on the minor league levels hurts every party involved. It cuts down fan bases across the country, it concentrates baseball in major cities, which hurts the nationwide appeal of the game,” said the active anonymous player. “For many people, it means they won’t get to see an affiliated baseball game live. It makes no sense for MLB teams to cut down on farm systems, in both the short and long term.”

MLB doesn’t care about any of this, though. And that’s a shame for the players, the fans, and for the future of professional baseball in America, too.

But her work is grueling and at times dangerous. Sometimes she isn’t paid for the work she does. Even when she is paid what she’s owed, it isn’t much and comes without any benefits.

She doesn’t get any paid time off; once when she had to stay home to care for her sick son, one of her employers got extremely angry with her. “I have to work when their kids are sick and they give me their viruses, but I can’t stay home when they give them to mine,” she noted.

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She’s experienced discrimination for speaking Spanish and being Latina, she said, including a client who told her they weren’t happy her son went to the same high school as their son. Years ago, she was even the victim of sexual abuse. Bosses have undressed in front of her and insinuated that they wanted to have sex with her. “I actually had to stop working, which was a financial hardship,” she said. “That kind of abuse impacts all parts of your life, including with your family … We bring the heaviness of these abuses home.”

But there wasn’t much that she could do about it. Domestic workers were the only type of worker excluded from Philadelphia’s antidiscrimination protections. “No habia una ley,” she said; there was no law protecting her or offering her recourse.

That will soon change. Since the middle of 2018, when the Pennsylvania Domestic Workers Alliance was formed, del Carmen and other domestic workers in her city have had one goal: Establishing a domestic workers bill of rights to include them in basic labor protections and even grant them powerful new ones. On October 31, that goal was achieved when the Philadelphia city council unanimously passed a bill establishing rights for the city’s 16,000 housekeepers and caregivers. It’s the 10^th such law in the country, joining those in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, Oregon, and Seattle.

Philadelphia’s bill of rights does three key things. First, it makes sure domestic workers are included in basic labor standards such as protection from racial, gender, age, national origin, and language discrimination, as well as the right to meal and rest breaks. It also goes above that floor to require that domestic workers be given legally binding written contracts in both English and their preferred language outlining job responsibilities, hours, and payment schedules. Employers also have to give domestic workers at least two weeks’ notice of termination, protect their privacy, and provide a notice of their rights.

But the third facet is the most radical: The city will create the country’s first-ever portable paid time off benefit system. The bill establishes a right to get paid time off for all workers, no matter how many employers they have. With that in place, it mirrors the city’s existing paid sick leave ordinance, which grants workers an hour of paid time off for every 40 they work.

Now, when a domestic worker puts in 40 hours across all of her jobs, she’ll be due an hour of paid time off, funded by prorated payments from each of her employers into a central benefit bank. Employers will have to contribute paid time off for any domestic workers they hire for five or more hours a month. The benefit bank will still be hers to claim even if she changes clients later on.The bank will be coordinated not by domestic workers themselves or even their employers, but through technology developed by a third-party vendor. The employers “don’t need to be talking to each other, and the worker doesn’t need to be coordinating between them either,” explained Nicole Kligerman, director of the Pennsylvania Domestic Workers Alliance.

“The 20^th century social safety net system is based on one person and one employer,” Kligerman noted. But many people now work in arrangements that don’t fit into that mold – working in the so-called “gig economy” or classified (and misclassified) as independent contractors –  which means they’re denied standard workplace benefits. Domestic workers hope their portable paid time off system can offer a new alternative.

Domestic workers are “the original gig economy workers,” Kligerman said, and they “can and always have led the way” on labor reform. But such a system could easily be imagined for other workers with more than one employer. “The implications are obviously really big,” she said. Ride share drivers, for example, are already looking into it. “We’re excited to be a guinea pig.”

Del Carmen was involved in lobbying for and crafting the bill of rights. “At times it was really difficult, some of [the council members] even ran away from us,” she said. But they kept showing up, week after week. “We fought as a team until we won.”

The feeling when the bill passed unanimously, including yes votes from the three Republicans on the city council? “Maravilloso,” she said. All of the provisions she and other domestic workers were fighting for made it into the final bill. “It really is complete,” she said. “And now other states can copy us.”

Had the bill of rights been in place 25 years ago, “my life would have been much easier,” del Carmen said. “I wouldn’t have shed so many tears for all of the things that happened to me.”

Del Carmen has already seen the impact of the newly passed bill of rights. All of her clients are working on creating a written contract. “I told them if I don’t sign a contract, I’m not going to work for them anymore,” she said.

She’s also very excited about finally getting some paid time off from work. “I’ve never had it,” she noted. “I’m just going to be at home enjoying my house. I’ve never been able to do that.”

Some parents and members of the State Board of Education have expressed concerns about how the process puts up barriers for low-income families, families with limited transportation, and immigrant families that are already on high alert under the Trump administration.

In a Twitter thread, Julie Lawson, a parent of a third grader in the district and PTA president of her son’s school, described roadblocks in the volunteer clearance process. The TB test costs $60 and is not covered by insurance. The single location that offers fingerprinting services for the district is located downtown and is only open during normal business hours, when working parents may have to take time off to go. “All of this is a major access barrier for a parent who wants to chaperone their kid’s field trip,” she said.

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A traditional TB test takes 48 hours and requires two separate visits — one to take the test and the other to have results read. Lawson has spent a lot of time reminding parents of the cost, where to go, and how to coordinate and communicate with health care providers — some of whom don’t want to give the test to their patients without risk factors present.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends TB screening for those who have been in close contact with TB, those who have traveled to countries with a high prevalence of the disease, people who live or work in high risk settings, health care workers, and children who have been exposed to adults with TB. According to the CDC website, “TB tests are generally not needed for people with a low risk of infection with TB bacteria.”

So, why does DCPS require it for volunteers? Jessica Sutter, a member of the State Board of Education, who has fielded concerns from parents about the policy, and who asked the district directly, says she’s still unsure. She says the district told her that they were operating on a Department of Health directive that required proof of a negative TB test of all DCPS employees, volunteers, and contractors.

Further, Sutter says, the district told her that free TB tests were going to be provided at the Tuberculosis and Chest Clinic, a clinic that provides diagnostic and medical management of persons who have been diagnosed with or are suspected of having TB. But after visiting their website, which states that they do not perform routine TB screening, such as those for job or school admission, Sutter says that does not appear to be the case.

“At DC Public Schools (DCPS), the safety and security of our students is our top priority. Fingerprint-based FBI background checks are required by law, and as of this time, proof of a negative Tuberculosis (TB) test is required of all DCPS employees, volunteers, and contractors per guidance from the DC Department of Health,” said DCPS in a statement. “Balancing the safety, health and security of our students with the need to create a welcoming environment for all families in our school buildings as partners in their child’s success is critically important. DCPS is reviewing the TB and fingerprinting policy for parent volunteers to seek out opportunities to provide more flexibility and partnership with family members whenever possible.”

Different school districts around the country have different approaches to volunteer clearance. Some districts do require all of the same components as DCPS, but they also offer vouchers for free testing at local clinics or a tiered process, where the clearance requirements are commensurate with the level of involvement. Many districts require only a background check or a background check and fingerprinting.

School districts need a clear understanding of who is volunteering, of course, but without putting up barriers to family engagement. While Becky Reina, founding chair of the Ward 1 Education Council, a volunteer organization that advocates for public schools in the ward, describes the fingerprinting as easy, with a short wait, she’s quick to acknowledge that entering a government building that requires signing in with a government issued ID is something that could cause anxiety for some parents. “Given the hostile immigration environment parents are living with under the Trump administration, no amount of reassurance will satisfy much of D.C.’s immigrant community,” she said.

Emily Gasoi, a State Board of Education member, representing families in Ward 1, said the fingerprinting piece is driving a lot of the fear among some families. She first became aware of parental concerns about the DCPS policy through school and PTO meeting visits, where she repeatedly heard from constituents that the process, while onerous for everyone, presented a particular deterrent for families with insecure immigration statuses and those unable to afford the costs associated with the process.

“This is more than an inconvenience, it’s an equity issue,” said Gasoi. While Gasoi understands the need for a clearance process that keeps students safe, she suggests there could be more equitable ways of clearing volunteers and that the district consider different policies for different levels of volunteers.

For her part, Lawson spent dozens of hours coordinating with a handful of nearby schools to have a fingerprinting unit stationed in the schools’ neighborhood for a day. In order for the district to send the unit, though, a minimum number of applicants who had already completed the online background check and TB test had to sign up.

In the end, only 16 applicants out of 40 who initiated the process completed fingerprinting. While some parents said they completed the fingerprinting on their own time, Lawson said that for most, she couldn’t confirm an appointment because she never received a TB result.

The benefits of having a child’s primary caregiver involved at their school are numerous. Research shows family engagement results in improved student achievement, reduced absenteeism, and better grades, test scores, and behavior. Sutter says, “We absolutely want every child in the care of our schools to be kept safe, but whose responsibility is that, financially? And how do we make this accessible rather than burdensome in such a way that it will discourage especially low-income families from participating?”

This piece has been updated to add a statement from DCPS.

These numbers are staggering. When you consider the impact of childhood trauma — which tells us that kids who experience or witness abuse are more likely to develop a slew of physical and mental illnesses as adults — those numbers are infuriating. And baffling. Domestic violence can be hard to escape, especially for those who have been in the mire of it for years, but once kids become involved, shouldn’t that be enough motivation to leave?

It’s this question, and the assumed answer, which drives “failure to protect” laws in child welfare programs across the United States. Essentially, failure to protect laws charge a parent with not doing enough to shield their child from witnessing or experiencing abuse. Virtually every state pursues some form of failure to protect charges within the civil child welfare system. These laws are aimed at the non-abusive parent living in an abusive household. Usually, the parent has been subject to intimate partner violence. But the laws can also be used in households in which the child is the victim of one parent but not the other.

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While these laws were written with the intention of penalizing a parent who neglects the safety and/or well-being of their children, they all too often make unsafe environments even less safe by penalizing non-abusive parents living in an abusive household, and can become the basis for temporarily or permanently removing children from the home. They rarely leave room to consider the complexities of intimate partner violence, instead relying on assumptions and stereotypes that are incapable of capturing the nuanced reality of family bonds.

In January of 1999, Sharwline Nicholson decided to end her relationship with the father of her infant daughter. He lived in South Carolina, and had been crossing state lines each month to visit Nicholson and their daughter in New York. But when she ended the relationship, he responded with violence.

She called 911 and made arrangements with a friend for the care of her two children while she stayed overnight at the hospital. The next day, Nicholson was notified by the New York Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) that both of her children had been temporarily removed from her care on the basis that she had failed to protect them from witnessing the violence that had been inflicted upon her by her former partner. At the time, this was considered a form of neglect.

Nicholson would eventually win back custody of her children, but would be placed on a child maltreatment registry. This action kickstarted a lawsuit that would eventually lead the New York Court of Appeals to rule in 2004 that a parent’s inability to prevent a child from witnessing abuse could not be a sole factor for removing a child. Child welfare reform activists celebrated the decision.

“What Nicholson actually did was not just to change the attitude toward victims of domestic violence,” said David Lansner, a civil rights and family law attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the Nicholson case. “Neglect had to be shown as a serious matter; you had to show that … there was imminent danger of serious harm and not just the possibility of harm. … [Child services] and the court had to balance the harm that would result from removal against the risk of leaving the child at home, so you couldn’t just ‘take the safer course’ because removal was harmful to kids and shouldn’t be done unless it was really necessary.”

Unfortunately, New York is relatively unique in that respect; other states, lacking a case like Nicholson, still remove children for the possibility of harm that caseworkers and judges interpret by a parent’s “failure to protect” her children from being in a household where abuse takes place.

Erin Miles-Cloud, who formerly worked as a parent attorney in New York and is currently one of the co-founders of the advocacy group Movement for Family Power, explained the ways in which some of the better-resourced, urban systems can still fail families, even today. “Because New York has this middle ground of family shelters, ACS sees it as an unreasonable option to stay in a home where intimate partner violence is occurring,” she said.

What many people don’t realize is that — in New York City — parents who access a shelter as the result of domestic abuse will automatically be moved to a different borough, meaning a change in school district for their children, not to mention the loss of access to support networks, such as friends and family or trusted child care, lack of which can easily become another maltreatment charge. There’s also no guarantee as to what type of housing the family will receive or for how long. In some cases this could mean dormitory-style living for a year or longer, with no access to even a personal refrigerator.

But even the most comfortable, “home-like” shelters remain government-funded institutions — which means they come with restrictive rules, such as nightly curfews and rigid limits on how many days a parent can be away from the shelter, even to visit family. They are also a source of constant surveillance for the families housed inside. Miles-Clouds calls shelters and hospitals among the “largest offenders” when it comes to calling in new maltreatment reports, and notes that New York ACS often uses shelters as “second or third eyes on a family” when arguing a related case in court.

Because child welfare agencies self-report their data, and failure to protect  is not an independent maltreatment category in itself (these cases typically fall under the “neglect” umbrella), it is difficult to know exactly how many non-abusive parents end up being investigated because they were victims of abuse who sought help, or because their children reported being harmed by someone else in the household. But we do know that most states do not have even the mild protections enjoyed by families in New York. That means a child can be removed if the state convinces a judge they have been or will likely be psychologically harmed by witnessing the abuse.

Some states will also pursue criminal charges against victims of intimate partner violence who have children in the home. In six states – Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina and West Virginia – non-offending parents face potential life sentences for failure to protect charges, and in Texas the maximum penalty is 99 years. Last year, the Associated Press reported on the case of Tondalao Hall, a mother whose boyfriend was sentenced to two-years time served (meaning he had already completed his jail time while waiting to be sentenced) for beating her children, including a three-month-old infant. Hall, who was never accused of harming her kids, is currently serving 30 years in prison for not calling the authorities on her boyfriend.

Latagia Copeland-Tyronce, a parental rights advocate and the founder/executive director of the National African American Families First and Preservation Association who spoke to TalkPoverty about her experience, knows first-hand how devastating it can be to be accused of not protecting children from another person’s abuse. She first faced the traumatic confusion of a failure to protect charge in Toledo, Ohio, in 2013.

She was 26 years old and had been involved in an abusive relationship for 10 years. What she did not know, however, was that her daughters’ father was also sexually abusing her three eldest girls. When one of Copeland-Tyronce’s daughters finally disclosed the abuse to her sister, she promptly contacted child services.

Copeland-Tyronce immediately left her children’s father. She also cooperated with the criminal case that would ultimately land him a 30-year prison sentence. But this was not enough for Lucas County child protective services. They claimed she had known about the abuse and had failed to protect her children both from witnessing the violence perpetrated against her, and from the sexual abuse which they had experienced.

“My children never said that I knew anything or that I was involved in the abuse and I was never charged with a crime related to the case,” countered Copeland-Tyronce.

Less than a year after the initial removal, her parental rights were terminated and all six of her daughters were adopted to other families. When she gave birth to a son in 2014, by a different father and with stable housing in place, he was also removed from her custody.

“Because I had a [termination of parental rights] TPR, failure to protect, with my daughters. No other reason,” she said. At the time, the first TPR was still under appeal.

Candis Cassioppi, a mother based in Athens, Georgia, had her youngest child removed from her in the hospital after giving birth, she told TalkPoverty. The removal was prompted by an incident of assault by her child’s father perpetrated against her during her pregnancy.

Although she initially called the police and sought medical attention — causing those injuries to become part of her medical record — she ultimately declined to press charges or testify against her abuser. After her son’s birth, this incident became a reason to claim she was failing to protect her children from harm. Now, she is court-ordered to participate in a slew of activities, including domestic violence groups and parenting classes, in the hopes of regaining custody of her infant.

Like mandated reporting laws, which require certain professionals and institutions to report suspected child maltreatment, failure to protect laws and policies are in place, purportedly, to ensure that child maltreatment does not go unreported. “If a child dies in the home because there was a batterer who was so dangerous that the victim-partner couldn’t protect [the kids] … we’re still liable to make sure that the child stays safe,” explained Mary Nichols, a now-retired administrator at Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), to the California Health Report in 2015.

But she also admitted in the same article that the laws are confusingly vague: “If you look up California Welfare and Institutions Code 300 and just read the definitions of ‘failure to protect,’ you can see how broad they are … [If] somebody would like to craft legislation to make it more workable, in terms of protections for domestic violence [victims], that would be great. It’s a pretty raw tool that we have.”

As the cases detailed in this article demonstrate, the reality of domestic abuse is far too complex to address with vague, generalized laws. Instead of protecting families, these blanket laws mean that parents who experience domestic violence may end up burdened by a fear of reprisal for reporting that violence. Take Cassioppi’s case, for example. Her baby was born healthy; had she not called the police and sought medical attention after being assaulted during her pregnancy, she likely would have walked out of the hospital with her newborn in arms. And Copeland-Tyronce now asserts that if she were to ever encounter intimate partner violence again, she would “not at all” feel safe calling the police for help.

Lansner said implementation and caseworker attitudes are major problems with the way domestic violence cases are handled within the child welfare system. “The caseworkers just don’t get it,” he said, adding, “the caseworker might go to the home, find the guy there in violation of a protection order and then remove the children instead of calling the police and having him arrested, which is what [the caseworker] should do.”

Parents who experience intimate partner violence also face a number of other complexities that caseworkers and judges don’t always take into consideration when charging these parents as culpable for traumatizing their kids by proxy. For example, one study found that 99 percent of domestic violence survivors had also been subject to economic abuse, a form of financial control that can leave them stranded without the resources necessary to secure independent housing or provide for their children’s basic needs. Because lack of appropriate shelter, clothing, and food also fall under the child services maltreatment category of “neglect,” this leaves many non-abusive partners trapped between the crosshairs of a failure to protect and a failure to provide charge. Either way, they’re ending up on the maltreatment registry for neglect.

By necessitating that caseworkers identify concrete harm toward a child before removing her from the home, New York has found a way to slightly balance a system designed to punish parents simply for being unfortunate enough to experience abuse. Although their system is far from perfect — as Miles-Cloud noted, it funnels parents into a less-than-ideal shelter system, and the law still does not address the caseworker bias that concerned Lansner — it provides a template which other states could use to begin the process of clarifying these laws.

Ideally, however, survivors of domestic violence should be met with compassion and provided with services that help their families heal and thrive intact. It seems, instead, that as long as failure to protect charges exist, the child welfare system will continue to promote a culture of secrecy surrounding intimate partner violence, thus validating the very abuse it claims to condemn.

“I was homeless, looking for a place to live, and trying to get into a drug treatment program,” Gomez told TalkPoverty. “I couldn’t afford to enroll at a volunteer center and do my hours.” Her struggle to fulfill the terms led her down a rabbit hole of unsympathetic judges, sexual harassment, and dangerous working conditions.

Several recent high-profile cases have put court-ordered community service like that Lopez experienced into the headlines. So has a University of California, Los Angeles study that took a close look at how community service is used in LA County, and the wildly disparate outcomes within the county’s court-ordered community service framework. Limited research on this subject is in circulation, but the information from Los Angeles suggests tracking and quantifying data around community service nationwide might yield important insights into a little-researched aspect of the legal system. As with other elements of the criminal legal system, class and race heavily mediate the kind of service people engage in and how many hours they are ordered to complete.

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The researchers found significant racial disparities, with Latinx and Black people being more likely to serve community service as a result of disparities in citations, arrests, and charging decisions. For example, in traffic cases that resulted in community service, which involve infractions like speeding and failing to stop, 81 percent of workers were Latinx, out of proportion with LA’s roughly 49 percent Latinx population, and 8 percent were Black.

They also found a high percentage of people who could not afford attorneys (78 percent) amongst those who performed community service, while 16 percent had limited English proficiency and needed translators in court. This paints a profile of a predominantly low-income population — 89 percent of those serving community service in the cohort they studied were low-income — of color, with substantial numbers of immigrants.

Around 100,000 people are sentenced to community service in LA County every year, serving the equivalent of 4,900 full-time, paid civilian jobs and 1,800 government jobs. The number of hours of labor this represents, and the significant cost savings for community service sites, is tremendous. Noah Zatz, a UCLA law professor and lead author, told TalkPoverty, “We were startled to see just how high the hours were for many people, people getting hundreds or even thousands of hours.”

The report argues this is a form of extractive labor that stacks on to existing “poverty penalties” in the criminal legal system, in addition to driving inequalities on work sites, where people completing community service work side-by-side with paid parties in everything from municipal animal shelters to for-profit nursing homes, but without the same benefits, protections, and wages.

Lopez recalled that at one placement, she was ordered to engage in unsafe activities like cleaning bathrooms with a mixture of bleach and ammonia. At another, she said she was forced to mop on her hands and knees in a kitchen surrounded by men who stared at her, but she had to “swallow that pill and push through” after the supervisor threatened to “throw out all my hours.”

“In addition to the direct displacement dynamic,” noted Zatz, referring to paid workers who might lose out on roles filled by community service, “the other dynamic at play is that these assignments function as a form of subsidy to nonprofits.” Government agencies also experience big savings through community service; over half of the cases the researchers looked at involved CalTrans, the state’s highway construction and maintenance agency.

Community service is sometimes represented to members of the public as a compassionate alternative to jail time and a way to “work off” court-imposed debts. In fact, it can create significant hardships. People may struggle to complete high numbers of hours on top of their paid jobs and other obligations, such as school and child care. When Lopez struggled to complete her service and asked for help, judges were unsympathetic; it ultimately took the help of an attorney with A New Way of Life, an advocacy organization that works with women leaving prison, to get the court to work with her. The court agreed to accept volunteer hours she served at organizations not on its officially sanctioned list, acknowledging her work with community advocacy organizations.

The researchers noted that disability can also be a factor; the study cites one disabled person who was sentenced to 60 hours of work they were unable to perform and ended up with 180 hours of “light” service. Zatz notes that people receive more credit for physically demanding work, which creates inherent inequalities for disabled people.

And some still owe court-imposed fines and fees that can’t be worked off by laboring on construction crews or organizing files at the sheriff’s office, with 86 percent of those involved in criminal cases making payments that averaged $323 on top of their service. That’s, of course, after they’ve paid the fee for placement at a community service work site recognized by the court.

Many members of the public may not be aware of the close ties between court-ordered community service and the mounting crisis of court fines and fees. Nearly every state has seen steep increases, many of which are established in rigid fee schedules that judges can’t change. In many cases, courts are offering community service as a way to “pay off” the very fines the court has imposed, though they could conduct ability-to-pay assessments to determine whether those fines are realistic. For some, the only way to resolve these debts is to work, providing free labor to participating sites.

The reliance upon free labor is troubling for the researchers. Whether people are engaged in community labor, which includes a physically demanding element like working on a road crew, or community service, like volunteering at a thrift store, they are treated as a cheap and disposable resource. Not only are they not paid for their time, they’re not provided with meaningful skills and a path to advancement, with very few people hired on by the agencies and organizations they work for. These organizations can also be choosy, indicating that they won’t work with people convicted of certain kinds of crimes, which makes it harder for them to complete court-ordered community service.

At a time when labor organizing is in resurgence, community service represents a largely unexplored aspect of the labor movement. Some participants in community service programs are working alongside union members who have fought for robust contracts that include fair pay and benefits as well as protected working conditions. Community service workers don’t benefit from those contracts and are in fact sometimes forced to sign waivers explicitly identifying them as volunteers and giving up certain workplace rights and protections.

Reforming court fines and fees to address the modern-day debtor’s prisons and coercive labor conditions across the United States is critical, as is coming up with alternatives to incarceration that do not involve exploitation. Community service as it exists now could also be reformed; people could be provided with job training, meaningful pay, and other supports to turn a court-ordered job into economic opportunity, something people like Lopez, who’s been sober three years and is currently pursuing a college education, could have benefited from.

Until then, members of the public may want to look twice at community service’s role in their neighborhoods.

That year, the city applied for a $1.34 million U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant that would have allowed the city to hire more health department staff focused on assisting the city’s ongoing efforts in preventing childhood lead poisoning. The grant would have funded city officials to test more young children for lead poisoning and collect better data that would allow them to identify the most at-risk kids.

Just months after applying, the city was denied. But the reason had nothing to do with public health. As the CDC explained, the 2010 U.S. Census counted Detroit’s population at 713,777, which was shy of the grant’s 750,000 minimum population requirement. The CDC said in a statement that it does not advance grant applications that don’t meet eligibility criteria requirements for further review.

The lost opportunity underscores the importance of having an accurate count of all people living in the United States during the constitutionally-mandated decennial Census. The count factors into how billions of federal dollars are distributed throughout the country. The number of people in your city can determine eligibility for resources needed to address lead, fix up roads, or improve schools.

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It is unclear whether Detroit’s 2010 population was undercounted by exactly 36,223 people, the number of residents by which the city fell short of the lead prevention grant’s threshold. But there is a lot of evidence that Detroit’s Census population in 2010 was less than the number of people actually living in the city, and it’s probable that it would have reached 750,000 with a more accurate count. Undercounts are typical for large cities with a large number of hard-to-count populations such as renters or immigrants.

In Detroit, only 64 percent of households responded to the Census, according to Victoria Kovari, the executive director of the city’s 2020 Census campaign. In total, about 220,000 people did not send in the forms. The Census Bureau was able to track down information about some of those households after workers spoke to residents at their doors, as well as landlords, neighbors, or even the mailman.

But, according to the Census Bureau, 26,585 people were never counted, and instead represented an estimated number of people living in uncounted units, which the federal agency calculated based on a formula that includes comparable household sizes for the specific neighborhood. It is likely that the Census Bureau was off on its estimates and that the actual number was higher.

The populations in Detroit that the Census was unable to collect any information for and forced to guess about include people living in gated communities or renters such as young people and small, low-income families living in multifamily apartment buildings, Kovari said.

Kovari said it was too tough to tell whether there was an undercount, but based on the high number of people that the Census Bureau had to make a guess about, the count was likely not accurate. “It’s clear that renters in multi-family housing were not counted,” Kovari said. “I would go as far as to say we did not get an accurate count in those areas.”

For a city like Detroit, which filed for municipal bankruptcy just six years ago, those federal funds that were denied because of a likely undercount could have been critical, said Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies, who studies lead poisoning in Michigan.

While childhood lead poisoning in Detroit has improved in recent years, its rates still surpass those in nearby Flint. In 2016, city officials found that 8.8 percent of tested kids under the age of six were positive for lead poisoning, compared to 1.8 percent of kids in Genesee County, which encompasses Flint, according to the Detroit News. The elevated levels were higher in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, including one zip code that encompasses the Atkinson Avenue Historic District and Yates Park, in which 22 percent of 686 kids tested positive.

A lot of the city’s childhood lead poisoning problems stem from aging infrastructure that makes the water undrinkable and the city’s aging housing stock, often located in poorer neighborhoods, with lead paint-covered interior and exterior walls. Children in those neighborhoods are exposed to chippings and dust that come from the walls and breathe in exposed lead after nearby homes are demolished without following environmental remediation standards.

“$1.3 million would go a long way for [city officials] to get to the houses, to measure the blood levels in those houses and to provide case management and other services to those families. They simply lose that through this process,” Thompson said. “Detroit has some of the highest percentages of children with lead poisoning of any major city in the country so they really do need the support.”

Other cities likely experienced similar lost opportunities. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services relies on population data when distributing nearly $3 billion each year in funding and reimbursements of five of its grant programs, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a foster care program, an adoption assistance program, and a child care and development fund program, a 2018 report from George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy found.

Those researchers identified 37 states that may have lost out on millions of dollars in federal funding in fiscal year 2015 if their populations were undercounted by 1 percent during the 2010 Census. This includes Texas by $291.9 million, Pennsylvania by $221.7 million, Florida by $177.8 million, Ohio by $139 million, Illinois by $122.2 million, and Michigan by $94.2 million.

In most cases, it is impossible to tell which communities may have lost out on federal funds because of a Census undercount due to the fact that there are many overlapping programs with different complex funding formulas that take into account statistics beyond population size, such as the age and income of an area, according to another recent report from George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy.

But what is clear is that undercounts do occur throughout the United States, disproportionately impacting the black population.

According to the Census Bureau’s own 2014 analysis, nearly 1 million children — 4.6 percent of all kids under the age of five in the U.S. — were not represented in the 2010 count. Children who are Latinx or black were undercounted at higher rates than white children. Such undercounts are due to children who have complex living situations, such as splitting time living between parents who do not live together, or who come from families that are considered hard-to-count, such as those who live in high-poverty neighborhoods or rental housing, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.

“The undercount of children under age five in the decennial census, and in surveys like the American Community Survey (ACS), is real and growing,” the 2014 Census Bureau report read. “This is not a new problem and has been present in decennial censuses for many decades. The differential undercount of this population across geography and demographics makes this a larger problem for some racial and ethnic groups and some parts of the country.”

It is reasonable to conclude that Detroit’s undercount was larger than the national average. The city’s population of children under five is higher than the national average and, according to research conducted by the City University of New York, several of its neighborhoods are considered among the hardest to count in the country.

In fact, the city’s population meets the very definition of hard-to-count: Areas in which less than 73 percent of its residents responded to the bureau’s first attempt to reach them.

Hard-to-count communities often include young children, racial and ethnic minorities, non-English speakers, low-income people, people who are disabled, people who are experiencing homelessness, and people who do not live in traditional housing, according to Ron Jarmin, deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Detroit has a poverty rate of 37.9 percent, 85 percent of its population are considered ethnic minorities, more than 10 percent of its population uses a language other than English at home, and 20 percent of its population is disabled, according to Census Bureau data.

To complicate matters, one in five Detroiters is evicted each year, a problem which, according to Pulitzer Prize winning author Matthew Desmond, disproportionately impacts black women, which would also lead to an undercount.

Lastly, the 2008 economic recession, which crashed the city’s economy, may have also played a part, according to Kurt Metzger, a demographer and Michigan mayor who started the local data organization, Data Driven Detroit. In 2010, city leaders, he said, were trying to address Detroit’s high unemployment rate, foreclosure crisis, and plummeting housing values as residents were underwater on mortgages and land contracts, so they were not thinking about the Census.

Metzger expected an undercount, but the end result was much worse than he anticipated, he said.

“While I have no exact undercount in mind, I was floored when I heard the 2010 count. I knew there was going to be a significant pop loss even without an undercount, but was expecting something closer to 775,000,” Metzger said in an email.

“The undercount was the reason for not qualifying for the grant. Many Detroiters had no interest in being counted and the city never worked to convince them otherwise,” he added.

The Trump administration is going to make this bad situation worse. It tried to include a citizenship question in the Census, a move that would have caused an undercount of at least 9 million people, since non-citizens and households or families with non-citizen members would fear retribution from the government if they answered. The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could not include the question unless it changed its justification for adding it, which they claimed was to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

The Trump administration shortly after dropped the question, but is still providing an inadequate supply of resources needed to ensure an accurate count. The NAACP filed a lawsuit last year against the Census Bureau and the Trump administration, claiming that their lack of preparedness for the 2020 Census violated the U.S. Constitution, since the government is required to conduct a full head count of everyone living in the country.

The civil rights organization claimed the Census Bureau was under-funded and under-prepared, hiring fewer people to knock on doors and count people that did not self-respond, and opening half the number of field offices throughout the country. Those cuts are being made while the Census Bureau rolls out, for the first time, an Internet-based survey response system.

There are widespread cybersecurity concerns related to allowing people to respond to the survey digitally, and such techniques could affect responses from communities with limited Internet access, which are often areas with a high population of people of color who are considered hard-to-count.

The Census Bureau in a statement defended its 2020 count efforts. According to the bureau, the agency is planning the most robust marketing and outreach plan in the agency’s history: It will spend $500 million on marketing, up from $376 million in 2010, advertise in “many different languages,” and is designing a “robust” outreach plan and hiring locally to engage with communities and reach hard-to-count populations.

The bureau also said that households in areas where Internet is unreliable will receive a paper questionnaire on the first mailing and all households that do not respond, regardless of the area, will receive a paper questionnaire on the fourth mailing. It added that people can respond in 12 different languages other than English over the phone or through the Internet, and enumerators will have 59 different non-English language guides among other ways of reaching out to non-English speakers.

But such threats to the accuracy of the count are real, according to Kelly Percival, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program.

“The 2020 Census is facing a lot of threats. A lot we have seen in past Censuses and a lot is unique for 2020,” said Percival.

“These are having a snowball effect and they could lead to an undercount in certain communities,” Percival added. “This will translate into less political power and less funding for those that need it… I think it’s an attempt to politicize the census which is not what the census is about.”

A relatively small lead prevention grant can go a long way and help a lot of children. According to Detroit officials, the 2017 grant would have enabled the city to increase the number of children under six years old who are tested for lead by 20 percent, allowed the city to collect better data so it could identify higher-risk populations, improved lead exposure outreach and education for those higher-risk populations, and better identified kids who have been exposed so they could be connected with services. It would have also provided new training for public health professionals, the lead prevention workforce, and other stakeholders who are on the front lines of the fight.

Ask the city, though, and losing out on the grant was no big deal. While, “Federal dollars will certainly assist the Department in coordinating lead related activities,” the city is doing just fine addressing the problem without it, according to city spokesperson Tamekia Nixon.

“After we didn’t receive the 2017 grant, the Detroit Health Department pursued other funding streams to allow us to provide the same scope of service intended in the grant, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree. However, at this time we are not able to quantify the exact difference in numbers,” Nixon wrote in a statement.

Last week, the city received a $9.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to assess 120 housing units and address lead hazards in 450 homes throughout the city for low-income families with young children, among other functions.

However, the primary function of the grant is for lead abatement, not surveillance of lead poisoning, like the CDC grant would have provided, and it will not solve the issue, said Thompson. Federal funds for such prevention efforts is crucial, he said.

“It’s really hard for the Health Department to get to even a fraction of the houses and really work with the families and they lost support to do that,” Thompson said.

Members of Detroit’s Health Department spoke to TalkPoverty on background but referred questions to the city’s communications department before going on the record. The city’s communications department gave TalkPoverty basic information about its lead program after more than a week of requests, but gave vague answers about whether losing out on the CDC funds hurt the city’s lead prevention efforts in any way. At times, Nixon told TalkPoverty to “file a FOIA” (Freedom of Information Act request) for such information.

It is unclear why the city downplayed the importance of missing out on the federal grant. However, after being denied the CDC grant, the city’s former Health Department Executive Director, Joneigh Khaldun, in a July 10, 2017 appeal of the federal agency’s decision, characterized the federal funds as a “severe need.”

“Addressing lead exposure remains a critical need given the history of Detroit as a large industrial community and the subsequent ubiquity and permeation of lead in our neighborhoods,” Khaldun said.

As American cities like Detroit scrap for federal funding to address very important issues facing their communities and their residents, an accurate count in 2020 is crucial.

But for their son’s first few years of school, when Custen was working in Draper, Utah, attending the annual Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings that laid out this plan could have threatened their job. To participate in meetings 40 miles away, “I would need to use PTO, and there would need to be space available in the schedule for me to leave,” they explained. “If someone else had already claimed time off that day before I had the chance to, then I wouldn’t be able to take the time off myself without receiving a strike for an absence, which would put my job security at risk.”

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Custen’s son receives his services in part through IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), which serves around 14 percent of public school students. IDEA guarantees a right to an IEP, which includes an evaluation of a student’s educational abilities and needs and provides a detailed plan for any support services, specialized instruction, or accommodations they may need due to a disability. These accommodations may include alternative assignments, permission to record a spoken lecture, large print textbooks, extended testing times, assistance with organizing a desk space, or access to speech-to-text software, among many others.

Parents can be crucial partners when it comes to selecting accommodations in an IEP, but Custen’s job was making it impossible to get a seat at the planning table. Meanwhile, Custen’s ex’s schedule allowed him to regularly attend — a disparity that led to family stress and communication gaps around their son’s education plan. Their son’s behavior was different when he was around his father than when he was around Custen, for example, in part because their ex struggled to accept that their son was neuroatypical.

“He would often go into meetings with unrealistically rose-tinted lenses on our son’s behavior and progress,” Custen explained. “He would skew his own perception of our son’s capabilities and milestones. For instance, he would do 90 percent of the work in getting him dressed while our son would do 10 percent of it (such as pulling up pants or sticking arms through sleeves once his shirt was already pulled on for him) and claim that our son was capable of dressing himself.” This led to confusion over what kind of assistance their son would actually need at school.

Custen’s frequent absences meant the services their son received were selected based solely on his behavior around his dad. “The fact that I was not present at these meetings meant that they were taking him for his word on our son’s at-home behavior,” Custen shared. In turn, “they would have to hear from me later and go through the process of editing notes and plans for the IEP. I can’t imagine that it was easy or comfortable for the team helping our son to be caught in the middle of such a back-and-forth between [me and] my ex either.”

Some parent advocates believe problems like Custen’s could be partly alleviated by a recent announcement from the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). The agency responded to a parent whose employer denied their request to take intermittent Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave to attend IEP meetings. The agency clarified that employees whose children have “serious health conditions” (those for which a patient receives either inpatient care or continuing care from a medical provider) requiring IEPs are able to take time off under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to attend IEP meetings without losing their job or continued health insurance coverage.  FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 workweeks of leave in a 12-month period for serious health conditions or to care for family members.

According to the decision, parents can use FMLA leave to attend IEP meetings because they involve medical decisions, discussions of children’s health and well-being with respect to those decisions, and the provision of proper physical and psychological care. Notably, the DOL also said a child’s doctor doesn’t have to be present in order for a parent to use FMLA time to attend their IEP meeting.

Amanda Morin, an education writer/author, parent advocate, and former teacher, knows many parents simply won’t be able to take advantage of the clarified policy, especially if they are low-income. Seasonally, intermittently, or self-employed parents are rarely eligible for FMLA, which is restricted to private employers with 50 or more employees working for them within 75 miles of a central worksite. Employees are only eligible if they’ve worked for at least 1,250 hours across the 12 months prior to the leave and have worked for their current eligible employer for a full year.

“Even parents who do have FMLA may not always be able to afford the time off if it will have to be unpaid,” she explained. Overall, around 59 percent of U.S. workers were covered by FMLA as of 2012. That number may have shifted downward since then due to the influx of freelance positions and the rise of the gig economy.

In many ways, this decision looks like a major move towards greater equity in education. Family members work schedules are often intimately connected to their children’s IEP meetings. For researcher, writer, and former teacher Mireya Vela, IEPs have always been a part of her life — and her job choices. Vela’s son, now 25, began his IEP at four years old after his speech delays and other developmental issues became apparent.

Vela tailored her work schedule, and even her choice of career, around her son’s educational and medical needs. “From the time my son was six to the time he graduated high school, I only worked part time. I couldn’t work longer than that,” Vela said. “I often had 2-3 jobs at the same time. But all my jobs worked around my need to drop everything and run to the school.” What’s more, Vela consistently advocated for meetings longer than the customary school-requested 45 minutes, and attended them flanked by a support team of clinicians and advocates — which often meant some rescheduling.

A parent’s ability to take FMLA time off for an IEP meeting will also depend on their child’s exact diagnosis and necessary support services. Morin said “it may also be challenging for parents of kids who don’t have a medical diagnosis, but have an IEP, because getting documentation of the need for leave isn’t as clear-cut.” There might be cases where a child is in clear need of services to help them with a disability or developmental delay, for example, but their family is uninsured or underinsured or can’t afford to see a high-level specialist. In other cases, a student might have to go through an extended period of testing or medical assessment before they receive a final medical diagnosis. Without a documented specific diagnosis, a parent may struggle to prove their eligibility for FMLA leave.

Still, Morin calls the ability to use FMLA intermittently for IEP meetings “a step in the right direction,” especially because not all eligible parents may have known that they could use time off for this purpose. “I’m pleased that it shines a light on the fact that an IEP meeting is tied into a child’s health and well-being,” she said. “I think, for parents who have not been able to leave work to get to meetings, knowing this is available, and feeling confident enough to bring it to an HR department to use the new policy, has the potential to be really empowering and increase family-school engagement.”

An equal, engaged dynamic between schools and families is critical, says Morin, because parents often understand their children more intimately. Parents also have more knowledge about how a student might learn or interact in different settings, which could impact the frequency or types of services they may need.

The DOL’s recent announcement marks a potential step forward in terms of recognizing IEPs as crucial to children’s well-being, health, and quality of life, rather than positioning them as optional “add-ons” to a one-size-fits-all public school education. For Brim Custen, family-school engagement was indeed the driving factor in their son’s well-being and educational progress at school. Later, when Custen began working as the communications coordinator for the Utah Pride Center, their new employer’s greater flexibility allowed for much more active participation in the development of their son’s IEP, and they saw a sea change after becoming more directly involved.

Initially, Custen’s inability to attend IEP meetings forced both families and school administrators to wade through red tape as they struggled to come to a full understanding of exactly what Custen’s son could and couldn’t do. “When he would move to a new classroom with new teachers, there would be some growing pains as they adjusted to the fact that I would seldom be present in person at these meetings,” explained Custen, “and I would end up having to disagree with my ex and provide different perspective after the fact through email or phone call.”

No longer mired in confusion, the team working with Custen’s son was able to communicate more clearly and flesh out a comprehensive plan to help him pay attention and regulate his emotions both in and out of class. “Thanks to there being an IEP in place and a team of teachers and therapists who understood his needs and worked within them, I’m proud to say that my son is doing vastly better in his behavior, self-control, and retention of information in school than we had anticipated he’d be able to,” Custen shared.

In the next couple of years, this stretch of northeastern Washington, D.C., will transform from a hole in the ground next to a church and down the road from a McDonald’s and a Sav-A-Lot into an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, some luxury apartment buildings, and, rumor has it, a grocery store.

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And because the area has been designated an Opportunity Zone, investors will be able to reap hefty tax benefits for the money they put into these projects — which shows exactly how the Opportunity Zone program, created by the 2017 Trump tax cut law, has gone awry.

Opportunity Zones are intended to spur investment in low-income communities that aren’t traditionally targets for businessfolk or developers. In exchange for putting their money into areas usually starved of capital and leaving it there for a certain amount of time, investors will pay lower tax rates than they would otherwise. Leave an investment in an Opportunity Zone for 10 years, and the capital gains earned will be tax-free; returns to investors could be increased by up to 70 percent thanks to the program, according to one estimate.

More than 41,000 Census tracts nationwide were eligible to be designated as Opportunity Zones, and investors are already pushing for the upcoming 2020 Census to expand those areas.

On the surface, Washington D.C.’s Edgewood is a perfect fit. The poverty rate in the neighborhood is nearly 30 percent, and the median income is just $28,000, according to Census Bureau data, in a city where the median income is above $82,000.

But there are a couple of big problems. First, the developments that will receive tax benefits because of the Opportunity Zone were well underway before the bill creating Opportunity Zones even existed, thanks in part to a $24 million subsidy from the city itself. The lead development company, MRP, freely acknowledges that its project would have gone ahead without tax incentives.

“We were well underway, almost finalized with our development plans and our program and mix [before the Opportunity Zone designation],” John Begert, a vice-president at MRP, said at the project’s groundbreaking in July, according to WAMU. “We were able to take advantage of it, but it wasn’t an original thesis of the business plan and of the development.”

This is a problem endemic to both Opportunity Zones specifically and corporate tax incentives more broadly: They end up subsidizing companies for investments those companies would have made anyway. According to one study, up to 75 percent of tax incentives given to companies in order to locate somewhere specific actually had no bearing on that company’s decision.

All across D.C. the sort of development occurring in Edgewood has occurred without anything like an Opportunity Zone to incentivize it. A similar debate took place around the building of D.C.’s publicly-funded baseball stadium: Proponents like to point to the surrounding economic development as proof that the $750 million Nats Park was a good investment, but don’t really grapple with the fact that other neighborhoods across the breadth of D.C. developed in exactly the same way without a taxpayer-funded sports complex.

But there’s also another question worth asking: Even if the Opportunity Zone were driving actual investment in the neighborhood, would that investment help the people at whom it’s ostensibly aimed? Like much of D.C., Edgewood is gentrifying rapidly; it’s a historically black neighborhood with more and more white people (myself included) moving in and driving up real estate prices, as it’s one of the few pockets of the city where there is any chance of a young professional being able to purchase a house somewhat near the Metro system. For white households in the neighborhood, the poverty rate is 2 percent; for black households, it’s 31 percent, according to the Census.

Rent and home prices are inevitably on their way up; there are currently two homes within the Opportunity Zone that are on the market for around $950,000, per Redfin. This will all hurt current residents who can’t afford higher living expenses.

Those same residents threatened with displacement likely won’t be able to take advantage of the new housing being built either, because D.C.’s average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,550, and many so-called luxury buildings charge much more. Future jobs at the movie theater or other retailers likely won’t pay enough to cover that amount, and just 116 of a total 1,450 units in the Bryant Street development will be designated as affordable housing under the city’s Inclusionary Zoning program, which allows for units to be set aside for families making 50, 60, or 80 percent of the area’s median income.

The new development is meant to entice new people, not aid the ones already there.

Small businesses are under pressure due to the increasing property costs. Our local dry cleaner recently closed after the owners’ landlord refused to renew their lease. It will be replaced by a condo building. In order to make way for the new development, a Big Lots store, a couple of fast food joints, an H&R Block, and a kind of strange drum shop were also all forced to close.

There are no requirements that investors even track whether members of the community are benefiting from the money and amenities Opportunity Zones bring in. D.C. received a grant from a private foundation that will enable it to do at least some data collection, but the zone is already here and the grant was just announced this week. So, the cart is very much before the horse.

As city councilmember Brianne Nadeau wrote last year, “Unfortunately, the design of the program has some serious flaws, and will likely accelerate the patterns of displacement caused by runaway capital that we’ve already seen for decades, but on a federally-subsidized scale.” Indeed, the developer who receives a tax break that had nothing to do with the decision to invest in Edgewood undeniably benefits from the Opportunity Zone. But after that, it’s unclear who else comes out as a winner. There will almost inevitably be displacement, and nothing is being done to help the folks affected by it, particularly those who aren’t homeowners.

My neighborhood certainly isn’t the only one in D.C. where projects that were already planned, surrounded by blocks that were gentrifying all on their own, received Opportunity Zone designations. Nor is this a situation unique to the capital city. But it’s a particularly egregious example of how the rhetoric around a program meant to help economically disadvantaged communities doesn’t come close to matching the reality.

To sum it up, that my neighborhood is an Opportunity Zone is patently absurd.

“I just wanted a job that paid more,” Powell explained. First Premier offered him $16 an hour in base pay, which could rise with incentive pay to $18 to $20 an hour depending on Powell’s success in collecting debts.

In a country where middle-class wages are hard to come by without a college degree, the comparatively good pay of debt collection can be a big draw. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay in 2018 for debt collectors was $17.32, a big step-up in pay from other lines of work such as retail sales ($12.75) or fast food ($10.89).

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71 million U.S. adults have fallen behind on a bill and now have debt in collections. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S. household debt is at an all-time high — and behind our system of easy credit are roughly 300,000 debt collectors, working for both lenders and 3rd-party collection agencies, whose job it is to recover money from American families.

These debt collectors may not match your expectations of slick-talking hucksters willing to do whatever it takes to get paid. Like many of the debtors they collect from, the collectors are often low-income themselves. While most have a high-school diploma or equivalent, some, like Powell, are teenagers. 69 percent of debt collectors are female.

At relatively low wages, debt collectors are expected to engage in what University of Brighton psychologist Carl Walker has called “mental warfare” in order to collect; the industry can leave behind scars for both the borrowers and the collectors. It’s a grueling job. In a 2016 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey, debt collection agencies with more than 250 employees reported an average turnover rate of 75 percent to 100 percent.

If you were born into the middle class, you’ve probably never heard of Powell’s former employer, First Premier, but it’s a major player in America’s system of subprime credit. At one point, it accounted for as much as 47 percent of all subprime credit card solicitations sent out in the United States, and now it’s the nation’s 12th biggest issuer of Mastercard credit cards.

First Premier credit cards often come with eye-popping fees. One, for example, has a $300 credit limit, a $95 one-time “program fee,” $75 in total monthly and annual fees in the first year, $120 in monthly and annual fees in all subsequent years, and a 36 percent APR. Those exorbitant prices draw in only those consumers with few other options for credit.

As Powell explained, if the borrower couldn’t pay on the spot, the collections agents at First Premier would ask for a “promise to pay.” There was folk wisdom about what different promises to pay meant: a $20 money order on the 3rd of the month meant the customer was on disability, and if it was coming on the first of the month, it meant the customer was a senior collecting Social Security. Getting a customer’s checking account credentials was ideal — it let First Premier automatically debit the customer’s bank account on the specified date — but debit and credit card payments, payments by Western Union, or money orders were all fair game as well. A lot of customers were surprised or angry about how much they owed.

The job “definitely broke you down,” said Powell. “At a certain point, you felt like you weren’t doing the right thing.” Powell “no-called, no-showed” — e.g. got fired after failing to show up to work — a little more than a year after he started. “The lion’s share [of customers] probably would have been better off if they had never opened the card,” he said.

When Chaz Fertal went in for his job interview at Checkmate in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010, he was originally afraid he was getting duped in a Craigslist scam. Fertal showed up to an office that appeared deserted, with blacked-out windows, only to find out the building had been intentionally obscured; Checkmate was concerned that angry customers would try to track the debt collectors down. Fertal’s base pay at Checkmate was around $2,000 per month, but offered the possibility of big commission checks. Fertal says his biggest was around $4,400, meaning your pay could more than double if you were good at getting borrowers to make payments.

A current Checkmate employee confirmed over the phone that the company’s current interest rates in Arizona were as high as 180 percent per year. As Fertal explained, a customer wouldn’t actually have to make progress on paying down their debt for the Checkmate collector to earn his commission. If customers fell behind and went into collections, Fertal said he would earn commission whether he convinced them to pay the full balance or if he convinced the borrower to pay off outstanding interest while taking out a new loan. For the purposes of commission, taking on a new loan counted as “paying off” the old one.

Fertal said the incentive scheme encouraged agents to push borrowers into these loan “rollovers.” “You’d talk to a customer on the phone who after four or five months would still owe the whole amount” and they’d be outraged, Fertal said, when they realized the payments they’d made had done nothing to pay down their debt.

For Fertal, there was a clear day, he said, when he realized he didn’t want to work at Checkmate anymore. When Checkmate customers applied for loans, they typically gave Checkmate a bank account routing and account number, giving Checkmate the right to withdraw payments; if a customer went past due, the loan entered default, and, Fertal says, Checkmate would attempt to withdraw the whole outstanding loan balance from the customer’s checking account. If Checkmate wasn’t successful at withdrawing the full amount, they’d break the balance into smaller amounts and try again — Fertal said the company’s practice was to make three attempts per day, starting at 4:30 in the morning, just after any direct deposits would have landed in the borrower’s account overnight. The only way, Fertal says, a borrower could stop the process, was by making a promise to pay and providing a credit card number or debit card number to do so.

Fertal remembers one borrower well. Overnight, Fertal says, Checkmate had taken the woman’s “entire paycheck, I think it was a thousand dollars,” he says. “She had two or three kids. She told me, ‘I have nothing to feed my kids, our refrigerator is empty, they took everything.’ I went to the ACH department and they couldn’t reverse it. She told me, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, the only thing I can think of is killing myself’ — and I knew it wasn’t a lie, you could hear the loss in her voice. I remember telling her, ‘your kids need you more than anything right now, and that that’s not the answer.’ I was trying to see if there was anything we could do, even taking out a new loan, but she still had a balance on her existing loan.”

Fertal quit shortly after that phone call in 2011, and he said he still thinks about that woman and her family.

Fertal and Powell’s experiences show the toll subprime credit and debt collection industries take not only on their customers, but on the front-line agents as well. These debt collection jobs offer Americans a step up in financial security, in exchange for taking on the difficult role as intermediary between high-priced lenders and consumers in dire straits.

“The environment would just be toxic. You’d get a worse and worse impression of people,” said Fertal. “The reality is that you’re not talking with people who are in a great place in their life.”

Editor’s note: Trevor Powell asked that his name be changed for privacy.

This post has been edited to clarify Fertal’s commission earnings.

A common pressure among first-generation college students, especially those from low-income families or immigrant families who came to the U.S. to give their children more opportunities, is the pressure of finishing. The weight of their family’s sacrifice and struggle is omnipresent.

With all that on her shoulders, graduating into a recession wasn’t even on Cavalho’s radar. But that’s exactly what happened.

“I thought I should be able to get a job with this degree because that’s what I was told. You get your college degree and then good stuff will come. I knew there was value in a college degree,” she said.

A generation lambasted for being the reason America can’t have nice things, while derided for the ways they choose to spend the little money they have, millennials have never fully benefited from our robust economy. Many are still trying to get right after the last recession, which was so bad it earned the moniker “great.”

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Unfortunately, as news headlines keep telling us, a new recession may be on the way.

Like a lot of recent college graduates, Cavalho moved back in with her family. According to Pew Research, in 2014, people aged 18-34 were most likely to be living with their parents rather than by themselves or with a spouse. At first, she applied for office jobs. When she didn’t hear anything, she applied for customer service positions at Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, and Jack in the Box. But still, no call-backs.

Her parents were confused as to why she had gone through the trouble and expense to attend college. Didn’t her degree afford her the opportunity to get a good job and be living on her own?

After a few months at home, Cavalho returned to the Bay Area to find work. She eventually found a job working for a private investigator. She was living in her car and hiding her struggles from her friends. They had been so proud of her for graduating, and she had already felt like she had disappointed her parents. She eventually found a job as a labor organizer for AFSCME and relocated to Los Angeles.

This was the cruel reality for many graduates who went to college to lift themselves out of poverty. They earned their degrees at the same time 30 million individuals were losing their jobs. New graduates weren’t just competing with their peers for what few jobs there were, but with the millions of others who had just been brutally tossed into the job market.

The employment nadir came in March 2009 when 803,000 non-farm jobs were lost. Entry-level jobs became harder to get, as competition came from people with much longer resumes. A wealth of volunteer positions became available, as funding dried up essentially, everywhere. Those who had financial stability and extra time were able to leverage competitive unpaid internships and volunteerism, which could then be used as a way to make up for a lack of entry-level positions. Everyone else was out of luck.

This stunted millennials’ earnings potential for the rest of their lives. In fact, millennials had lower real incomes than previous generations. In the year 2014 (using 2016 dollars), the median earnings for millennial men and women were $40,600 and $31,200. Compare that to the earnings of Gen Xers in 1998 at $44,200 and $32,400 and Boomers in 1978 at $53,400 and $33,100 (still 2016 dollars and median earnings).

Once you start behind on earnings, you never really catch up. And it’s even worse for people of color and women, who get left behind even during good economic times. In March, a report entitled “Clipped Wings: Closing the Wealth Gap for Millennial Women” was released by Insight Center in collaboration with Asset Funders Network and Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap. The authors found that income inequality persists according to race and gender, in addition to generation.

“Young Black people earn 57 cents and Latinx earn 64 cents for every dollar earned by young White people,” the report says. Single millennial men currently have an average of 162 percent more wealth than single millennial women. College educated white women hold two-thirds more wealth ($52,406) than college educated Black ($3,316) and Latinx ($29,889) women combined.

But it’s not just income where those who graduated into the Great Recession have fallen behind. A study published last year entitled “Are Millennials Different?,” by a division of the Federal Reserve Board, found that in the year 2016, millennials were also less likely to own homes and have fewer financial assets than previous generations. They also carried debt loads larger than boomers did when they were young, thanks in part to the ballooning cost of education.

Millennials without access to family wealth were less likely to benefit from opportunities that were available to their peers who had more family or inherited wealth.

Case in point, homeownership. KPCC in Los Angeles analyzed data for Federal Housing Administration loans made to Californians and found that in 2018, one in three borrowers received family contributions. This number was up from one in four in 2011.

Millennials trying to buy houses but lacking help from their family had a harder time buying a home — the very hallmark of middle-class wealth generation. Millennials of color would have been deeply affected if their parents had lost their homes and assets to the foreclosure crisis that followed the Great Recession, due to predatory subprime lending to communities of color.

This inability to build wealth was compounded by student loan debt. Young adults had accepted thousands of dollars in federal loans, in effect leveraging their potential earnings, based on the assumption that a job market would exist when they were ready for it.

Spoiler alert, it didn’t.

Ten years after the beginning of the recession, a third of millennials hold student loan debt, with black women holding the most and white men holding the least. The national student loans debt load outpaced auto loans back in the third quarter of 2009 and is now just over $1.6 trillion. Women hold two-thirds of that amount.

Recovering from a recession takes time. And things such as student debt, high costs of living, and asset and wealth depletion hold millennials, especially millennial women of color, back from choosing what they want to do over what they need. If a new recession comes before they’ve had a chance to get ahead, they likely face empty bank accounts and unknowable challenges.

I recently had dinner with a friend and fellow woman of color who also graduated college in 2009. She says she feels like she’s just now making it; working as a city planner, feeling stable in her job, able to plan for her future, and about to start an MBA program. Cavalho just got into one of the top law schools in the country, accomplishing a goal she didn’t dare admit to herself because she felt it was so impossibly out of reach.

It took us 10 years just to get our feet under us. Let’s hope we’ve gotten far enough to weather whatever comes next.

Mandy had tried methadone, another medication similar to buprenorphine, three times unsuccessfully, but was determined to maintain sobriety this time. When she learned that she was pregnant, using again became a “hard no.” She enrolled in a comprehensive, high-risk pregnancy program geared toward people in recovery from substance use disorders.

There, she learned that due to a Massachusetts state statute requiring hospitals to report any prenatal substance use, she would be subject to a child services case once she had given birth. But she was assured that as long as she remained compliant with treatment and continued to prioritize her health and pregnancy, the investigation would be brief and relatively unintrusive.

That’s not how it went, though. Instead, she was charged with neglect and a placed on a statewide child maltreatment registry that would limit her job options and even her ability to attend field trips with her child.

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Mandy was relatively lucky because she had the knowledge and resources to successfully appeal this decision, but many mothers who face similar circumstances are stuck living with the consequences of child welfare involvement simply for seeking treatment.

Media outlets have labeled the uptick in overdose deaths since 2015 the “opioid crisis,” and a rash of sensationalized stories — cops overdosing from contact with crime scenes, babies born “addicted” to drugs, drug dealers compared with serial killers — are fueling a public perception of drug users as a macabre and dangerous population.

The result? A crackdown on parents — especially mothers — who use drugs, with a hard target centered on those with a past or present addiction to opioids. State laws vary, but at least 23 states and the District of Columbia articulate that substance use during pregnancy is child abuse, and virtually every state in the U.S. will open an investigation (at the very least) into a person who tests positive for substances during or shortly after pregnancy.

According to research compiled by the Vanderbilt Center for Child Health Policy, the number of infants entering the foster care system rose by nearly 10,000 between 2011 and 2017, and at least half of those infant removals were due to parental substance use, often during pregnancy.

Not only can these types of punitive measures make pregnant people who use substances wary about seeking medical care, but applying personhood rights to the unborn is a dangerous precedent that criminalizes people for events outside of their control; for example, earlier this year in Alabama, Marshae Jones faced criminal charges for having a miscarriage after she was shot.

Women’s rights advocates continue to fight laws that pursue the rights of fetuses before those of the people who carry them, and have seen some wins — for example, the charges against Jones were ultimately dropped, and last year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed a ruling against a mother who use opioids and marijuana while pregnant, stating that fetuses were not covered in their child maltreatment laws — but it remains an uphill battle around the nation.

At the same time, abortion rights are under fire. Fueled by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, many conservative states are implementing laws that make abortions virtually impossible to access legally and safely. For example, Alabama’s governor recently signed into law a bill that holds doctors criminally liable, with a penalty of up to 99 years in prison, for performing abortions that are not medically necessary and also bans abortions at all points of pregnancy, even in cases of rape and incest. Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio also passed recent legislation banning abortions after six to eight weeks respectively, which is before many people even realize they are pregnant. Because habitual drug use can interrupt or alter menstruation, it can be even more difficult for those experiencing addiction to catch a pregnancy early enough to terminate it in one these states.

The concurrent rise of anti-abortion laws and punitive prenatal substance-use laws leaves people who become pregnant while having a substance use disorder — whether active or in remission — trapped in a dangerous situation that is often overlooked due to the stigma attached to substance use during pregnancy.

“Among people with substance use disorders, there’s no one more stigmatized than pregnant women,” said Stephen Patrick, a neonatologist and an associate professor of pediatrics and health policy at Vanderbilt University. He added that this pervasive stigma leads some people with substance use disorders to fear and distrust the medical community, even to the point of avoiding treatment.

Unfortunately, that distrust is often warranted. “Pediatricians often don’t know what they are required to do, and often states have a hard time interpreting what the federal government wants them to do,” Patrick explained. At the federal level, child welfare guidelines are vague and general, leaving states with broad discretion when it comes to defining child maltreatment and the subsequent responses. This means that when state or county authorities are misinformed about the reality of substance use and parenthood, that bad information can easily become codified into the system. Worse, it allows those policymakers determined to give the unborn personhood rights a means for policing the behaviors of pregnant people. “The end result is a system that in many cases over intervenes in some families that may be in recovery, and in other cases may not intervene when it needs to,” Patrick said.

Mandy’s story is just one example of the real-world impact of this stigma. My own life is yet another: I gave birth in 2014 while prescribed methadone. My daughter was hospitalized for neonatal abstinence syndrome, which is a common side-effect of appropriate methadone usage. She had no other health problems and, five years later, remains a healthy and developmentally normal child.

Nonetheless, a child welfare case was opened against me in the state of Florida. At the time, the case was deemed unsubstantiated — but four years later, a call by my mother-in-law to the Florida state child abuse hotline triggered another investigation. This time, the investigator made no attempt to speak with me before making her decision. She simply looked at my previous records of having been prescribed methadone while pregnant and filed to have my two daughters removed from my care. More than a year later, I am still fighting to get them back.

I love my daughters, and I have no regrets when it comes to birthing them — but I remember learning I was pregnant with my youngest less than a year after her elder sister was born. I was on a low dose of buprenorphine after having tapered from the methadone I began taking during my previous pregnancy. I had just finished grad school, and before entering treatment had been using heroin intravenously for nearly five years. My husband and I, both in recovery, were broke and sharing a mobile home with his parents in South Florida.

I became pregnant after being unable to access a timely refill on my birth control. Abortions in Florida are not covered by Medicaid. I didn’t feel ready for another child, but I had no way to finance an abortion. I don’t know that I would have decided to get one if I could have; that’s something I will never know, because it was a choice I simply did not have. Now, the same state that gave me no other options is withholding my children from me for having sought treatment for a medical condition.

No woman should feel compelled to terminate a pregnancy because she has a substance use disorder—but when jurisdictions withhold that choice, they force people who use drugs to suffer harsh punishments simply for becoming pregnant. Sometimes, that even includes jail time.

“In 2006, the Alabama legislature passed the chemical endangerment of a child law, and even though the legislation said this has nothing to do with pregnancy and drug use — it has to do with punishing adults who take children to dangerous places like meth labs — it was used as a basis for arresting pregnant women using any controlled substance, even if prescribed,” explained Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. This has led to the arrest or child welfare prosecution of thousands of women since it was implemented; in 2015, ProPublica identified 1,800 affected mothers. The law is still being used.

Both anti-choice activists and those who push for criminal or civil prosecution of pregnant people who use substances claim to be protecting children. But the reality is one of oppression and harm. “It is an anti-woman policy and an anti-child policy,” says Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Welfare Reform, of child welfare policies aimed toward substance use. “Any time we take a swing at so-called ‘bad mothers,’ it falls to the children.”

You see this in cases like mine; my judge doesn’t see my daughters crying every time I leave our once weekly supervised visit, nor does she have to answer their questions about why they can’t come home, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You see this also in cases like that of Keri, a mother who I interviewed for a story I wrote for Filter Mag, who bought buprenorphine on the street and self-detoxed before giving birth to avoid child welfare intervention. A 2017 paper by Amnesty International reports that doctors across the nation are seeing substance-addicted people avoid timely prenatal care out of fear of prosecution, harming the very infants these laws claim to protect.

Across the country, harm reduction efforts are gaining traction, and the government is slowly increasing access to evidence-based medical care. But even while the general perceptions and treatment of people with addictions are advancing, pregnant people who use drugs continue to be stigmatized and punished.

Said Paltrow, “There’s no question that prosecutors and others have used the stigma and horrific medical info about the impact of controlled substances on pregnancy to establish in the law separate rights for fetuses, and anti-abortion principles that treat pregnant women like criminals.”

In an attempt to to give parents, particularly those with little disposable income, a break from those big numbers, many states in the coming weeks will turn to an old tax policy standby: sales tax holidays.

In 2019, 16 states have sales tax holidays planned, on which sales tax is waived or cut for a select group of items, most often back-to-school supplies or disaster preparedness goods ahead of hurricane season. The vast majority of them fall on either the last week of July or in early August.

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The first such holiday took place in New York in January 1997, as a response to the fact that New Jersey levies no sales tax on clothing. Florida implemented a sales tax holiday the following year, and then Texas did the same the year after that. From there, their popularity grew significantly: 2010 was the peak year, with 19 states implementing some version of a holiday.

Today, these holidays are often promoted as providing a specific benefit to “hardworking” families and low-income people by lowering the cost of goods that have been deemed necessities. And as a bonus, local small businesses that have been hurt by the rise of internet commerce will theoretically see a jump in shoppers too.

But once you get past the self-congratulatory pablum of the lawmakers hyping these holidays, you see that they are much less beneficial for low-income folks than they appear.

The theory behind sales tax holidays is simple: Because the sales tax applies to everyone equally, and because low-income people spend most of their income, a suspension of the sales tax helps them more than it will a household that saves a large percentage of its income. Indeed, most states have tax systems that take more from the poor than the rich, with sales taxes largely to blame.

However, a sales tax holiday does little to change that equation for a simple reason: People with less money don’t have the ability to plop a whole bunch of it down in a store when a sales tax holiday comes along. When 40 percent of households can’t even access $400 in an emergency, it’s simply not an option to spend big sums in order to take advantage of a tax gimmick. This is the same reason that low-income families can’t just buy in bulk in order to save money on household goods: They don’t have the cash to fund larger purchases, even if it would be a cheaper approach in the long run.

Richer households, though, can do just that.

Per a 2010 study by the Chicago Federal Reserve, households with incomes under $30,000 and single-parent households derive essentially no benefit whatsoever from sales tax holidays. Instead, “the wealthiest households and households consisting of married parents and young children have the largest, statistically significant response.”

Sales tax holidays may even wind up hurting the poorest residents of a state because, to make up the lost revenue, governments wind up setting the usual sales tax rate higher than it would otherwise have been. And there’s some evidence that retailers game the tax holiday system too, marking up their products in the days before the holiday and then pocketing the difference when the sales tax is removed.

But the biggest problem is that a policy aimed at giving people a break ends up undermining the sort of programs and services that would actually help those same people far more. Altogether, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), states will lose more than $300 million in revenue this year due to sales tax holidays. And ITEP expects that total to increase as internet shopping becomes more prevalent in the coming years, because currently nearly every sales tax holiday applies to online purchases.

That’s $300 million that won’t be spent on health care, job placement, affordable housing programs, or schools. Money that could be spent on direct services is instead plowed into a bank shot tax break that can’t possibly help low-income people more than a direct infusion of cash or more social services would. Several states implementing tax holidays for back to school season – including Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama – still spend less per student than they did before the Great Recession. Instead of sustained investments in the classroom or tax credits aimed specifically at them, low-income parents in those states receive a gimmick.

It’s not the case, of course, that there is no benefit to anyone from these tax holidays. But the cost is not in any way justified by the help provided. Putting more money into schools so parents don’t have to pony up for hundreds of dollars worth of school supplies would do more good over the long term than trying to boost pencil sales over one weekend ever will.

When McGary lived in Portland, Oregon, a city inspector decided he had too much debris in his yard and cited his home as a “nuisance” property under the city’s local nuisance ordinance. McGary, who was living with AIDS, asked volunteers from a local AIDS project to help. But before they could clear the yard to the city’s satisfaction, McGary was hospitalized with AIDS-related complications. His patient advocate informed the city that McGary was an individual with a disability and requested more time, but Portland refused. The city issued a warrant for violating the city’s chronic nuisance ordinance, and charged him $1,818.83 for the cost of clean-up. When McGary couldn’t pay, Portland claimed rights to his home — and forced McGary sell it to satisfy his debt to the city.

McGary is just one of many people with disabilities who lose their homes in the estimated 2,000 municipalities across the country with “chronic nuisance ordinances” (also called “CNOs” or “crime-free ordinances”), local laws that punish residents for behaviors the city decides are “nuisances.” Most encourage or even require landlords to evict tenants whose homes are declared a nuisance — and impose fines and fees on landlords if they don’t evict and the infractions continue. In some cases, like McGary’s, cities fine homeowners or place “liens” (a debt attached to a property) to “nuisance” properties, effectively forcing a cash-strapped household to sell their home.

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Definitions of a nuisance vary widely, but they can include arrests occurring near the property; failing to mow your lawn or maintain your yard; or even calling 911 “excessively.” Broad definitions of “nuisance” behavior can sweep up behavior that simply reflects a tenant’s disability, such as being unable to clean your yard or calling 911 for medical aid. In communities around the country that have utterly failed to fund social workers, substance abuse treatment, or other resources for people to turn to in a crisis, calling 911 may be or seem like the only option — and in cities with chronic nuisance ordinances, they might be evicted for it.

When it comes to calling 911, the threshold number of “excessive” calls may be quite low — for example, in Bedford, Ohio, a property can be declared a “nuisance” after just two 911 calls. After a tenant called 911 twice in three months seeking help because her boyfriend was suicidal, Bedford declared her home a nuisance and fined her landlord. Her landlord began eviction proceedings shortly after. In another case, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, a mother called the police because her daughter was harming herself and posting suicidal comments on social media; police connected her daughter to a crisis counselor, but cited their home as a nuisance

We spent the past year analyzing police reports and call logs from Midwestern municipalities that use chronic nuisance ordinances. In city after city, we saw these ordinances had a severe impact on residents with disabilities, especially residents who called 911 for medical help because of a mental health crisis, substance use disorder, or a chronic illness. When a woman in Neenah, Wisconsin discovered that her boyfriend had overdosed on heroin, she called 911 in time for paramedics to administer naloxone, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses, and save his life. But after paramedics reversed the overdose, police charged her boyfriend — who had been in treatment for substance use disorder — with possession. Because of the overdose and the possession charge, the city told the landlord the home was about to be declared a nuisance; the landlord issued a 30-day eviction notice against the woman and her boyfriend.

These cases aren’t isolated. According to a lawsuit challenging a nuisance ordinance in Maplewood, Missouri, at least 25 percent of enforcement actions in the town were related to “obvious manifestations” of disability. For example, Maplewood declared a home a nuisance after a resident with PTSD and bipolar disorder called a crisis hotline and volunteers sent local police to her home. Ohio, which has the second highest rate of opioid-related deaths in the country, is another example. Police and paramedics are trained to carry and administer naloxone to combat a crisis that’s killing more people than the AIDS epidemic at its peak. But a study of four towns in Ohio found that, in every single one, more than one in five properties that were declared nuisances were marked because of 911 calls for help during an overdose.

These laws are bad news for other marginalized tenants, too. One study in Milwaukee found that nearly a third of nuisance enforcement actions stem from domestic violence, most often against Black women. And tenants of color are impacted most: the New York Civil Liberties Union found that Rochester, New York, issued nearly five times as many nuisance enforcement actions in areas of the city with the highest concentration of people of color as it did in the whitest parts of town.

The Americans with Disabilities Act bans state and local governments from denying people with disabilities the benefits of public services, programs, or activities. Courts have read the ADA’s sweeping non-discrimination promise to cover “anything a public entity does.” By punishing people for calling 911 during a mental health crisis or for being unable to clean their front yard — in other words, punishing them for a disability — chronic nuisance ordinances violate the ADA’s promise of eliminating state-sponsored discrimination. By attaching consequences like fines and eviction to 911 calls, towns and cities deter people with disabilities from accessing police and medical services (even though people with disabilities are paying for those services with their tax dollars) and again risk violating the ADA.

McGary, the Portland resident living with AIDS who lost his home because of a chronic nuisance ordinance, sued the city arguing just that — and a federal court of appeals agreed. Portland’s nuisance ordinance applied to everyone, not just people with disabilities. But when a law burdens people with disabilities more harshly than abled people, the ADA requires that cities and states accommodate those differences, including by making exceptions to generally applicable policies. The federal court found nuisance ordinances such as Portland’s would violate the ADA if the city imposed them neutrally, without making accommodations for the unique burdens they placed on people with disabilities. They can also violate the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits municipalities from adopting policies that discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or disability.

Portland won’t be the last city in court over its nuisance ordinance. This April, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Bedford, Ohio, arguing the city’s chronic nuisance ordinance discriminates against people of color, people with disabilities, and domestic violence survivors. New York’s state legislature just passed a law to bar cities from considering 911 calls as nuisances, largely because of nuisance ordinances’ outsize impact on survivors and people with disabilities.

Ultimately, repealing these ordinances would be a step towards ensuring that people with disabilities and other marginalized tenants have access to stable housing in their communities. Towns and cities should take chronic nuisance ordinances off the books  — and if they don’t, civil rights lawyers might make sure they don’t have a choice.

Editor’s note: All names have been changed for privacy reasons.

That storm was one of a record 1,263 tornadoes in the U.S. tracked by the National Weather Service in the first half of 2019. Many of those storms have been concentrated in the Southeastern part of the country, in a region dubbed “Dixie Alley.”

Tornadoes in the South can be particularly deadly because there’s a relatively high percentage of the population there living in mobile homes — and most of those homes are spread out in rural areas, meaning lots of people with few options to escape the path of powerful tornadoes.

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Alabama and the Carolinas are consistently among the top five states with the most residents living in mobile homes — as well as in modular or manufactured housing, which is intended to be in a fixed location, but is similarly dangerous in severe storms. According to the Manufactured Housing Institute, residents of manufactured housing have a median household income of just under $30,000 per year.

Protecting these low-income, far-flung populations with limited resources from major storms isn’t easy. That made them a subject of particular interest to researchers involved in a recent University of Maryland study examining mobile homes.

The first challenge people face is receiving critical information in time to allow them to take action. The researchers found standard tornado warnings are falling short in protecting residents. In particular, mobile home residents were less accessible on social media and more dependent on their local TV meteorologist.

Researchers also found the majority of mobile home residents had incorrect assumptions about what they should do during a storm, with many believing myths and misconceptions that could be dangerous like “if you’re driving, you should take shelter under a bridge during a tornado.”

The researchers recommended that National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices should work more closely with local newscasters to address this information gap. Similarly, forecasters could prioritize actions that mobile home residents can take to deal with limited physical supplies and inadequate shelter.

But educational campaigns can’t solve the problem completely, because residents (and the communities where they live) face significant planning challenges due to lack of resources and available services.

“Mobile home residents in our study reported statistically significantly lower perceived access to shelter and self-efficacy to take shelter compared to fixed home residents,” the researchers noted. Developing emergency evacuation plans is challenging in areas where many residents may lack reliable vehicles or other resources, or may be reluctant to leave their homes and belongings unattended for what may turn out to be a false alarm. It’s also hard to assemble an emergency kit when you can’t afford things like weather radios, hand tools, back-up batteries and chargers, or extra quantities of medications — let alone bigger items like generators.

Kelley said that in rural areas like his, residents often lack the time — and sometimes the transportation or ability — to get to a community shelter, even if they know where one is. “I wish every rural home had to have a storm shelter of some sort. We had four and a half minutes warning with this storm,” he said.

“It’s great to have community shelters available, but if people don’t have transportation to get there, or wait till they have confirmation of an approaching tornado before they move, the shelters are not effective,” said David Roueche, an assistant professor of structural engineering at Auburn University — located in Lee County. He specializes in researching wind damage and ways to make structures better protected from high winds.

He led a team that analyzed the impact of the March 3 storm, and specifically looked at the 19 out of 23 victims who lived in manufactured homes. Their investigation revealed that all of the manufactured homes involved either had degraded anchors, had anchorage systems that apparently didn’t meet state code, or lacked ground anchors entirely. Anchors are devices – generally made of metal, sometimes coupled with concrete – that are used in conjunction with straps or tie-downs to secure the structure to the ground.

“We know it’s a problem. What can these people do? We can enforce stricter building standards to give people a much better chance of survival in their home. We can install micro-community storm shelters — as in, smaller shelters that serve a street, or a cluster of relatives — but this all takes money that the residents don’t have. So how do we prioritize the limited pre-event mitigation funding from FEMA or other groups? What other funding mechanisms can we use? These are the questions we’re asking right now,” he said.

While progress has admittedly been slow, Roueche said he is encouraged by results seen in communities such as Moore, Oklahoma, which adopted enhanced building codes to strengthen their homes, with minimal impact on home prices. He is also a proponent of storm-vulnerable inland areas adopting the same Department of Housing and Urban Development building standards recommended in Florida and coastal regions, since climate change and unusual weather patterns have increased the incidence of extreme storms in a wider range of locations.

With nowhere else to go, Kelley said his family has no choice but to stay in their home while it is being repaired. “It is coming along slow but steady,” he said. He created a memorial area on a section of his property, where he will plant 23 fruit trees — one for each of the lives lost in the storm. The memorial also has a pond and chairs where people can come and remember the victims or just enjoy some peaceful solitude.

Kelley said he hopes it will provide some comfort to local residents.

They want a $15 wage floor and reasonably-priced health care, and they’re united across the industry: The DCA demonstrators work for LSG Sky Chefs, which serves American Airlines at DCA. Employees at Gate Gourmet, another major industry player, joined the strike authorization; Delta Airlines and United Airlines could also be affected. Together, they account for three of the top four airlines in the United States, carrying nearly 400 million people in 2017.

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Eyerusalem Retta has been working in the bowels of DCA as an airline caterer since 1989, preparing beverages for customers like American Airlines. She said her starting wage was $5.15 an hour. After 30 years of service, she makes $13.35. “Our job is hard, we need better insurance, and for many, we want better retirements. We’re almost retired!,” she told TalkPoverty. The $15 minimum wage workers are demanding would result in a wage increase for “the majority” of airline catering workers, according to the union.

American Airlines made $1.9 billion in 2018.

Organizers are also contending with the high price of employee health insurance, especially for families; Retta pays $131 dollars weekly for her five-person family, a hardship on low pay. The health care situation is especially acute for workers with a long history of service. They are facing low wages paired with growing health issues caused by a working life of demanding physical labor that need attention. Sonia Toledo, who has worked for LSG Sky Chefs in Miami for 16 years, told TalkPoverty “I don’t have it, I don’t have any health care.”

“I’m paying for one bedroom, $1,700 a month. I have to work overtime. And sometimes, I don’t want to do it, but sometimes I need to work for Uber for extra money. It’s very tough. I’m a diabetic, I have to get medicine, I have to eat certain foods. So I gotta pay for this stuff,” said Nelson Robinson, a DCA worker who pays $50 weekly for his employer health insurance but adds that the copays are a burden.

Getting to this point has been a challenge. According to UNITE HERE, workers began negotiating a contract with Gate Gourmet in October 2017 — a company spokesperson told TalkPoverty the company “continues to work in good faith with the union” — and Sky Chefs in October 2018. But collective bargaining is difficult for airline and railway workers thanks to the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which guarantees bargaining rights in these industries with limitations. Specifically, workers can’t strike without permission from the National Mediation Board.

The union requested mediation in its negotiations with Gate Gourmet and Sky Chefs in June 2018 and January 2019 respectively as it moved into the next phase of its negotiations. Now, workers are requesting a release to strike this week, hoping the Board agrees that the parties involved are unable to agree to arbitration. Workers have signaled that they are ready to strike as soon as the 30-day cooling period is up. Passengers in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and more would notice very quickly. Several affected airports are major regional hubs, like Atlanta, where a labor disruption could be costly for airlines.

It’s not just about the pay and health insurance. Working conditions for catering crews are extremely poor. Airline food is the subject of many a late-night comedy routine, but a flight without even the basics — like water and tea — can quickly turn into an unpleasant one. In fact, airlines are legally required to provide food and water to passengers stranded in tarmac delays. Fully cleaning out and resupplying a plane from the moment it arrives at the gate to the time it pushes back is a delicate but high-speed dance; every minute counts.

The work behind that turnaround, tiny bags of pretzels, plastic-wrapped swizzle sticks, and all, can be grueling. Those working at the airport must contend with blazing tarmac heat in summer and frigid conditions in winter. Offsite locations, where food is prepared and readied for catering, are often poorly temperature-controlled as well. For those in refrigerated work environments, the cold is constant. Retta described two years with no air conditioning in the notoriously swampy climate of D.C.

Caterers also work with caustic cleaning chemicals, sharp knives, and boiling-hot industrial dishwashers, all of which expose them to the risk of occupational injuries. In 2015, a Centers for Disease Control report documented high levels of carbon dioxide in refrigerated workspaces along with lack of access to water, and noted that most entries on injury logs were “acute traumatic injuries” like knife wounds.

Gate Gourmet and Sky Chefs have both run afoul of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), most notably in cases involving the deaths of airport truck and lift operators or nearby employees, the people passengers are most likely to see while peering impatiently out the window to see if their planes are ready. In 2017, SkyChefs faced thousands of dollars in OSHA penalties for failing to maintain safe and operable exit routes.

Poor conditions are bad news for passengers, too. In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration cited Gate Gourmet for “dead apparent nymph and adult cockroaches too numerous to count” in one Kentucky catering facility. It is the tip of a moldy, poorly temperature-controlled, cross-contaminated iceberg.

Without strike authorization, workers can and will continue trying to negotiate with their employers. The unions has not announced any plans to leverage slowdowns, stoppages, or sickouts — such as the large number of illnesses seen among flight traffic controllers during the 2018-2019 government shutdown. (The union made it clear that they did not “condone or endorse” such activity.) It has indicated that it will continue to pursue all legal means for resolving the labor dispute. But, the union noted in reference to the DCA action, “while we will continue this process it’s important to know that American Airlines can end this dispute right now, without the need for a strike,” by setting standards for pay and health insurance for catering workers.

In the meantime, the next time you open a stroopwafel on United, think about the hands that packaged it. 

LSG Sky Chefs did not respond to a request for comment.

Like nearly 20 percent of American college students, Landre is disabled. And because Landre has spinal muscular atrophy type 2 and uses a wheelchair, her success is possible in part due to Medicaid-funded personal care assistance. The hours of personal care she receives at home allow Landre to live and study independently, while attendants help her complete crucial daily tasks related to hygiene, eating, and safety. But just a few weeks ago, her insurance company’s decision to cut her care hours from 112 hours per week to 70 nearly brought her college career to an end.

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Her insurer’s decision to reduce her access to in-home aide care is just one symptom of an underlying problem related to recent slashes to Medicaid funding. “New Jersey, like a lot of states, has tried to cut costs in their Medicaid program by contracting insurance companies called managed care organizations [MCOs], to manage it. It’s a weird way of privatizing Medicaid,” Landre explained. Some states contract with MCOs, made up of groups of health care providers, clinics, and organizations, to provide Medicaid services for a set amount per member each month.

This setup means MCOs are free in some cases to make cost-cutting decisions for profit, rather than basing decisions on actual assessments of medical needs and quality of life. Cuts affect marginalized populations like seniors and disabled people who need long-term care disproportionately, and often result in outdated policies that harm disabled people most. Almost 3 million seniors and disabled individuals rely on Medicaid for in-home personal care services that allow them to avoid institutionalization in a nursing home or other facility. “The incentives here are for them to keep cutting people’s care down, and there are very few consequences for that,” said Landre.

In the wake of a flurry of media attention, the New Jersey Department of Human Services reversed its decision, reaching a new agreement with Landre to reinstate her former care plan. But Landre and other disabled college students say it shouldn’t take public pressure on the part of individual advocates to address a much bigger underlying problem. “While this agreement will fix my situation, it does nothing to help thousands of other disabled New Jerseyans who continue to suffer due to discriminatory Medicaid policies and the predatory behavior of their insurance companies,” she wrote on Twitter.

Other students in Landre’s position have had to mount similar nationwide campaigns. From launching crowdfunding efforts and navigating complex bureaucratic systems for months at a time to spending hours publicizing their messages on social media, in press conferences, and on media outlets, disabled students often bear the burden of serving as both tireless advocates and public relations specialists just to attend college.

17-year-old Darcy Trinco, for example, who also has spinal muscular atrophy type 2, has faced many of the same obstacles in her path to a pre-med curriculum at Johns Hopkins University in the fall. Her current allotment of 30 hours of personal care services per week won’t be enough when she’s living independently. She and her family have been wading through a sea of red tape and uncertainty since she was first admitted.

Today’s stories of the roadblocks that often await disabled college students as they try to access educational opportunities are eerily similar to those faced by activist Nick Dupree (who sadly died in 2017) back in 2003. A quadriplegic and writing student at Spring Hill College, Dupree used in-home nursing care services through Medicaid while attending school in order to live independently. Threatened with losing those services upon turning 21, Dupree launched a campaign called “Nick’s Crusade” to fight for his right to remain in college and to avoid having to enter a nursing home facility after his 21st birthday.

Recently trending hashtags like #WhyDisabledPeopleDropOut are a sobering reminder that the obstacles facing disabled college students are systemic rather than isolated — and that not much has changed in the 16 years since Nick’s Crusade. “It’s so hard for disabled people to fight [this kind of segregation] in most cases,” Landre said, noting that, with family support and knowledge of the law, she’s actually “one of the lucky ones.” Many disabled students don’t have access to the same legal knowledge, family supports, and widespread publicity as the ones who most often make the news. Many disabled students don’t know that they even have the right to “fight the system,” much less the resources to do so.

Many disabled college students who drop out — which happens at around twice the rate of nondisabled students — cite trouble accessing accommodations and adequate personal care hours as significant factors in their decision to leave school. That’s why changes to state Medicaid policies through means like New Jersey’s proposed bill A4130, which would increase reimbursable personal care hours for working adults with disabilities, and broader civil rights legislation like the proposed Disability Integration Act could be so instrumental, Landre says, in leveling the playing ground for all students.

Landre knew the problem was deeper than her individual access to education, even after state officials reached out to her to sign a new agreement that would allow her to return to school. She isn’t about to stop fighting for her right, and the right of other disabled college students, to integrated education.

“So many other people just get a letter in the mail with an agency decision and don’t even know they can appeal. They have to go, ‘Well, now I have to get divorced, or move back in with my parents, or quit my job.’” She concluded, “It’s long past time for things to change” — both in terms of Medicaid’s outdated policies and in terms of ideologies that keep disabled people isolated, institutionalized, and excluded.

The other half? Paying to get to the procedure itself — a task that can cost hundreds of dollars on its own and eat up hours, if not days, of travel time in states that lack usable local public transit systems or mass transportation between rural and urban areas.

Nearly 20 percent of poor people lack their own vehicle, and the same states that pass paternalistic abortion restrictions are also the states least likely to spend infrastructure funding dollars on mass transit, considering it a form of “social welfare” for those too poor to own cars. States like Mississippi, Missouri, or Kentucky, which have just one clinic each, lack usable public transit within their borders, or easy access into major cities from suburbs and rural towns via train, light-rail, or even major bus lines.

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The limited number of abortion clinics — often paired with face to face waiting periods that are anywhere from one to three days apart — and the shortage of transportation infrastructure means that low-income patients without a car are often forced to hire taxies and other car services, rent vehicles, or navigate an expensive bus or train schedule at a time when they are emotionally and in some cases physically vulnerable, too.

“We’ve had patients use Uber to get to [Jackson Women’s Health Organization] in Jackson [Mississippi] from Oxford or Hattiesburg,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, told TalkPoverty. “I didn’t even know you could go that far.” The cost? Around $200 for a 90-mile trip.

The logistical challenges quickly pile up. Alabama — which has three clinics spread throughout the state — has Amtrak, but the route through the state is limited and scheduling is difficult. This makes navigating the transit options a search for the right combination of trains and bus routes — often shuffling the same patient from bus to train and back again. Abortion funds — organizations that offer financial support for those seeking out a pregnancy termination — can offer gas cards, but that still requires patients to have a car to begin with. For those in one-car families, that also means letting another family member or friend into a very private, personal decision, too.

Amanda Reyes, co-founder of the Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion funding and practical support group for pregnant people in Alabama, said for patients outside a city — even just in the exurbs of the cities that do have clinics — renting a car is often the only solution. But for people who are low income and lack not only the funds for renting but also the credit cards, debit cards, or checking accounts needed to rent a car in the first place — about 20 percent of Americans are considered “unbanked or underbanked” — this can be nearly impossible. Because of Alabama’s requirement that patients visit a clinic and then wait 48 hours before returning for a termination, the car is needed for multiple days; the Yellowhammer Fund typically rents cars for a week.

“That’s why we got ourselves a van,” said Roberts. Now, with a van that can get patients from far out cities or towns to the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, Roberts is able to help some patients avoid that extra expense. It’s assistance that no doubt means even more to some local abortion patients who may hire a cab from one of the city’s taxi companies only to have it arrive with “Choose Life” etched into the side of the car’s body, according to Roberts.

Getting to a clinic without a car is a nightmare even when the provider itself is only a 15-minute drive away. Hiring taxis, Uber, or Lyft always means providing a name, and often a home address, to a driver. That can be especially difficult when ride app drivers refuse to serve neighborhoods that are predominately black or even refuse a ride once they realize the client is a person of color, as once happened with one of Roberts’ clients. In St. Louis, where Missouri’s only abortion provider is currently fighting the state to keep its doors open (it was just granted permission to continue operating until early August while it awaits a final decision), getting from a home in the north side of the city to the St. Louis Planned Parenthood can take hours, simply because the busing system exists as a means of keeping neighborhoods segregated from each other, rather than interconnected.

“The bus system is woefully underfunded and not super accessible for most people,” explains Alison Dreith, former executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri and current deputy director for Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois, which is just 10 minutes across the river from St. Louis. “It doesn’t go into North St. Louis, which is primarily a poor, black community. It would take multiple buses and transfers. It’s not just accessible.”

Then there is the more complicated — but not entirely rare — case of the patient who is worried about domestic violence, abuse, or has other safety concerns that make it necessary to hide the entire process from their partners, families, or the person who got them pregnant. “I spent 45 minutes calling every rental car agency in Birmingham,” Reyes told TalkPoverty, explaining the extra steps required to help a patient who was getting an abortion without informing an abusive spouse, and who needed to cover her actions along the way. “She couldn’t take a bus, she needed to rent a car, and she needed to be able to do it using cash so he wouldn’t see a charge for it. To get a car that way, you have to call the day before to see if anything is available.”

Cash-only rental cars often require the cash upfront, in addition to $300 or more in deposits in case of damage or theft. While an abortion at seven weeks would only be around $600, the costs for travel and other support were expected to be nearly three times that amount for Reyes’ client. It is just one of the many ways that a patient can be blocked from obtaining an early abortion and instead require a termination in the second trimester, instead, where the cost of an abortion rises with each additional week of gestation.

Getting the money for an abortion when you are poor and in a conservative state or rural community is only half the battle. Without an adequate public transit infrastructure, those with the ability to afford a termination may become trapped in pregnancies they do not want, simply because they lack the means to make it to their appointments. And the same legislators who have starved off transportation infrastructure in the name of rejecting “social welfare” will then deny those pregnant people any medical assistance, accessible contraception, living wages, childcare or safe housing, all while being the ones who forced them into this impossible situation in the first place.

But income isn’t the only issue: Camden is also infamous for being a “food desert.” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, huge swathes of the city are populated by people who live in low-income neighborhoods, don’t have a car, and don’t have a grocery store within half a mile of their homes.

New Jersey lawmakers have been trying to “help” Camden for what feels like forever, and one of their ideas was to use tax incentives to entice new grocery stores into the city. But instead of bringing in new shopping options and addressing entrenched inequality, the effort showed how giving tax breaks to private corporations doesn’t help local economies or reduce poverty.

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First, some background. At the behest of Gov. Phil Murphy (D), a task force is looking into New Jersey’s corporate tax incentive programs, which, in theory, use tax breaks to entice and retain businesses, thus creating jobs and boosting incomes. What the task force has found so far is that those programs are a total mess: Instead of creating good jobs for residents of the state, they’ve allowed connected lawyers and lobbyists to direct tax breaks to their clients, who often broke their job creation promises, all at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

Case in point: The effort to bring a grocery store to Camden. In its first official report, the task force noted that a provision of a 2013 rewrite of New Jersey’s corporate tax incentive programs specifically addressed grocery stores in Camden, under a program called Grow NJ. But a politically connected law firm called Parker McCay — whose CEO happens to be the brother of a prominent New Jersey Democrat — “drafted large swaths of the [tax incentive] bill in various respects that appear to have been intended to benefit the firm’s clients,” according to the task force. That included shaping the grocery store provision to explicitly help its client, ShopRite, and prevent other grocery stores from benefiting from the tax break.

Here’s what the law firm allegedly did: It represented a joint project to have a ShopRite anchor a larger retail area in Camden, which was announced before the state legislature rewrote New Jersey’s tax incentive programs. That project, per the task force “was planned to be over 150,000 square feet, with at least 50 percent occupied by the grocery store.” Another developer was, at the same time, pushing a smaller project that also included a grocery store.

When New Jersey’s new tax incentive programs were later announced, the criteria for grocery stores were very specific. Grocers only qualified if they were “at least 50 percent” of a larger retail development “of at least 150,000 square feet” — the exact specifications that ShopRite had planned. (At the time, the average grocery store in the U.S. was 46,000 square feet.) As a result, the incentive explicitly helped ShopRite and rendered its competitor ineligible for the tax break, even though either project would also have fulfilled the goal of opening a supermarket in an underserved area.

Ultimately, ShopRite didn’t follow through on its Camden project, and neither did the second store that was made ineligible for subsidies. So the end result was no new grocery store in Camden at all. Instead, a sealant company took the site ShopRite would have used, thanks to $40 million in tax breaks; per the Philadelphia Inquirer, “No explanation has been provided for why the ShopRite project collapsed.” (In 2014, a PriceRite opened in Camden that was also too small to qualify for the tax breaks ShopRite would have enjoyed.)

Camden’s grocery stores were one of many examples in New Jersey’s incentive programs in which private concerns trumped the public interest. As the task force put it in its report: “Certain aspects of the Grow NJ program’s design are difficult to justify from a rational policy perspective and can be understood only as the result of a process in which certain favored private parties were permitted to shape the legislation to their benefit — and further, in some cases, to disfavor potential competitors.”

Sadly, such inside wheeling and dealing is a standard part of corporate tax deals. In fact, according to a study by the Kansas City Federal Reserve, an increase in a state using corporate tax incentives is correlated with an increase in its officials being convicted of federal corruption crimes. That connection makes a certain sort of sense, since corporate tax incentives are targeted to specific industries, if not specific companies, making a coziness between elected officials and corporate interests nearly inevitable.

But inside dealing aside, was using tax breaks to entice grocery stores into Camden even a promising strategy? A growing body of research says probably not.

One problem inherent in tax incentives is that they often go toward “incentivizing” actions that the business receiving them would have taken anyway, for other reasons. A study by Timothy Bartik at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that at least 75 percent of incentives wind up merely being free money for companies that planned to take such action regardless of the incentive. That’s also true with grocery stores: A 2017 study found that up to about 70 percent of grocery stores that entered low-income areas due to the federal New Market Tax Credit likely would have done so even in the absence of the credit.

There’s also plenty of evidence that bringing grocery stores into food deserts isn’t necessarily the panacea for those areas that advocates claim it is. Higher-income and lower-income households actually spend about the same amount of money on average in supermarkets: 91 cents of every dollar spent on groceries versus 87 cents, respectively. They also travel roughly the same distance to those stores, on average.

So simply bringing a store into the neighborhood cuts down on travel costs, but doesn’t have all the ancillary benefits — better diets and better health — that policymakers claim will occur. Diet is much more closely connected to the amount of money a household has and in what region of the country it’s located.

“The primary factors are economic and time constraints that are affecting people, not geographic barriers, in wealthy countries,” said University of Iowa College of Law Adjunct Professor Nathan Rosenberg. “The more studies that have been done, the stronger those studies are, and the better the data we have, the more clear that’s become.”

In 2018, Rosenberg argued in a paper he co-wrote with Nevin Cohen entitled “Let Them Eat Kale” that incentives for grocery stores get the food access solution precisely backward. Instead, Rosenberg and Cohen noted that boosting wages, strengthening worker protections, and increasing funds for programs such as those providing school lunches will all do more to address the root causes of food-related inequality.

So New Jersey lawmakers took a dubious idea, made it worse by allowing politically connected players to influence the process, and wound up achieving nothing for the people of Camden. Sadly, that’s often how programs like Grow NJ shake out: Good for the rich and connected, and leaving everyone else hungry for better solutions.

These days, he’s putting in around 60 hours a week, even though his contract says he’s supposed to work 50 hours and the payroll system only counts 40 hours a week for the purpose of accruing sick leave. His managers keep giving him more to do. “They just add and add and add,” he said. “There’s no way for us to get everything done.”

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While overall his pay is higher than it was when he was hourly thanks to bonuses, those bonuses aren’t guaranteed. In terms of guaranteed pay per hour, he’s making less: He estimates that right now, it averages out to about $8 an hour, whereas the people below him make $16 an hour. And so much intense work has taken a huge toll on him. “It wears you out to work this many hours,” he said. “I’ve blown out my knee, blown out my back. I’m almost on the brink of not being able to survive physically.”

Ahlgren isn’t eligible for overtime pay because the federal threshold of $23,660 to qualify has gone without an update for decades. And without extra overtime pay for his extra hours, he’s just keeping his head above water financially. “I don’t have really enough to survive or go to the doctor or plan for the future or anything like that,” he said.

Ahlgren may be able to look forward to some relief, however. At the beginning of June, the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries released a plan to update its own overtime threshold. It would ensure that any worker in the state who makes less than 2.5 times the minimum wage — by 2026, nearly $80,000 a year — will be owed overtime pay. About 400,000 people like Ahlgren are expected to be affected.

The state of Washington had to take matters into its own hands because efforts to increase the overtime threshold at the federal level have stalled. In 2016, the Obama administration updated federal overtime rules so those making $47,476 or less would be automatically covered, both hourly and salaried. It would have been updated every three years to keep up with wage growth thereafter, likely covering those making $51,000 by early 2020.

But the update was challenged in court and ultimately struck down. Rather than defend the Obama update, the Trump administration first did nothing, and then put forward its own proposed increase to $35,308 without any automatic updates. According to the Economic Policy Institute, it will cover 8.2 million fewer people than the Obama rule would eventually have.

In the wake of Trump’s weak federal action, a number of states have stepped into the breach, because, as with the minimum wage, federal overtime law is just a floor; states and localities can go higher if they choose.

“This is a standard that is really important to the vibrancy of the middle class, and it has dramatically eroded over time,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. The minimum wage raises pay and living standards for those at the very bottom, but overtime is “about the lower end of the middle class,” she said. The typical person impacted by it is the front-line supervisor in a fast food restaurant or retail store — a low-level manager who may be asked to put in 60 to 70 hours a week at no additional pay. Updating overtime therefore acts as a “companion standard” to increasing the minimum wage, she said.

Pennsylvania was the first to act when last year Gov. Tom Wolf (D) proposed raising the state’s threshold to $47,892 by 2022 and updating it automatically every three years after that. California and New York have also taken action: California‘s overtime threshold will cover everyone making less than $62,400 by 2023, while New York will raise it to $58,500 in New York City and phase it in at different rates for different parts of the state.

But Washington state has so far gone the furthest. “The Washington announcement is definitely the boldest,” said Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s a model for how states can take strong action to protect workers from the Trump overtime rollback. We hope it’ll spur more states.”Previously, about two-thirds of the salaried workforce had to be paid overtime when they worked more than 40 hours a week. Washington’s update would cover about 44 percent, Sonn said: “It’s really quite moderate historically because it wouldn’t fully restore overtime pay to the share that had it in the 1970s.”

One of the beneficiaries in Washington would be Sidney Kenney. When he started working at a residential service provider for developmentally disabled people in a salaried position, he was told the job would be 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. “Soon you find out that’s not true,” he said. He was required to always be on call, even on weekends, holidays, and vacations. It meant keeping his phone at the ready even when at the movies or in bed. “It changes how you live,” he said.

He once took a vacation to go to a friend’s wedding but found himself having to do work on the way there, during the wedding, and on the way home. Every time he put in those extra hours, he was paid the same. “It builds resentment,” he said. “You’re angry, you feel like you’ve been lied to, feel like you’ve been taken advantage of.”

So, he decided to move to an hourly position instead. “I loved the job I was doing,” he said. “However, I realized it was not a lifestyle I could continue or wanted to continue.” Now he has a set number of hours, and if he has to come in early or stay late, he’s paid for that extra time. “My days off are my days off,” he said. “I still get phone calls from work and I still get some text messages, but I don’t have to answer them.”

“Your time is invaluable,” he noted. “I can plan things, I can enjoy my time. It’s a crazy world and nothing’s promised, so what time I do have I want to enjoy.”

But he thinks if his state’s proposed overtime update goes into effect, almost all of the positions at his job will simply be made hourly to accommodate it. “I would have stayed in the same position if it were hourly,” he noted. “If they were to extend the same position I had … but in an hourly capacity, I would go back to it.”

Ahlgren doesn’t expect that being covered by overtime regulations would reduce his hours. But it will mean extra money for his extra work. “At least I would be able to go to the doctor and take of myself,” he said. “I would be able to plan for a future where I wouldn’t just have to do this forever.”

Other states may soon join in the action. Last week Massachusetts held a hearing on a bill that would increase its threshold to $64,000 by 2026. Colorado’s labor department kicked off a comment process for whether and by how much it should raise its overtime standards, which will continue through Aug. 15. And a bill has been introduced in Maine’s legislature to increase its threshold. There may be others just waiting in the wings: Sonn noted that 16 states filed objections to Trump’s overtime update. “That shows there’s a long list of states that think it’s not enough,” he said. “We may well see them acting in the future.”

Workers in Washington also hope their state can inspire others to act. “So many businesses have built their models around having these free workers,” Kenney noted. “It’s not right, it’s not ethical, and it’s not fair.”

“I’m just hoping more states follow suit,” he said.

When it comes to hazardous working conditions on American farms, many people think of pesticide exposure; as early as the 1960s, farmworkers were ringing alarm bells about it. But heat stress has actually surpassed pesticides — which cause cumulative harm over time — as the most immediate lethal danger in the fields, according to Dr. Marc Schenker, distinguished professor of public health sciences and medicine at University of California Davis. “We don’t see acute deaths from pesticide poisoning anymore,” says Schenker (though pesticides are still recognized as a significant danger with severe health risks for people exposed to them).

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An estimated 2.5 million farmworkers across the United States endure dangerously hot conditions on the job. As the heat climbs, workers can start to develop symptoms of heat stress including dizziness, nausea, fainting, vomiting, fatigue, poor coordination, and seizures. As their organs, especially their kidneys, start to break down, they can fall into a coma and die if not treated. Between 1992 and 2006, 68 farmworker deaths attributed to heat exposure were reported. Limited access to more current data makes it challenging to uncover the depth of the problem, though advocates claim deaths are likely underreported.

Outdoor temperatures aren’t the only issue. Personal protective equipment, ranging from suffocating Tyvek suits worn for pesticide application to thick trousers and heavy boots for working around thorny plants, can add to farmworkers’ misery.

“In workers, the major producer of body heat is metabolic workload,” explained Schenker. “If you’re working in outdoor conditions, you’re generating the majority of body heat from metabolism. The simple prevention is to reduce workload.” The piecework rate of payment for farmworkers, in which people are paid by the pound rather than by the hour, is a recipe for working as hard and as fast as possible. The system is great for employers, but bad for workers.

Access to drinking water, shade, and rest can help workers manage their body temperatures in high heat conditions. But just two states, California and Washington, have laws that require sufficient shade structures and drinkable water be nearby to meet the needs of the work crew. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, in which companies like McDonald’s and Trader Joe’s pay a premium for more ethically-sourced tomatoes, also requires access to shade, drinking water, rest breaks, and hygiene facilities as part of its code of conduct.  But even those requirements aren’t always enough.

In 2008, a 17-year-old pregnant farm worker died of heat-related illness because the drinking water was too far away, despite the fact that California’s heat protection law dated to 2005. Outcry led to enhanced safety regulations and better enforcement, but despite a dedicated heat violation hotline, improved data collection, and a push for better internal auditing to ensure complaints are investigated in a timely fashion, the problem persists.

Even if they have access to preventative care in the field, workers face another heat-related challenge when they go home: Farmworker housing may consist of crude shacks operated by farmers or contracting companies, or hot trailers with no air conditioning. Leydy Rengel of the United Farm Workers Foundation recalls the extreme heat of the Coachella Valley beating down on the trailer she shared with her parents, both farmworkers, as a child: “My parents would come home after 10-hour shifts, and didn’t have a place to cool down.” This can be dangerous, said Schenker: “Nighttime cooling is an important factor in preventing heat stress illness.”

While the short-term implications of heat-related illnesses are well understood, not as much is known about what they mean for people in the long term. Schenker is researching this subject, with a particular interest in what happens if workers experience repeated incidents of acute kidney injury, a potential complication of heat stress. This is especially vital since climate change is making conditions for farmworkers even worse.

California’s most recent climate assessment warned that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate, the state’s average daily high temperature could be as much as 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher from 2070-2100 than it is today. Over that same period, the annual number of extreme heat days (over 103.9 degrees) could rise from four to twenty-four. The amount of land scorched in wildfires will increase 77 percent.

In California, the law protecting workers from the effects of high temperatures is clear, but enforcement has been erratic. The UFW Foundation was one of the entities that pushed the state to issue more clarity and direction to keep farms — and the contract companies that supply a large number of farmworkers — accountable. Schenker, who has spent years researching farmworkers, said “California really does lead the nation,” but what that can look like from farm to farm is highly variable.

During the recent high heat event, the UFW Foundation ran an awareness campaign encouraging people to report unsafe conditions and setting up tables at locations farmworkers frequent to educate them about their rights. Rangel said even with the promise of anonymity, workers were reluctant to report. “They’re rather just be quiet,” she said, especially when they’re undocumented. And when state officials may take days to respond, complaints don’t always lead to enforcement.

Outside California and Washington, the picture can be grim for farmworkers in high heat conditions. They have some protections under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but for farmworkers, especially undocumented people in isolated areas, knowledge of the law and the ability to ask for enforcement can be limited.

“Last year, there was a 24-year-old farmworker, an H2-A guest worker in Georgia, who had only been in the country for less than 10 days, and he suffered heat illness. Nobody paid attention, his employers were not informed of how to handle this. They thought he was just being lazy,” said Rangel. It wasn’t the first time an ill worker had died in similar circumstances.

As consumers grow more aware of concerns around farmworker health and safety — calling, for example, for restrictions on pesticide use and listening to farmworkers speak out about sexual abuse in the field — heat illness should be a more prominent topic of conversation. Just as hotter days and longer summers will affect the quality of crops, they’ll affect the quality of life for the people who cultivate and harvest them.

When asked about the ‘99ers, as they’re known, at U.S. Soccer media day last month, forward Alex Morgan simply replied: “Now it’s our turn to make our mark.”

Indeed, twenty years after the 1999 tournament, the U.S. Women’s National Team is again seeking both a World Cup title and a massive shift in the perception of a woman’s worth in sports. Moreover, women athletes in other sports are hoping Team USA’s success will mean more power for them in their own labor organizing efforts.

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In March, U.S. players filed a class action lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) for gender-based discrimination. The lawsuit highlights inequities in travel conditions, promotion of games, staffing, and support and development. All are persistent despite improvements that came with a 2017 collective bargaining agreement and after a 2016 lawsuit.

The latest lawsuit states that the U.S. women were offered $40,000 less for making the 2015 World Cup roster than men were offered for making a 2014 roster. That pay gap stretched to $53,750 by 2018. The lawsuit also states that the women’s team made 38 percent of the compensation of the men’s team from March 19, 2013 to December 31, 2016, despite bringing in more revenue than the men’s team in 2016.

The revenue surplus on the women’s side is impressive, but does represent an outlier, and is greatly driven by the 2015 World Cup and subsequent victory tour. Knowing that, players were willing to have compensation increase only in years they outearned the men’s team.

U.S. Soccer denied these claims in their defendant’s answers and affirmative defenses filed May 6, 2019, stating “the current CBA provides for player compensation that increases based on increased viewership, attendance and sponsorship revenue, in each case over and above their guaranteed salary and other benefits.” So 28 players, including 22 on the 2019 World Cup roster, are moving forward with their lawsuit.

When comparing the list of accomplishments for the women’s national team, which includes three World Cup titles, four Olympic gold medals, and being ranked number one in the world for 10 of the last 11 years, to that the men’s national team, which has no World Cup titles or Olympic medals and hasn’t even qualified for the Olympics since 1988, one can hardly say the pay scale is based on merit.

Other female professional athletes see the soccer team’s argument as air-tight. They also believe a win in court for the U.S. team will mean a win for them too.

“When you look at the women’s national soccer team, they are better than the men, they do generate more money, they do pack the stands,” said four-year WNBA veteran Imani McGee Stafford, a center for the Dallas Wings. “They check all of those boxes and the only conversation as to why they don’t get paid like the men is because they are women.”

WNBA players recently opted out of their collective bargaining agreement and hope to negotiate with the NBA for better travel regulations, higher salaries, and higher revenue splits. Sports economist David Berri noted the current agreement with the WNBA and the NBA, its overseer, offers players roughly 25 percent of WNBA revenue, while NBA players own a 50 percent split of revenue. Additionally, NBA player contracts protect players from playing within 24 hours of travel between time zones. WNBA contracts do not.

If the women’s soccer team is the standard for WNBA players, the 23-year-old women’s pro basketball league is the standard women’s hockey players hope to achieve, as professional women’s hockey has struggled for years to stay afloat. In the 2017 #BeBoldForChange boycott and the current #ForTheGame movement pushing for what they deem a viable league, women’s hockey players seek a North American league that can pay a livable wage and meet professional standards.

Women’s hockey players recently organized the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, which consists of more than 200 hockey players, including all of Team Canada and Team USA, who say they will not sign contracts to play in North America. The #ForTheGame movement made waves on social media on May 2, one day after the closure of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL), which left the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) as the only professional league left standing in North America.

“We are fortunate to be ambassadors of this beautiful game, and it is our responsibility to make sure the next generation of players have more opportunities than we had,” said USA Hockey forward and 2018 Olympic gold medalist Kendall Coyne Schofield in the PWHPA release. “It’s time to stand together and work to create a viable league that will allow us to enjoy the benefits of our hard work.” Coyne Schofield earned $7,000 playing for the 2019 NWHL champion Minnesota Whitecaps. Canadian 2018 silver medalist Sarah Nurse earned $2,000 playing for the Toronto Furies in the CWHL.

But is the fact that other women athletes are watching the women’s soccer team’s fight so closely added pressure or motivation?

“I think it’s both,” said midfielder Morgan Brian. “Seeing those other women’s professional teams follow along with our journey, I think it inspired us to continue to keep the conversation going and to push for more … that’s something that we’ve always had in our DNA and want to be a part of us. We’re not only great on the field and pushing along the women’s game, but we’re also pushing along the women in this world.”

Goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris said that because she is preparing for a World Cup, she has a platform to speak about equality and a duty to use it, especially as she looks towards the end of her career.

“I’ve dedicated my entire life to my craft,” said Harris. “I have not been financially rewarded for what I’ve given and the success I’ve reached. So why do we speak up? Because I don’t want the future to have to worry about what I have to worry about in a few years, and that’s starting this life all over again at 35.”

After the World Cup, Harris and her World Cup teammates will continue their fight with U.S. Soccer. It is important to note that, while the 2019 lawsuit specifically seeks damages for national team players, the team still knows there is work to do in the USSF-owned National Women’s Soccer League.

Since 2016, the national team has found ways to incorporate the NWSL into its fight for gender equality in soccer, as players in that league who don’t play for their respective national teams don’t make a livable wage, and some NWSL teams even lack proper training conditions.

Crystal Dunn, who will be playing in her first World Cup, returned to the NWSL after being one of the final cuts from the 2015 World Cup roster. “World Cup years, I think are incredible. What [playing in NWSL] did for me was it allowed me to regroup and reset,” said Dunn. “That’s basically what really was important for me in 2015, was having the league to be able to take my mind off over everything else.”

The NWSL did raise the overall salary cap per team to $421,500 for the 2019 season. The increased salary cap brings the league minimum salary to $16,538 and the league max salary to $46,200, according to a January league release. The league also increased the housing allowance for each franchise, perhaps in light of controversy endured by New Jersey last year. Sky Blue FC came under massive heat when players began talking about the subpar conditions they faced for years. Training facilities with no running water, no showers at their home field facilities, and deplorable housing were just a few things they brought to light.

For all of these reasons and more, the fight off the pitch is important to the women’s national team. So too is playing to up their standards in France. The goal: World Cup champion or bust.

Families below the poverty line in Iowa are eligible to receive support for the majority of their child care, a benefit that can be worth more than $11,000 per year. Families are still eligible for the most of the credit — about $8,000 per year — until their incomes reach 145 percent of the poverty line, or about $25,000 for a single parent with one child. But if that parent’s income is just one percentage point higher, they aren’t eligible for support at all.

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That steep and dramatic cut-off point for assistance is combined with one of the lowest income thresholds in the country; neighboring states such as Kansas and Minnesota both set their cut-offs above 180 percent of the poverty line.

These programs are paid for by the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which has provided money to all U.S. states and territories for the purpose of helping low-income working parents afford child care since 1990. However, the program was chronically underfunded for decades, and by 2015 served the fewest children in the program’s history. In 2018, Congress increased discretionary CCDBG funding by about 80 percent for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, to help make up for some of the shortage. While this money was intended to make sure more children would receive care, Iowa’s eligibility ceiling has remained capped at 145 percent, where it has been for more than 10 years.

The 2018 increase in CCDBG funding means Iowa has $13 million more from the federal government to spend on child care assistance. While the Iowa legislature appropriated $3 million of the new CCDBG funding to increase reimbursement rates for child care providers, the rest of the funding increase hasn’t yet been allocated by Iowa’s legislature. At least 70 percent of the increase must be spent on direct services like expanding the number of families eligible for child care assistance or improving the quality and safety of child care in the state.

At the Iowa minimum wage, which remains frozen at the federal level of $7.25, pulling together the $186 per week it costs on average to pay for child care for one child takes 26 hours of the wages in a 40-hour week. Nearly two in every three Iowan parents working full-time would have to spend more than seven percent of their income to afford a child care center, exceeding the federal benchmark for affordability.

When getting a 20 cent raise means losing nearly the full value of the child care assistance benefit, the pressures on families are so strong that some working parents in Iowa are turning down small pay raises offered by employers to keep their Child Care Assistance (CCA) eligibility. In December of 2018, the federal Office on Child Care issued a citation to Iowa indicating the state wasn’t allowed to terminate benefits if the family initially qualified for CCA and saw only a modest increase in income. While Iowa is required to make this fix, the change is unlikely to help families who hover just above the threshold for eligibility.

Dave Stone, advocacy officer for United Way of Central Iowa, sees cost as the main sticking point for Iowa legislators hesitant to expand eligibility and soften the cliff effect. “Child care is expensive,” says Stone, and Iowa has “not been keeping up the appropriations” as child care costs have risen faster than wages.

The Beasleys are some of the people struggling to get by just above the cut-off for assistance. Katherine Beasley, her husband Dan, and their two kids, Peter (seven) and Noah (one), live in the Oakridge Neighborhood of Des Moines, a community that provides additional services to support their residents. When Noah was born in 2018, Katherine lost her job — in the first few weeks after Noah was born, he was frequently sick, and Katherine’s employer wasn’t happy that she wasn’t working enough hours. With only her husband Dan’s income, the Beasleys quickly drained their savings and fell behind on bills. By the time Katherine got a new job, her family had received their last possible extension from their utility company, and were about to have their electricity shut off. With her first paycheck, her family was just above the cutoff point for assistance.

“It was very stressful. You try not to show it to the kids, but you do feel depressed,” said Katherine. “The most important part was making sure the boys would be fed; sometimes there wasn’t anything left for us after feeding the boys.”

Through Oakridge, Katherine was able to access a program funded primarily by corporate donors that pays all but $50 of Noah’s $220 weekly child care cost. Even still, when Peter finishes elementary school for the summer in a few weeks, she doesn’t know how she’ll find care for him and still make ends meet if her next request for State Pay isn’t approved.

“I was taught that financial problems stay at home, so nobody really knows. I’d been raised not to ask for help, but it comes down to putting your kids first and supporting them,” she said. Struggling to provide for young children can be a stigmatizing experience. Perhaps this is why political interest in child care affordability lags behind higher education, despite the fact that child care is more expensive than college tuition in 28 states.

Without the Oakridge Neighborhood child care assistance, Katherine said she wouldn’t be able to continue her progress towards a nursing degree, a move she hopes will permanently change her family’s financial trajectory. “I’d have to get two jobs. The kids would never have mom or dad at home,” Katherine said, adding that it’s important to her that she has enough time to advocate for the needs of her older son, a special education student.

Helping families like the Beasleys is one reason why United Way of Central Iowa, along with their Skills2Compete Coalition partners including the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, and the Iowa State Education Association, have called on the Iowa state legislature to expand eligibility for CCA to at least 185 percent of the federal poverty line. The United Way of Central Iowa’s proposal would phase out assistance gradually using copays. To Stone, getting rid of the steep “cliff effect” is key. With a gradual phase out, families wouldn’t need to refuse small raises or avoid getting higher-paying jobs to maintain crucial child care assistance.

United Way of Central Iowa estimates implementing its proposal would cost around $22 million per year. On a federal level, the Child Care for Working Families Act, which is co-sponsored by the majority of congressional Democrats, would provide free child care to all families earning less than 75 percent of their state’s median income and cap spending for families earning up to 150 percent of the federal poverty line at 7 percent of their income. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has also proposed her own plan to pay for child care for all families making less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, and to provide support for families earning more than 200 percent of the federal poverty line who still can’t find child care at less than 7 percent of their income..

“We know support for children is critically important for adults to have success — in work, in certification programs, or in education. And we need to make sure that children get the support they need to enter kindergarten on par with their peers,” said Teree Caldwell-Johnson, CEO of Oakridge Neighborhood Services. If Iowa appropriates enough money for affordable child care, a generation of parents will have the freedom to make a better life for their families, and a generation of children will start their lives on more solid footing.

Editor’s note: The Beasley family requested that their name be changed for privacy.

“The end result is a lot of people are going to suffer,” he said.

D.C.’s council recently gave preliminary approval to a plan that would close United Medical Center, known as UMC, in January 2023, while reducing the city’s financial contributions to the capital’s only public hospital in the intervening years. Hospital officials say they need some $40 million to keep operating in this fiscal year alone, but the city’s payments going forward would be capped at $15 million annually.

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The move — which will be up for a final vote on Tuesday — has activists and workers at the hospital concerned, for a whole host of reasons. It also fits into a wider recent trend of hospitals closing up shop in the neighborhoods that can least afford it.

UMC is currently the only hospital in Washington that is not in the city’s northwest quadrant — which is both its whitest and richest. The city is grappling with the effects of widespread gentrification and rapidly changing demographics. By one measure, it is the fastest gentrifying city in the country, and in the top four for most black residents displaced. The population UMC serves is majority black, the poorest in the city, and disproportionately composed of Medicaid and Medicare patients.

If the budget cap is implemented, UMC will have to cut back services before ultimately closing. Already, UMC has reduced services due to budget constraints and financial woes, including closing its cancer clinic; a notice that the hospital will lay off employees within the next 60 days was circulated recently. Meanwhile, a proposal to open a new private hospital in that part of the city is far from a done deal, meaning the current hospital has an explicit end date, but the plan for replacing it is only half-baked.

“There is a closing date in the legislation that is not tied to the opening of any other hospital and right now, the city is still only in negotiations with the new Ward 8 hospital provider, which seems to have many roadblocks. So we don’t know what a realistic timeline is to have a new hospital in that part of the city,” said Elizabeth Falcon, executive director of D.C. Jobs With Justice, which is fighting the budget cuts.

Cutting back at UMC will mean longer wait times for its patients, and according to Jean-Pierre, higher mortality rates for those who suffer from strokes, heart attacks, and gunshots, as they are the most vulnerable when delays occur.

“There’s a lot of delays now, but to even cut more is going to create a catastrophic event,” he said. “They’re paying taxes just like the folks in Georgetown, [the richest part of D.C.]. Why should they have the delay in health care when they face a stroke?” For some residents in the area, the next nearest hospital after UMC is a nearly nine-mile drive away, which can take more than an hour in rush hour traffic. And the hospitals closest to UMC already say they have more patients than they can handle.

“Too many of our debates in DC are win-lose or lose-lose. UMC is another example. The debate shouldn’t be: New hospital in Ward 8 or responsible patient care at old hospital in Ward 8. It needs to be both. Vulnerable lives are at risk,” tweeted D.C. council member Elissa Silverman.

But the closing of UMC is about more than just one hospital in one part of one city. It is also emblematic of larger trends in which hospitals are closing, consolidating, and moving out of low-income urban neighborhoods in favor of neighborhoods with richer residents.

In 2014, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found that the number of hospitals in major U.S. cities fell by nearly half between 1970 and 2010, and most of those that closed were public hospitals or hospitals located in low-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, two-thirds of hospital openings during the same time period were in more affluent neighborhoods.

That tracks with D.C.’s experience. The city lost Providence Hospital, in its northeast quadrant, earlier this year, and now UMC has been put on life support, while its four other major hospitals are in wealthier or rapidly gentrifying parts of the northwest.

Not surprisingly, hospital closures lead to worse health outcomes, particularly for those who suffer from heart attacks or injuries that require immediate medical attention. Areas that lose hospitals also tend to lose other medical services as well, as doctors and other practitioners move away or decide to open new practices elsewhere. This turns low-income areas into health care deserts.

Plus, those same areas tend to be the least served by public transit, and have the most residents who don’t own their own modes of transportation, putting ever-higher barriers between patients and the care they need.

“Localities are getting out of the business of running hospitals. That doesn’t mean people are out of the business of getting sick in every neighborhood,” said Falcon. “We are at a moment in history where governments don’t like paying for government services.” Available data on hospital closures is not great, but between 1996 and 2002, per one study, at least 13 public hospitals closed; another study found that public hospitals that closed between 1990 and 2010 were in neighborhoods with significantly higher percentages of black residents than public hospitals that remained open.

On the private side, meanwhile, powerful, multi-facility health systems are responsible for much of the hospital consolidation cities have experienced. Between 2005 and 2017, there were 1,000 hospital merger and acquisition deals announced. 40 percent of hospital stays now occur in markets in which there is only one hospital owner. Such consolidation, in addition to making hospitals fewer and farther between, drives up prices and drives down management quality.

UMC has had its struggles, of course. A slew of errors led regulators to shut down its obstetrics ward in 2017. The only reason the city has been running the hospital at all is that its financial misadventures necessitated a 2010 rescue from bankruptcy. But few think that the city would let it collapse completely. Organizers are moderately confident that, if a new hospital is not completed in the neighborhood by January 2023, the council would at least continue to keep UMC’s emergency room open.

But none of that stops the slow bleeding already occurring there, or makes up for the preventable illnesses, injuries, and deaths that will happen in the intervening years due to the cap on funding; it says nothing good about the city that its poorest residents are saddled with its least-functional hospital. None of UMC’s problems change the fundamental fact that the bulk of D.C.’s available health care services are in the parts of the city where the residents are the wealthiest.

“We are trained to do no harm,” said Jean-Pierre, the UMC nurse. “But the D.C. council does not live by the same code of ethics. Based on the cutting, they’re doing a lot of harm.”

Advocates argue the rule is designed to suppress unions by making it more difficult to collect dues. And there’s more than union dues at stake: Home care providers could, for example, experience lapses in health coverage by failing to keep up with premiums.

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Many home care workers are family members providing home and community-based care to loved ones. Their work can include assistance with activities of daily living like bathing, dressing, and toileting, along with light housekeeping, help with errands, and other services designed to help disabled people and older adults stay in their communities. Home care is one of the fastest growing professions in the United States, with a projected growth rate of 41 percent for those working at agencies.

The median wage for home care workers is $10.49; a 2017 National Employment Law Project survey found unionized employees made $2 more per hour when examining the difference between weighted average wages. The majority are women of color, reflecting the gendered and racialized history of the field, and 28 percent are themselves on Medicaid.

In some ways, Medicaid-funded home care can act as an anti-poverty program and compensate people for care work that is normally considered unworthy of pay. “When I found out about In-Home Support Services [the California implementation of the program],” said Andrea Dudley, who cares for her son, “it was like a godsend…it’s not a lot of money, but it’s helped me.”

Home health work, like other labor that takes place in the intimate setting of the home, has been historically undervalued. When the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) passed in 1938, domestic workers were explicitly excluded from wage and hour protections, in part at the behest of Southern Democrats. In the years since, domestic workers, including those offering home health services, have fought to organize. In the 1970s, Congress amended the FLSA to cover some domestic workers, but home health aides were still left out by a provision excluding “babysitters” and “companionship services.” But recently, they’ve started making gains. They won wage and overtime protections under FLSA in 2015 and have grown home care worker union participation. In 2010 they pushed for the passage of a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York, and a similar national bill to extend these protections nationwide has been introduced by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

Now anti-union proponents, pushed by groups such as the National Right to Work Committee, are on the offensive. In 2014, they won a significant victory with Harris v. Quinn, which ruled that home health care workers are not public sector employees. Therefore, those who choose not to join the union may not be required to pay service fees, enjoying the benefits of collective bargaining without the costs.

In this instance, the government argues Medicaid monies should only be paid out to providers, with exceptions for tax deductions but not for third-party payees. In response to concerned comments about the implications of this rule, the government insisted that “it in no way prevents” home health workers from paying union dues, insurance premiums, and other costs via other means. To prove their point, HHS staffers even calculated the cost of envelopes and stamps for mailing payments.

While HHS staffers dismissed concerns, worker advocates argue this rule change could make things extremely difficult for home health workers, and not just when it comes to sending in union dues. Some are unbanked, making it challenging to mail a check. Others deal with significant demands on their time and schedules that could make it hard to keep track of due dates and mail things on time. Issues like these could potentially lead to lapses in health coverage and other problems that could be easily resolved with automatic deductions. More to the point, home health workers themselves have repeatedly stated they want the option to make assignments.

The extremely targeted nature of this rule has big implications. Independent providers are difficult to organize because of their far-flung nature. They don’t have a shared office, meeting place, or workspace to network, because they labor entirely in private homes, out of the public eye. They are underpaid and vulnerable to exploitation. Union membership can change that. Dudley commented that the union helps her “stay informed” and connected with other workers.

The rule is “a blatant attack on us,” she added, asking what should make care workers in particular subject to a bar on withholdings. It’s a question shared by other worker-advocates and their allies. Unions such as the SEIU and AFSCME are organizing against it, and at least five states are suing.

“It’s our choice to take our deductions out of our checks,” said Dudley.

During a recent visit to her pain clinic, Stern’s pain management doctor informed her that her treatment plan was going to need to change again: Now, she would have to choose between taking Xanax and taking hydrocodone (also known as Vicodin). The doctor was not concerned that she was misusing her medications, but that law enforcement would come after him if “something happened to [her].” So, Stern had two options: medicate her pain, or get enough sleep. She chose the latter.

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While Stern’s story may seem extreme, her experience is representative of many chronic pain patients who have come up against various barriers that have been set by state governments, the medical field, and corporate pharmacies. According to recent CDC findings, 50 million Americans have chronic pain; although chronic pain affects people from all economic backgrounds, it tends to hit those in poverty the hardest. People in chronic pain tend to experience greater poverty, and struggle with the cost of medications and frequent pharmacy or doctor’s visits. The treatment of chronic pain also has major disparities when it comes to race, and black women in particular have suffered the consequences of those disparities.

Many of these access issues stem from a response to the opioid addiction and overdose crisis, declared a public health emergency by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2017. However, early response efforts have increased chronic pain and its consequences, leading to worse outcomes for chronic pain patients that should be addressed as a new public health crisis.

This crisis accelerated when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released their set of guidelines on opioid prescribing, intended for use by primary care providers, in 2016. The CDC has since clarified that the guidelines were recommendations, not strict policy, but the harm to many chronic pain patients like Stern has been done.

“The only treatment available [for my condition] at this point is treating the pain and the chief of urology at OHSU instructed my primary care doctor to allow me to have a monthly supply of opioid pain medication,” Stern said, but the results of opioid scaremongering have left her in agonizing pain instead. Part of the CDC’s 2016 guidelines, under the heading “Assessing Risk and Addressing Harms of Opioid Use,” stated that “[c]linicians should avoid prescribing opioid pain medication and benzodiazepines concurrently.” For someone with complex medical issues like Stern, this guideline is not useful.

Some government agencies are starting to recognize the consequences of cracking down on pain patients’ opioid prescriptions; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released a safety alert on the negative effects of sudden discontinuation or abrupt tapering of opioids, which can include “serious withdrawal symptoms, uncontrolled pain, psychological distress, and suicide.”  The authors of the 2016 CDC guidelines for opioid prescribing also recently clarified how its guidelines are meant to be used as a response to widespread misapplication of those guidelines.

The misconception that opioid prescriptions lead to opiate addiction has been widespread, and overarching state and federal measures to combat the opioid overdose crisis are reaching a fever pitch. There’s the Oregon Health Authority’s (OHA) now-tabled proposal to force-taper all Medicaid patients on opioids for certain chronic pain conditions; Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Gardner’s controversial proposal to limit all acute pain medication prescriptions to a seven day fill, which sparked massive pushback from the chronic pain and disability communities; and Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who favors a three-day fill limit. In contrast, the American Medical Association (AMA) has come out against arbitrary pill limits, as has a group called Health Professionals for Patients in Pain (HP3).

Very few opioid addictions begin with a patient who has a doctor’s prescription: Up to 80 percent of people with an opioid addiction illegally obtained pills from another source like a friend or relative first. While the opioid overdose epidemic from illegal heroin and fentanyl is a serious problem, federal and state actions to decrease the number of opioid prescriptions and/or pills in circulation overall will have — and are already having — a hugely negative impact on chronic pain patients who take opioid medications. While the number of pain prescriptions has declined since 2010, the number of deaths due to overdoses involving heroin and synthetic fentanyl has increased.

According to Thomas Kline, MD, a physician in North Carolina who maintains a list of chronic pain patients who committed suicide after being forced off of their medications, the anti-opioid hysteria that has taken root in the medical field and the federal government has resulted in “people [being] killed.”

Senators and state representatives are not medical doctors, and overarching government intervention of the kind that we are witnessing in private medical treatment can and does have consequences that are bad for chronic pain patients.

A one-size-fits-all policy, whether at the state or federal level, when it comes to chronic pain and opioids may have unintended consequences for chronic pain patients. Dr. Kline puts it more starkly: “Limiting the number of pills [that patients can get] is not going to work. All it’s going to do is screw people.”

The conditions that led to the riot were nothing new. MCCC was designed to hold 301 people, but at the time was packed with over 400. The jail has a history of chronic overcrowding; in 2016 the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii filed a complaint that named MCCC as the most “egregiously overcrowded” on the islands, to the point that it was unsafe. Among other issues, the report notes that it was common for three, four, or sometimes five people to be placed into cells designed for two, forcing them to sleep on the floor among roaches and rats, sometimes with their heads beneath the toilet.

Tempers were strained by other issues, as well. Anonymous whistleblowers told The Maui News about undersized, nutritionally insufficient meals, and last year, the facility was fined more than $16,000 for failing to maintain a functioning fire alarm system. The phones — which often serve as the sole connection to incarcerated people’s children, partners, and other family — were chronically broken. “And mail,” Sam said, “we’d get [letters] that were weeks and weeks and weeks postdated, or never, ever get them; they’d just get sent back.”

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On March 11, 2019, some of the people detained at MCCC began complaining to the guards. It started as a typical, minor confrontation, but this time they’d had enough of being ignored. When a guard ordered everybody back to their cells, several detainees refused. And then they did more than refuse. They began by throwing chairs at windows, smashing computers, and stacking together toilet paper rolls and other flammable items. Overbooked and understaffed, the situation quickly became more than the guards could control. Soon, there was a fire. Detainees report being locked in cells while the module burned, their guards nowhere to be seen. Fire sprinklers worked only sporadically. Smoke filled the cells, blindingly thick. Sam said he was able to escape to an outdoor recreational area, but when he and several others arrived, police negotiators yelled at them to go back inside and leave through the emergency exit, or face escape charges. But according to Sam, those emergency exit doors were jammed.

Eventually the fire was doused, but detainees then had to contend with police in riot gear, who were beating people, sometimes after zip-tying them, according to the reports given to The Maui News. Once the riot was settled, people jailed in the facility were sent back to the same cells that had just been trashed. Many had no access to working toilets. Sam’s mattress was gone. Eventually he passed out on the concrete floor, succumbing to sheer exhaustion.

In the month after the riot, two inmates escaped from the facility through a broken door. MCCC has not stopped housing people, not even for repairs, which include fixes for smoke-stained walls and replacement beds, chairs, tables, and kitchen equipment. One module had to be decommissioned due to the damage; the people housed inside were relocated to other areas of the facility, which are now even more crowded than they were prior to the riot.

When asked for comment, a prison official told TalkPoverty “The disturbance at the Maui Community Correctional Center (MCCC) is under investigation and internal review by the Department of Public Safety. There is nothing further we will be discussing about the on-going investigation at this time.”

The damages are expected to cost 5.3 million dollars, much more than it would have cost to fix the phones or provide sufficient meals to the people housed in the facility. National estimates place the cost of feeding incarcerated people at around $2.62 per person per day; raising that figure by a full dollar would not bring MCCC’s food budget, at capacity, to even half a million dollars. And phone calls, which cost money to detainees and their families, are a highly profitable industry in the corrections world, which means those phones essentially pay for their own repairs. What happened at MCCC is an extreme, dramatic example of the deleterious effects of overcrowding within correctional facilities, but the core issue is one that quietly affects pretrial jails and prison facilities across the nation.

Last April, guards were so overwhelmed by a riot in a South Carolina maximum-security prison that they waited more than four hours to enter the building, leading to the deaths of seven inmates. A 2017 riot in Delaware that led to the death of a corrections officer has also been attributed to overcrowding and understaffing. And earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice deemed Alabama state prisons for men were in violation of the Constitution due to severe overcrowding that led to physically and emotionally dangerous conditions. Some evidence suggests overcrowding may even be linked to a rise in the use of solitary confinement.

Overcrowding can manifest in everyday deprivations, like the denial of visitation, vocational and rehabilitation programs, and appropriate medical care. And it stems from laws and policies that target vulnerable populations. There are laws targeting transient and low-income people, such as panhandling, loitering, and public camping ordinances. Then there are those which could theoretically affect anyone, but somehow tend to target the poor anyway. Drug laws, for example, disproportionately affect people like Sam; addicted, cash strapped and in need of medical treatment. Sometimes people can be incarcerated for months simply for carrying a used syringe or a baggie with stray powder.

Those laws are paired with the cash bail system allows wealthier people to pay their way out of jail pending trial, and leaves those with less economic means — about 460,000 people, or one-quarter of all incarcerated people —  behind bars. People who face pretrial detention are more likely to be convicted, usually through a guilty plea.

When people are picked up on allegations that are essentially the result of deprivation — whether of food, housing, or appropriate medical care — and can’t make bail, they languish in correctional facilities until those facilities become stretched beyond capacity. Because these laws essentially target people for activities of necessity — for example, sitting on a sidewalk — they lead to overzealous arrests of people who don’t have the money to bond out. Too often, the crimes that land people in jail stem from an acute need for mental health or substance use services —the exact type of care that these facilities are unable to adequately provide.

What took place in Maui is only one example of a nationwide issue. Across the country, cash bail practices along with anti-drug user and anti-loitering laws continue to funnel people through an already overloaded system, increasing the cost demand on facilities to provide for the basic needs of the people housed inside. The result is hundreds of thousands of people crammed into jails and prisons that are unsafe, unhealthy, and, quite possibly, unconstitutional.

Editor’s note: When requested, names have been changed to allow people to talk more freely about their experiences behind bars.

Data on incarcerated Black Muslim women is slim, but reported cases of de-veiling date back at least 14 years. In 2005, Jameelah Medina was accused of being a terrorist by a Los Angeles County Sheriff and forced to remove her hijab. In 2017, Kirsty Powell settled a lawsuit with Long Beach for the “humiliation and distress” she suffered when her hijab was forcibly removed by police. Last year, the Council of American Islamic Relations in Michigan filed a civil rights complaint on behalf of Siwatu Salama-Ra, whose religious rights (including access to a hijab, Quran, and pork-free food) were violated while incarcerated.

These are only a scattering of cases, and more surely linger in the shadows. Unfortunately, not every case is reported, because doing so can lead to retaliation or long legal battles. Multiple groups have taken up fights to introduce changes across the country to address these problems, but the issue of violating Black Muslim women’s religious rights is deeper than policy.

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There is a legal precedent for allowing Muslim women to wear hijab while incarcerated. Along with the First Amendment guaranteeing religious freedom, Congress passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000, which included protecting the religious rights of incarcerated people. However, that precedent has been difficult to apply to incarcerated Muslims due to Islamophobia embedded within the carceral system. As noted by CAIR Michigan staff attorney Amy Doukoure, there is no uniform policy across facilities regarding the right to wear hijab. Instead, Doukoure said, “When it comes to county facilities and state facilities, every county and every city has their own policy. Or a lot of them still have a lack of policy.”

This lack of policy leaves a lot up to discretion, which poses unique issues for Black Muslim women. Although Black Muslims make up a fifth of all Muslims in the United States, we occupy a tumultuous space. Black Muslims experience an anti-Black extension of Islamophobia rooted within the “afterlife of slavery”. Theorized by African-American literature professor Saidiya Hartman, it refers to the continued devaluation and dehumanization of Black lives, accomplished through a “racial calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”

In some cases, the removal of Black Muslim women’s hijab is also linked to public shaming tactics. Educator and activist Angela Davis noted in “Are Prisons Obsolete?” that Black women are subject to regimes of punishment that differ greatly from those experienced by white women. Part of that includes publicly shaming or humiliating Black women, which is seen time and time again throughout the criminal justice system. The very existence of online mugshots and media usage of them is a great example and, for Black Muslim women, poses a unique concern.

In Maine, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office opened an internal investigation in 2016, after at least one Black Muslim woman — who was arrested at a protest — had a mugshot without hijab released to the media. In the opinion of other protesters, the decision to release the mugshots online was intentional.

When working on developing a policy in LA county, Margari Hill, co-founder and executive director of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, noted that law enforcement tried to slip in vague wording to leave things up to their discretion, and advocated for having dual mugshots: one with hijab and one without.

That “dual mugshot” policy also exists in Michigan, where Doukoure said women are often told they can’t wear headscarves for identification purposes, adding, “You’re allowed to wear them in your driver’s licenses and you’re allowed to wear them in your passport photos, so why does the Michigan Department of Corrections need a higher standard than every other state and federal government agency?” Despite the Michigan Department of Corrections having a policy around hijabs in general, there is no rule preventing those photos from going online. If they do, it’s essentially impossible to remove them due to the difficulty of communicating with online search engines and convincing them to take the photos down, and the department itself.

The issue of having a mugshot without hijab going online is one I’m familiar with. According to a Ramsey County Public Information Officer, the county’s official policy since March 2014 has been, “We exchange [their hijab] for one of ours (to avoid any contraband issues). We take two pictures, one with and one without. The one without is confidential and never released.”

But similar to the Black Muslim women in Maine, I was arrested while protesting the police. While I was detained, I was told by a male officer that I needed to remove my hijab for my mugshot. I complied, because the process of getting booked and released takes hours. I was too tired to argue. Despite Ramsey County’s own policy, it was the only picture taken. That mugshot was later released online.

Groups have attempted to address the lack of policy within their own regions, which illuminated other factors at play. For instance, cultural ways of wearing hijab that are dominant in Black communities are not considered markers of one’s Muslim faith in the same way that they are for other communities.

In the 1960s, the repeal of the National Origins Act and Asiatic Barred Zone led to an influx of Muslim immigrants, which led to the American public beginning to explicitly code Muslims as Arab. As a result, Hill shared that she would often have to demonstrate to law enforcement different ways to wear hijab and the various materials it could come in. She noted that if a Black Muslim did not have the proper “markers” to be considered “legitimately” Muslim — such as an Arabic name or a particular phenotype — then the reaction was accusations that “Oh, you’re wearing [a scarf] for fashion” and “You’re not a real Muslim, you’re a Moos-lim.”

This process of facilities taking it upon themselves to determine who is a legitimate Muslim — and excluding Black women from that — was also noted by Doukoure. In 2018, at the same time CAIR Michigan filed a civil complaint against the Michigan Department of Corrections on the behalf of Ra, the organization filed a second on the behalf of Marna A. Muhammad, who was illegally denied clergy status.

“We believe that because she was an African-American woman serving an African American community, they didn’t find her to be what they consider to be a stereotypical Muslim,” Doukoure shared. Muhammad was with Masjid Wali Muhammad, the oldest masjid in Michigan. “And therefore, they refused to recognize that someone like her could be a religious, spiritual leader that could have clergy status.”

Through the dehumanization of Black people — and our subsequent removal from the religious, as outlined by Delice Mugabo — Black Muslims are rendered invisible within mainstream discussions around Islamophobia, but still perceived as an inherent threat. This anxiety is transferred from colonial times, such as Charles V of Spain’s attempts to exclude “slaves suspected of Islamic learnings” after a revolt. Black Muslims as a threat to social order are well documented within the criminal justice system, where Black militant became synonymous with “problem” and then interchangeable with Muslims. The de-veiling — and general maltreatment — of incarcerated or detained Black Muslim women is a symptom of wider issues relating to anti-Black Islamophobia. Black Muslim women are regarded as inherent threats due to both their Blackness and their Islam.

The issue of de-veiling Black Muslim women within detention facilities cannot be read as simply an issue with policy implementation. Even when the right policy exists in writing, experiences like mine reveal that it is not actually implemented as a standard practice. Instead, people must reckon with the deeper, systemic issues leading to the simultaneous delegitimization and criminalization of Black Muslim women.

This April marked the 20^th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. In the weeks following the anniversary, three deaths and numerous injuries were caused by two shootings on school campuses. Despite whatever fervor Columbine may have stirred 20 years ago to address school shootings, they have become a common part of the U.S. news cycle and school shooting drills a regular part of a student’s education. However, no matter how common these events are, safety drills and strategy have not adequately developed inclusive safety measures for students with disabilities.

This is not a trivial problem: 14 percent of students have a disability.

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The current approach regarding active shooter events is the “run, hide, fight” strategy, the response recommended by the Department of Homeland Security, which calls for running away when possible, hiding somewhere safe when you can’t run, and fighting the shooter if running or hiding are not options. For students with disabilities who may not be able to run, employment of the “hide” aspect of the “run, hide, fight” strategy often calls for waiting in areas such as libraries, bathrooms, and classrooms for response personnel to assist them — even if these areas aren’t very accessible or safe. The fight strategy is the last option, one that no parent or teacher wants a student, disabled or otherwise, to have to do, and a strategy that has left two young students dead in the last several weeks. However, if schools have not provided sufficient options for students to respond, they may be left with few other choices than to charge or thrown items at an attacker.

Plus, tools like door barricades and lockdown plans designed to keep children safe often ignore the needs of students with disabilities, who in addition to mobility disabilities may have adverse reactions to alarms that overwhelm senses, difficulty processing instructions, or an inability to remain still or quiet.

Using a classroom as a refuge area was the solution Katie’s school decided to use when she was in fifth grade. “I just (in theory) had to wait in a burning building until someone came to get me. Even at 10 years old, I knew this was a horrible plan and I was not a fan,” she said.

While Katie was raised in Michigan, these issues are national. A settlement in a Newark, New Jersey, high school district was reached in 2017 after it left at least one disabled student in the school when an unplanned alarm went off.  The school “did not have policies for evacuating students with disabilities,” according to federal officials. More than 20 years ago, the City of Alexandria, Virginia, school board was sued twice regarding evacuation and school safety of students. Despite laws and litigation establishing accessibility requirements that go back decades, much has remained the same in evacuation plans for students with disabilities.

When it comes to students with disabilities, organizations such as Safe and Sound Schools and the ALICE Training Institute recommend the use of Independent Emergency and Lockdown Plans, or IELPs. These protocols hook into Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs), a federal requirement for special education students, which are detailed and routinely updated plans to accommodate students with disabilities; or a student’s 504 Plan, which ensures access to certain accommodations, such as extra time on tests.

While IELPs can be a great way to address a child’s specific needs, learn the problem areas of the school, and connect with disabled students and their parents, it is a dangerous disservice to everyone on a school campus to relegate inclusive solutions to these problems to just one student and their specific IEP or 504 team. It does not seem feasible that a school administration could efficiently respond to the individual IELPs of each student and keep all students safe in the event of a real emergency.

Relying on individual plans also represents a missed opportunity for universal design and inclusion, which could benefit the campus as a whole. Universal design of safety plans would produce plans that are created with the flexibility and intention of being used by the largest number of students possible, based on a recognition of varied needs, rather than amended later for individual students as needed.  Additionally, IEPs and 504 Plans are a federal requirement that does not apply equally to private schools, which do not have a requirement to provide IEPs to students with disabilities.

In 2019, schools should be beyond a “separate but equal” approach to students with disabilities. Disabled students spend on average more than 60 percent of their time in a general classroom. It is dangerous and lazy not to integrate identified safety needs into school response plans, which should be accessible and account for the many needs of all children attending the school. For instance, investments in tools like noise canceling headphones, or cue cards for the classroom, may help students handle loud noises and follow the steps in a lockdown procedure.

The requirement for inclusion in the classroom and in emergency preparedness is not just fanciful suggestion, but the law. The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, applies to places open to the public, governments, and schools. A recent ADA-based lawsuit against the New Rochelle, New York, school district, which failed to evacuate two students during a fire and did not include students using mobility aids in drills, ended in a payment of $26 million dollars to a student who uses a wheelchair.

With the innovation that has taken place in the last several decades, people like Katie often wonder why there haven’t been improvements to school emergency plans and why students continue to face dangers due to inaccessibility nearly 30 years after the ADA and hundreds of school shootings later.  While school safety has turned into a billion dollar industry, efforts such as metal detectors or adding police are not creating safer school campuses. Funds could be used for more comprehensive alarm systems, evacuation chairs, additional training and drills, and emergency elevator systems that will allow all students to be less passive in an emergency situation.

Inclusion is planning for everyone from the beginning. The onus for creating an effective response to an active shooter should not reside with the student, teachers, or parents, but with school systems using the knowledge and input of those parties. IELPs are a conversation we need to be having for K-12 students with disabilities, but they are only a beginning step for making our schools truly accessible and as safe as possible for anyone that may be on campus in an emergency. School districts have spent far too long avoiding true integration in school emergency plans, and it puts students’ lives at risk.

Uber executives’ plans to take the company public on Friday have only exacerbated the situation, so Uber drivers across the country have pledged to log out for 12 hours beginning at noon on Wednesday. Drivers and their supporters also plan to protest in front of the Uber headquarters in downtown San Francisco.

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For months, drivers have pointed to the inequities between what they earn driving, which often calculates to below minimum-wage after taxes and expenses, and the billions that executives are projected to reap once the company goes public. Silicon Valley technology website TechCrunch reported in April that Uber is seeking up to $100 billion in valuation, one of the biggest such valuations in California history.

Among those cashing in on the I.P.O. are Uber’s former CEO and founder Travis Kalanick, who was forced out in 2017 for alleged internal conflicts and poor management. Kalanick could make as much as $9 billion, while venture capitalist Matt Cohler could pocket about $11 billion, and founder Garrett Camp may make $6 billion.

While driver protests have happened before, such as the strike that saw U.K.-based drivers withdraw their labor in October 2018, the Uber strike has expanded to stretch across the world in cities such as Los Angeles; Nairobi, Kenya; and Sydney, Australia, where drivers plan to strike for at least part of the day on Wednesday. City agencies such as Bay Area Rapid Transit are encouraging potential riders to utilize public transit as an alternative, and both the San Francisco Taxi Drivers Alliance and New York Taxi Driver Alliance are joining the protest out of a sense of solidarity with their rideshare counterparts.

Mostafa Maklad, an Uber driver in San Francisco and organizer with Gig Workers Rising, who is originally from Egypt, points out the little-known fact that the Saudi Arabian royal family could stand to gain the most from the Uber I.P.O. through direct investments and holdings. “Most Uber drivers in San Francisco are from Yemen,” says Maklad. Prince Mohammad bin Salman, as Saudi Arabia’s minister for defense, has spent billions on an air campaign targeting Yemeni rebel groups, which has led to civilian casualties. “All of that money will go towards the [Yemeni Civil War], which has killed hundreds of thousands.”

In recent months, rideshare drivers with Gig Workers Rising, a project of the grassroots labor organization Working Partnerships USA, have begun pushing back against what they allege are abuses of their “independent contractor” status. This spares the company from having to provide benefits or other labor law protections to drivers.

Maklad said, “Uber has always looked at drivers as just a number or an application on a paper.”

The drivers are also agitating for more transparency around payment models, an increased wage commensurate with the Bay Area’s high cost of living, benefits such as workers’ compensation and paid time off, and a role at the bargaining table in the workplace. Their organizing comes on the heels of a rare victory, when drivers in New York City won a minimum pay rate in December as part of the City Council’s attempt to regulate ridesharing companies under the Taxi and Limousine Commission and offset the gridlock that extra cars on the road cause.

“Wages have actually gone down in years. It’s expensive year-after-year. There’s no increase [for inflation] like other workers, no benefits,” Maklad said. After Uber made changes to its payment structure in October, drivers said their overall take-home pay actually decreased. Uber told a number of media outlets at the time, such as Business Insider, that it did this to keep earnings more consistent.

Other grievances Maklad pointed to include the lengths Uber executives seem to go to assuage their customers at the expense of their drivers. He highlighted one recent case in Los Angeles, in which a passenger stabbed a driver, citing the risks that rideshare drivers take when they pick up customers. Other cases include the oft-made complaint about Uber’s passenger-skewed ratings system, and that until recently drivers could only contact Uber through an email system.

While Maklad and other drivers allege that Uber shirks responsibility for passengers’ behavior, they also allege that Uber itself is less than forthcoming when it comes to dealing with its drivers, despite the critical role drivers play in ensuring the operation runs smoothly.  “We have the right to know much money we’re going to earn before we pick a passenger. We have the right to know who we’re picking up,” said Maklad. “It seems any passenger can commit a crime and get away with it because there’s no way to figure out who a passenger is [if anything goes wrong]. Uber wants to keep everything confidential.”

Uber drivers have been accused of discriminating against passengers, but that doesn’t undermine their very real fears about assault and harassment, highlighting the failures of a platform that benefits neither driver nor rider.

In contrast, Maklad said, drivers’ accounts are automatically deactivated after they’ve been in three car accidents, regardless of whether the accidents are the driver’s fault or not. Maklad says the only course of action drivers can take is to email the company. He pointed to an incident in which one driver’s account was deactivated after his third accident — despite his not being at fault — after which drivers tried to deliver a petition to Uber headquarters in support of the driver to demonstrate their frustration with Uber’s policy.

Maklad said, “We were turned away at the door. Uber sent its security guard to tell us that they don’t accept physical deliveries, and that we had to email them.” The San Francisco Examiner reported that a guard tackled one driver/supporter.

“They refused to respond to his message, even though there were 8,000 signatures in support,” he said.

“Their business model is to find a way to avoid being responsible for employees,” said Maklad. “But we’ve never been treated like independent contractors.” A court ruling last year challenged the practice of labeling people who appear to be employees as independent contractors in California. Uber’s quite familiar with this issue: a current case concerning misclassification of drivers in Massachusetts and California is making its way through a San Francisco court, which has already seen Uber pay out $20 million in settlement fees. Another judge ruled that because the plaintiffs drove for Uber BLACK, the limousine side of Uber, and were able to have free rein over how they structured their time and when they took breaks, they couldn’t be considered employees and thus weren’t entitled to protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which doesn’t apply to independent contractors.

Wednesday’s strike looks to have a far-reaching impact beyond that of just gig workers. There is a sense that the circumstances surrounding the strike extend beyond transit, as the exorbitant amounts that executives stand to receive are reflective of the accelerating income inequality gap between workers and bosses. One U.K.-based organizer told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Uber drivers were told they are unskilled, stuck in poverty, and will never stand up. Now, a global network for drivers are working together to fight back!”

There are currently almost half a million children in foster care in the United States, 123,000 of whom are waiting to be adopted. Child welfare data indicate that approximately 23 percent of children in foster care identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, like Alex.

In the state of South Carolina, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently waived federal nondiscrimination policy for foster care and adoption. While South Carolina is the only state that has been granted such a waiver to date, there are 10 states — Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia — that use federal dollars to support private faith-based agencies, even when those agencies discriminate against foster and adoptive parents who do not share their stated religious values.

There has been a lot written on the principles of this policy. But much less has been said about whether these agencies are even able to effectively do their jobs.

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Delaying, or even preventing, placement with permanent families — which agencies do by default when they restrict the pool of available families — can have life-long consequences for kids in foster care. Every year, about 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system without being adopted, leaving them with fewer educational and employment opportunities, and more likely to experience homelessness, become pregnant early, lack access to health care, and become involved in the criminal justice system.

There is also a more nuanced question as to whether agencies that discriminate against prospective parents are capable of supporting the diverse children  —  children of varying religious backgrounds, races, ethnicities, abilities, gender identities, and sexual orientations  —  that make up the foster care population.

Optimally, the foster and adoptive parents working with states should reflect the same diversity as the children they serve, and most importantly, every foster parent a state works with should be able to support, affirm, and meet the needs of any child in care. The demographics of children in foster care, and foster and adoptive parents, look different in every state. However, children of color and children who identify as LGBTQ+ are disproportionality involved in child welfare systems and experience disparities while there. There is also incredible diversity in the faith needs of children in foster care. Many young people express the desire to be connected to their faith community. This is a critical part of a young person’s identity, and the only faith and spirituality needs that should be taken into account are theirs.

Studies have found that attention to a child’s identity is core to promoting health and well-being — and that doing so has an impact on their success and stability as adults. For example, research has demonstrated that providing children of color with opportunities to cultivate a positive relationship with their ethnic and racial identity can serve as a protective factor, offsetting trauma, increasing self-esteem, and helping to mitigate the effects of racial discrimination. Research also shows that acknowledging and affirming youth’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression is critically important to a young person’s health and well-being, and promotes both safety and their success in foster and adoptive homes.

In reference to South Carolina’s new order, Erin Hall, a former provider and the previous CEO of the Palmetto Association for Children and Families, stated, “Finding foster and adoptive homes is about matching a child’s needs with a family. In South Carolina, we have put the preference of one faith-based agency ahead of the mission of child welfare. This is not reflective of what we know is in the best interest of kids or what most of the faith-based service providers in South Carolina believe is right.”

When child welfare agencies prioritize the needs of faith-based agencies over children, that restricts their ability to recruit and license loving and affirming foster and adoptive homes, there are significant negative consequences for children. Alex’s experience is one example.

In Alex’s case, by placing a young child in a home that was not affirming, she grew up without the support that foster and adoptive parents have committed to provide, and the state has committed to establish.

Child welfare experts, including many faith-based providers, know that these religious refusal laws hurt children. Unfortunately, the current political climate, and the too often unchecked power state governors and legislators have over the policies that govern child welfare systems, is likely to lead to more religious refusal in the future. Texas’ attorney general has now asked for a waiver to exempt religious groups in his state. In Pennsylvania, several lawmakers, without going through their governor, sent a request for such a waiver directly to HHS. These actions may respond to the desires of some providers, but is not aligned with the majority of faith-based child welfare providers and is firmly outside of the norms of child welfare best practice.

Lena Wilson, vice president of the children and families division at Samaritas, one of the largest faith-based providers in Michigan, described what she saw as the obligation of organizations like hers in the wake of the passage of a religious refusal law in her state: “We as agencies have to be vigilant to ensure all of our children and families are served without discrimination. Currently discriminatory legislation is being passed in the dead of night, which further marginalizes our LGBTQ youth and families and denies them equal access to services that they deserve.”

*Name was changed for privacy.

But today, fourth-generation farmer June Provost and his wife Angie are among the very last of Louisiana’s black sugarcane farmers — and they’re fighting desperately to retain their land and livelihood. (Months of interviews and research became a feature story I published last October in the Guardian.)

After June was driven out of business in 2015, and then Angie in 2017, the Provosts alleged discrimination and wrongdoing by local agricultural lenders, a local sugar mill, and county U.S. Department of Agriculture officials, and they’ve brought multiple lawsuits to prove they were treated differently than white farmers. June and Angie say the tactics used to force them from their land — including vandalism, intimidation, and contract and lending discrimination — have been widely deployed by various institutions to topple the entire black farming community.

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The agriculture industry is awash in such discrimination, with slavery as the original and most horrifying sin. In 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights predicted that by 2000, there would be no remaining black farmers in the United States (today, fewer than 2 percent of U.S. farmers are black), and a 1997 USDA internal audit showed that loan applications for black farmers took three times longer than white farmers to be processed. The Pigford lawsuits of the 1990s and 2000s found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had consistently discriminated against black farmers during the loan process, and resulted in pay-outs (most of them $50,000) for thousands of victims.

As a country, we are long overdue to atone for the unpaid labor, trauma, and harm inflicted upon enslaved Africans — as well as for decades of Jim Crow policies, which widely placed black Americans and their descendants at a stark economic disadvantage. Today, the call for reparations is gaining momentum. Many key Democrats have expressed support for legislation sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), which would establish a commission to study the feasibility of reparations.

The first attempt at reparations came on the heels of the Civil War, when General Sherman ordered a sweeping redistribution of land across the U.S. South. Up to 400,000 acres of formerly Confederate-owned land was to be divided into 40-acre parcels and given to newly-freed slaves. But just months later, President Andrew Johnson overturned the order, and black families were evicted from their new acreage. “Forty acres and a mule” became one of many broken promises by the U.S. government to black America.

During slavery, the Louisiana sugar barons were among the most brutal perpetrators, using the bodies of enslaved black people to build and work their plantations. Such plantations produced the products that would prop up the early U.S. economy. Angie Provost’s ancestors were stolen from their home in Cameroon and forced onto slave ships bound for Louisiana sugar plantations.

Even after slavery was outlawed, many black workers were imprisoned as indentured servants under a legal system of debt peonage. Laborers worked off debt in the fields for free, but were kept perpetually in debt, forever bound to work without pay. Just as wealth, opportunity, and the institution of racism was passed to the children of white plantation owners, imprisonment by debt was often transferred to the next generation of black laborers.

In her book, Farming While Black, farmer and food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman wrote, “If African American people were paid $20 per week for our agricultural labor rather than enslaved, we would have $6.4 trillion in today’s dollars in the bank right now. This figure does not include reparations for denied credit and homeownership opportunities, exclusion from the social safety net and education, or property theft and destruction.”

But reparations aren’t only about the past. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that “between 1983 and 2016, the median black family saw their wealth drop by more than half after adjusting for inflation, compared to a 33 percent increase for the median white household.” Today, reads the report, “the median black family today owns $3,600 — just 2 percent of the $147,000 of wealth the median white family owns.”

A similar disparity exists in land ownership. In the United States, white landowners own 98 percent of rural acreage (worth over $1 trillion), while black landowners own less than one percent (worth approximately $14 billion).

Last year, during an interview with Hank Sanders, one of the lead attorneys for the Pigford case, I asked him if he felt that the $50,000 pay-outs that black farmers received constituted justice. “I feel like we did the best we could do, but I don’t think that was justice,” he said. “When you take a farm away from people, you not only take away a way of earning a living, you also take away a lifestyle. Money can’t replace that.”

But, he said, it was a start. It was also proof of the widespread racism within the department, and the significant harm done to black farmers at the hands of the government.

“Pigford was meant to right the wrongs of discrimination, but most of the claimants awarded are out of business,” said Angie. This now includes June, who received a pay-out as a Pigford claimant, along with his father and brothers, leading Angie to believe that reparations should also include policy changes, “including extending legal limits for retaliation.”

“Those of us discriminated against — whether it’s racism or sexism — rarely speak up or fight back based on the fear of being eliminated or devalued further,” said Angie. “Taking away that fear is part of reparations.”

The children of Flint and another 3,000 communities across the U.S. with dangerously elevated lead levels in their blood face an uphill, lifelong road littered with lead-induced developmental challenges, caused and exacerbated by long-neglected infrastructure ill-equipped to meet their needs, and a national public seemingly reluctant (if not apathetic) to do anything meaningful about it. Infrastructure might not be the “hottest” policy issue to pursue, but the consequences of ignoring it are all too clearly costly and deadly.

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Five years after Flint entered the national consciousness, the perpetrators of this man-made crisis continue to go unseen and unscathed. And Flint is just the beginning. Because of bad corporate actors, derelict landlords, and governmental neglect and mismanagement at all levels, our nation’s infrastructure has become toxic and dilapidated, in need of more than $2 trillion worth of investments and 21^st century policies that prioritize the most affected and proactive prevention rather than costly yet reactionary and incrementalistic approaches that favor wealthy enclaves.

Despite declarations to the contrary, with 2,500 lead-tainted pipes still in use, Flint remains poisoned and we as a nation still haven’t put our money where our mouth is in equitably ensuring that every person has access to clean water and safe homes, free from health hazards. The last major government study conservatively estimated that more half a million kids residing throughout the U.S. have significant levels of lead in their bloodstream as a result of the more than 9 million homes, neighborhoods, and schools that still have lead paint and pipes within their walls.

While Congress banned lead in plumbing systems 33 years ago and the United States, as a whole, has made important investments in reducing overall lead exposure, federal efforts have stopped short of pursuing an aggressive and comprehensive plan to remediate the millions of affected water pipes. Though the poisoning of Flint brought crucial attention to our nation’s tainted water systems, often overshadowed in the national conversation is the fact that lead-based paint is the most common, highly concentrated poisoning source for children in the United States. Despite being federally outlawed in 1978, lead-based paint remains within the crumbling walls, windowsills, and other surfaces of more than 37 million old homes and millions of aging buildings – schools, business spaces, and government offices –  where inhabitants can easily ingest and inhale contaminated dust and paint-chips.

The cost of these man-made infrastructure crises is always more than dollars and cents ­– it’s irreversible nerve and brain damage, unexplained neurological symptoms, hookworms and “neglected tropical diseases,” in the rural South, and lives lost to severe pneumonia and raging wildfires. These, and countless other examples of lives irreparably damaged by deteriorating and ineffective infrastructure, do not exist in isolation.

Poor infrastructure impacts everyone, regardless of race and class status, but – like so many other issues in America – racial minorities and people living in poverty experience the brunt of that pain. More than half of Flint’s population is African American and slightly more than 40 percent of residents live in poverty; similar stories reported in cities like Milwaukee, in rural areas of Kentucky or Alabama, and elsewhere are often in majority black areas and/or where poverty levels are high. Members of the Navajo Tribe continue to deal with gradual poisoning as a result of uranium mining in the 1950s, and towns in Alabama have become a dumping ground for human waste because of our nation’s failing wastewater infrastructure.

When these communities are observed in aggregate, rather than as separate, local issues, we can start to see the disturbing patterns of negligence, apathy and harm. Disasters like in Flint are part of a larger national failure, and our delayed and insufficient response is a public display of a larger, more heinous truth: America still hasn’t decided that clean water and a safe environment is not a privilege, but a right. An investment in our infrastructure and a commitment to maintaining accountability and transparency, when done right, is a commitment to just and equitable policy – and an affirmation that everyone deserves to live in an environment that is safe and healthy.

Even five years later, the Flint water crisis remains a crucial talking point for those looking to highlight the many inadequacies in government responses to disasters. It’s been highlighted by celebrities, Miss America pageant contestants, presidential candidates, and Twitter users expressing their frustration towards what they perceive as less important funding priorities, but that righteous anger hasn’t translated to a fury scaled for the national catastrophe we’re heading towards.

It’s not that the public is wholly apathetic to the dramatic consequences of a lack of investment in our country’s infrastructure. Poll after poll actually indicates that voters support federal spending on infrastructure improvements. In the 2016 and 2018 elections, there were local ballot measures that centered the need for more funding for infrastructure priorities – and many of them passed with voter support. However, that intensity of local support across the nation was focused on transportation issues rather than issues of water and sewage systems, broadband or electric utilities, of which privatization can further complicate matters. And even as voters express support for infrastructure measures, their higher priorities often still lie in policy areas such as the economy, health care, and education — all issues that can feel more immediate and pressing despite their inextricable links to the basic facilities and systems that America relies on.

To ensure that our infrastructure stops poisoning us today and in the future, we must redress the public policies and actions that segregate and neglect communities as well as earnestly hold accountable public officials, corporations, and landlords who put and keep people in harm’s way. And, ultimately, we must prioritize preventing these transgressions in the first place. Government, at all levels, must comprehensively support and provide restitution for the individuals and families poisoned for life because of lead and other preventable toxicant-exposures born from our compromised infrastructure.

Ultimately, Congress must seek to go beyond just getting out of our nation’s $2 trillion repair funding hole or fulfilling the hollow infrastructure promise of the current commander in chief. To truly end the ongoing poisoning and ensure that no community has to ever again suffer from this type of preventable, man-made infrastructure crises, the federal government will need to enact a full-scale, innovative package of national investments that helps harmed communities remediate and rebuild, improves the nation’s standard of living, restores public oversight and reasserts local control over the vital building blocks that make healthy, just, and thriving communities. Without that commitment, we’ll watch crises like Flint continue to unfold across the nation – and this time, we won’t be able to feign surprise. The lives of residents in Flint, and the thousands of other communities just like it, depend on it.

If a new pork inspection rule recently highlighted by the Washington Post passes next month, the lines will run even faster and plant employees will have to take responsibility for this visual inspection, putting workers and eaters at risk.

Though this might sound like another Trump-era regulatory rollback, it’s actually the final step in a drawn-out food safety debate that’s spanned four administrations.

The changes are part of a double-acronym mouthful, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)-Based Inspection Model Project (HIMP). These new inspection methods have been quietly piloted at a select number of pork and poultry plants for some 20 years, with the basic goal of reducing USDA inspector spot checks and moving more safety testing offsite. Big meatpackers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service claim these “modernizations” will improve safety and address inspector shortages, without harming workers.

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But accounts from workers and investigations by government watchdogs and advocacy groups tell the opposite story. By speeding up processing lines and allowing meatpackers to police themselves, HIMP plants pose serious risks for food safety and increase already hazardous working conditions.

While the Trump administration faces blowback for giving plant employees greater oversight of hog slaughter, the Obama administration passed similar food inspection changes in the poultry industry in 2012, known as the New Poultry Inspection System.

These changes shift some duties from federal food safety inspectors to plant employees. Previously, federal inspectors visually checked every chicken or hog carcass for things like infected organs, fecal contamination, and other signs of diseases or defects. The new systems put plant employees in charge of those checks. For pork, large plants currently must have seven USDA inspectors; under the new rules, they would have three. For poultry, the number of required USDA inspectors shrunk from four to one.

USDA and industry groups often say that the HIMP pilot programs in both pork and poultry have proven just as, if not more, safe than the current system. But additional accounts suggest otherwise.

A 2013 inspector general report argued that the USDA “did not provide adequate oversight” of the HIMP pork pilots, and that the agency could not determine whether the pilots improved food safety. In fact, the inspector general said “HIMP plants may have a higher potential for food safety risks.”

The advocacy group Food & Water Watch also uncovered that the new salmonella testing program was flawed for all poultry plants prior to a protocol change in July 2016, bringing the HIMP poultry pilot findings into question as well. The group also obtained inspection documents for 14 HIMP pilot poultry plants through a Freedom of Information Act request, and found widespread instances of company employees routinely missing defects.

Politico reported that several poultry plants enrolled in the new poultry processing program have already failed necessary food safety testing to increase their line speeds. Food & Water Watch also revealed that these poultry plants also “fail the agency’s salmonella performance standard at a greater rate than those that have not opted into the new system.” In fact, one of the original poultry pilot locations operating at faster line speeds was forced to suspend operations in May due to food safety violations.

When it comes to pork, there are only five HIMP pilot plants, but of the top 10 pork plants nationwide with the most food safety violations, three participated in HIMP. This includes the worst performing plant, which racked up nearly 50 percent more citations than the next most dangerous plant over the course of three years.

More fundamentally, having plant employees check carcasses amounts to self-regulation and presents a clear conflict of interest. Simply put, plant owners profit more the less they stop the line, making them more reluctant to address quality concerns than federal inspectors. In a public comment, one concerned USDA inspector said, “the bottom line is that a company is out to make money and they can not do that if the line is not running. Even if it means letting something go down the line and ultimately out the back door that is not fit for human consumption.”

“If this proposal goes through and inspectors are cut, I would not feel safe enough to feed [poultry] to my family,” she added.

When a handful of powerful meatpackers ramp up line speeds, the risks extend beyond food safety to the workers who face the physical toll of processing more animals in less time.

As it stands, the USDA only assesses line speed increases for food safety outcomes. The agency is quick to note that it does not have jurisdiction over worker safety, and that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protects workers. But OSHA has been derelict in its duty to prevent workplace injuries directly tied to increased line speeds.

While OSHA has set maximum operating speeds in some industries, such as grain processing, it has not done so for meatpacking. In fact, OSHA denied a 2013 petition requesting that the agency set slaughterhouse speed standards on the grounds that it did not have the resources to study the issue.

In absence of worker-safety informed limits, line speeds continue to increase. Historically, poultry lines ran at 70 birds per minute. Today they’re up to 175, after the poultry industry petitioned the Trump administration to revoke an Obama-era decision to keep the speeds at 140. The new pork rules would lift processing speed limits entirely, and the Post reports that line speeds could increase from 18 hogs per minute to 20. In four independently conducted surveys by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, Nebraska Appleseed, and Human Rights Watch, workers cited increased line speeds as the top or most notable complaint in regard to workplace safety.

According to the Department of Labor, meat processors get injured five times more frequently than other workers, and are nearly 20 times more likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. True injury rates are likely even higher: Another study by the Government Accountability Office found that federal data likely does not capture all meat processing injuries, especially because immigrants and refugees, who comprise 28 percent of meatpacking workers, are less likely to report injury or workplace misconduct due to fear of retaliation or deportation. OSHA also admits that workers with limited English proficiency “often do not get the necessary safety training on the job and do not know their rights under the OSHA law.”

No matter how you slice it, faster line speeds line meat processors’ pockets at everyone else’s expense. Their costs per animal go down the faster lines run, churning out more product per worker and per plant. The one leg meat corporations have left to stand on is the argument that they’ll pass their savings onto consumers, but recent price fixing cases prove those talking points are hogwash. The only real winners are corporate packers and their shareholders, while workers and eaters pay the price.

The only thing that made paying them realistic, she said, was that she received a $4,200 tax refund this year.

“I would have put off my medical payments [without the refund],” she told me via email. “Between rent and day to day expenses, I don’t have the income to pay both. … Even with insurance the numbers seemed insurmountable until I got my refund. If it wasn’t for that I would have had to reapply for payment plans with the risk of being sent to collections.”

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Tax returns were officially due this week, which means that the roughly 80 percent of filers who receive refunds will soon have their money, if they don’t have it already. The average tax refund so far this year is $2,995, which is roughly in line with last year. For the average family that receives a refund, the amount is equal to nearly six weeks’ income. And a big proportion of the money Americans receive during refund season, like Megan’s, goes to pay for health care.

According to a report from the JP Morgan Chase and Co. Institute, families who receive a tax refund increase their out of pocket health care spending by 60 percent the following week. Spending on health care remains higher than normal for 75 days post-refund.

“The cash infusion represented by a tax refund payment allowed more people to make more purchases of healthcare goods and services, but, even more consequentially, it facilitated larger payments,” the report said. “This implies that the cash infusion generated by a tax refund payment triggered additional spending on large healthcare ticket items that consumers could have least afforded out of their pre-refund cash flow.”

“100 percent of ours is going to pay for prenatal care and the birth of our second child, due in June,” said Molly, who received a refund of around $2,000 for her family’s state and local taxes. “Our first child’s 2017 birth was uncomplicated and routine, and while I don’t remember what we paid out of pocket versus what insurance covered, the birth, the epidural anesthesiologist, the recovery, and a one-day stay in pediatrics (due to jaundice, probably the most common newborn treatment there is) was a little over $20,000. So we’re counting on the 2019 refunds going to paying off this birth as well, as we will easily hit our deductible.”

62 percent of the additional health care spending triggered by refunds went to in-person payments to health care service providers. That indicates that the higher spending isn’t limited to paying bills for past services, but that tax refunds actually led families to seek care that they had put off until they received a cash infusion. Dentists receive a disproportionate share of the additional spending: One in four adults with incomes below the poverty line skip needed dental work because of costs, and dental-related issues are responsible for about $1 billion per year in emergency room spending.

That so many Americans need a refund windfall in order to access medical care, sadly, makes sense. About one in four adults – 65 million people – reported skipping a medical treatment due to costs in the last 12 months, according to a recent West Health-Gallup survey. Last year, Americans borrowed a collective $88 billion for medical treatments, which doesn’t include the totals from the now ubiquitous medical crowdfunding campaigns that have proliferated on social media.

So tax season injects cash for those households to get the care they either would have had to delay or go into debt to obtain.

It’s worth noting that receiving a big refund means a taxpayer overpaid her taxes during the year, whether via automatic withholdings from paychecks or by paying quarterly estimated taxes (which is a requirement for the self-employed and independent contractors), thus giving the government an interest-free loan. A refund is just that overpaid amount being paid back.

However, the public doesn’t really view it that way: According to a recent New York Times poll, 77 percent of people would prefer to overpay and receive a refund come tax time, which makes sense. 40 percent of people don’t have $400 to cover an emergency cost, and the average savings amongst the poorest 20 percent of households is zero dollars, so an unexpected tax payment can deal a real blow.

But people also use their refund as a way to enforce savings: Paying their money to the government and then getting it back means they can’t spend it in the interim. Recent reports have shown that the Trump administration, in an attempt to inject money from its 2017 tax bill into the economy sooner, decreased withholdings so that people had less taken out of each paycheck for taxes throughout the year, meaning they were less likely to overpay their taxes and require a refund. But that ploy has backfired spectacularly. Many taxpayers were reportedly upset at getting smaller refunds than they expected come Tax Day, even if their overall bill was in many instances lower than the year before.

“We actually aren’t those types who try to have a big refund each year. We’d rather not allow the government to keep an interest-free loan all year. My husband has tweaked his withholdings so we do get more in the paycheck each week because we need it for all the copays, gas, etc,” said Lindsey Cox of Thomasville, North Carolina. Both she and her husband carry a gene for a rare disease called Van Maldergem Syndrome, which two of her three children have, while the third has severe nervous system issues. Their health care bills total hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. This year, their tax refund of $2,940 went to an array of household needs.

“Our tax return went to catch up on the house payment, electric bill, other small miscellaneous bills, and some car maintenance we had been putting off, like inspections, tire rotations, oil changes, etc.,” Cox said. “We’ve become experts at gaming our system and know for instance, we can be 60 days behind on electric before we face it being cut off. We’ve learned very well how to rob Peter to pay Paul and stay afloat in the process.”

That so many Americans need a quick injection of money in order to see a doctor or access other necessities is a problem that can be addressed by policy: Think universal health care, or the proposals to both expand the pool of those eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and allow low-income households to receive some of their refund early. As Bryce Covert explained, “as powerful as the EITC is, there are plenty of people who receive barely any money from it or miss out entirely.”

Tax Day should be a celebration of America’s commitment to civic responsibility and collective welfare, not a grim reminder that far too many people can’t access things that should be basic human rights. However, for too many, a tax refund isn’t just the difference between staying afloat and not, but between seeing a doctor and not, which can literally be the difference between life and death.

Editor’s note: When requested, last names have been withheld to allow people to talk freely about their finances.

But she’s had a constant lifeline: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

When working parents who make less than $55,000 file their taxes, they can expect a credit back that averages a little more than $3,000 every year. Very poor working people without children can also claim a much smaller credit of $295. In 2016, nearly 26 million households received the money, and it lifted 5.8 million people out of poverty. It’s been linked to better health and educational outcomes for kids and their parents.

When Sullivan became a parent for the first time at the age of 18, she got the credit back when she filed her taxes. She’s now 45 and has received it nearly every year since.

“It has literally fed my family” when wages and food stamps didn’t stretch far enough, Sullivan recalled. “I’ve been able to catch up on rent. It’s kept the lights and the heat on.”

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Sullivan lives in Medford, Massachusetts, a couple miles north of Boston, and utility costs can skyrocket in the harsh winters even though she carefully keeps dials turned as low as possible. While the electric company can’t cut her off during the worst of it, as soon as that moratorium lifts she’s often been plunged deep into debt — sometimes hundreds of dollars, even during a mild season.

The financial need among EITC recipients is often urgent: Recipients are more likely to file early in order to get the money as quickly as possible, often at the end of January or early February. And like Sullivan, most use the money to pay down bills and debt or to cover their basic needs; in 2015, 80 percent reported using the money to pay rent, mortgages, utility bills, or credit card debt.

“When I receive the EITC credit … I can pay the bill and get caught up, or at least be able to use that to negotiate with a down payment plan,” she said. “It creates such a relief to know that I can rest my head at night knowing that when I wake up tomorrow there’s not somebody creeping outside my door looking for my electric meter to cut it off.”

“Even at times when I haven’t been in crisis, I’ve been able to use my EITC to supplement my income over the next several months,” she added. It’s during those times that the credit has allowed her to send her children on field trips or participate in sports programs. “It can really enhance the quality of life.” One year, after going without a car for a decade, she spent $2,000 to buy one that allowed her to drive to the grocery store, rather than walking home holding groceries with freezing fingers.

But as powerful as the EITC is, there are plenty of people who receive barely any money from it or miss out entirely. In fact, a childless person living right at the poverty line who gets the credit will still owe federal taxes, pushing him deeper into poverty.

The EITC is also tied directly to work; it doesn’t start phasing in until a family earns its first dollar. That means anyone who is destitute enough to be getting by without any official pay — either earning under the table or not at all — can’t qualify. The share of people who survive with no job and no government cash assistance has been since the mid-90s, reaching one in five single mothers by 2008.

Some politicians want to fix these problems and go even further. Last week, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Richard Durbin (D-IL), introduced legislation to expand the EITC for parents and significantly boost it for the childless — increasing the maximum amount a childless worker could get from $529 to over $2,000. It also allows recipients to access up to $500 ahead of tax time, which would hopefully provide families relief throughout the year, not just in one lump at tax time, so they don’t have to turn to payday lenders or go into debt when emergencies arise. The bill has garnered support from nearly every Democrat in the Senate.

In 2017, Brown and then-freshman Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) put forward a plan that would have expanded the EITC even more for a poor family with two children, increasing it from the current maximum of about $5,700 to more than $10,000, while childless workers would see their credit grow six-fold. The two lawmakers, along with Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), resurfaced the idea in February and extended it to students and people caring for young children, aging parents, and other relatives — none of whom are currently eligible.

The EITC is “the most effective tool we have to put more money in the pockets of ordinary Americans,” Brown, Khanna, and Watson Coleman wrote in an op-ed in March. “We’ve seen a lot of ideas floated to make our economy fairer and fight income inequality. Expanding the EITC…needs to be at the center of those conversations.”

Diane Sullivan is luckier than some: Beyond the federal EITC credit she can expect every April, she can also count on a supplemental state version that adds another 30 percent of its worth because she lives in Massachusetts. But 19 states don’t have such a program. In addition to a federal expansion, the rest could start their own and ensure that their credits are refundable so that families can get the money whether or not they owe taxes.

“We should acknowledge that theses tax credits are a critical lifeline for families,” Sullivan said.

For households that qualify for SNAP, February, the shortest month of the year, was a long one. During government shutdown, 40 million Americans who participate in the program experienced as many as 60 days between the issuance of their February and March SNAP benefits. The shortages in household budgets meant that food banks across the country were inundated.

“355 households on February 19,” says Kelli Hess, operations director for the Missoula Food Bank & Community Center in Missoula, Montana. Hess notes that historically, February is a slower month for the pantry — families are receiving tax returns, and the short month means SNAP benefits don’t have to stretch as far. Prior to February 19, the local food pantry’s busiest day had served 240 families. “It was absolutely fallout from the shutdown. People can’t survive without paychecks. And they can’t survive without SNAP. Which is why this proposed rule change is so scary.”

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The rule change, proposed by the Trump administration, would limit states’ ability to waive work requirements during periods of high unemployment. Similar cuts to the program were rejected by the bipartisan Farm Bill passed by Congress in December 2018.

The administrative rule change would kick Miriam Bayer, a local academic, off SNAP. She is composed and deliberate in her statements as she explains the situation, sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Missoula.

She holds a master’s degree in biology from the University of Montana. During her undergraduate work at Washington Lee, which she attended on a full scholarship, she began her research on salamanders — work that earned her a first author publication before graduation. She spent a year researching in Brazil and was awarded a prestigious PhD candidacy at the University of Montana, a placement that allowed her to continue her education debt-free. However, a debilitating migraine condition forced her to pivot from the PhD candidacy to the master’s program. It also resulted in significant debt.

“Because of my medical condition, it took me longer to graduate, and I had a lot of medical bills. I would max out on my out-of-pocket every year seeking treatment. Between neurology, I was in a chronic pain program, physical therapy. That combined with the cut in income from switching from my PhD to master’s, I signed up for SNAP. I don’t remember when I started going to the food bank. And I took out student loans.” During school, Bayer’s SNAP access was not time-restrained because she was working as a teaching assistant. Upon graduation in December 2018, she was designated as an ABAWD (able-bodied adult without dependents), and the clock started ticking.

ABAWDs can only access SNAP for three months in a thirty-six month period, unless they can document 20.5 hours of work per week. Bayer, who has part-time employment as a tutor, works 14 hours per week, in addition to searching for employment in her field and working to publish her graduate research. She is in her fourth month on SNAP and is only able to continue receiving basic food assistance as a participant in a job seeker’s program through Missoula Job Services.

“I have to document 20.5 hours of qualifying activities per week. Because it’s not 20 hours per week, my job tutoring doesn’t count.” Bayer must document job-seeking activities and visit Job Services weekly to meet with her assigned jobs consultant.

“It is hard. It’s hard to spend time on my research papers, getting them out there, and working my job 14 hours per week, and applying to jobs, and trying to get additional tutoring jobs to make ends meet in the meantime so I can perhaps wait a little bit longer for a career position.”

“It’s just meanness. It’s mean spirited.” Sixty miles to the south in Victor, Montana, Barbara Willing is struggling to survive. At 64 years old, she says she will never be able to retire. “My story is one of someone who would have been okay, if not for the recession. I lost everything. It wiped me out.”

With decades of experience on her résumé ranging from office management and secretarial work to manufacturing, technical editing, and linguistics, Willing, who has her master’s degree in English, felt this time of hardship would be temporary. “But at my age, no one will hire you. Not for a job that earns a real wage.”

Living in a rural community away from many services makes things more challenging. “Driving to appointments, having to prove I need these programs. I don’t have the money for transportation, but there’s no way I could afford the rent in Missoula. I have to live out here.”

Willing has been on SNAP since October 2018. She describes the application process as demanding, but not impossible. She waited to apply for assistance until she was truly desperate, with zero dollars to her name and in danger of losing her housing.

“I don’t know how they expect people to make it. I know that as part of this waiver I’m on I can work for free, volunteering somewhere. But I don’t have the money to buy the gas!”

Barriers to employment differ widely from circumstance to circumstance. For Bayer, Willing, and the 755,000 people across the country in similar positions, access to basic needs like food makes the pursuit of career or gainful employment livable. After allowing hundreds of thousands of Americans to go without paychecks during the government shutdown, this administration’s proposed rule is another example of tone-deaf policies that do not reflect the realities of America’s working class.

“The charitable food system is not prepared — is not capable — of picking up the need that this rule change would create. The shutdown was heinous, but it was temporary. This would be disastrous,” says Hess.

For people like Willing, “This rule change, it leaves me out in the cold.”

Editor’s note: To leave a comment on the proposed regulation to limit states’ ability to waive work requirements, visit handsoffSNAP.org.

Instead of culminating in a celebration of the internet retail giant’s corporate citizenship, the yearlong search for HQ2, as it became known, turned into a PR disaster. First, activists and local politicians in New York City raised enough ire about their state’s $3 billion deal for a half-share of HQ2 that Amazon ultimately backed out.

Now activists in Northern Virginia, where Amazon decided to put the other half of its new headquarters, are also hoping to derail the company’s best-laid plans, or at the very least bring some much-needed attention to exactly what is being given away – all three quarters of a billion dollars of it –  to a mammoth company in the name of economic development.

“We’ve been door-knocking mostly in neighborhoods that are low-income neighborhoods, or immigrant as well,” said Danny Cendejas, an organizer with La Collectiva, which is part of a coalition called “For Us, Not Amazon” that is critical of Virginia’s deal with the company. “It ranges from people not knowing Amazon is coming here to not knowing about the incentives that are being offered, to not knowing the effects of Amazon coming here.”

A consistent critique of the Amazon deal, in fact, is that the company hasn’t engaged with the community. “There was not a lot of information being given out, was the sense that we got,” agreed Maha Hilal, co-director of the Justice for Muslims Collective, which is also part of the “For Us, Not Amazon” coalition. But of the people who were aware Amazon was coming, Hilal said, there were some major concerns.

“There is the issue of incentives. With the city granting Amazon incentives, [the residents] are basically paying their taxes to Amazon,” she said. “And the fear of displacement was a big concern. Even though it’s Crystal City where they’re slated to come, it’s going to impact many communities.”

On Saturday, Arlington County’s board will vote on a $23 million package of local tax incentives for Amazon, which would be in addition to the up to $750 million it will receive in incentives from Virginia at the state level. That’s on top of a favorable tax deal already offered to tech companies that relocate to Arlington’s “Technology Opportunity Zone.” Crucially, the proposed deal with Arlington did not include any pledge by the company to pay living wages or put money into affordable housing funds. Instead, Amazon simply has to meet office space occupancy goals.

Meanwhile, a recent study by the New Virginia Majority found that the new Amazon facility in Virginia will displace some 6,000 people, mostly from working-class families, as well as drive up housing costs and exacerbate existing traffic congestion woes.

“This issue with Amazon HQ2 coming here, it will disproportionately affect middle- and low-income people in many ways, in the short and long term. That’s just a fact,” said Julius Spain, president of the Arlington branch of the NAACP. “We have to be cognizant of the low-income communities who may be driven out. They can’t afford to live in a quote ‘revitalized neighborhood.’” The For Us, Not Amazon coalition has asked the Arlington board to formally delay its vote, but as of this writing, that seems unlikely.

So why does this happen? How does one of the richest companies on Earth talk a state and county into giving it hundreds of millions of dollars? Because it can, and politicians pay.

This is how big corporations operate in modern-day America: They pit cities and states against one another in a battle to see who can dish out the most tax breaks, incentives, land grants, and other giveaways to an already-mammoth money-making organization. Companies hold their workforces for ransom and threaten to effectively kill them off by moving somewhere else, and lawmakers cave and pay up. And almost no one follows up in subsequent years to see if anyone’s promises have been kept, perpetuating the cycle.

Estimates for how much state and local governments spend annually on corporate tax incentives vary, but everyone agrees it’s in the tens of billions of dollars annually. And that’s likely an undercount, because navigating subsidies requires keeping tabs on thousands upon thousands of government agencies, offices, and officials, many of whom don’t do an adequate job of tracking what they’re handing out, or intentionally hide their subsidies entirely. A 2017 survey found half of the nation’s 50 biggest cities and counties didn’t even disclose the names of incentive recipients.

Plenty of research has been done on the efficacy of corporate tax incentives, and the consensus is that they don’t have real economic effects. As the researcher Timothy Bartik put it in a 2017 analysis: “Incentives do not have a large correlation with a state’s current or past unemployment or income levels or with future economic growth.”

There are many reasons the effect is so minimal, but one of the big ones is that tax incentives wind up “incentivizing” moves that companies would have made even if they hadn’t received a dime, with companies creating or destroying jobs based on the same considerations that fostered the move, not any particular tax break.

Take the case of Toyota. The car-maker received $40 million from the Lone Star State to consolidate three offices from around the country into one headquarters in the Dallas suburbs in 2013. It was the largest corporate tax break Texas had dealt out in a decade. And Toyota said afterward that the move would have made sense for the company even if those public dollars weren’t on the table.

“That wasn’t one of the major reasons [in] deciding to go to Texas,” Toyota spokesperson Amanda Rice told the Houston Chronicle in the spring of 2014, referring to the subsidies. Instead, “company representatives referenced a host of other factors, including geography, time zone and quality of life.” Yet the company received a $40 million windfall anyway.

This exact critique applies to Amazon and HQ2. After receiving data from hundreds of cities, and spending months picking over the particulars of 20 “finalists,” the company wound up choosing the nation’s capital and the world capital of finance. There are good reasons for it to have an expanded presence in both places that have nothing to do with tax rates. It’s possible it even had them in mind from the very beginning.

In fact, if taxes were the overriding concern, Amazon would have gone to Newark, New Jersey, or Montgomery County, Maryland, both of which offered it much more money than did Virginia and New York.

Given the evidence, why do corporate tax incentives continue to be a plague on state and local budgets?

Because, for a lawmaker, the appearance of doing something to bring in jobs makes for good headlines,  and the cost can always be punted to the next person.

“Politicians really do need to get re-elected, so there really is a political value to issuing press releases and cutting ribbons and passing along the cost to your next three successors,” said Greg LeRoy, director of Good Jobs First, an organization that tracks corporate tax subsidies.

There’s also a collective action problem when it comes to specific subsidies: The company in pursuit of them has every interest in doing whatever it takes to secure its bounty, while opponents have diffuse interests, and may not be particularly harmed by any one deal in a way that necessitates mass resistance. Since the subsidies are bad for the public at large in the aggregate, but beneficial for one interest group in the specifically, organizing to fight back is made difficult.

Political scientist Nathan Jensen, currently at the University of Texas–Austin, has looked specifically at corporate tax incentives and found that their use has an explicit political benefit. “A governor reaps more reward for new investment in his or her state if his or her administration offered tax incentives,” he and three colleagues wrote in a 2013 study that looked at governors and whether their support was bolstered by the use of tax incentives to bring in new businesses. “In fact, a governor will be rewarded for offering tax incentives even if it does not succeed in luring the intended investment.”

And this is true not only at the state level. “In a study of local governments, we learned more about official use of business incentives for electoral gain. We found that directly elected mayors, as opposed to appointed city managers, offered larger incentives and engaged in much weaker oversight of business incentive programs. Elected mayors offered more money and conducted fewer and less rigorous cost-benefit analyses to investigate whether the incentives were economically useful,” Jensen wrote in 2016.  Electoral accountability really wasn’t anything of the sort.

Another factor playing into the politics of incentives is that Americans are starting fewer businesses than they used to. In the 2010s, new business start-ups activity hit rock bottom as the country emerged from the Great Recession, but that was only the culmination of a trend that has been occurring since the 1970s.  There are a lot of theories as to why this decline in America’s entrepreneurial spirit has occurred, including that it’s a result of the decrease in robust anti-trust enforcement, but it’s a certainty that it’s happening. And fewer new businesses means fewer ribbon-cutting opportunities for lawmakers, so they’re all fighting viciously over what’s left.

That effect is apparent even now, as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, along with other New York lawmakers, are still trying to cajole Amazon into re-reversing its HQ2 decision. But for now, New York stands out as a rare victory for activists against the corporate greed machine.

“That was a victory for all communities of color, for all immigrant communities and low-income communities that are fighting daily against the threat of displacement,” said Cendejas. “Deals for economic growth shouldn’t be done on the backs of low-income communities and communities of color.”

“I’m happy that something happened up there in New York, where the people spoke and Amazon listened and they left,” Spain said. “That gave me some motivation to say, ‘listen, the same thing can happen in Arlington.’ Anything’s possible.”

This piece was adapted from “The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs” by Pat Garofalo, out now from Thomas Dunne Books.

One of the most exciting elements of the bill is its explicit callouts of disability, acknowledging the fact that 17 percent of children in America have disabilities and need child care too — but can face barriers to inclusion.

The United States is facing a dual problem of scarcity and unaffordability when it comes to child care. 83 percent of parents with children under age five report difficulty locating affordable child care of sufficient quality in their area. Challenges with paying for child care or finding a suitable provider are pulling parents out of the workforce or leading some people to reconsider parenting altogether.

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Common threads in Warren’s Universal Child Care and Murray and Scott’s Early Learning Act and the Child Care for Working Families Act include increasing compensation for child care providers; making child care free or low-cost, depending on income; and investing in quality improvements across the board. But Murray and Scott’s bill is comprehensive and inclusive: It extends services beyond child care centers and into homes and communities, addresses care from birth through age 13 for all children and up to age 18 for disabled children, and invests in full-day, full-year programming to accommodate parents with varying schedules and those who need child care services in the summer.

The disability inclusion in Murray and Scott’s bill — which includes funding for activities such as making sure facilities getting government money are accessible and providing training to staff so they can better serve disabled kids and their parents — builds on the work of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It positions such funding as a routine part of meeting quality standards — something society tends to view as “special treatment” or a “burden.” Everyone in America deserves access to child care that meets the needs of their children, and that includes disabled children, who can be excluded by inaccessible facilities, poorly trained staff, and other barriers.

As long as child care is under discussion, though, it is worth addressing the fact that disability isn’t an issue limited to children and while these bills are an excellent start, we should also be looking to the future. Disabled children grow up and build families of their own ­— 6.2 percent of parents are disabled, and disability is more common in black and brown parents — and those families, in turn, will need access to child care. Sometimes that means care for disabled children of disabled adults, and sometimes it’s care for nondisabled children of disabled adults.

“You really need [child care providers] to be on your team,” explained Dr. Kara Ayers, Associate Director at the University of Cincinnati Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities. Ayers is the co-founder of the Disabled Parenting Project, which studies the experiences of parents with disabilities. As part of her research, she said she sees issues like inaccessible restrooms and “just one step” entrances — doorways where a single step is all that lies between wheelchair users and entry — are common at the facilities she visits.

Mandated reporters, people legally required to report possible abuse and neglect to the authorities, may have limited experience with disabled parents. Attitudes about disability may lead mandated reporters to be concerned about disabled parents’ capability. This is an issue with doctors, social workers, and teachers, and Dr. Ayers has found that it can appear in child care as well, an issue that raises personal concerns. “If I come in and these people are weirded out,” Ayers added, “one person could decide my daughter is not safe with me and one call could start that process.”

Ayers speaks to a looming worry in the disability community: In every state, it is legal to weigh parental disability when making determinations about whether to remove a child from a home, on the argument that the parent must be “unfit.” According to a 2012 National Council on Disability study, removal rates climb as high as 80 percent in cases of intellectually disabled or mentally ill parents involved in custody fights.

Disabled parents, said Ayers, worry about admitting that they need help or having to explain that services and supports are not a good fit for them, and that hooks directly into the child care conversation — if disabled people are nervous about communicating their needs, it’s challenging to make necessary recommendations.

Comprehensive access to child care, whether accomplished legislatively or through rulemaking, must be inclusive of disabled parents. For example, funds for increasing accessibility could also be used for continuing education classes to familiarize child care providers with the disability community. For disabled parents, adaptive parenting classes –  which teach people how to navigate parenting with a disability with tips on topics like handling a baby while using a wheelchair and using braille-embossed flashcards to teach sighted children to read – could be made more readily available for expecting or newly-disabled parents through expanded funding.

Likewise, parenting equipment should be made more readily available and affordable through existing systems that already connect disabled people with adaptive tools that help them lead independent lives, such as independent living centers, community programs for new parents of all ability levels, Medicaid, and occupational therapy programs.

The United States should also consider what constitutes “activities of daily living,” the tasks that personal assistants can provide for their clients, currently defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services using a model followed by many private insurance providers. The agency’s current definition includes things such as toileting, preparing meals, cleaning, and a wide range of other activities — but most parents would argue they should include parenting, too.

A government-funded personal care assistant “cannot do anything for child care,” said Keith Jones, president of Soul Touchin’ experiences, a community empowerment and policy advocacy group. Jones learned to change diapers with his feet as a new parent worried about being deemed unfit, and commented that it’s ludicrous to ask a personal assistant to “just ignore” a child who clearly needs attention.

As it stands now, Ayers explained, aides may not be allowed to help disabled parents, depending on the terms of their contract. If a baby is crying for attention, they can’t pick them up for a cuddle. If a parent needs help getting a child into a high chair for a meal, they can’t ask their aide for an assist. Explicitly including parenting as an ADL, says Ayers, could help disabled parents and kids alike — and it’s possible to have safeguards for those worried about parents abusing their aides as child care providers.  A regulatory change initiated by CMS could be the most effective way to address this shortcoming.

The growing understanding that child care must be a part of progressive movements is heartening to see, and it’s encouraging that lawmakers like Murray and Scott are exploring disability issues as they develop new policy. Including disability from the start in ambitious proposals like these makes it easier to build on them, creating more equity and justice for the disability community.

The federal government has long attempted to sever tribes from the land — their source of knowledge, culture, and health. Through war and forced relocation, tribes were physically removed. Policies such as the 1887 General Allotment Act forced many to adopt sedentary lifestyles and use Western agricultural techniques. And contemporary legal restrictions on centuries old fishing, hunting, and gathering techniques means that tribes are still limited in how they can gather foods and medicines.

Food sovereignty — efforts to re-create local, sustainable, and traditional food systems that prioritize community need over profits — has been one of the major ways tribal communities are combating disparities driven by colonial policies. Food sovereignty looks different in every tribe, as it is based on community need and tribal tradition, and it isn’t just about food. Swinomish efforts have focused on the impacts of climate change, which is already threatening their community health.

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History led many reservations to become food insecure, and federal support is limited. Hundreds of tribes utilize the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations — which since 1973 has distributed bulk food items to rural Native Americans who don’t have access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-eligible stores — but the food often doesn’t meet basic dietary standards and sometimes arrives spoiled.

Loss of land and traditional foods has caused myriad health problems in tribal communities. Native Americans have the highest rates of diabetes of any racial group, as well as disproportionately higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Mental wellbeing has also been impacted: Some scholars argue that colonial violence like displacement and spiritual disconnection from the land has led to cross-generational trauma and unresolved grief for Native individuals and communities.

Climate change is making this worse.

Historically, the Swinomish harvesting calendar revolved around 13 moons. The calendar corresponds to seasonal shifts throughout the year, with each moon bringing a new set of ceremonies and foods to be collected and processed. The first moon of spring, moon when the frog talks, is when herring and smelt are harvested and sitka spruce, red cedar, and Oregon grape roots are collected. In the moon of the sacred time, during the end of December and January, cultural traditions are passed from elders to younger community members.

The seasonal changes associated with each moon are becoming less predictable with climate change. Extreme heat waves in the normally moderate climate stress plants and may stunt root development. Less predictable or extreme tides (whether too high or too low) hamper clam digging and other shorefront gathering.

Public health leaders, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, recognize that climate change has direct impacts on human health. These impacts may be even more acute for the Washington tribe: the reservation is 90 percent surrounded by water, and salmon, crab, and clam are major sources of food. The sea is of intimate importance.

Yet Western measurements of health and climate impact do not take cultural history, interdependence, and connection to the land and non-human world into consideration, often focusing exclusively on individual, physiological health impacts. For example, a toxicologist may look at pollutants in seafood and advise the Swinomish to eat less. Yet when taking into consideration food security, ceremonial use, and transmission of traditional knowledge, the removal of seafood would be detrimental to Swinomish conceptions of health; climate change is threatening the tribe’s autonomy.

To address this disconnect, in 2003, Dr. Jamie Donatuto, the environmental health analyst for the tribe, set out with elder Larry Campbell to develop indigenous health indicators, which they hoped would bring a more holistic and culturally relevant lens to public health policy, climate change predictions, environmental risk assessment, and the tribe’s food sovereignty work. After interviewing more than 100 community members, they determined the Swinomish health indicators to be: self-determination (healing and restoration, development and trust); cultural use (respect and stewardship, sense of place); natural resource security (quality, access, safety); resilience (self-esteem, identity, sustainability); education (teachings, elders, youth); and community connection (work, sharing, relations).

One of the first challenges they wanted to tackle using these indicators was climate change impacts. After gathering data on predicted storm surge, sea-level rise, sediment movement and more, they led a series of workshops with elders, youth, clam diggers, and fishers, to gauge which beaches they should focus their limited resources on. They identified several that were both culturally significant to the tribe and at high risk for climate impacts, and focused their workshops on traditional foods to contextualize these problems.

“It’s not about outreach, it’s not unidirectional. It’s about really engaging them,” Donatuto reflected. Now, based on community input, the tribe is developing clam gardens that are more resilient to climate impacts such as sea level rise, storm surge, and possibly ocean acidification. Clam gardens are a traditional way of managing a beach ecosystem to create optimal habitat for clams while ensuring food security for the tribe. Dr. Donatuto’s team also shared community feedback with the Swinomish Senate, who valued their priorities equally to scientific data when constructing the tribe’s climate change adaptation plan.

Beyond policy changes to address climate change impacts, elders were also concerned about a generational disconnect in traditional ecological knowledge. Using the 13 moons as a guide, in 2015 the tribe developed an informal curriculum to educate youth on the lunar calendar and traditional foods. Though it has attracted interest from local schools, Donatuto stressed that it is a land-based, community-led curriculum. The tribe hosts dinners and other events in which elders and educators lead community members outside to learn, for example, tree identification, how to collect tree resin, and how to process it. Participants not only learn about traditional foods, but learn it through traditional methods of knowledge transmission.

Swinomish food sovereignty and climate change adaptation efforts are reflective of national movements in Indigenous reclamation and resistance. Tribes recognize that in many cases, disparities that face Native communities are borne from and exacerbated by systemic colonial and racial violence, including the devaluation of Indigenous knowledge. So how could the same system that produced these disparities be a source of the solution?

Resistance and reclamation take many forms. The White Earth Band of Ojibwe recently recognized the “personhood” rights of wild rice in an effort to thwart oil pipeline construction through their habitat. Some tribal courts are beginning to draw from traditional gender and familial beliefs instead of U.S. federal law in domestic violence, divorce, and custody cases. And studies have found that Native students in schools that teach entirely in tribal languages are often higher performing than their counterparts that attend English-only schools, including on English language standardized tests.

As these and Swinomish efforts reflect: Revitalization of Indigenous knowledge, politics, and land relations is not just about remembering traditions, but solving urgent contemporary issues.

This means the estimated 400,000 people with disabilities who are paid an average of $2.15 an hour will slowly gain access to jobs that pay the full minimum wage. That’s a big deal, especially to people like George, who used to work in a sheltered workshop run by Melwood, the company where Cari serves as president and CEO.

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George used to get nervous at work exactly twice a year. He’d held the same job providing cleaning services at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2008, but since Melwood was a sheltered workshop, George could be paid less than the minimum wage. The only way for him to avoid that was to test well at time trials held every six months. If he completed his work quickly enough, he was paid at a fixed rate. If he was too slow, he’d be paid a subminimum wage.

Today, we recognize that type of testing as cruel. But Melwood was established in 1963 by families who wanted to provide their children with developmental disabilities with opportunities to gain skills, have a vocation, and earn a wage. At the time, this was considered progressive — many people with disabilities ended up warehoused in institutions, and these families simply wanted to be able to keep them at home. But as disability policy has evolved, disabled people have been able to demand more — including access to jobs that pay well enough that workers can support themselves. Society changed, and programs like Melwood had to change with it.

In 2016, Melwood got on board. It relinquished the 14(c) certificate that classified it as a sheltered workshop and transitioned to paying all of its employees with disabilities competitive wages in integrated settings.

There were supports in place to make it work: The University Centers on Disability, Parent Training and Information Centers, and Protection and Advocacy Network all provide supports and services to help people move to integrated employment. Oregon and other states have demonstrated the ability for disabled workers to achieve successful outcomes transitioning to competitive integrated employment when state Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies and Intellectual/Developmental Disability Services work together.

In 2019, people with disabilities should not be facing futures with segregation and subminimum wages. They should be allowed to reach their full potential in a competitive integrated environment. They should earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Correction: This piece was updated to remove one of the original authors.

“Each year, every major league team has their minor league players report to spring training. Most fans don’t know those minor league players have to work 31 straight days for no pay,” said Garrett Broshius, a former minor league baseball player and current attorney who is attempting to sue Major League Baseball to ensure that minor leaguers receive fair pay for not only spring training, but all year round.

“If you’re requiring someone to work, you should be paying them the minimum wage. It’s a fairly basic principle,” he said.

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Low wages, though, are the reality for most minor league players. At the lowest end of the pay scale, they make about $1,150 per month during the season, which lasts about half the year, and receive nothing during the offseason or spring training, even though they are expected to stay in shape and train.

All that unpaid and low-paid time adds up; many players make about $7,500 annually, or even less. And because they spend so much time practicing, traveling, and playing games without being eligible for any sort of overtime pay, their hourly compensation dips far below minimum wage.

“I’d work 70 hours a week, and I would get paid $45 per game, so that comes out to like $3 an hour,” said Jeremy Wolf, a former minor league player who now runs More Than Baseball, an organization that aids minor leaguers. “The hot dog vendor makes more than the players do.”

This is possible because minor league baseball players are exempt from most minimum wage and overtime pay protections. A federal spending bill that averted a government shutdown in March 2018 included the positively Orwellian “Save America’s Pastime Act,” which explicitly exempted minor league baseball players from federal pay protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act, so long as they were paid the equivalent of the federal minimum wage of $7.25 for a 40-hour week, which comes out to about $1,160 per month. The bill also explicitly said players are only paid for 40 hours of work during the season  “irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball related activities,” and that players don’t need to be paid for spring training or the off season.

Major League Baseball had been pushing for something like the “Save America’s Pastime Act” to become law for years, in order to blunt legal efforts such as Broshius’. After spending just half a million dollars or less annually on lobbying Congress between 2009 and 2015, Major League Baseball spent more than $1 million annually from 2016 to 2018.

Now the league is aiming to do the same thing at the state level, since states are allowed to exceed federal minimum wage and labor protections. At the behest of MLB,  Arizona Republican state Sen. T.J. Shope introduced a bill that would exempt minor league players from that state’s minimum wage law, which requires pay of $12 per hour by 2020, with few exceptions. He introduced it despite having clear misgivings about its legality, calling it “not ready for prime time.”

Not coincidentally, Arizona is one of the two states in which the bulk of spring training takes place (the other being Florida, where the state minimum wage is just $8.46 an hour). Broshius’ suit also brought claims under Arizona law, which the bill’s sponsor explicitly says would be undermined by his legislation.

“It’s just a preemptive strike by Major League Baseball,” said Wolf. “There a group of people that are just trying to cement not paying these employees.”

As Broshius explained, the month they work without pay in the spring can really hurt minor league players who don’t make it onto a major league roster — which entitles them to not only a minimum salary of more than $40,000 but also union protection — when they get shipped off to a new minor league team. “You go to a new place and you have to pay for your first month rent, put down a security deposit, a lot of players have student loans, and obviously you have your regular bills too,” he said.

Major League Baseball teams, not the minor league affiliates themselves, pay minor league players. They claim that paying fair wages to everyone in the minor league system would cause financial ruin, and also isn’t necessary because players have months of offseason in which they can work other jobs. Plus, they argue, minor league players are more akin to struggling actors going on auditions than daily workers who should receive steady pay.

“Their core argument is that it’s not practical to pay the players based on how long the games last or the hours they spent practicing because a minor league player isn’t doing it for a career, they’re doing it to see if [making it to the majors is] viable,” explained Lindsay Brandon, an attorney who specializes in sports law.

But, Brandon added: “Are these athletes generating revenue for these minor league teams? Absolutely.” The Texas Rangers, for instance, made $1.2 million from spring training last year. Brandon likened the case of minor league players to that of NCAA athletes, who are also attempting to earn a fair share of the revenue they generate. (Other professional sports leagues, such as the NBA or NHL, tend to pay their minor league players better.)

Compensating unpaid players for their month in spring training would amount to a rounding error for most major league teams. In fact, paying them at least minimum wage all year round would barely put a dent in the bottom line.

“If you give every player minimum wage for a 12-month season —  each team has 200 minor leaguers — each team raises their payroll by $4.5 million,” said Wolf. “$4.5 million is one average major leaguer.” Indeed, average pay in MLB in 2018 was about $4.5 million, while the league made $10.3 billion in revenue.

Why do minor leaguers put up with such shabby treatment? They don’t want to step out of line because they know that the dream of the majors, and its vast riches, is not that far away.

“I got to wear a Mets uniform. Players who are playing are blinded by that sort of thing,” said Wolf. “No one’s going to strike, no one’s going to scream union, no one’s going to do anything to make themselves stand out.”

So baseball gets to keep paying its players next to nothing, because it can.

On the sidewalk where I stood in Nogales, Arizona, a storefront window displayed mannequin brides, dressed in white wedding dresses. Not 50 feet away, the coils of glinting wire expand like a lethal slinky.

It was morning, and the town of 20,000 was just beginning to wake up. Downtown in the shopping district, a garbage truck rumbled past, and Norteño music played from stereos outside of just-opening shops. Shuttle drivers congregated along the sidewalk, waiting for Tucson or Phoenix-bound passengers to fill their vans.

In November 2018, the Trump administration ordered that the wall at the Nogales port of entry be topped with concertina razor wire. Last week, more rows of wire were suddenly added to the Arizona side of the wall, and stretched much further than the immediate port of entry. And this time, the wire was placed all the way to ground level.

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Concertina razor wire is a form of coiled barbed wire, first used in World War I. It gets its name from a musical instrument which much like an accordion has bellows that expand to produce its sound. It would be a pretty name, if it were not so dehumanizing and brutal an object.

Nogales residents alerted Mayor Arturo Garino, who said he was not told that more wire would be added. “Let me tell you,” he told Arizona Public Media, “They didn’t even have the courtesy to tell us they were doing this in the first place.” He requested to meet with federal officials to discuss the issue but was refused.

A unanimous vote by the Nogales City Council on Feb. 6 resulted in an official resolution demanding that the wire be removed from city limits.

“Concertina wire has sharp razor-like blades that are coiled [and] is designed to entangle its victim as the razors slice/cut deeply into the flesh and causes indiscriminate injury which can be fatal,” reads the resolution. “Placing coiled concertina wire that is designed to inflict serious bodily injury or death in the immediate proximity of our residents, children, pets, law enforcement and first responders is not only irresponsible but inhuman.”

Indeed, we could follow barbed wire backward in time and find it present during our worst moments as a nation. First patented in 1874 by Joseph Glidden, it was used by land grabbing homesteaders to corral their animals and section off land parcels across the indigenous-occupied West. Thus, Native Americans referred to barbed wire as “devil’s rope.”

Barbed and concertina razor wire have been used to ensnare unsuspecting men on battlefields in faraway places, to imprison Japanese-American families in World War II-era internment camps, to secure modern-day prisons which disproportionately incarcerate people of color. And surely, we have all seen photographs of emaciated children penned into Nazi concentration camps by such wire?

Now, it’s being used to further cut a city in two. For many residents, who have long called their city Ambos (“Both”) Nogales, the border between the U.S. and Mexico is a forced line separating what has historically been a single bi-national community. While in 1918 — after a misunderstanding resulted in a fatal cross-border gunfight — the two countries constructed a mutually agreed-upon fence, the barrier was porous and meant as a friendly method of keeping order. Residents were easily able to cross the border to visit family members or to shop, supporting the economy of both cities.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, when the Clinton administration adopted a border security policy called Operation Gatekeeper, which severely increased Border Patrol presence and turned the friendly line into a fortified wall, made from steel landing strips left over from the Vietnam War. Crossing the border became complicated, and in some cases, impossible. Some families were split up, no longer able to visit with one another.

So began the ritual of visits to the wall, to hold hands and talk between the slats. “Especially on weekends, it’s not uncommon to see people camped out in plastic chairs on the U.S. side, while loved ones in Mexico set up tables and lay out a family meal on the other,” wrote Arielle Ziontes in a 2017 article for the Nogales International.

But Ziontes described the installation of metal sheets of mesh along International Street at a popular meeting place, which reduced visibility and prevented families from being able to touch or hold hands.

Now with the addition of the concertina wire along the Nogales wall, any other meeting places have effectively been sabotaged.

As I stood on International Street, staring through the mesh where family members used to hold hands, I noticed a Border Patrol agent parked in the shade of the wall. He rolled down his window as I approached. I asked him about the wire — when it went up, who installed it, if it will be placed at ground level for the entirety of the wall. He shrugged. He didn’t know anything about infrastructure, he said; that’s not part of his job.

“Is it the National Guard’s?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, and he rolled up the window.

If the Trump administration refuses to tear down the wire, Mayor Garino said he’s prepared to go to court. And it’s not just here in Nogales that officials are pushing back against federal directives to militarize the border. Just before President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, New Mexico’s Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered most of the National Guard troops stationed along the New Mexico border to withdraw from their posts, citing a “charade of border fear-mongering.”

In a speech on Feb. 12, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he was withdrawing the 360 National Guard troops stationed at the Mexico-California border. “This border emergency is a manufactured crisis,” he said. “California will not be part of this political theater.”

After deploying additional troops to the southern border in November 2018, Trump spoke at a rally in Bozeman, Montana. “The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens to flood into your communities,” he told the crowd. And then he seemed to reassure them, saying, “We have our military on the border. And I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight.”

But from where I stood in Nogales, the wire was anything but beautiful. The metal coils caught the blinding glare of the sun, and the mid-morning light through the wall made shadows on the ground that looked like jail bars. Just yards away in Mexico, on the other side of the wire, children filed out into a schoolyard. I could see them dribbling a basketball, jumping rope. Their sing-song voices traveled over and through the wall.

Ernst Weissing is seeking to rent 20+ acres of tillable farmland in southeastern Minnesota. Land with a barn or pole shed and access to water is preferred; no house is required.

Kelly Schaefer is seeking to rent 20 acres of farmland in Minnesota, Arkansas, Oklahoma or Kentucky. Land with pasture, fencing, water, power, outbuildings and a house is preferred.

Landowners post, too, advertising farmland for rent or sale:

Ellen Parker has for sale 9.2 acres of farmland in east-central Minnesota’s McLeod County. The land consists of 3 pasture acres, 3 tillable acres and 3 forest acres.

The listings demonstrate, in part, a rapid occurrence of land transition across the United States. The National Young Farmers Coalition estimates that more than two-thirds of America’s farmland will change hands in the next two decades. But as the older generation ages out of the industry, young farmers struggle to access affordable farmland.

America’s farmers are getting older, fast. According to the most recent Census of Agriculture, which is conducted every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average age of the American farmer is 58 years old, and has trended consistently upwards over the last three decades. More than 33 percent of farmers are 65 or older.

Between them, these farmers manage 320 million acres, approximately one-third, of United States farmland. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 500,000 farmers will retire in the next 20 years.

The aging of the American farmer raises some big questions: Who will grow our food when these farmers are gone? And what will happen to the farmland currently managed by elderly farmers? Unless America’s fertile fields wind up in the hands of a new generation of independent farmers, they’re likely to become housing developments, fracking sites, or simply gobbled up by big agribusiness.

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The primary reason young farmers can’t enter the industry is land: High land costs effectively price them out, whether or not they come from a farming background. Between 2004 and 2018, farmland inflation rates increased by approximately 150 percent. While the national average was $3,040 per acre, some states had averages well over $10,000. Rhode Island has the highest average cost per acre at $13,800.

“Regardless of geographic area, land access is the top challenge for young farmers who are currently farming and the biggest barrier preventing aspiring farmers from entering the industry … And it’s the number one reason that young farmers are quitting,” says Holly Rippon-Butler, a third generation farmer and the Land Access Program Director for the National Young Farmers Coalition. (Full disclosure: I once served as NYFC’s Arizona organizer.)

The issue of land access is a problem I’ve seen up close. Five years ago, as a “beginning farmer” — defined by the USDA as those in their first 10 years of farming — I dreamed of raising our children on the farm and providing decades of food to our community. We planted trees that I imagined would still be there when we died.

But our land payments, mortgage and equipment debt, and operational expenses felt crushing, and I could not imagine saving for emergencies or sending my children to college on my farm income — so several years in, I left the farm.

Many of my longtime friends are still farming, so my social media feeds are filled with documentation of their energy and tribulations: the glow of a field at sunset, the freak hail that annihilated a greenhouse, pigs foraging in the woods, a goat birth captured on video.

But there are also rollercoaster stories of land access. Two friends worked for three years to transition newly-purchased acreage to organic certification, only to be told during their first full season that eminent domain would mandate a gas line eventually be installed through the middle of their farm. A friend in the Midwest has been forced to relocate her entire farm several times due to leasing issues. There are stories of bad landlords, broken leases, interest rates that are way too high, the only affordable acreage too far from a local market to support it, apprenticeships gone sour, dreams quashed, and sweat equity wasted.

The issue of land access is also intertwined with America’s student debt crisis, as school debt can prevent a young farmer from affording land payments or qualifying for loans. In 2017, NYFC surveyed approximately 3,500 farmers under the age of 40. Respondents were 60 percent female, and included a “proportion of people of color and indigenous farmers… roughly twice that of the 2012 Census of Agriculture.” Student loan debt was the second-most cited challenge expressed by young farmers, after land access. 61 percent of respondents reported needing another job to make ends meet.

Third generation Georgia farmer Chad Hunter, whose story is featured as an NYFC case study, says federal student loan debt has prevented him from accessing additional credit to add goats and sheep to his cattle operation. “Farming is difficult,” Hunter said, “Physically, the work is demanding and unrelenting. Financially, it is hard because farmers need credit to operate until they can make a harvest. Credit is difficult to obtain with student loan debt and that makes operating difficult.”

A 2014 NYFC survey on student loan debt found that the approximately 700 respondents had an average of $35,000 in student loan debt. Of those, “[53] percent of respondents were farming but struggled to make their monthly loan payments, and 30% of respondents said they were not farming or had delayed farming because of their student loans.”

Young farmers who are priced out of owning farmland must rely on leasing acreage — often through annual rental agreements — owned by landlords, 97 percent of whom are white. “Leasing can be a great thing when farmers are just getting started, but it’s hard to make long-term investments, like amending the soil or building infrastructure, when you don’t have the security of owning land,” says Rippon-Butler. Leasing also means farmers have less collateral when applying for farm loans, which can limit the size or scope of their operation.

And relationships between landowners and farmers run the gamut from hands-off arrangements, strong partnerships, to those fraught with conflict. Inherently, though, there’s a power imbalance — one party owns the land, and the other doesn’t — which places leasing farmers at the whims of the landowner.

Some steps have certainly been taken to try to address this crisis. The most recent farm bill, passed in December, included permanent funding for beginning and disadvantaged farmer programs. Important improvements were also made to the federal loan program that supports direct farm purchases, doubling the loan limit from $300,000 to $600,000 to reflect the real estate market.

In Minnesota, where just 4 percent of farmers are under the age of 35, NYFC’s Central Minnesota chapter organized successfully for a new law that provides a state income tax credit to landowners who sell or lease land, livestock, or farm equipment to a beginning farmer. As part of the program, the beginning farmer must enroll in a farm management class, also covered by a tax credit.

Also in 2017, Colorado farmers were given a boost by a state law that reimburses farms up to 50 percent of the cost of hiring an apprentice. The program helps farmers afford the labor they need to run their businesses, and it provides paid opportunities for new farmers to gain access to land and mentorship.

Last year in New York, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Working Farm Protection Act into law, after it passed through the state legislature with unanimous support. It strengthened existing farmland protection laws, making state funding permanently available for programs that help keep farmland in the hands of farmers.

But more can be done. For instance, in 2015, NYFC worked with coalition partners to introduce the Young Farmer Success Act into the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2017, it was reintroduced with bipartisan support. If passed, the law would amend the 1965 Higher Education Act to include full-time farm or ranch managers or employees as public service jobs, eligible for the public loan forgiveness program. After 10 years of “income-driven student loan payments,” the loan balance would be forgiven.

“We have this huge natural resource in our farmland and in the knowledge of the farmers who have been the stewards of that land. And as our climate is changing and our world is changing, it’s so important that we protect our ability as a nation to produce food,” says Rippon-Butler. “There is just so much at stake here.”

But after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail. Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids.

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When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse — usually to a state or county child abuse hotline — a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly — especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers.

The trouble is, algorithms aren’t designed to find new information that humans miss — they’re designed to use the data that humans have previously input as efficiently as possible.

“If you give it biased data, it will be biased,” explained Cathy O’Neil, mathematician and author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, while speaking with me for a story I wrote for Undark last year. “The very short version is that when you’re using the past as a kind of reference for how it works well, you’re implicitly assuming the past is doing a good job of rewarding good things and punishing bad things. You’re training the system to say if it worked in the past, it should work in the future.”

Historically, low-income families have had their children removed from their homes at higher rates than wealthier families. As a result, these new algorithms work to codify poverty as a criteria for child maltreatment. Some of the variables that these tools consider are public records that only exist for low-income parents, such as parents’ poverty status, whether they receive welfare benefits like SNAP and TANF, employment status, and whether they receive Medicaid. Other factors, like previous criminal justice involvement and whether or not there have been allegations of substance misuse in the past, are also dramatically more likely for families living in poverty.

This bias exists even in systems that have been highly praised, like the Allegheny Family Screening Tool currently being implemented in Pittsburgh, where prior arrests and parents’ mental health histories are considered factors in whether a child should be removed. It’s similar in other, less-transparent systems, like one in Florida where tech giant SAS contracted with the Florida Department of Children and Families to research which factors were most likely to contribute to the death of a child by maltreatment. According to press releases by SAS (some of which have been unpublished since they began garnering media attention) the company used public records such as Medicaid status, criminal justice history, and substance-use treatment history.

The results led jurisdictions in Florida to zoom in on factors that apply to huge swaths of families, including mine. In April of last year, an allegation of drug use and child abandonment led Broward County, Florida child welfare investigators to investigate my family. When my drug tests were negative, the investigation pivoted to my recent financial setbacks, which had been caused by my husband’s acute health crisis. My children were ultimately removed from my care, and we have been separated for nine months for reasons that are primarily financial. My case is far from unique. Three-quarters of child protective cases in the United States are related to neglect, not abuse, and that neglect usually means lack of food, clothing, shelter, heating, or supervision: problems which are almost always the result of poverty.

Ira Schwartz, a private analytics consultant, thinks he may have found a way to help re-balance this system. He conducted a research study in Broward County — the same county in which my case is based — that discovered the current approach to child welfare substantiation is highly flawed. According to his research, 90 percent of system referrals were essentially useless, and 40 percent of court-involved cases (which typically involve child removal) were overzealous and harmful, rather than beneficial, to the families. He created his own system that, like the Allegheny tool, predicted the likelihood that a family would become re-involved with the system. But he admits quite openly that predictive algorithms like his target the poor.

“We found in our study that lower socioeconomic status was one of the significant variables that was a predictor [for reinvolvement with the system],” said Schwartz. “The issue with higher-income families is … they just don’t really come into the system because they have other options. With higher-income families, when there’s child abuse or neglect or even spouse abuse and it’s reported, they can afford to go to private agencies, get private mental health services; they can see a psychiatrist or social worker or psychologist … it’s a discrimination factor.”

Schwartz believes that these types of admittedly discriminatory computer programs can still be put to good use when combined with prescriptive analytics, which would determine the services that high-risk families need in order to remain out of the system in the future. Schwartz says this would include services like rental assistance, food assistance, day care funding, and housekeeping services. This would help welfare agencies understand which families need what services, and streamline the process of providing them. (All jurisdictions are legally required to make “reasonable efforts” to help families resolve the issues that brought them under investigation, but how agencies go about meeting that standard varies widely by location.)

The issue with these algorithms is certainly not malice on the part of their creators. Even the more secretive, proprietary algorithms being created by companies like SAS claim to want to create a safer system that results in less child maltreatment. But it’s unclear if that is possible with the data that’s available. Without comparable data from wealthier populations, which are better protected by privacy laws, the new systems cannot produce accurate results — and even if more data were added, it would mean more families are being separated and surveilled.

“Forty-plus million Americans live in poverty. They have pets and they love their pets,” said Matthew Bershadker, president and CEO of the ASPCA. Given the American average of 1.8 animals per household, Bershadker estimated that over 25 million cats and dogs are living in poverty, and he noted that 52 percent of the clients of the ASPCA Animal Hospital in NYC are living on less than $15,000 per year.

“We see people often who are in their darkest day,” said Lori Weise of Downtown Dog Rescue in Los Angeles, which is dedicated to helping people keep their pets. “They’re facing some other crisis, and they happen to own a dog.”

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Weise’s organization finds many people are at the shelter because they’ve run out of options — often because they’ve run out of money — and they aren’t aware of resources to help. In one ASPCA study, 40 percent of low-income pet owners surrendering an animal to a shelter said they would have kept their pet if they’d had access to affordable vet care, and 30 percent said the same if they could have gotten free or low-cost pet food.

There’s a growing awareness that meeting the needs of low-income pet owners is central to the mission of animal rescue. “Everywhere I go, we are either involved in or are talking to people about safety net services,” said Bershadker. “It’s almost as if a few years back a massive light bulb went off in the animal welfare community and we stopped thinking about how to get animals out of shelters and we started thinking about how to keep animals from coming into shelters.”

Some programs have, in fact, been working to keep pets together with low-income owners for a while, and the people running them have learned some important lessons about what it takes. Downtown Dog Rescue, founded in 1996, has helped keep 12,000 pets from being surrendered to shelters in south Los Angeles since 2013. They don’t have fancy facilities, just a card table and two chairs outside the shelters they partner with, where they start a conversation with people who may be in a panic.

“They’re crying, bawling, shaking, maybe they have a citation — they’re scared,” said Weise. “I say, ‘if I told you I could help you, would you want to get rid of your pet today?’ And they often say: ‘Oh no, I love him.'”

Once they’ve established that someone would rather keep their pet, the counselors start to connect people to resources: a volunteer handymen that will patch a fence for someone who’s been cited for their dog running loose, low-cost training advice, and crucially, options for lower-cost vet care. In L.A., there are free spay and neuter services for low-income pet owners, as well as vets who provide a discount on services to people working with Downtown Dog Rescue. The numbers needed to help someone keep a pet often aren’t huge — Weise said it generally costs them less than $100. One challenge is often persuading vets to volunteer time and offer discounts. “A lot of them have tremendous amounts of student loans,” said Weise. “The young ones are struggling.”

Weise has found that it’s crucial to make it easy for vets to help. They work with three main animal hospitals, so no one vet is bombarded with cases. They make sure billing is free of complications: Clients show up with written vouchers stating what Downtown Dog Rescue is paying for, and there’s one point of contact for billing the organization. For their monthly free clinics, they handle all the organizational details: tables, chairs, event permits, outreach flyers. “The vets just show up, do the work and leave,” she said. “We stay in our own lanes. We don’t give medical advice, they don’t do planning and outreach, and it’s a beautiful relationship.”

As a national complement to the kind of work Weise is doing locally, the ASPCA is researching ways to lower the cost of vet care without diminishing quality. “How do we shorten diagnostic and treatment protocols?” asked Bershadker. “If the vet can diagnose more quickly with fewer tests, it’s cheaper, and if it’s cheaper it’s more accessible.” He pointed to a previous success: a technical advance in performing spay/neuter surgeries called the pedicle tie that’s allowed vets to complete the procedure in a shorter time.

Taking a broader view, Bershadker also thinks the field needs to take a cue from the legal world, which has a discipline of community-based lawyers, and find a way to make that possible for vets. “We need to create an economy around being a community veterinarian,” he said. “There’s a desire for vets to give back to their communities — we need to make it economically viable for them.” Making basic procedures more efficient is one way of doing this. More loan repayment programs for vets practicing in underserved areas like the Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program are another possibility.

It’s critical that services be geographically accessible and that people are aware of them. One way to address those issues and be more efficient in general is to make use of existing institutions that already reach low-income people. One example is the ASPCA’s partnership with Food Bank for NYC to supply pet food, which in its first year has distributed nearly 100,000 pounds of dog and cat food to 254 food pantries.

“Rather than recreate the distribution system that they have perfected over time, we simply add pet food to that,” Bershadker said. “They’re happy about it because they want to serve the entire family, and we’re happy about it because the animals are getting fed.” What’s more, ASPCA puts stickers on the bags of food that inform clients about other services, so now if they need low-cost vet care, they know where to go.

Bershadker said that the animal welfare world needs to think creatively about partnerships like this with other systems such as child protective services, domestic violence services, and law enforcement. “You don’t need to rebuild the infrastructure — it exists,” he said. “You need to attach yourself to what is there.”

The fundamental flaw of such pieces — often beautifully written and deeply intimate — is that they are personal. They highlight the struggles of a narrow swath of the authors’ generation, but fail to consider the larger implications that their experiences may have for the country as a whole. They bemoan a failure to achieve a promised life, but this life was only promised to, and expected by, a specific group of people.

That life includes a specific set of circumstances to measure against, with a further expectation that you love what you do for a living or you’re not living the life you deserve. But this concept of a promised land is not limited to the millennial generation. In fact, for a hundred years, that dream lifestyle has mostly looked the same: The ability to buy a nice home in a cute neighborhood with a middle-class income, an emotionally rewarding dream job, and exotic vacations to warm climates every winter. (For a uniquely millennial twist, add a French bulldog with an active social media presence.)

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The idea of “passion jobs,” where people pursue jobs that are emotionally fulfilling, has its roots in the 1900s. Every generation since has experienced frustrations when running up against the reality of the working world, whether the aftermath of the Depression for the Silent Generation, the corporate restructuring that narrowed opportunities for Generation X, or the tyranny of the precarious “gig economy” for millennials.

This dream is a specifically middle-class one, though, and it speaks primarily to a relatively small group of people: Those who always assumed they would go to college, for example, and who undertook debt to do so. People who assumed that they would be rewarded with gainful employment as a rite of passage, because this, too, was something they were told. White people. Nondisabled people. People who haven’t been thrown out of their homes or excluded from jobs because of their gender or sexual orientation. People who don’t have financial obligations to family members that may have started as soon as they were old enough to work.

For a disabled Latinx millennial with no college degree scrubbing toilets and caring for two generations at home, reading about how getting knives sharpened is too exhausting to contemplate is not necessarily relatable, even if that person is struggling with the same fundamental problem: Employers who view them as disposable and the familiar refrain that if you bootstrap hard enough, you’ll come out on top. The failed promise for many people from working and lower-class backgrounds isn’t a house with a picket fence, but basic human dignity, a life where your needs are met and you are treated with respect, whether janitor or CEO.

Treating the experience of feeling beaten down by a job that abuses you as something exceptional that primarily affects a class of predominantly white knowledge workers in New York, D.C., and Los Angeles makes commentary on the subject feel self-indulgent and privileged. It confuses a lost middle-class dream with something much deeper. It fails to expand to a larger conversation about what it means to be poor — not broke — and working class in America, and how exhausting and demoralizing it can be to have no money and feel like you have no future.

There is a nagging sense, while reading works like these, that the authors are desperately striving for class mobility to distance themselves from their imagined vision of poverty. They aren’t like those other people — the ones without college degrees, the ones caring for family members at home, the ones with messy lives who are experiencing intergenerational poverty. They’re better than that and deserve better, and thus have no reason to find common cause with the garbage men and housekeepers, doormen and farmworkers of the world, even if both are experiencing sexual harassment, a vast wage gap between worker and executive, workplace instability, and other “millennial burnout” woes.

This is a basic function of capitalism: Walling off communities that should be able to find common ground before they have an opportunity to build coalitions and power. Sweeping rhetoric that claims to speak for a whole generation while only describing narrow experiences is fundamentally alienating for members of the same generation who may find little in common with the way “burnout” is presented, even if they are also experiencing it. It can verge on the offensive when it borrows from the language marginalized people have developed to describe the bone-deep, existential pain of living in a world where they, and their lives, are not valued.

This isn’t a “millennial burnout” problem. This is a capitalism problem. Let’s start treating it like one.

The longest government shutdown in history has rendered many federal agricultural services unavailable, including the thousands of Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices that assist farmers with dozens of programs, such as disaster relief and annual farm operating loans. This is the time of year when Nestler and Beltram should be working with their FSA officer to prepare their annual loan packet — but with the office closed and their officer furloughed (and prohibited from using work cell phones or email to respond to farmers), they’ve had no choice but to wait.

“Usually by now we’re far enough down the road that we know the loan is going to get processed,” said Beltram. “But right now, we don’t have those assurances, because we haven’t been able to communicate with [the FSA].” With spring just around the corner, every week counts. Last year, they applied for their loan on Jan. 1 and received their funds five weeks later, on Feb. 6.

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Last week, some FSA offices re-opened for a three-day period to work solely on existing loans and 1099 tax form preparation for borrowers, as those forms are due on Jan. 31. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also announced that FSA offices would reopen on Jan. 24 for two weeks, and would offer “a longer list of transactions” for farmers, including operating loans. At the end of two weeks, if the government has still not reopened, FSA offices will move to a three-day work week schedule. All FSA employees will work without pay until the government re-opens.

Even with these measures, and even if the government does re-open soon, the damage has already been done. “I mean, if I’m reading the tea leaves, the best case scenario is they’re going to show up on the 24th with a huge backlog of stuff to do … and we’re not going to get our loan near on time,” said Beltram.

In fiscal year 2018, the USDA loaned a total of $5.4 billion, which helped farmers buy property, equipment, and necessary inputs, such as seeds and fertilizer — all of which are vital to farm operations and also prop up small rural economies.

Take tomatoes. At the beginning of February, Beltram and Nestler order seedlings from a local greenhouse, which requires a 50 percent deposit. By mid-March, they’ll begin fertilizing and prepping their fields, and seedlings will be transplanted in mid-May. They’ll spend money on inputs — fertilizer, irrigation and field supplies, fuel for their vehicles, shipping boxes, and labor — for tomato plants that won’t mature to generate revenue until mid-August. That’s at least six months without cash from sales.

“So every spring, we go to our lender, which is the FSA, and they loan us operating funds to put our crop in the ground,” said Beltram. “It’s the way farming has always been. … If you weren’t working with the bank 100 years ago, you were going to the general store and buying everything on credit until your crops came in.”

Factoring in costs for their entire 60-acre farm (which also includes organic leafy greens), Beltram estimates they’ll need $200,000 just in establishment costs, before they even think about harvest.

As they purchase their supplies and pay their employees, those funds naturally ripple out to others in the community. But the shutdown has brought this seasonal farm economy to a halt, freezing out farm families and small businesses already on the brink.

The shutdown situation also exacerbates a rough few years in farm country. In November, the USDA projected that net farm income would decline by $10.8 billion (14.1 percent) in 2018 — just 3.3 percent above the 2016 level, which was the lowest since 2002. As a result, the United States is losing farms in an eerie echo of the 1980s farm crisis, an economic disaster that upended rural America. In Wisconsin alone, 638 dairy farms closed up shop in 2018. Adding to the problems, President Donald Trump’s trade war made pawns out of commodity farmers, resulting in retaliatory tariffs that had sweeping and disastrous effects.

“Had [President Trump] set out to ruin America’s small farmers, he could hardly have come up with a more effective, potentially ruinous one-two combination punch than tariffs and the shutdown,” wrote Iowa radio news director Robert Leonard in a New York Times op-ed.

Climate change brought extreme weather to farm country as well. In North Carolina, Hurricane Florence was estimated to cost farmers more than $1 billion in damage and loss. And over the course of the season, Nestler and Beltram received more than 100 inches of rain (Asheville’s annual average is 45 inches), which caused massive flooding and wiped out 30 percent of their entire crop.

“It was the worst year we’ve ever had at the farm, financially,” said Beltram. “I don’t know any farmers in this area that have money sitting around right now. Everybody I know either broke even or lost money this year.” And then came the shutdown: He knows farmers who can’t pay their rent, buy groceries, or pay for day care because of the effect the government’s closure has had on their finances.

Beltram and Nestler plan to head to the FSA office as soon as it re-opens, but don’t expect to get their loan funds until mid-March, at best. In the meantime, they’ll go to the bank to apply for a bridge loan, and are considering the possibility of cash advances from credit cards until their FSA loan can be processed.

“I’ve been farming long enough that I can’t sweat things too much. I just have to have faith that it’s all going to work out,” Beltram said. “But there’s no question that our livelihood is seriously threatened by what’s going on.”

My doctor, recalling my poor insurance, asked, “Do you ever get to the other side of the state?” I looked at her quizzically. “Because there’s an imaging service over there that offers ultrasounds for …” She paused and searched her computer. “Let’s see … $137, maybe closer to $300 if they think you need both abdominal and transvaginal. But it’s like a two-hour drive.”

My eyes bulged out of my head. I was billed more than $1,000 for the last ultrasound I’d had at my local hospital years earlier.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

I was relieved that my doctor told me about the discounted service. If I’d had to pay $1,000 or more out of pocket then I would have put off the procedure, like so many Americans do (and that’s if I ever got it at all). I had no idea that health care service costs could vary so wildly.

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Not only do prices vary from place to place, but the amount a patient will pay for the same service within the same hospital can vary depending on whether a patient has health insurance and what health insurance plan a patient has. When I called my local hospital to compare their prices for the ultrasound, I was told that it would cost around $700 with my insurance. If I were uninsured, that price would go up to almost $1,200. Meanwhile, that $137 option was a two-hour drive away — I just had to know where to look.

People looking for a car are told to shop around, maybe get a used car, or borrow one from a friend. Too often that same ethos is pushed into the health care space, with patients told to look around for the best deal or negotiate prices with providers. But price shopping for health care services is not as straight-forward as price shopping for a vehicle, despite legislative attempts to solve the problem.

At the beginning of the year, a new rule went into effect that requires hospitals to post their list prices online. But, as Kaiser Health News points out, that kind of transparency won’t have much of an impact because patients can’t understand those prices. The lists are full of incomprehensible abbreviations, list services separately that would always be bundled together, and vary depending on a person’s specific health plan, so consumers cannot get the type of information they need for comparison shopping. Moreover, these are just the list prices charged by hospitals; they do not include the price of physicians’ services during the hospital stay.

Not everyone has a doctor like mine, who actively looked out for my financial interests. And many times, even when people do try to calculate costs ahead of time, the tools they’re given turn out to be wildly inaccurate. One person profiled by the Philadelphia Inquirer, who proactively used her insurer’s price estimator tool to calculate the out-of-pocket cost of a breast MRI, was shocked when she was billed more than twice what the tool had suggested would be the upper-end range of out-of-pocket costs for the procedure.

Plus, finding the cheapest care is just the first hurdle.

My ability to access more affordable diagnostic services depended on a lot of things aligning — I had to have flexibility in my schedule to drive to a discounted imaging service provider, and I needed a vehicle that could make the trip. When all of those things did happen, I still had to shuffle work deadlines, time the appointment so that the drive there and back didn’t conflict with my kids’ school drop-off, and arrange for after-school care for them.

That same flexibility simply isn’t possible for everyone. Nearly 1 in 5 workers experience unstable work hours, which makes it impossible to schedule time to head to a different health provider in order to take advantage of cheaper care. Also, around 9 percent of Americans don’t own a car, and in recent years the number of people obtaining driver’s licenses has been trending downward. In rural areas, the nearest health care provider could be hours away. Though I live in an urban area, the nearest discounted service provider was a two-hour drive.

In an emergency, no one has time to inquire about costs. And even in less urgent situations, there is often no way to accurately determine prices. While hospitals are now required to post their price lists online, health care isn’t Amazon, where items are easily searched for, compared, and where prices are fixed. And high-deductible insurance plans are increasing in number, including in employer-sponsored plans, as insurers attempt to cost-shift onto consumers. That means more people are going to be in the same place I was over time.

On my drive to the other side of the state, I considered how fortunate I was to be able to access discounted health services. But being a self-employed person with a vehicle should not provide me with more options than someone with a less flexible work schedule or who doesn’t have a car. No one should have to waste precious time searching aimlessly for the best deal for treatment, and no one should have to go without because they didn’t know it was more affordable elsewhere or because the more affordable location was not accessible.

Until the U.S. chooses to recognize health care as a human right, rather than a commodity or entitlement, the poorest Americans will continue to suffer.

This year, the renewal process has been made even harder by the partial government shutdown, which accelerated deadlines with no notice for the more than 40 million people who receive benefits. And that’s just one of the effects the shutdown has had on SNAP and other nutrition assistance programs.

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On Jan. 8, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that February SNAP benefits would be distributed by Jan. 20, in order to get around shutdown-related restrictions. That called for a herculean effort: Millions of new applications and recertifications that would normally be due in February now need to be submitted by mid-January. Normally, new applications and annual recertifications take place on a rolling basis. For recipients who couldn’t gather supporting material in time or didn’t know about the deadline, such as furloughed federal workers hoping for nutrition assistance while they remain without pay, the time to file for benefits has already come and gone.

At the same time, some grocers have stopped accepting SNAP because the government shutdown means they cannot renew their licenses. As the shutdown continues, the number of vendors will dwindle, a particular issue for people in areas with limited options.

The effects of these problems are wide-reaching. Nearly half of SNAP recipients are children, and LGBTQ people, along with disabled people, are much more likely to need nutrition assistance.

States administer the SNAP program, and the state-by-state chaos has been frustrating. “I have not received any update from the state’s human resource department about how this would affect us. In every other instance of benefit changes, we are sent copious written notification(s),” another recipient told TalkPoverty via email. Documentation also sometimes contradicted itself, adding even more uncertainty to the process.

Others reported that they heard about the deadline from news stories or Facebook, and struggled to get answers from officials in local offices — many of which set different deadlines, making it difficult to determine when applications and renewals needed to be submitted. At least one recipient read on social media that SNAP benefits distribution would be reversed if agencies ran out of money, something that shouldn’t be possible with EBT cards. Confusion and fear like this are familiar for many low-income people, who sometimes feel at the whims of capricious government policies and procedures.

“I’ll push myself not to use [benefits distributed early] until February but there’s a fear they could be taken away. Everything just seems so uncertain. Poor people know to use what we have when we have it because we can’t depend on what will be there in the future,” said one SNAP recipient.

SNAP is not the only nutrition assistance program with funding thrown into uncertainty by the shutdown. Also threatened are the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, which supplies benefits to 7 million pregnant people, new parents, infants, and children, and the Food Distribution Program in Native American communities, which fed over 90,000 people a month in 2017. The latter adds to the shutdown-induced woes — which include limitations on access to health care — in Native communities. The national free and reduced-price lunch program, which feeds more than 30 million kids annually, could also be in danger if the shutdown persists into March.

Even after the government reopens, the danger isn’t over, thanks to a dangerous Trump administration proposal to make work requirements even harsher in SNAP, which Congress explicitly refused to do in the latest Farm Bill. Currently, 33 states and Washington, D.C. have waivers in place for high unemployment areas to relieve the strict time limits for so-called “able-bodied adults without dependents” written into SNAP in 1996, which restrict benefits eligibility to three months out of every three years for those considered “able-bodied” with no legal dependents. The Trump administration wants to sharply curtail states’ flexibility to use these waivers, throwing 755,000 under- and unemployed people off SNAP.

“I don’t have contingency plans because I can’t have any,” says a disabled SNAP recipient in Colorado who struggled to get an answer about her recertification documents, normally due in February. Members of low-income communities have extensive experience creating their own safety nets to support each other through hard times, but “I think that people are going to get burnt out and stretched too thin by all the need that surrounds them.”

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to clarify the Trump administration proposal on SNAP work requirements and the current status of work requirement waivers.