There have been rumors that this might happen for months. The first time I heard about it, I was sitting in my summer internship with the city of Dallas. One of my supervisors asked me if I was familiar with possible changes to the “public charge rule,” which requires immigrants to prove that they will not use government benefits before they are granted permanent status. When I shook my head no, she gave me a handout that explained who would be affected.

Individuals with visas or legal permanent residents. Check.
Individuals who have used any federal assistance programs. Check.

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I held my breath when I read it, my eyes darting from line to line while I felt the walls close in. This was about my family. They were looking for me.

My parents moved to Dallas from Chihuahua, Mexico in the early 90s. My brothers and I were all born in the United States. We used Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to get our standard vaccines as kids, and my parents got their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. We followed all the rules and did exactly what we were supposed to do.

I always follow the rules. I just started my senior year of high school, and I have my days completely packed with extracurricular activities. That means debate on Mondays and Wednesdays, LULAC meetings Wednesday mornings, mock trial on Tuesdays, We Fight Fear meetings after school, volunteering Saturdays and Sundays, and SAT prep in between. I don’t climb back into bed until 12 a.m., after finishing homework, sending emails, and setting up meetings.

I’m not just doing these things because I like them. I’ve never felt I have the option to turn down opportunities, because if I push myself hard enough to get a scholarship then all the late nights will be worth it.

I’m in the process of setting up my Common Application profile for college. I always knew that my parents wouldn’t be able to afford my tuition, and that I would have to cobble together grants and scholarships to pay my way. So it’s up to me to prove to colleges that they should pay for me to attend.

But when I heard about the new immigration rule this summer, I had to second-guess the one thing I was most certain about: going to college. If I applied for Pell Grants to cover tuition, was that going to count against my parents? If their income dipped below the threshold in this new immigration rule, would I need to stay home and get a job to ensure they weren’t targeted? If I followed through on my dreams, and on all the work I’ve put in, would I be betraying my family?

I’m not the only one who is scared. Once my mom found out about the rule, she told me she wasn’t comfortable continuing my little brother’s Medicaid coverage. He’s only 3 years old, and he has so much growing left to do. The government knew it would create this risk when it announced the new rule: Documents from the Department of Homeland Security predict that people will receive less health care, and that disease rates will increase for U.S. citizens who have not been vaccinated yet.

Those documents are talking about my little brother.

When the rule finally came out last week, and I got to look at real words on paper instead of wading through a swirl of rumors, I got a tiny taste of relief. This version of the rule won’t apply to people who already have green cards, and my mom just renewed hers. For now, I can daydream about college, and my parents can sign my brother up for health insurance.

Just a short while ago, we wouldn’t have made the cut. There are hundreds of thousands of people who still won’t. Those people, and those families, will see the opportunities they’ve worked so hard for finally within their children’s reach, only to be forced to wave them away, in case it costs them everything. They’ll do exactly what we did: pass on health insurance and decline the few extra bucks to make sure we didn’t go to bed hungry. What else are we supposed to do when the government forces us to choose between our families and our future?

Even though I’m safe for now, I don’t feel like I’ve won. This isn’t a game. Not to me, not to my brothers or my parents.

But as I sit here and contemplate which college campus I’ll be walking onto this time next fall, if I get to go to one at all, that’s what it feels like. It feels like they’re using children as chess pieces in a twisted political contest to force immigrants into the shadows of a nation we helped build.

Davidson, 32, was employed as a youth care worker at a Tucson shelter run by Southwest Keys Programs, the organization contracted by the federal government to house immigrant children across multiple states. His job was to assist with the approximately 300 immigrant children, ages 4 to 17, living there.

As the only staff member fluent in Portuguese, he had been called in to translate for three recently-arrived Brazilian siblings ages 8, 10, and 16. The siblings were distraught. They hadn’t slept since they arrived at the shelter that morning, and staff had told them that their mother had disappeared. In Brazil, those who are “disappeared” are abducted from their homes and never seen again. They were terrified. Davidson addressed the oldest brother, “You have to be strong.” Weeping, the boy responded, “How?”

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These three children were among the more than 2,300 separated from their parents between May 5 and June 9. They are caught up in the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separates children from their parents in order to criminally prosecute all adults who are caught crossing into the United States, even those exercising their legal right to seek asylum.

After Davidson refused to order the siblings not to embrace, he says his supervisor began to yell instructions at them in English and Spanish. According to facility policy, the siblings were then split up into different areas because of their ages and genders. When Davidson asked a case manager where the children’s mother was, she said she didn’t know, wouldn’t know for a week, and that it would be another week to speak with her. Two weeks later, on June 12, Davidson resigned.

*          *          *

Davidson had been seeking post-college employment when he interviewed and subsequently began work at the shelter in February. Inspired to work there because his father was an immigrant, Davidson proposed teaching a capoeira course. Posters on the walls read: “We are all humanitarian heroes.” Davidson says, “They have a progressive corporate culture they present. They make you feel like we’re a humanitarian organization.”

The Estraya Del Norte shelter on North Oracle Road in Tucson is unremarkable in every way. Painted beige, the squat building blends into a strip of old motels, many of them abandoned. Tucsonans likely pass the building every day without noticing or wondering who is inside.  When organizers and activists finally learned there was a detention facility for immigrant children in their own community, they came together to form the Free the Children Coalition.

Last week at a coalition-led rally, several hundred protestors gathered in front of the Tucson federal courthouse with markered signs reading: “Morals Over Profit,” “We Will Not Abandon Our Children,” and “Where’s Our Humanity?”

Isabel Garcia, board member of humanitarian organization Derechos Humanos and a longtime immigration attorney, called the policy of family separation “the lowest of the low.”

“We’re here because we allowed it,” she said. “What are we going to do moving forward?”

*          *          *

In 1924, Congress first passed legislation criminalizing illegal entry or re-entry, but over time, the prosecution of border-crossing has varied widely.

Border communities like Tucson have felt the impact of increased border policing in more recent years. In 2010, Arizona passed S.B. 1070, which required law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of detained or arrested individuals if officers have “reasonable suspicion” they might be in the country without status. (The Supreme Court later struck down much of the law, and narrowed this specific provision.) Operation Streamline, a program begun in 2005, brings 70 migrants accused of illegal entry or re-entry before a federal judge almost every weekday. If migrants plea guilty to illegal entry, they are sentenced to time in detention but receive a misdemeanor rather than a misdemeanor and a felony for border crossing. In some courtrooms, prosecution of all 70 defendants, who appear before the judge seven at a time, takes as little as half an hour.

But American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Billy Peard, who has been meeting with immigrant parents held in detention in Eloy and Florence, Arizona, says, “From what I can tell, there is no precedent for systematically prosecuting adults for illegal entry or re-entry if they came over with a minor child.”

*          *          *

Davidson said the atmosphere at the shelter became “more intense” and “more authoritarian” after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” announcement in May. Previously, he said, many Guatemalan children who came to the United States without their parents were prepared to enter a shelter. “They were very compliant, they kept their heads down.” But then under zero tolerance “kids started coming in who didn’t know the drill, who were ripped from their parents. Laws were rolling out differently day to day,” Davidson says. “If case managers didn’t understand, you can imagine what kids didn’t understand.”

“You know that audio clip everyone’s listening to of kids’ crying?” Davidson says. “That’s something we were experiencing every day—those were the sounds of the evening as we were preparing to go home.”

Two days prior to the arrival of the Brazilian siblings, three kids ran away. Davidson witnessed the most acute behavior from children referred to by staff as “of tender age,” those under 12. Kids ran around, cried through the night, and hit teachers. One child demonstrated problematic sexual behaviors, grabbing at his teachers’ genitalia. He was 6.

“I call it a triple threat of trauma,” Davidson says. “Escaping traumatic experience in their countries, becoming traumatized entering, and then again in facilities. When you combine that with underpaid and untrained workers, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

The short- and long-term health consequences of separating children from their parents were confirmed by Dr. Eva Shapiro, a Tucson pediatrician of over 40 years. “A parent’s role is to mitigate these dangers,” Shapiro said. “Robbed of that buffer, children are susceptible to learning difficulties, depression, and chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.” She continued, “Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claim they are acting to protect the best interest of minor children, but the White House and Department of Justice have vocally supported the idea of family separation as a deterrent to keep migrant families from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Last week, Tucson mother Daisy Pitkin awakened when her 3-year-old son cried out from a nightmare. After consoling her child, she sat on the edge of his bed as he fell back asleep and nearly had a panic attack. “I thought: What would happen if nobody came?” she said. “What would happen if a stranger came? That’s happening to children right now.”

Pitkin was one of 17 parents who brought their small children to a “Play Date” last week at Republican Rep. Martha McSally’s Tucson office. She said that contacting elected officials is “a foundational democratic act,” and that the parents’ chief objective was to find out the Congresswoman’s stance on the separation policy. For an hour, parents read stories, led children in songs, and helped kids make art.

When parents asked staff to call her D.C. office or try to reach the Congresswoman on her cell, their requests were denied. Staff told constituents that the office had two caseworkers: one for veterans’ issues and one to handle housing issues of elderly constituents. “When we asked what happens if one of her constituents comes asking about immigration, they said, ‘We don’t have anyone here who can talk about that,’” Pitkin said.

Another organizer and mom, Margot Veranes, said staffers asked why the group didn’t make an appointment or come when Congress wasn’t in session. “We don’t feel that this can wait,” Veranes said. “This needs to stop in the next five minutes ’cause every moment it’s happening to a new child—and the trauma for these kids and parents is going to be lifelong.”

In response to the “Play Date,” Congresswoman McSally’s chief of staff released a formal statement accusing the group of being led by “radical activists” and breaking into the office. “Events like these distract from the many issues our country faces and make it harder for our community to come together to address them,” the statement read.

Veranes, whose children are 6 months and 2 years old, argues that this is exactly the issue our country needs to address. “We’ll try anything to make this stop,” she said. “We have the luxury of being parents who are unified and we stand in solidarity with parents who don’t know where their kids are.”

The office handed out opinion forms, which many parents and some children filled out. One, from a 10-year-old, read: “Please try to stop this. It’s really wrong.”

On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order purporting to end family separation that in reality just opened the door to the mass and prolonged incarceration of children along with their families—and potentially simply delaying family separation. This policy also contradicts a 1997 federal court decision that children accompanied by their parents cannot be held for more than 20 days. Moreover, the Trump administration has no plan to reunite the thousands of children whom it previously took from their parents.

“There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” said a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

One of the Tucson Play Date organizers, Reverend Alison Harrington of Southside Presbyterian Church, a mother to 4- and 6-year-old daughters, explained the new policy this way: “What the president said is ‘We won’t separate families, we’ll incarcerate them.’ My hope is that this is a moment of awakening for many people so they can begin to see what’s truly happening in our nation.”

The conclusions are damning. “The United States already leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality, and it is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal,” the report concludes. “High child and youth poverty rates perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.”

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The U.N. explicitly lays blame with the Trump administration for policies that actively increase poverty and inequality in the country. “The $1.5 trillion in tax cuts in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality. The consequences of neglecting poverty and promoting inequality are clear,” it concludes. “The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship.”

In December, Alston visited seven locations throughout the country—ranging from Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood to rural Alabama, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico—to meet with people experiencing deep poverty, along with experts and civil society groups.

In an interview with TalkPoverty ahead of the release, Alston characterized the United States as an outlier among the developed world.

“If you said to most Americans, ‘Look at what country X does to its ethnic minority or to a particular religious minority’ … your average American with any knowledge of that situation is going to shake her head and say, ‘This is a disgrace,’” Alston said. “But of course there’s a direct parallel in the United States and it affects not just a small ethnic minority but a very large racial group of African Americans in particular, where they just come out worse on every possible indicator and policies are clearly designed to hit them harder.”

Alston described meeting “people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor,” and people in Puerto Rico “living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash, which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability, and death.” In Lowndes County, Alabama, the U.N. found cesspools of sewage that flowed out of dysfunctional (or nonexistent) septic systems, which has led to a resurgence in diseases that officials believed were eradicated. A recent study found that more than one-third of people surveyed in Alabama tested positive for hookworm—a parasite that thrives in areas of poor sanitation, which has not been well-documented in the United States since the 1950s.

The reactions to the visit from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress ahead of the report have ranged from indifference to hostility. Alston requested meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan and a range of Republican committee chairs—all of whom declined the request. Senators Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Rep. Terri Sewell, and Elizabeth Warren’s staff, on the other hand, all met with Alston. Alston also got a mixed result from the Trump administration. While some agencies were cooperative, “the Justice Department … basically refused all requests to meet and that was pretty striking. It’s not the sort of thing that normally happens on a mission like this,” Alston says.

The Human Rights Council oversees human rights protection around the world. Though the United States is an elected member of the council, it doesn’t have the friendliest relationship with the body. President George W. Bush boycotted the council at its founding in 2006 (a decision the Obama administration later reversed), and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has been a relentless critic of the council under Trump. Notably, the United States and Cuba are the only countries in North America not to offer standing invitations from the Human Rights Council.

As for the odds that the report will force the administration to change course, Alston was not hopeful. During the visit, “The U.S. was visibly debating what to do with $1.5 trillion [in tax cuts]. And its proposals in relation to those living in poverty was essentially to cut back on existing benefits in order to help fund the tax reforms. That made for a pretty dramatic contrast for the approach that I have found elsewhere.”

Twitter, in particular, was ablaze—first with pleas of #WhereAreTheChildren, then with frustration directed largely at Ivanka, and finally with outrage over the new “zero tolerance” prosecution policy that has already separated more than 1,300 children, some as young as infants, from their parents.

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Tweeting—especially in an administration that decides much of its public policy on Twitter—that #FamiliesBelongTogether is a good place to start if you want to help change. But here are three more ways you can join the fight:

1. Know the Facts

There has been a lot of misinformation in the past week—some of which was well-intentioned, but potentially harmful to immigrant children. So make sure you know the basics.

Family separation is not a law—it is a Trump administration policy.

President Trump has tried to shift blame onto Congressional Democrats by tweeting that they need to end the “horrible law” that is causing family separation. But the practice of splitting up families at the border is the direct result of this administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute anyone who is caught crossing the U.S. border, including families who are seeking asylum. While parents are transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service to be criminally prosecuted, imprisoned, detained, and perhaps deported from the country, their children are taken into government custody and held with little or no contact with their parents.

Tellingly, the Department of Homeland Security is not only separating families that are being prosecuted for illegally entering the country, but also families that are requesting asylum at official ports of entry—that is, parents who are doing exactly what the administration is saying it wants them to do.

The Trump administration is deliberately prosecuting parents and separating them from their children in order to deter other families from coming to the U.S. to ask for asylum—something they are fully and legally eligible to do.

Many of the families being separated today have fled extreme violence and abuse to seek asylum in the United States

The right to seek asylum has long been recognized by international and federal law. That is why an increasing number of families, many of whom are fleeing extreme violence and abuse in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, have taken the treacherous journey north to seek asylum protections in the United States. New analysis by the Center for American Progress shows that the extreme violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—and in particular the rates of homicide against women and girls—remains alarmingly high. The Trump administration is deliberately prosecuting parents and separating them from their children to try and deter them from coming to the United States to ask for asylum—which these families are legally eligible to do.

2. Join the National Day of Action for Children

Outraged by what’s happening to these children and their parents? Join the fight to end family separation by participating in the National Day of Action for Children planned for today, Friday, June 1. Actions will be taking place in locations across the country, as well as online.

If you attend, make sure to share photos, videos, and digital content with the hashtags #FamiliesBelongTogether and #KeepFamiliesTogether. 

3. Sign and share with your friends petitions to end family separation

We have the power to call for an end to this wrongful policy. Let’s continue building enough public pressure until we see a change. Please consider signing the ACLU’s petition to the secretary of homeland security to end family separation today.

The order, titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” carries little weight by itself. It directs a broad range of federal agencies to review programs serving low-income people and make recommendations on how they can make the programs harder to access, all under the guise of “welfare reform.”

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The order’s main purpose appears to be smearing popular programs in an effort to make them easier to slash—in part by redefining “welfare” to encompass nearly every program that helps families get by. To that end, the order reads as follows:

The terms “welfare” and “public assistance” include any program that provides means-tested assistance, or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households, or families that have low incomes (i.e., those making less than twice the Federal poverty level), the unemployed, or those out of the labor force.

Redefining everything from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) to Medicaid to Unemployment Insurance to child care assistance as “welfare” has long been part of conservatives’ playbook, as my colleague Shawn Fremstad has pointed out. The term has a deeply racially charged history in the United States, evoking decades of racial stereotypes about poverty and the people who experience it. By using dog-whistle terms like welfare, Trump is erecting a smokescreen in the shape of President Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen”—so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.

The fact is, we don’t have welfare in America anymore. What’s left of America’s tattered safety net is meager at best, and—contrary to the claim in Trump’s executive order that it leads to “government dependence”—it’s light-years away from enough to live on.

Take the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP provides an average of just $1.40 per person per meal. Most families run out of SNAP by the third week of the month because it’s so far from enough to feed a family on.

Then there’s housing assistance, which reaches just 1 in 5 eligible low-income families. Those left without help can spend up to 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities each month, while they remain on decades-long waitlists for assistance.

And then there’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 when Congress famously “[ended] welfare as we know it.” Fewer than 1 in 4 poor families with kids get help from TANF today—down from 80 percent in 1996. In fact, in several states, kids are more likely to be placed in foster care than receive help from TANF.

Families who do receive TANF are lucky if the benefits even bring them halfway to the austere federal poverty line. For example, a Tennessee family of 3 can only receive a maximum of $185 per month, or a little over $6 a day.

Yet TANF is the program Trump is holding up as a model—hailing 1996 “welfare reform” as a wild success—despite the fact that TANF has proven an abject failure both in terms of protecting struggling families from hardship and in helping them get ahead.

In particular, this executive order directs agencies to ramp up so-called “work requirements”—harsh time limits on assistance for certain unemployed and underemployed workers—which were at the heart of the law that created TANF. But decades of research since TANF was enacted show that work requirements do not help anyone work.

Make no mistake: Pushing for “work requirements” is at the core of the conservative strategy to reinforce myths about poverty in America. That “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” That anyone who wants a well-paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.

But in reality, millions of Americans are working two, even three jobs to make ends meet and provide for their families. Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have even $400 in the bank. And nearly all of us—70 percent—will turn to some form of means-tested assistance, like Medicaid or SNAP, at some point in our lives.

Trump claims his executive order is intended to eliminate “poverty traps.” But if he knew anything about poverty—aside from what he’s learned on Fox News—he’d know the real poverty trap is the minimum wage, which has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour for nearly a decade. That’s well below the poverty line for a family of two—and not nearly enough to live on. There isn’t a single state in the country in which a minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at market rate. Many low-wage workers are forced to turn to programs like Medicaid and SNAP to make ends meet, because wages aren’t enough.

If Trump were really trying to promote “self-sufficiency”—a concept he clearly doesn’t think applies to the millionaires and billionaires to whom he just gave massive tax cuts—he’d be all over raising the minimum wage. In fact, raising the minimum wage just to $12 would save $53 billion in SNAP alone over a decade, as more low-wage workers would suddenly earn enough to feed their families without nutrition assistance.

Yet there’s no mention of the minimum wage anywhere in Trump’s order to “promote opportunity and economic mobility.”

Which brings us back to the real purpose of this executive order: divide and conquer.

Trump and his colleagues in Congress learned the hard way last year how popular Medicaid is when they tried to cut it as part of their quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just Medicaid that Americans don’t want to see cut. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to SNAP, housing assistance, Social Security disability benefits, home heating assistance, and a whole slew of programs that help families get by—particularly if these cuts are to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. What’s more, as polling by the Center for American Progress shows, Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who backs cuts.

By contrast, vast majorities of Americans across party lines want to see their policymakers raise the minimum wage; ensure affordable, high-quality child care; and even enact a job guarantee to ensure everyone who is able and wants to work can find a job with decent wages. These sentiments extend far beyond the Democratic base to include majorities of Independents, Republicans, and even Trump’s own voters.

That’s why rebranding these programs as welfare is so important to Trump’s agenda. Rather than heed the wishes of the American people, Trump’s plan is—yet again—to tap into racial animus and ugly myths about aid programs in order to pit struggling workers against one other. That way, he can hide his continued betrayal of the “forgotten men and women” for whom he famously pledged to fight.

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) defines border militarization as “the systematic intensification of the border’s security apparatus, transforming the area from a transnational frontier to a zone of permanent vigilance, enforcement, and violence.”

The NNIRR further states that “the outcome of border militarization has not been to deter migration, but instead to create more vulnerability.”

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Sixty miles south of my home in Tucson, at the U.S.-Mexico border, a crude steel wall cleaves the town of Nogales in half. Once a single town, relatives now stretch their arms through slits in the wall to hold hands. North of the border, Interstate 19 runs through a scrubby desert, past dusty Arizona ranch towns and gated retirement communities, paralleling the green line that marks the Santa Cruz River. The desert stretches out as far as you can see: thousands of acres of rocky mountain ranges, remote wilderness areas, First Nations land, and cattle ranches.

In 1994, the U.S. Border Patrol began a new strategy called Prevention Through Deterrence. Urban areas from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California, were outfitted with more Border Patrol agents and military-style equipment, including cameras and walls. As a result, it was no longer possible for migrants to cross the border in urban areas. They now had to traverse remote stretches of desert by foot.

In the Sonoran Desert, summer temperatures can climb up to 120 degrees near some of the most commonly used crossing routes. Monsoon storms turn bone-dry arroyos into dangerous flash floods. In winter, below-freezing nighttime temperatures can induce hypothermia. There is little shade and the only water might be found inside the belly of a cactus, or an algae-filled cattle tank. There are rocks to turn ankles, rattlesnakes, and miles upon miles of spiny cacti.

In the last two decades, more than 7,000 bodies of migrants have been found in the Arizona desert, most having died of exposure or dehydration. Thousands more men, women, and children have disappeared. In 2015 alone, more than 1,200 missing persons cases were opened by the human rights organization La Coalición de Derechos Humanos, in response to people looking for loved ones who went missing on the journey through the desert.

A report co-authored by La Coalición de Derechos Humanos and humanitarian group No More Deaths reads, “The region has been transformed into a vast graveyard of the missing.”

*                    *                    *

In the late 1990s, southern Arizona communities began to witness the effects of increased border militarization. Human remains were found in the desert. The Medical Examiner’s morgues continued to fill up throughout the early 2000s, as missing persons reports and phone calls increased from frantic family members. Border Patrol checkpoints appeared along rural roads and highways. Reports of racial profiling in urban areas increased, as did raids in neighborhoods and workplaces.

A widespread citizen response began—one that, full disclosure, I joined as a volunteer for La Coalición de Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths when I moved to Tucson in 2005. Several groups were formed to provide legal support, missing migrant searches, public education, and direct humanitarian aid. Others continued the work they’d been doing to support border crossers since the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. Local volunteers—including retirees, pastors, nurses, and youth activists—drove desert roads and hiked into remote areas to leave gallons of water along migrant trails, hoping it would save lives. “¡Hola, hermanos! Somos amigos de la iglesia. Tenemos comida y agua,” they called as they walk through the desert brush. Hello, brothers! We’re friends from the church. We have food and water.

Over a three year period between 2012 and 2015, No More Deaths tracked approximately 31,000 gallons of water they placed in an 800-square-mile radius. Eighty-six percent of the water was used, demonstrating high need. But over that same period of years, water jugs were vandalized by humans at an average of twice per week. “Although it is likely that multiple actors are responsible for the destruction of humanitarian aid at our water-drop sites, the results of our [geographic] data analysis indicate that US Border Patrol agents likely are the most consistent actors,” states the report.

A series of videos taken by wildlife cameras and personal cameras clearly show Border Patrol agents destroying water jugs and other humanitarian aid supplies. In one video, a female agent kicks a line of water jugs one by one, smashing the plastic containers against the rocks. In another, a male agent looks into the camera and sneers at the unseen videographer. “You’re gonna’ get a good shot. Just picking up this trash somebody left on the trail,” he says. “It’s not yours, is it? All you have to do is tell me that it’s yours.” He pours out water from the jugs as he talks, his forehead glistening with sweat.

On January 17, 2018, just hours after the above video footage was released, eight No More Deaths volunteers were apprehended by Border Patrol. All are being charged with federal misdemeanors, except for Scott Warren, a faculty associate at Arizona State University and a longtime No More Deaths volunteer, who is being charged with a felony for harboring migrants after agents witnessed him providing two people with water and food. If convicted, he could face five years in prison. In Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge—where the volunteers had been looking for distressed migrants and leaving humanitarian aid supplies—No More Deaths volunteers discovered 32 sets of human remains in 2017.

This is not the first time that the federal government has brought charges against No More Deaths volunteers. In 2005, Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss were arrested while transporting three severely dehydrated migrants to a medical facility, and charged with smuggling and conspiracy felonies. They each faced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. After over a year of legal proceedings and a widespread grassroots campaign in support of humanitarian aid, the charges against them were dropped. In 2008, Walt Staton, then a seminary student, was cited for littering after U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers found him leaving water containers on trails in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. Several months before Staton’s citation, Dan Millis was cited for littering, also by U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers, for leaving water containers in the wildlife refuge.

For Millis, the citation came just two days after he and three other No More Deaths volunteers found the lifeless body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl in a nearby remote area. Josseline Hernandez and her 10-year-old brother had been traveling with a group of other border crossers when Josseline became ill and was left behind. The siblings were on their way to California to meet their mother. Millis spent months in court fighting the littering charges, arguing—as Sellz and Strauss did—that “humanitarian aid is never a crime,” and that water containers left in the desert with the intent to save lives is not litter. He won the case in an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court, which ruled that the water containers were not garbage.

*                    *                    *

Todd Miller, a journalist and the author of two books about the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, says the Trump Administration’s decision to send the National Guard troops to the border “reinforces, supports, and frees up the U.S. Border Patrol, a self-described paramilitary agency.”

Since 1993, the U.S. Border Patrol’s annual budget has increased more than ten-fold, from $363 million to over $3.8 billion, and the number of agents increased from 4,000 to 21,000. The combined budgets for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017 was $19 billion—more than the FBI, DEA, and U.S. Marshals Service combined.

“The Border Patrol not only operates on the international boundary line, but also in 100-mile jurisdictions, and they do it with extraconstitutional powers above and beyond what normal law enforcement can do,” says Miller. “They can put up checkpoints, pull people over in roving patrols, and essentially violate the 4th amendment—the right to not be searched or seized. This is why the ACLU calls the borderlands a ‘constitution-free zone.’”

The effects of militarization also spill into courtrooms in communities along the border. In 2005, under President George W. Bush, Operation Streamline began, a daily assembly-line courtroom processing of undocumented migrants found crossing the border. During the Obama presidency, Operation Streamline increased dramatically. In just two hours, up to 70 people can be tried and sentenced.

Miller has spent the last eight years researching the private military companies that also want to cash in on border militarization. He describes attending border security conventions with “vendors and companies adamantly discussing their desire to break into the border security market.” In the early 2010s, as U.S. military operations were winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Miller says many of those companies expressed that they were in search of new markets. “One vendor, who had before sold his company’s products to the U.S. military, told me ‘we are now bringing the battlefield to the border.’”

In the years since Prevention Through Deterrence began, poverty and violence have continued to force those fleeing for their lives to head north. And so they come—exhausted from the journey, some with babies in their arms, seeking work, seeking a good safe life—and when they reach the border, they are inhumanely squeezed into the gauntlet of the desert, where, as Miller says, “death has become one of many deterrents.”

“When you consider human security, such as the right for a person to have shelter, food, health, education, a future, you see quickly that the billions of dollars put into border militarization are drastically misplaced,” Miller says, joining the many border residents who say that the U.S. government should address the socioeconomic and political reasons driving migration in the first place.

But instead of tackling those root causes of migration, Miller says the U.S. government has focused on putting up walls and bringing the military to the border. In an April 5 interview with Democracy Now, he said, “There will be more agents. There will be more walls. There will be more technologies. There will be more checkpoints. There will be more drone surveillance. There will be more expansion of this apparatus into these 100-mile jurisdictions. And I think that’s the intention.”

I discussed what happened and what this policy is all about with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama.

Rebecca Vallas: Heidi, what is this policy that the Trump administration is advancing and what are they hiding?

Heidi Shierholz: In December, the Trump administration released a proposed rule to try to make it legal for employers to take workers’ tips. There were regulations on the books from 2011—it was a long-standing practice at DOL that tips cannot be taken by employers. But the Trump administration is trying to rescind those regulations, and it’s really bad for workers.

But now the Department of Labor is bending over backwards to try to make it seem like it’s not terrible for workers. For instance, they talk about how theoretically employers who take tips could share some of those tips with the back of the house workers or other untipped workers. But there is nothing in this rule that says they are required to do so. So, what’s going to happen is employers will end up just pocketing a lot of those tips themselves.

The controversy that broke is that the DOL claimed that they could not do a quantitative analysis of how much in wages and tips would be transferred from workers to employers as a result of this rule. But what was revealed today is that that was all untrue. They actually did the analysis, and it showed billions of dollars being transferred from workers to employers. They actually took it to the Secretary of Labor who said something to the effect of, “Okay, we can’t publish something that shows this because this will make us look terrible. Take this back to the drawing board and see if you can bring me back smaller numbers.” They did that, but they never got it down as small as was comfortable for Secretary Acosta, so they just got approval from the White House to remove the analysis entirely. So this proposal was released without any quantitative economic analysis about the impact the proposed rule would have on workers, even though they are legally required to quantify the economic impact to the extent possible.

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RV: So not only did they try to figure out a methodology to get a number they were comfortable with—in terms of how much employers were going to end up pocketing in the way of workers’ tips and wages—but they decided because they couldn’t get the number down they were just going to pretend they’d never done it at all? Is that what we’ve learned?

HS: Yes, that’s what we’ve learned. They said in their proposal that they were—quote—“unable to quantify how customers would respond to the proposed regulatory change” and that the department “currently lacks the data to quantify possible reallocation of tips.” So they just said in a bunch of different ways, “We can’t do this.” But we know they did do it. The numbers looked bad for them, so they buried it. This is real malpractice. The public deserves to have those numbers. They make the department look like it is not living up to its mission of actually protecting workers—in fact, it’s just going to transfer a whole bunch of money from workers to employers and they wanted to hide that fact.

RV: When they went to crunch the numbers on this policy it looks like they found something similar to what you guys at the Economic Policy Institute had already been telling people for a while. You did some analysis finding that if this rule goes into effect, workers will lose billions in lost tips and wages.

HS: So we don’t know exactly what the DOL estimate was. We know it’s in the billions but no one knows the actual number. I worked at the Department of Labor. I worked on many, many analyses like this. I have full confidence that the analysis that we did at EPI likely used the same data that DOL used for their analysis. And when we did it we came up with an estimate that $5.8 billion would be shifted from workers to employers as a result of the rule and that nearly 80% of that, or $4.6 billion, would be taken from the pockets for women who work for tips, and that’s primarily because women are much more likely to work in tipped jobs.

RV: It’s not just tipped workers who are actually at risk of being hurt here, correct?

HS: One of the interesting things that’s the backdrop to this is that the DOL has been trying to sell this rule as something that will make restaurants more egalitarian, because now we’ll have this sharing between better-paid tipped workers and lower-paid back of the house workers like dishwashers and cooks. But it is very unlikely that they will do that. The rule does not require them to do it. They would be no more likely to share tips with back of the house workers than they would be to make any other choice about what to do with that shiny new revenue stream, which is what being able to confiscate tips would mean to them. They could increase executive pay. They could make capital improvements to their establishment. They could just line their own pockets. Under basic economic logic, those back of the house workers are not going to get more pay.

RV: This is hardly the first time that the Trump administration has been caught either lying or hiding evidence about the policies they’re looking to advance or the Obama-era policies they’re looking to roll back. You mentioned that because there are very specific rules governing how rule-making is supposed to happen in this country—rules that it appears that the Trump administration has clearly broken here by withholding and lying about evidence in their possession about this rule during a [public] comment period—can you explain a little bit about how that works?

HS: In this particular case, they are simply required as part of the rule-making process to quantify to the extent possible the economic impact so that the public has that information in hand in order to comment on the purposed rule.

The rule-making process in general is really basic in some sense: The agency puts out a proposed rule, anyone can comment on it. The public, advocates, business groups, anyone has the right to tell that agency what they think about their rule. The agency is actually required to read [the comments] and to take them into account as they’re crafting their final rule. So it’s absolutely crucial the public is given all the information so it can understand the impact of the rule and comment on it.

DOL claimed it wasn’t possible for them to do this quantification. But we produced an estimate in less than two weeks. It wasn’t rocket science. And now we know that they did do an analysis, buried it, and then claimed that they couldn’t do it.

Given all that has happened, they need to withdraw this rule, re-do the economic analysis, and let the public comment with all the information at hand.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on February 2. It was edited for length and clarity.

When he was a candidate, Trump pledged to turn the Republican Party into a “worker’s party.” He claimed that each of his policy decisions would hinge on whether it creates “more jobs and better wages for Americans” and promised to side with workers instead of “special interests” and the “financial elite.” But throughout his first year, he sided with corporations and the wealthy instead.

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In 2017, Trump used his executive authority to pare down worker safety protections, make it harder for workers to receive the pay they earned, and hamstring their ability to collectively bargain for decent wages and benefits. His administration took action to weaken mine inspection rules, undermine the quality and pay of apprenticeship programs, and delay and roll back rules that will prevent construction and agricultural workers from being exposed to toxic chemicals.

Under Trump’s watch, the Department of Labor has signaled that it will use its regulatory power to roll back overtime coverage and protections for millions of workers and allow companies to legally confiscate employees’ tips. It withdrew guidance that held corporations accountable for wage theft. And the National Labor Relations Board is trying to slow the process for workers to request a union election.

Already, Trump’s agency appointees overturned a 2015 precedent that protected workers’ rights to bargain with companies that influence their workplaces. These so-called “joint-employer” protections are increasingly important since large corporations are more often relying on temporary staffing agencies, labor subcontractors, and franchises to supply their labor force. Now corporate interests are pushing even more extreme legislation: A bill to roll back protections for minimum wage, overtime, and child labor violations by joint employers has already passed the House. A president who cares about the rights of workers would fight hard against such a proposal.

Trump’s war on workers extends to the public sector as well. The Trump administration has backed union opponents that want to eliminate fair-share fees in the public sector, attempting to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court precedent and weaken public sector unions. And last night, he promised to make it easier for political appointees to fire federal public sector employees.

Just like last year’s joint address to Congress, the president promised last night to create jobs with a new infrastructure program. However, his fiscal year 2018 budget shows that this “new plan” is a shell game, since it would be paid for in part by cutting $138 billion from the Highway Trust Fund, which currently funds highway and public transportation projects across the United States, and eliminating existing job-creating infrastructure programs like TIGER and New Starts grants.

And while Trump touted his infrastructure plan, he didn’t guarantee that the jobs created will actually support a family. While the federal government has upheld Davis-Bacon prevailing wage standards for nearly 90 years to ensure that construction jobs funded through federal spending provide decent wages, many on the right are pressuring the administration to leave out these protections. Trump failed to mention them last night. If the president really wants to help workers, he should guarantee that all jobs created by the infrastructure package include the prevailing wage protections and pay at least $15 per hour, and expand contracting job quality protections broadly to ensure that all government spending creates well-paying jobs for workers.

The president also boasted about the performance of the U.S. stock market and the benefits of his tax cut bill. Yet neither today’s market performance nor the tax bill will make substantial, long-term improvements in the lives of everyday Americans. The run-up in stock market value predominantly benefits the rich, as 80 percent of U.S. stock value is held by the wealthiest 10 percent of households. Meanwhile, despite Trump’s false claim that “we are finally seeing rising wages,” the average wage of production and non-supervisory workers rose by only four cents in 2017 when adjusted for inflation—a growth rate of just 0.17 percent, below the last four years of wage growth.  And the tax bill—which Trump previously justified by saying working- and middle-class taxpayers would “receive the biggest benefit – it won’t even be close”—in fact gives the most to the richest taxpayers. This year, taxpayers making over $1 million will bring home a tax cut 100 times larger than the average tax cut for families in the bottom 80 percent by income. And in 2027, once individual tax cuts expire, nearly 92 million families making less than $200,000 annually will be paying more in taxes.

Viewers also heard Trump boast about one-time bonuses from companies seeking favor with the administration. However, the fact that some of these companies laid off thousands of workers as they were announcing the bonuses failed to make it to the presidential teleprompter.

Trump’s claims during last night’s speech can’t hide the truth: Month after month, the Trump administration took action to benefit wealthy donors instead of working people. From denying overtime protections for millions of Americans, to raising health insurance premiums, to weakening safety protections for workers, he has continually failed to stand up for those he claims to support. His pledge to lead a new “worker’s party” was a bait-and-switch, and he should be held accountable for this failure.

In a series of tweets, Seema Verma, the Trump official who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, argued that work requirements will “improve health outcomes” and cause improvement in “mental and general health, and well-being.” The administration’s guidance allowing states to deny people Medicaid makes similar claims.

#Claimants who move off benefits and (re)-enter work generally experience improvements in income, socio-economic status, mental and general health, and well-being.” #TransformingMedicaid https://t.co/TgmgCk6Bb2

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) January 11, 2018

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The administration points to two research reviews it says support its case for allowing state officials to deny Medicaid to low-income people not meeting state work requirements. In fact, neither of the studies say that imposing work requirements as a condition of receiving health care will improve health. Moreover, both of the studies rely heavily on research from countries with universal health coverage—that is, countries that provide health care and coverage to all of their people regardless of employment status and without imposing work requirements. In these countries, people are empowered to make work and education choices without being threatened with the loss of health insurance if the state doesn’t like their choices.

In short, the reviews don’t tell us anything about the impact of Medicaid work requirements on health. What they actually do tell us is the that relationship between health and employment is much more complicated than the administration suggests.

The most rigorous and recent of the two reviews found insufficient or inconsistent evidence that employment was beneficial for general health, except for depression. The authors also cautioned that selection effects—the fact that more healthy people are more likely to work—may have caused an “overestimation” of their findings that work was beneficial for depression. In theory, one could conduct a demonstration study that denied employment to some people while providing it to others in order to isolate the causal effects of employment on health. But, as the authors note, this would be unethical.

The older and less rigorous of the two reviews, a 2006 evidence review commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department of Work and Pensions, concludes that “the balance of the evidence” shows that work is “generally good for health and well-being, for most people.” But it goes on to detail what it calls “major provisos.” These include that “health effects depend on the nature and quality of work” and its “social context,” and that “jobs should be safe and accommodating.” The more rigorous review makes a similar point and notes research concluding that “low-quality jobs can lead to reduced health, while high-quality jobs can lead to improved health.”

These findings about how low-quality jobs can negatively impact health are particularly relevant for Medicaid beneficiaries. As researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation have documented, most non-elderly Medicaid enrollees (who do not also receive SSI disability benefits) are employed, but typically in poorly compensated jobs that do not offer health insurance. Among non-elderly Medicaid enrollees who are not employed, physical and mental health impairments are common.

If we truly care about able bodied, working age adults on Medicaid, then we have a responsibility to help them rise out of poverty. https://t.co/0cXxSyAmQF

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) January 17, 2018

If the state officials and the administration want to improve health and well-being, they should offer real help with finding well-paying, safe, and accommodating work to all Medicaid enrollees, but on a voluntary basis. This help should include child care assistance and other work supports. But allowing state officials to coerce people to take any job—or work even more—under threat of losing their health insurance takes away people’s agency and will cause far more harm than good.

Finally, if the administration is serious about improving the health of working-class people, then it should stop rolling back important labor standards and worker protections. And it should get serious about improving job quality, including by raising the minimum wage as President Trump made a campaign promise to do.

Bottom line: All the happy Orwellian Twitter talk from Trump officials won’t change the fact that their policy will hurt millions more than it will help.

I sat down with Rebecca Cokley, a senior fellow for disability policy at the Center for American Progress, to discuss this.

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Rebecca Vallas: So I’ve had conversations with a lot of folks who say “Why does it matter? People can use all kinds of language but isn’t this just about people being a little too PC?”

Rebecca Cokley: I’m going to read a quote from Leslie Templeton from the Women’s March Disability Caucus. She just posted a series of snapshots of news clips talking about the mental status of Trump. She said, “When you read stuff like this, having said issue yourself, it makes you feel small. It makes you feel inferior, it makes you feel weak. Not only do I feel like my rights are being attacked by Trump, I feel who I am is being attacked by the American people.”

These are people’s lives. The accusation of someone’s unfitness to serve in any sort of role—whether as a parent, a colleague, a boss, an educator—is impacted by the slightest accusation, especially around mental health. It’s not about someone being PC or not, it’s really about a lack of understanding of the impact of labeling someone without irrefutable proof.

RV: So there’s a connection being made between his negative behaviors and his unpopular policies that people are explaining by this labeling. You’re saying that by extension people who themselves have mental health disabilities, mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and so forth are being implicated in these negative behaviors.

RC: Definitely. I also think one of the challenges with all these armchair diagnostics is that the people that are doing it aren’t even clear on what a mental health disability is. We sit there and see articles titled like, “Can someone with the attention of a kitten on crack make a decision?”, “Trump has social autism,” “Trump has a dangerous disability.” People still like to think about the other, the unknown, the shadow in the corner of the room, the thing we don’t talk about, versus acknowledging that it’s your son seeking therapy, it’s your best friend who is grieving the loss of their mother, it’s your boss who is now taking anti-anxiety meds. It’s much easier to castigate those folks than to say, “No, these are real people, and in some cases even me.”

RV: There’s a particular significance of this conversation having to do with the presidency or really with any elected office. It’s basically gospel that people with mental illness or mental health disabilities are unfit to serve. If someone has ever sought treatment—whether for depression or for substance misuse—even just that can stop someone from being taken seriously as a potential candidate. So in reinforcing this kind of narrative around what mental illness is and tacking it onto Trump’s face, there is a much deeper consequence that a lot of people aren’t thinking about that has to do with maintaining the status quo or even taking us backwards in terms of representation by people with disabilities in elected office.

RC: Definitely. When we’re talking about people with disabilities writ large we’re talking about 54 to 58 million people. If you’re zooming in specifically on people with mental health disabilities or mental illness, we’re talking about 10 million people in this country. And I think as we’re talking about Trump, it really is much easier to point at “mental fitness” than to actively talk about behaviors. That’s uncomfortable, because it forces us to be specific: What are the behaviors that we’ve seen? What are the behaviors that are evident in this person’s history that we should be pointing at to say “we screwed up here.” We dropped the ball, we elected somebody who was unfit to become president of the United States.

Besides, we have a history in this country of electing people with disabilities. Right now we can look at Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) as people with physical disabilities that are currently serving in government.

RV: Your examples point out that people would not be looking at Trump and saying “man, his disability makes him unfit to serve” if it were a physical disability—that’s something that people at their core would understand would be deeply offensive. But if it’s a mental illness, all of a sudden that seems to be equivalent to unfitness to serve.

That brings us to something you often talk about, what you refer to as “a hierarchy of disability.” And what this means in the policy context, for example, is that it has been a lot easier to get health coverage if you’re a person who has a physical illness or a physical disability than it is to get mental health coverage. But that conversation is rare when it’s about social perceptions and stigma. I think what we’re seeing here is this massive gap between the trust that a lot of people in this country have for the potential leadership or decision-making by people without disabilities or people with physical disabilities, compared with people who have mental health disabilities or mental illness or intellectual disabilities and so forth. Am I right to characterize it that way?

RC: I think you’re definitely right. I’ll even use myself as an example, being a little person. I walk in the room and you can tell that I’m a little person. Nobody is going to object to me asking for a stool or jumping on the chair to push the chair down. But for a long time I wasn’t as out about having obsessive compulsive disorder and it wasn’t something I frequently talked about until I was in my 20s. I was actually challenged by a friend and mentor of mine, Andy Imparato, who is very outspoken about having a mental health disability. When Andy and I were on a four-hour car ride from Washington, D.C. to Newport News for the Virginia Youth Leadership Forum, there were two topics of conversation: One, why haven’t I proposed to my then-boyfriend, now husband and two, why don’t I talk about having OCD?

We had a conversation about why I was hesitant to talk about it, and why I had put myself out as an advocate, as a spokesperson, as somebody working in the disability space, but I was not coming to the table with my whole self there. And so I tried it that night. I addressed the fact that I walk in the room as a little person and that’s a privilege. And I often don’t think we talk about disability as privilege. There is a privilege to my existence as a person with a physical disability. There’s a privilege to the fact that unlike 80% of disabled people, I grew up in a family just like me.

And then I addressed the fact that I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I used to wash my hands like 200 times a day. The number of young women who came up to me afterward was amazing. It was about 50 young women that pulled me aside that all wanted to talk about mental health disabilities. The fact that I had a job, the fact that I was in a relationship, the fact that I was being paid to go around the country and talk to other young people with disabilities, and the fact that I was working on a presidential campaign at the time were huge.

So I think a lot of times when we have internally stigmatized our own mental health disabilities and then we face a public that criminalizes mental health, without any criminal behaviors associated with it. We do it for no more reason other than to say that you don’t like somebody, for no more reason than to say that somebody is evil or you don’t agree with their decisions. It invalidates a part of their humanity, and makes it that much harder for folks to come out.

RV: I want to get to the solutions part—how we do better. You talked about the importance of precision in language. What’s your advice to those folks who are out there wanting to be good allies on this?

RC: I think checking in on your friends that have mental health disabilities and saying, “Hey, how is it going? Do you need anything? How are you feeling in this time?” And doing some real deep listening as to what people are encountering, because it’s hard right now. I think also connecting to organizations that work with folks with mental health disabilities, whether it be groups like Dan Fisher’s Psych Survivors Network or certain chapters of the National Alliance on Mental Illness that are doing some really good things. Engage to see what needs to be said, what is the right language to use, and ask your friends. So much of our language gets caught up on the fear of saying the wrong thing versus taking five seconds and asking your friends what’s the right thing to say.

I also think, as long as we continue to hold mental health at arms length as “the other,” we can’t have the conversation that we really need to be having. That leads to the criminalization of mental health and the knee-jerk reaction of saying, “Oh, that person can’t do that job because they’re nuts.”

RV: I want to read a tweet by Julia Bascom, Executive Director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. She says, “We can conclude that the president is unfit to serve without armchair diagnosis or violations of medical ethics. We can resist racism, totalitarianism, and a nuclear threat without ableism. We don’t need this, we can do better, progressives have a moral obligation to do better.” Powerful words. But it feels to me that that piece of call-to-action language doesn’t quite go as far as some people are wanting to go, especially given the conversations about invoking the 25th Amendment. So I would love to hear any suggestions you have about how people can handle these kinds of hard and honest conversations when folks are looking for guidance about how they can actually engage in this conversation but in a way that is not ableist.

RC: I think going back to the last line of Julia’s tweet, progressives have a moral obligation to do better. We are the party that came up with mental health parity in health care, thanks to former Senator Paul Wellstone. We are the party that is pushing for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to end sub-minimum wage programs for people with disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to increase access to mental health services on college campuses and programs for young people with mental health disabilities. Why are we then at the same time being so quick to use disability diagnosis as a weapon? Because we don’t like the president and we think the president is acting like a jackass. If President Obama wasn’t afraid to say Kanye was a jackass, why can’t we say that President Trump is being a jackass?

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on January 6. It was edited for length and clarity.

New analysis from the Center for American Progress estimates that as many as 6.3 million people could be at risk of losing Medicaid under this new policy.

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Adding so-called “work requirements” to Medicaid has long been on GOP leaders’ wish list. Most recently, it emerged as part of Congressional Republicans’ unsuccessful efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act last year. And Republican governors in a slew of red states have been chomping at the bit to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs; while all eyes were on the health care debate in Congress, at least 10 states requested authority to do so last year alone, with the potential to impact 640,000 people. More states are likely to follow suit after the release of today’s guidance.

While the policy might sound reasonable at first blush, upon closer inspection it’s just another strategy for ripping health insurance away from the people who need it most—unemployed and underemployed workers struggling to make ends meet.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 25 million working-age people were covered by Medicaid in 2016. Most—roughly 60 percent—were working themselves, and nearly 80 percent lived in working families. And of those not currently working, 6 percent were looking for work, 30 percent reported caregiver obligations, 15 percent were in school, 9 percent were retired, and just over one-third reported facing health problems.

Taking away these people’s health insurance isn’t just cruel; it’s wildly counterproductive. Study after study shows that having health insurance is associated not only with better health but also with increased work capacity, which translates into higher wages and earnings. Medicaid plays a central role in making it possible for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions to work, as it is the nation’s largest provider of home- and community-based services such as personal attendant care.

History also shows that work requirements not only fail to improve long-term employment outcomes—they actually leave people worse off.

In 1996, as part of the legislation that famously “[ended] welfare as we know it,” Congress converted Aid to Families with Dependent Children into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and introduced a new policy requiring most adult recipients to participate in qualifying work activities as a condition of receiving cash assistance. While some TANF recipients did initially experience gains in employment—thanks in large part to the strength of the labor market during the booming economy of the 1990s—those gains ultimately proved to be short-lived. Few TANF recipients were able to secure stable, long-term employment with decent wages. Many others were unable to meet TANF’s stringent work requirements at all, due to employment barriers such as caregiving obligations, health problems, low levels of education, and criminal records. As a result, they were left without assistance even though they hadn’t found work.

Notably, while the letter sent to state Medicaid directors today says Trump’s new policy won’t apply to pregnant women or people receiving Medicaid on the basis of disability, the guidance itself admits that this will fail to protect the many people with disabilities and health conditions who don’t fall into that bucket, noting: “CMS recognizes that individuals who are eligible for Medicaid on a basis other than disability (and are therefore classified for Medicaid purposes as ‘non-disabled’) may have a disability under the definitions of the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

A study by researchers at the University of Michigan released in December suggests that people with disabilities and health conditions make up a large part of the population at risk of losing Medicaid under this cruel new policy. Two-thirds of Medicaid enrollees in that state who were not currently working reported a chronic physical illness, 35 percent reported having a diagnosed mental illness, and one-quarter reported having a physical or mental condition that interfered with their ability to function at least half of the time.

Meanwhile, the letter also concedes that many people may need “supportive services” such as job search help, child care assistance, transportation, or disability-related supports in order to work. But it goes on to make clear that states cannot use federal Medicaid funds to provide these types of services and supports.

In short, work requirements don’t help anyone work. Rather, at their core, work requirements are premised on a set of myths about poverty. First, that “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” Second, that anyone who wants a well-paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And third, that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.

Reinforcing these myths is core to Trump’s divide-and-conquer playbook. That’s why he’s so keen to smear Medicaid and other popular programs as “welfare”—a term with a deeply racially charged history, evoking decades of racial stereotypes about who is poor in this country. By using dog-whistle terms like “welfare,” he’s betting that he can paint people who turn to Medicaid and other public programs to make ends meet as modern-day “welfare queens” so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.

Meanwhile, a big part of the story here is an unforgiving low-wage labor market dominated by poverty wages and unpredictable work schedules. A minimum wage worker in 2016 had to clock an additional 244 hours to earn the same amount in real terms as she did the last time Congress raised the federal minimum wage back in 2009. As a result, many low-wage workers need to turn to public programs such as Medicaid and nutrition assistance, which have come to function as work supports when wages aren’t enough.

If Trump wanted to keep his campaign promises to the “forgotten man and woman,” he’d embrace policies that address the real problems facing struggling workers and families, like raising the minimum wage. Instead, the president remains hell-bent on taking health care away from tens of millions of Americans, over the objections of the American people—and he’s made it clear that he’s done waiting for Congress.

Editor’s note: To get involved and fight back, visit HandsOff.org to learn more about the Hands Off campaign to stop cuts to health care and other basics that help families make ends meet. 

Updated: This article was edited to include the number of people who would lose Medicaid in the ten states with pending waiver requests. 

These allegations inch the media coverage closer to the reality many women face, in part because many of the people reporting are ordinary restaurant employees rather than high-profile actresses or news anchors. There’s also the matter of the industry they work in: Low-paid working women are often at the greatest risk for abuse, particularly if they are in service professions.

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At the same moment, the Trump administration is pushing a rule that could make tipped workers even more vulnerable to harassment. In early December, the Labor Department—urged on by the restaurant lobby—announced a plan that could allow employers to steal tips from their workers. Under the new rule, employers could pool all tips and distribute this money to other workers, including non-tipped workers—or keep it for themselves. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the rule could allow employers to pocket $5.8 billion in workers’ tips each year, in an industry where 66 percent of workers are women and 25 percent of workers are women of color.

This could result not only in the theft of tipped workers’ wages—even though they are already nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers—but it could also increase their likelihood of being sexually harassed. Tipped workers are often at the mercy of customers to make ends meet financially, and the new rule would add additional pressure from employers and managers who would control the distribution of tips. That could drive conditions from bad—accommodations and food service workers already account for 1 out of 7 sexual harassment charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—to worse.

And the proposal’s effects don’t stop with tipped workers. If employers choose to redistribute the tips to other non-tipped employees, they could classify them as tipped workers and knock their base wage down to $2.13 per hour. This could raise their risk for sexual harassment as well as wage theft because, while employers are legally required to ensure tipped workers are paid the minimum wage, evidence shows employers often don’t.

There is, of course, another option: Instead of rushing through a rule that will lower wages and increase vulnerability to harassment for tipped workers—all with a very limited period for public feedback—the Trump administration could focus on paying tipped workers fair wages. That means eliminating their separate minimum wage, which is something the minimum wage bill before Congress would do. Evidence shows this would work: In the seven states that have abolished the separate tipped minimum wage—where employers are now required to pay their workers at least minimum wage—tipped workers take home higher pay and are less likely to experience harassment. Pair that with solutions to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace, and you’re poised to make progress not only on economic security but also on reducing the number of workers who have to say #MeToo.

Rebecca Vallas: So just to kick us off, net neutrality is one of those wonky terms that doesn’t even sound like English. Help us understand—what is net neutrality?

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel: I think this fight around net neutrality is the free speech fight of our generation. Net neutrality is essentially the principal that all internet traffic should be treated equally. It prevents internet service providers from charging a premium for access to internet “fast lanes” or slamming the breaks on content that poses a threat to their financial or political interests.

I like the expression “the open internet,” the internet democracy. Net neutrality keeps the internet open, free, and fair; it preserves a level playing field where good ideas can prosper no matter who or where they come from. The free, democratic internet plays an essential role in our civic dialogue. And that’s why the FCC in 2015 passed rules to protect net neutrality, reclassify the internet as a public utility, and enforce the rules of a level playing field. The Trump FCC is trying to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections that were put in place. These would include the ban on blocking, replacing them with a “transparency” regime enforced by the FCC. Transparency is a euphemism for doing nothing. A broadband carrier like AT&T, if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state, blocking its critics and promoting its own agenda. Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet’s and America’s founding spirit.

There are some legal scholars who believe that by going this far in trying to overturn rules put in place under the Obama administration, the FCC may have overplayed its legal hand, and that this will go to the courts because government agencies aren’t free to abruptly reverse long-standing rules on which many have relied without a good reason. A mere change in FCC ideology isn’t enough. And I think we can talk a little bit about the activism that we’re going to see because the future of the internet is at stake on December 14, when former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai, chosen by Trump to chair the FCC, is going to force a vote on ending net neutrality.

RV: The main focus in the media since the announcement from the FCC last week has largely been on the battle between the so-called telecom titans, Comcast and AT&T, Verizon, and the internet giants, Google, Amazon, Facebook. But as you’re describing, there’s a lot more at play than who is going to win a big corporate tug of war—this is going to have real consequences for regular people who use the internet.

KVH: There is a corporatism at work here—the media monopolists in the telecom industry hate net neutrality. They’ve worked for years to overturn guarantees of an open internet because it gets in the way of profits. Now, if net neutrality is eliminated, these media monopolists will restructure how the internet works, creating information super-highways for corporate and political elites and digital dirt roads for those who can’t afford the corporate tolls. It’s fair to say that you’re witnessing a regime change where if Pai at the FCC is successful, he’s going to hand the keys to our open internet to major corporations to charge more for this tiered system. So it will, along with the tax bill—which will make our lives more unequal, more dirty, more unhealthy—you may well see a tiered system where powerful websites can pay to have their content delivered faster to consumers.

There’s another argument that’s been thrown out there, which is that the FCC chair says that he’s trying to make sure that new investment goes into the internet. He’s claiming that industry investments have gone down since 2015, the year the Obama administration last strengthened the net neutrality rules. Wrong, it’s just not the case. But let me step back and just ask, why should industry investments be the dominant measure of success in internet policy? Why is that the measure? What about improved access for students, or the emergence of innovations like streaming TV? So I think there’s a lot of skewing, a lot of false information being thrown around as the FCC tries to steamroll through changes that will impact and harm consumers, people with less access to capital, students, independent media, alternative voices, so there’s a real First Amendment free speech issue here, too.

RV: Some, including W. Kamau Bell, have pointed out that the end of net neutrality could be particularly devastating for artists and activists by effectively silencing the voices of people who aren’t already established or backed by those with power. He points out in an op-ed in The New York Times, “This fair internet, where everyone from an amateur comedian to a celebrity to a huge media company plays by the same rules, means you don’t need a lot of money or the backing of someone with power to share your content with the world.” And he names the example of Issa Rae, who started the web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which started as a YouTube series in 2011 but has now actually become a show, “Insecure,” that’s got its third season happening on HBO. It’s hard to imagine that happening in a world that doesn’t have net neutrality.

KVH: What we’re witnessing is more than a regulatory shift. It’s more than a story that should be consigned to the business pages. This is about a societal change. And if the FCC allows this digital profiteering to define the internet, it will affect all of what you spoke of, it will affect personal communications, education, commerce, economic arrangement, our politics and democracy itself. And it is a civil rights issue in a fundamental way because it’s about whose voice is heard. The most vulnerable are usually those who have a harder time making their voices heard, and a free internet lifts up and can amplify those who don’t have the money or power in our unequal society.

So this is a real fight for the kind of society we want to be, and I think that needs to be understood as we move to oppose not just the net neutrality decision. The FCC is beginning to overturn efforts to close the digital divide between wealthy and poor Americans, they’re declaring war on consumers, and in what I think is one of the most callous steps, the FCC abandoned an effort to limit the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls that sometimes force inmates’ families to pay upward of a dollar a minute to speak to their loved ones. So there is a real rollback of humanism as corporatism ascends.

This is a fire sale for humongous corporate interests, for the monopolists of the telecom world.  There are going to be protests December 7 in advance of the December 14 FCC vote targeting the offices of corporations that have opposed net neutrality such as Verizon. There are going to be protests against offices of members of Congress who have opposed net neutrality. There will be marches on the FCC both digitally and on the streets, and there are legal and legislative strategies to defend the internet and the future.

RV: The politics on this as well are somewhat baffling, because obviously this is part of a larger deregulation agenda. But it also just seems a little bit odd frankly, coming from an administration that has taken the exact opposite position on other issues related to competition. I’m thinking here specifically about the Time Warner-AT&T merger. It was literally just one day before the FCC announcement on net neutrality that the Trump justice department announced its opposition to the proposed merger.

KVH: It’s incoherent. The reality is if you’re a strong supporter of free markets, net neutrality is what allows for competition and free market in the broadband space. If you’re someone who strongly supports free speech and freedom of expression, net neutrality is what prevents companies like Comcast that own NBC from prioritizing or censoring content online. I think there is a split in the progressive community about the Trump administration’s move on the merger.

What is chilling, however, is a personal vendetta against CNN. It looks like what we’ve seen too often from this administration, a politicization of the tools of justice, privatization of justice for the sake of an administration. So there is an incoherence that is puzzling, but what is not puzzling is that the dismantling of the administrative state, the march through the institutions, the deregulatory crusade is in full throttle. And what we’re witnessing with the FCC is in sync with that. In that sense there is a coherence to this deregulation of all kinds of reforms that have brought us clean air, clean water, and a free and democratic internet.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on December 1. It was edited for length and clarity.

It’s all-out war on the poor at this point. https://t.co/v89ZgmRQCd

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 17, 2017

The FCC’s actions are the latest in a year-long assault on low-income Americans. They come at a time when Senate Republicans are trying to pass a tax bill that would strip health coverage from 13 million Americans and eliminate dozens of federal programs that support low-income families—including protection for crime victims, food for the elderly, and affordable housing—to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

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But those are just the headline battles. There is a quieter war being waged in the trenches: in state legislatures and federal courts, in congressional committees and governors’ mansions, and—as with the FCC’s recent decisions—in federal agencies.

Here’s a brief recap of what this war has looked like in just the past few months.

The administration is legalizing discrimination

While the ADA Education and Reform Act has been quietly making its way through Congress, threatening to undo decades of progress for people with disabilities, two separate agencies have undertaken actions of their own to repeal even more protections. The Department of Transportation yielded to pressure from airline industry lobbyists and delayed implementation of an Obama-era rule designed to prevent airports from routinely losing or breaking wheelchairs and other equipment that belongs to disabled passengers. And last month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded 72 guidance documents that help schools enforce protections for students with disabilities. The revoked guidelines include a policy that helps students with disabilities get federal financial assistance and guidance for states on how to meet the needs of students with hearing loss.

The courts are chipping away at civil rights, too. Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, could cast the deciding vote in a case from a business owner who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. If his appeal is successful, it could allow business owners to use their religious beliefs to deny service to customers on the basis of their sexual orientation, or even other protected identities such as race, religion, or national origin. This would hit low-income residents of rural communities particularly hard, who might not have other businesses they can turn to if they’re denied service (research shows they won’t).

Trump is also stacking lower courts with anti-worker judges: He appointed Thomas Farr, a lawyer who has defended voter suppression and built his career undermining workers’ rights, to a district court in North Carolina. Perhaps more frightening, he appointed Don Willett to the 5th Circuit—a pro-corporate judge who voted to give himself the authority to strike down regulations that “interfere with the free market.”

Federal agencies are chewing giant holes in the safety net

The Department of Health and Human Services is encouraging states to adopt work requirements for Medicaid, which would punish unemployed workers for not being able to find a job by taking away their health care. This continues the administration’s trend of using work requirements to gut safety net programs, after Trump’s presidential budget proposed work requirements to help pay for $193 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, FEMA was already coordinating the recovery, setting up supplies and personnel. But Trump’s administration was extremely slow to help citizens in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico recover from Hurricanes Maria and Irma, withholding aid until after the hurricanes made landfall. More than 20 percent of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to clean drinking water, more than half the territory doesn’t have access to electricity, and 60 percent of U.S. Virgin Islands residents are still without electricity. (If the House budget passes, things will only get worse: The budget cuts nearly $1 billion from disaster relief to help pay for Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall.)

The administration’s xenophobia is getting even worse

Months after the Trump administration ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), they denied a few thousand DACA renewal applications for being late, even though many of these applications were sitting in a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services mailbox before the deadline passed. The administration also ended Temporary Protected Status for 60,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans, forcing them to uproot their lives in America and return to regions that have been devastated by imperialist U.S. foreign policy.

And, as expected, Trump has ramped up deportations—even from the historic highs taking place during the Obama administration. The United States has deported 34 percent more immigrants so far this year than in the same period last year. For many immigrants fleeing violence and instability in Latin America, deportation means a return to poverty, or worse.

Jeff Sessions gets a section all to himself

Earlier this summer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions strengthened the federal government’s ability to seize assets from people before bringing any criminal charges against them. In other words, this lets police officers take people’s money and property without due process. One more time: This lets police officers take people’s money and property without due process.

Sessions also declared that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act will no longer provide employment protection to transgender Americans, potentially allowing employers and insurers to deny coverage to a group that already experiences extremely high rates of poverty. This came after Sessions’ Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that Title VII also doesn’t cover sexual orientation—opening the door to more workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people. Other guidance from the DOJ on religious liberty could mean more discrimination in other areas of life as well, including discrimination in programs that low-income communities rely on for their health, safety, and security.

Nativism—the often racialized view that local interests should be protected over those of immigrants—is as old as the country itself. The anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic “Know-Nothing Party” was a major political force in the middle of the 19th century, electing eight governors and more than 100 members of Congress. The Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europeans, targeting Italians and Jews. Just this week, former White House adviser Steve Bannon revived anti-Catholic tropes in voicing his opposition to DACA.

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I spoke with Tyler Anbinder, a historian at The George Washington University and expert on the history of nativism in the United States, about how Trump’s decision fits into nativist politics throughout the country’s history.

Jeremy Slevin: You’ve written a lot about this concept of nativism. Can you start by explaining what it means and where Donald Trump fits into it?

Tyler Anbinder: Nativism is the fear of or dislike of immigrants and the belief that immigrants make the United States a worse place to live. Donald Trump fits in the pattern of American nativism that we’ve had for several centuries in that there’s always been a certain portion of the population that has a gut reaction that immigrants are a bad thing, that they take jobs from other Americans, that they change American culture for the worse, that immigrants can never become true Americans. Those tend to be the strains of nativist thought.

JS: Is there precedent for this level of vitriol and this level of nativism at the presidential level?

TA: Probably not at the presidential level. Typically, it’s been Congress that’s been much more anti-immigrant than presidents. In the past, when you had Congress pass anti-immigrant legislation, presidents have repeatedly vetoed it, and that happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with presidents such as Taft and Wilson vetoing immigrant-restriction legislation.

So this is a rare case in which the president tends to be the leader of the anti-immigrant movement and Congress is maybe a little less willing to go along.

JS: Obviously the big news this week is DACA, rolling back President Obama’s executive order protecting DREAMers. I think what makes this shocking to a lot of people is that these are people brought here as kids, traditionally a sympathetic political group. Has there been a singling out of immigrant children, either for good or for ill, in the past? Or is this a new territory?

TA: This is pretty much a new territory, because for most of American history, children have not been immigrants. Immigrants would overwhelmingly be people in their 20s especially, late teens, maybe early 30s … immigrants rarely brought children to America. They typically came to America unmarried, trying to strike out in the world on their own. There were exceptions—during the Irish potato famine for instance, or when Eastern European Jews were escaping the Pogroms in Russia. But typically, children haven’t been a very big part of the American immigration story.

JS: The not-so-subtle subtext of all this is racism, whether against Muslims like we saw in the travel ban and now Latinos with the end of DACA. It seems like race and immigration have always been linked—how has that evolved over time?

TA: Certainly American nativism has always had a racial dimension, even though exactly what people mean by the term “race” has changed. In the 19th century, the big targets of the nativists were the Irish. The American nativists believed that the Irish were of a different race—that most white Americans were Anglo-Saxon in origin, and the Irish were different and therefore couldn’t become true Americans, and weren’t even intellectually capable of reaching the status of other Americans.

In the late 19th century, the same charges were leveled against Eastern European Jews and Italian immigrants, which were the two biggest immigrant groups in that period. People said the same things. They would go so far as to say that these groups weren’t really “white,” and therefore being “less than white,” they weren’t capable of the intellectual attainments that other whites were and they should be barred from the United States.

JS: Have nativists always wrapped themselves in the identity of whiteness?

TA: Yes, with some exceptions. In the 1920’s, when there were restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration, African Americans were big supporters of that. They supported it primarily because they said, “immigrants are taking our jobs, and if we have fewer immigrants, better jobs would go to African Americans.”

So it’s not just that nativism is solely something that whites participate in. It can be something that others partake in, too. But in terms of the majority of American nativism, there’s always been a sense that the new group isn’t part of what the current Americans define as being American. For a long time that meant being a certain type of Protestant. Then it meant all Protestants. Then it meant all Christians. Then it meant Judeo-Christians. And that’s where we are today, perhaps.

JS: Steve Bannon said today that American Catholics have an economic interest in unlimited illegal immigration, so you’re kind of seeing that Anglo-Saxon anti-Catholic sentiment creep up again.

TA: That’s so interesting, I didn’t hear about that. Yes, that would precisely fit in with that historic trend.

JS: At the same time, there’s a tension within the modern Republican party between business leaders and Republican elites who often support immigration because it’s seen as a boon to the economy. Has that tension always existed?

TA: Yes, although the important thing to understand is that the business community won out for most of American history. Even when immigration restrictions were in place, often there would be loopholes. A great example of that is in the 1920’s, when restrictions were put in place on Southern and Eastern European Jews, there was an exception for Latinos. And that’s so those employers say, “well, we may not be able to get those Eastern or Southern European workers, but we can get Mexicans instead to do the work that those other people used to do.”

It’s only really starting in the 1960’s, when the restrictions were relaxed on groups like Asians and Africans and Eastern Europeans, that the restrictions were put in place on Latinos.

JS: So it kind of shifted—when Eastern Europeans were the largest immigrant group, they were targeted, and now that Latinos are a larger immigrant group, they’ve become the target.

Obviously, you’re more accustomed to looking backward, but what do you think is next, after DACA? Do you think we’re on a more restrictionist path like the 1920’s, or do you think this has got to shift?

TA: Well, it’ll be really interesting. Until very recently, I’d have said that the restriction could not win out legislatively. Politicians have found that talking tough on immigration is good, but Congressional Republicans are split between a cultural wing and a business wing, and the business wing has been very adamantly against restricting immigration for the reasons that we talked about. Because of that, there’s been this 30-year stalemate where nothing has changed.

But typically, Republican presidents have leaned toward the business wing. Clearly, it’s hard to predict where Trump is going to go, but one option he has is removing the [undocumented] immigrants that are already here. That’s something that the president can do on his own; he doesn’t need Congress, since it’s just an enforcement matter. That seems like the most likely possibility.

The next possibility would be the bill that was proposed by Tom Cotton a few weeks ago calling for a reduction in the number of legal immigrants. I find it hard to imagine that bill passing Congress, but certainly a lot of the Trump base would support that proposal, I’d imagine. I still think the most likely thing is gridlock on that, but with stepped-up deportation.

But I have to say this is a whole new ballgame, so it’s hard to predict.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and will air as part of a complete episode on September 15. It was edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview below.

Now the Trump administration and congressional Republicans seem to be coalescing around a response: They are preparing to open a new front in the war on drugs.

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The House’s fiscal year 2018 budget, which could be up for a vote as early as next week, shifts resources from treatment to enforcement. It strips hundreds of millions of dollars from public health agencies: $306 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and $198 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Furthermore, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will lose $219 million if the bill is passed, and Medicaid itself—which covers more than 40 percent of opioid treatment in the hardest-hit states—is also facing extreme cuts. Meanwhile the FBI will get $48 million more, the Department of Homeland Security will get nearly $1.9 billion more, and the Drug Enforcement Administration will get an increase of $98 million from 2017 levels.

By beefing up law enforcement and cutting funding for treatment, the House budget builds on the priorities outlined in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ notorious memo that re-ignites the war on drugs. In it, he orders federal prosecutors to seek maximum sentences for nonviolent, low-level drug offenses, re-implementing draconian policies that are emotionally and economically devastating to low-income and minority communities.

Decades of evidence already make it clear that war on drugs policies don’t work. The United States’ last experiment with this approach left the country with the largest prison population in the world, without addressing the root causes of drug use and addiction. Ninety-five percent of addicts return to substance abuse when they’re released from prison, compared with just 40 to 60 percent who complete a rehabilitation program.

These relapse rates are especially relevant now, as the opioid epidemic spreads on a massive scale. There were 33,091 opioid drug overdose deaths in 2015—roughly the same amount of lives claimed by firearms and motor vehicle accidents the previous year.

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation.

To minimize this widespread growth, addiction must be met with treatment—not punishment. But currently only 1 in 10 of the roughly 20 million adults in the United States with an addiction disorder receive the treatment they need. Hacking away at the limited budget that does exist for treatment is unlikely to improve the likelihood that people with addiction disorders get help.

Unlike previous drug crises, the American people want addicts to receive treatment. At least in part due to the race of the people affected—about 90 percent of the people who died from opioid overdose were white—this crisis has garnered sympathetic attention from politicians, the media, medical researchers, nonprofits, and the public, and has largely been framed as a public health crisis. Until recently, the attention set the country up to craft a progressive, proactive policy response to the crisis; a response that needs to be scaled up in order to effectively fight this epidemic.

In March 2016, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services released $94 million in new funding to 271 Community Health Centers with a special focus on expanding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in underserved communities—expected to treat nearly 124,000 new patients with substance abuse disorders. Furthermore, up to 11 states expanded their MAT services due to SAMHSA funding grants.

If Congress passes this budget and builds on the Sessions approach to criminal justice, the progress that’s been made in treating addiction as a public health issue—along with hundreds of thousands of American lives—will be lost.

Left unmentioned was the fact that, earlier this spring, the president of the United States called for historic cuts to FEMA’s budget. Trump’s 2018 budget blueprint proposed more than $1 billion in cuts to FEMA—11 percent of its total footprint. The proposal would make major cuts to six FEMA grants, including its two largest for preparing for and responding to emergencies. It would also entirely eliminate four grants, including funding for emergency food and shelter and training for first responders.

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The administration’s rationale is that FEMA funding cuts are needed to pay for its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts—along with Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the southern border. All told, Trump wants to shift $5 billion within the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA is housed, to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

FEMA is not Trump’s only target for cuts when it comes to disaster preparedness. The budget also takes an axe to the U.S. Coast Guard (unusual given the administration’s support for increased U.S. military spending), which has already rescued dozens from the floodwaters in Texas. The budget cuts a whopping $1.2 billion from the Coast Guard’s approximately $9 billion budget.

And despite promises to invest in the country’s infrastructure, Trump’s budget slashes the investments that are critical for disaster preparedness. He would immediately eliminate the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant, which, among other things, helped Florida build a new hurricane evacuation route in the Everglades. His cuts to the Highway Trust Fund would starve the country’s highway infrastructure of nearly $100 billion—and put more than 97,000 jobs at risk in Texas alone. Just last week, Trump announced the rollback of an Obama administration order that new infrastructure projects be designed to survive rising sea levels and climate change (FEMA was in the process of soliciting public comment).

The impact of these cuts will not be felt equally. Cuts to emergency preparedness—like the natural disasters themselves—fall particularly hard on the most vulnerable. Communities of color are the most likely to live in neighborhoods that are at risk of flooding. They’re also more likely to live near the petrochemical plants that could discharge toxic substances during the hurricane. According to social vulnerability maps, seniors, people with disabilities, immigrants, and people in poverty are all more likely to live in neighborhoods most affected by Hurricane Harvey.

The irony is that the administration is so focused on mass deportation and building a wall that it is openly neglecting real national security risks. FEMA and the U.S. Coast Guard not only respond to natural disasters and protect vulnerable populations; they also respond to terrorist attacks. As with so many other policies, Donald Trump is so focused on chasing his white whale that he’s ignoring the core functions of government.

Editor’s note: The Center for American Progress has launched a coalition of over 20 groups united in pushing back against any cuts to health care, disability benefits, nutrition assistance, and other basic living standards in the upcoming congressional budgets. Learn how you can get involved here.

I have been reading about Sessions with a kind of perverse fascination—but I have not read anything that makes me feel sorry for him. The things he stands for—the things he has stood for over the course of his decades-long career—are abhorrent. The President’s mean tweets haven’t made Sessions’s brand of law enforcement any kinder to poor and black and brown people.

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Sessions has bought into Trump’s false narrative about rising crime rates (which are actually near historic lows), and has proposed solutions founded on harsh punishment that’s meted out with impunity. He wants to reinstate lengthy, mandatory sentences for nonviolent offenses, and plans to undermine Department of Justice mandates designed to reign in abusive arrest patterns in communities of color. He believes racism in policing is a fact of life, but believes that being called a racist is the worst thing that can ever happen to a person.

His policy goals reflect a characteristically Southern paternalism towards black people, imbuing him with the air of a Great White Disciplinarian. He maintains an impersonal distance from the concerns of underserved black communities, such as Charleston’s Eastside, where I lived long enough to know that Sessions’s stances reflect the attitudes of many white Southerners.

The impoverished Eastside community was judged harshly. Passersby pointed at the trash on the street and the homes in disrepair as they drove through town, and shook their heads at the teenage drug dealers who idled on street corners looking bored or depressed.

I remember one young dealer—tall and lanky, without a wrinkle on his face—that I used to pass by almost every day. I assumed he was new to the trade when he appeared on my street in between my apartment and the local corner grocery, and I had no intention of speaking to him. Nope. I wasn’t giving encouragement.

Eventually, I noticed that he tended to frown and mutter at me when I passed by. I ignored him at first, but eventually his persistence made me curious. One day I stopped and listened. His hurried, garbled words astonished me.

“Teach me something,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say. So, we talked. He did not need me to lecture him or tell him he was wasting his life. He knew that he was on a dead-end track, and that he was barely literate. He told me he had dropped out of high school. He had applied for jobs as a dishwasher, but never got called back. So he did the one thing he could do to make money.

At the end of our first conversation, I promised that I would “educate him” by telling him a new fact every day when I saw him on the corner.

This isn’t a cheesy Hollywood movie, so I’m not going to tell you that I changed his life by teaching him when the Constitution was ratified. No matter how many facts I shared, I could not give this young man what he really needed. I could not counteract the notoriously unequal South Carolina school system. I could not provide a decent summer job, a community energized by economic development, or a society committed to easing the plight of the people in poverty.

I knew I couldn’t do that when I started. And by the time he disappeared from the street corner a few months later, I was sure I hadn’t. He needed too much. The Eastside needed too much.

If Jeff Sessions’ got his way, that young man would have been promptly arrested and given the harshest possible sentence. For him, that’s the end of the problem. Put the criminal behind bars, and move on.

I would love to see that teenager teach Jeff Sessions a few facts. I would love to see him tell the Attorney General what it’s like to be young, black, and full of hope for a better life and opportunities, but facing bleak options.

Maybe Sessions would learn that the law enforcement policies he favors will only perpetuate a vicious cycle of wasted lives. Maybe Sessions would learn that educational programs, substance abuse counseling, and economic opportunity accomplish more than harsh sentences.

Maybe.

Or maybe Sessions will at least soon learn what it’s like to be unemployed—after the Donald fires Sessions during one of his tweetstorms.

Here are a few big deal political maneuvers that haven’t received the reporting—or an outcry from a distracted public—that they need and deserve.

Reversing the Ban on Neurotoxic Pesticide

In March, the Trump administration’s Office of Pesticide Programs—which last year received 30 percent of its operating budget from the pesticide-manufacturing industry—canceled the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed ban of chlorpyrifos, a common pesticide used on crops that was derived from nerve gas developed by the Nazis.

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The Obama administration had called for the ban after “three long-term, independently funded studies showed the substance was toxic,” according to Reuters. Particularly vulnerable are farmworkers, and the brain development of children, infants, and fetuses.

“Chlorpyrifos has been shown beyond any shadow of a doubt to damage the brains of children, especially those of fetuses in the womb,” said Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and dean for global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The American Academy of Pediatrics also urged EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to reconsider his decision.

Yet Pruitt saw fit to hail the ban reversal as “returning to using sound science in decision-making.”

Dow Chemical—whose CEO leads a White House manufacturers working group—sells the chemical. More than 6 million pounds of it are used annually in the United States on crops like apples, oranges, broccoli, berries, and tree nuts. Two months after Pruitt’s decision, more than 50 farmworkers in cabbage fields were sickened when winds blew the chemical from nearby mandarin orchards.

You can get informed and fight for a chlorpyrifos ban here and here. You can tell grocers to stop buying foods that might have residue from the chemical here. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) has introduced a bill to ban the pesticide.

Nixing Science-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs

Last month, the administration cut more than $213 million from teen pregnancy prevention programs and research, eliminating the final two years of funding for 5-year projects. More than 80 institutions across the country lost their funding, and none of the programs provided abortion counseling.

Health officials told the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) that denying funding midway through a grant is “highly unusual and wasteful because it means there can be no scientifically valid finding.”

Some of the programs cut include: work Johns Hopkins University has been doing with American Indian teens to reduce sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy; University of Southern California’s workshops for parents on “how to talk to middle school kids about delaying sexual activity”; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center program that helps “doctors talk to Native American and Latino teens about avoiding pregnancy”; and Planned Parenthood’s work in five states to bring “rural youths and parents together to share family values, strengthen family bonds, and talk about healthy relationships and sexual health.”

“We’re not out there doing what feels good,” Luanne Rohrbach, associate professor of preventive medicine at USC, told CIR. “We’re doing what we know is effective.”

Despite the fact that the teen birth rate has declined steadily over the past 20 years, the ongoing need for science-based approaches to pregnancy prevention is clear. CIR notes that the rate is still high compared to other industrialized nations, and the decline isn’t as steep in low-income communities. Perhaps that’s why the cuts were made outside the normal appropriations process as the administration pursues an ideologically-driven agenda that is out of step with real public health and education needs.

You can let your elected representatives know how you feel about this decision here.

DACA at Risk

In June, 10 states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, informed the Trump administration that it must end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by September 5 or face a lawsuit that would be heard by an anti-immigrant judge who has halted similar initiatives in the past.

Past assurances by a notoriously fickle president to keep DACA intact are hardly sufficient. Even if the administration ignores the deadline, there is little reason to believe Attorney General Jeff Sessions would defend DACA in court. As Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) told The Washington Post, “Jeff Sessions is going to say, ‘Deport them.’ If you’re going to count on Jeff Sessions to save DACA, then DACA is ended.”

More than 780,000 young people, known as “Dreamers,” have been protected from deportation and made eligible to work since DACA’s inception in 2012. Seventy-eight percent of voters believe Dreamers should be allowed to remain in the United States permanently, including 73 percent of Trump voters.

Aside from the moral argument that people who grew up as Americans should be allowed to remain in the country, the Center for American Progress notes the economic case as well. Ending DACA would drain more than $460 billion from the national GDP over the next decade, and remove about 685,000 workers from the economy. Combined, the 10 states that are suing would lose $8 billion annually.

There is an opportunity take this issue out of the hands of extremists like the Texas attorney general and an unpredictable Trump administration. In July, the DREAM Act of 2017 was introduced with bipartisan support from Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

You can let your elected representatives know you want them to support DACA here.

Chemical Accident Prevention and Protection Delayed

After a 2013 explosion at a fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas, killed 15 people, including 12 firefighters, and injured 260—the Obama administration directed the Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen the safety requirements for facilities using and storing potentially toxic or dangerous chemicals.

In January 2017, after four years of deliberations, the EPA finalized its Chemical Accident Safety Rule, which would apply to more than 12,000 chemical facilities across the nation. It included commonsense measures like making information more available to communities to support emergency preparedness, and safety audits.

However, in June, after complaints from the chemical industry that the new rule “may actually compromise the security of our facilities, emergency responders, and our communities,” the Trump administration delayed implementation until February 2019. Even as it did so, it released a fact sheet noting 58 deaths and $2 billion worth of property damage caused by 1,517 facility accidents over the past 10 years.

A coalition of 11 states led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has sued the EPA over the delay. You can tell EPA Administrator Pruitt to implement the new rule here.

Trump is losing many of his high-profile fights. But in dozens of less-noticed ways, his administration is advancing its extreme agenda that exacerbates political and economic inequality. As much of the media remains fixated on the Russia story and the Great Trump Dysfunction, journalists and advocates will need to work harder than ever to make sure the damaging daily actions of this administration aren’t ignored.

This article is a collaboration between TalkPoverty and The Nation.

Alison Cassady, Director of Domestic Energy and Environment Policy at the Center for American Progress, contributed research for this article.

The reasons Trump cited to support his decision are pretty thin. He claimed that the military couldn’t possibly shoulder the medical costs, even though the military spends 50 times as much money on bands as it would on health care for trans servicemembers. He also noted that allowing transgender servicemembers would be a “disruption,” which is a pretty weighty claim to make on behalf of a force of people who are trained to deal with actual explosions.

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This announcement is, of course, a direct attack on the rights of trans Americans who are already serving in the military. It will force them back into the closet, make it impossible for them to get adequate health care, leave them vulnerable to assault, or rob them of their livelihoods. It’s also an attack on trans Americans who aren’t serving. It’s a clear statement about the value the government places on their skills, and on their lives.

American rhetoric tends to talk about servicemembers as if they’re all Captain America: Hyperpatriotic superheroes fighting evil for no reason besides their love of country. To be clear, servicemembers are often heroic, and they do a brutally difficult job. But at the end of the day, they’re doing just that: a job. And it’s a good job, with a livable wage that often provides housing and access to higher education. The catch—and it’s a big one—is that in exchange for that job, servicemembers have to be willing to trade the government their lives.

LGBT Americans have been making this trade with the government for generations. There isn’t much data on LGBT Americans in the military, at least in part because there isn’t much data on LGBT Americans at all. But many of us know there’s a home for us there, the same way we just know that Tegan and Sara’s new records will never be quite as good as “The Con.”

My high school best friend knew it. It wasn’t easy to be queer where we grew up—families tend to stick around our Rust Belt town for generations, and their old Catholic hearts are slow to change. Most folks meet social shifts with denial or quiet disapprovals, but his parents were the type of Christian who thought they could save us from ourselves. They tried to save him from his gayness every chance they got. First they tried sneaking up on him any time he left the house—including at least one incident that involved hiding in bushes—to manufacture public confrontations that were halfway between impromptu sermon and public exorcism. When they realized they couldn’t literally scare him straight, they cut him off financially. It was better to have no son than to have raised a queer.

He dropped out of college when his parents cut him off. He didn’t have the money he needed to get a degree, so he did what young Americans in need of a career have done for hundreds of years: He joined the military.

Trans Americans desperately need to have that option available to them. According to a report by the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress, half of transgender Americans earn less than $24,000 per year. One-third of black trans women earn less than $10,000 per year. Trans Americans are more likely to be rejected by their families, to be homeless, and to be forced into underground economies than the rest of the population. In some ways, that makes the military—a career that comes with a built-in family—a particularly good option for a lot of trans Americans. That option is something that trans Americans, as citizens of this country, are entitled to pursue. And it’s something that President Trump promised both LGBT Americans and veterans that he would support.

Whether Trump keeps his promises or not, trans Americans are going to fight for this country. They’ll do it in the military, even though the president just issued a declaration that orders them back in the closet. And they’ll do it right in front of the White House, with their signs raised and their heads held high, when the president tries to stop them.

But the pregnancy was unplanned, too. So was the abuse from the father. So was him kicking us out in the middle of a particularly snowy winter in northwest Washington.

A few months before my daughter Mia’s first birthday, I worked with a friend, eagerly taking up the slack in his landscaping business. I crawled through flowerbeds and junipers and pulled weeds. By the time the season ended, Mia and I had an apartment paid for mostly by a housing grant. But I knew if I expected anyone to hire me for a job with benefits, I needed a degree.

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My parents didn’t raise me with an expectation that I would go to college. When I approached my dad with a list of schools I wanted to apply to during my junior year of high school, he said, “Who do you think’s gonna pay for that?” So I moved out of my parents’ house and went to work full-time for over a decade. That had seemed all right. Respectable, even. But now I needed a job that would do more than just barely pay the rent.

I was able to go to college, and get the degree I knew I needed, because of a grant the federal government provides to low-income students—the Pell Grant. It covered my entire tuition at my local community college, leaving me a few hundred bucks to live off of. I crept along that way. I found full-time work as a maid. I worked late at night, often past midnight, and through the weekends when my daughter was with her dad.

Transferring to a four-year college, for me, meant moving to a different state. I moved to the place I’d intended to go before I became a mom. I moved because, when I visited, I found a progressive community that’d be supportive of a single mom working her way through college. I moved because I needed to hold myself accountable to my dream of being a writer that I’d had since I was ten. I needed my daughter to see me pursue that dream, and not settle for anything less, because I never wanted her to think life wouldn’t afford her the same opportunity.

By that time, I paid for books and tuition with the Pell Grant and a scholarship created for survivors of domestic violence. I also took out the maximum amount of student loans to cover living expenses through the school year when I was only able to work part-time as a maid.  I lived off of a little over $1,000 a month, and my daughter bounced from preschool to the various homes of classmates when I worked or attended class. Neighbors watched her for free, and I rented the other bedroom of our apartment in exchange for help with child care.

Since I was juggling work and child care, I couldn’t take a full course load during the semesters. Instead, I took classes every summer. When the summer courses finished, I worked 10- to 12-hour days doing move-out cleans, landscaping gigs, and any other work I could find until the academic year began again.

A month before my daughter turned seven, she watched me walk across the stage to get my bachelor’s degree.

A year later, I was working full-time as a freelance writer. A year after that, I celebrated my first book deal for a memoir about my time in college, when I worked as a maid. We no longer need government assistance, but we only got here because it was there for us when we did need it. Especially the Pell Grant.

In his recent budget, President Trump proposed cutting the Pell Grant’s surplus funds by $3.9 billion.  That surplus was set aside, with bipartisan support, so that recipients can attend summer school like I did. Trump also wants to cut funds for the work study program and TRIO, which mentors, tutors, and finds resources for students in need—including low-income single moms.

Trump’s plan to cut this funding will diminish opportunities for first generation students, single parents, disabled students, and low-income populations to get an education.  All that does is keep the cycle of poverty spinning. It keeps people shut behind closed doors, with the belief that opportunities just aren’t available to them.  It hurts students who can’t get the support they need through their families—because their family has no money, or no one has ever gone to college, or no one expected them to go, either.

I write today as a success story, heartbroken that others won’t have the same opportunity I did. Decreasing funds for these programs puts up road blocks that stop people in poverty from ever setting foot on a college campus, all for the sake of tax breaks for the wealthy that leave the path of the privileged pristine.

Nevertheless, 96 percent of the people who voted for Trump say they’d make the same decision today.

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When I was growing up—in the 1970s, in the deep South—I struggled to understand why some low-income white Southerners voted against their own interests. They dismissed unions, and supported politicians that let their states lag behind the rest of the country in every indices of health, livelihood, and employment.  They routinely supported candidates who opposed everything from access to affordable childcare, to unemployment benefits and investing in good jobs, to Medicaid expansion today.

But now I realize they’re not voting for policy. They’re voting for white privilege.

White privilege runs deep in America, and it still shapes white concepts of social standing and entitlement. Those entitlements can be symbolic—for example, the power that whites have in the South to maintain Confederate emblems with public prominence and high esteem. They can also be very literal, as with public policies that help whites build and sustain wealth while keeping doors of opportunity closed to blacks (think redlining, predatory lending, unequal access to higher education, and lack of investment in communities of color). That helps explain why black people in poverty have higher death rates than white people in poverty.

Perhaps because it plays such a central role in life in America, “white privilege” is not a comfortable phrase to say—not now, and certainly not in my childhood. Back then, Southerners only used this term—or its counterpart, “white supremacy”—to indicate that someone supported the Ku Klux Klan.

Most white Americans still prefer to define racism in those overt terms. It’s a convenient approach that limits discussion of racism to bygone “whites only” signs and burning crosses, and that argues inequality in our schools ended in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Few people—and even fewer white people—ever spoke the way famed basketball coach Greg Popovich did recently when he called out white privilege for what it really is:

If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally in this society and all the systemic roadblocks that exist, whether it’s in a judicial sense, a neighborhood sense with laws, zoning, education.  We have huge problems… that are very complicated, but take leadership, time, and real concern to try to solve… People don’t really want to face it.

Our most pernicious social ills—the ones that create the privilege that Popovich described, and that many of Trump’s voters cling to—are rooted in policies that were designed to target people of color. We can measure racism by the impact of redlining and toxic mortgages. We can see it in the justice system, where black defendants receive twice as severe sentences as whites convicted of the same crimes. We can find it in classrooms that are still highly segregated, leaving children of color in schools that receive dramatically fewer resources.

America is essentially a racist nation—riddled by racial markers—that is levying its harshest economic and psychological toll on the 1 in 3 African American children and more than 1 in 4 Hispanic children who live in poverty.

Trump appeals to a strain of American racism every time he calls for a border wall, or calls inner cities “a disaster,” or swears he’ll ban Muslims from entering the country. That is what many of his voters—who are disproportionately likely to hold dehumanizing views of black people—want.

By backing Trump, conservatives have coalesced around maintaining a racially divided nation, and so progressives must now coalesce against it. Decisively.

Unfortunately, liberal politicians hoping to woo white voters have also skirted acknowledging white privilege, out of fear that talk about race will strain coalitions. Even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders was slow to talk about racial disparities in America  at the beginning of his presidential campaign—before Black Lives Matter activists protested at his rallies. Silence concerning white privilege is a form of complicity.  It’s the hypocritical denial of reality experienced by blacks that fosters disunity between minorities and white progressives, and discourages minority voters.

The time has come for whites who understand what white privilege means—and who know in their hearts that they want no part of it—to join people of color in a way which is neither compromised nor complicit. Then, through shared power, people of color and white progressives can grow our political strength.

But this narrative overlooks the very real harm Trump has inflicted on the country—and, more importantly, on individuals affected by his policies. From undocumented immigrants, to people living near coal ash, to low-income families who would feel the effects of budget cuts—Trump has already done real damage to American families.

Here are three people who illustrate the human impact of Trump’s agenda during his first 100 days in office:

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1. Kim Brewer

Kim Brewer is a mother of four who lives in Dukeville, North Carolina, near a major coal-fired power plant named Buck Steam Station. According to Brewer, her first two children were born healthy. But after moving to Dukeville, she gave birth to two daughters with severe birth defects. Ava was born with Chiari malformation, a brain defect linked to exposure to toxic chemicals—including coal ash, which is generated by coal-fired power plants. Her youngest daughter, Laney, has spina bifida, which is also linked to coal ash. Both girls have also been diagnosed with epilepsy.

Buck Steam Station stores its coal ash in an unlined pit near a local waterway. The ash contains a variety of toxic chemicals—including arsenic, lead, mercury, and thallium (an active ingredient in rat poison). Living near coal ash sites is linked to heart disease, cancer, respiratory illness and stroke—the leading causes of death in the country. It’s especially toxic when it leaks, as Buck Steam Station did in 2014, contaminating groundwater, wetlands, and rivers.

In December, the Obama administration released a new rule protecting waterways from coal ash. Experts estimated the rule would have improved water quality in over 250 miles of streams every year.  But days after taking office, Trump signed legislation that quashed the rule—one in a spate of bills designed to undermine environmental protections.

Trump could still do more to protect people from coal ash, but if his Cabinet appointments are any indication, that won’t happen anytime soon. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, has delayed a separate rule regulating the safe storage of coal ash; and Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resource Division—the office in charge of prosecuting coal ash violations—is a former lobbyist for the coal industry.

2. Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia

No community has borne the brunt of Trump’s policies more than immigrants—both undocumented and documented. Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia, a 44-year-old father of three American citizens, worked for years in construction in Arizona.

Last month, he and his daughter, Yennifer, visited the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office (ICE) for what he hoped would be a routine check-in. They planned to return home afterwards to celebrate the 17^th birthday of Fomperosa Garcia’s son.  Instead, after an hour, ICE officers came to the waiting area and told Yennifer that her father had been detained.

The next day he was deported.

According to The Arizona Republic, Fomperosa Garcia had a worker’s permit and a pending asylum application to stay in the country—and had never committed a crime. “My father is not a criminal,” Yennifer said through tears at a press conference following his detention. “He’s not one of those people that…President Trump says. He’s not a rapist, he’s not a drug dealer and he’s not a murderer. My father’s an honest, working man, a family man that loves everyone he meets. He cares too much and that’s the only crime.”

“Please, everyone, be aware. They are taking everyone,’’ she told the crowd.

Testimonio de hijas de padre detenido por ICE en Arizona. @TelemundoAZ @LUCHA_AZ pic.twitter.com/qlMNZD5jdq

— Valeria Aponte (@VaponteTAZ) March 3, 2017

Fomperosa Garcia is just one victim of Trump’s mass deportations. Trump initially said he would focus on “bad hombres” or criminals, but ICE officers have since targeted people with minor violations, so-called “collateral arrests,” and even DREAMers who came to the country as children.

3. Martha Daniels

Martha Daniels was displaced from her New Orleans home after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. She now lives in Houston, where she relies on Meals on Wheels, a partially federally-funded program that connects volunteers with people who can’t buy or cook their own meals—often seniors.

For many, Meals on Wheels provides more than just nutrition assistance. It is a source of companionship and, importantly, regular health check-ins for seniors living alone—seniors like Daniels.

In January, a Meals on Wheels volunteer paid a routine visit to Daniels’ home. Instead of displaying her normal bubbly personality, Daniels was sitting stiff in her lounge chair and not breathing well, according to Houston CBS affiliate KHOU. She was rushed to the hospital, where the doctor told her she was suffering from a mild heart attack. Physicians said she may not have lived through the night if she hadn’t been brought to the hospital.

“If she wouldn’t have checked on me, who knows who would have come,” Daniels said.

Under Trump’s budget, people like Daniels may not have access to Meals on Wheels and its life-saving volunteers. Trump would eliminate the Community Development Block Grant and the Community Services Block Grant —two of the main sources of funding for the program. Despite inaccurate statements by the Trump administration, Meals on Wheels receives more than one-third of its funding from the federal government—and cuts of this scale would make it hard for many local community-run programs to keep their doors open.

When we talk about Trump’s First 100 Days, we need to remember that his policies are not an abstraction. They are causing immediate—and in some cases irreparable —damage to communities across the country. For all the infighting, lies, and scandals of his administration, Trump is making progress on remaking the country in his image. And that should give everyone who lives here pause.

Health insurance companies did not have to cover mental health care until the Affordable Care Act made it mandatory. If that requirement is repealed, people will get less treatment. Without treatment, some people will succumb to their illnesses. That means more suicides.

That’s not hyperbole. It’s not hysterics, or fear-mongering.  I’ve seen it happen. My dad killed himself a few weeks after my 12^th birthday.

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Even 12 years after my dad’s death, I’m haunted by the memories of that night. I can still see my mom crying as she broke the news to her two kids, the shock on my older brother’s ghostly white face, and the red and blue lights of a police car swirling on our living room walls. The sight of police lights still makes my stomach drop.

My father’s suicide has shaped my life. It brought isolating numbness, crushing grief, and  strange looks from the people in my small town who were uncomfortable with its taboo. My family’s income, which was decidedly middle class before my dad’s death, was more than halved by his passing. We made it work because we had Social Security survivors benefits, free and reduced price lunches, and could take out a home equity loan that we still carry today. That made it possible for my mother—an actual, honest-to-God superhero—to keep my brother and I fed and clothed on less than $40,000 a year.

Though Trump and the House Freedom Caucus may treat it as such, mental health is not a fringe issue. Every year, more than 44,000 Americans die by suicide. On average, it affects demographics that voted for Trump the most: 70 percent of suicide victims in 2015 were white men, with the rate of suicide being highest among middle-aged men. Like my dad.

My dad died, at least in part, because he wasn’t in treatment. Under Trumpcare, millions of Americans will find it difficult to seek treatment as well. Trump is gambling with their lives to pass a health care plan that will cut taxes for the wealthy.

If the bill passes, I could struggle to afford the therapy that helps me deal with the grief of losing my father. And there will be more 12-year-olds, like me, who will lose their loved ones. I can picture them now: hugging their knees, and watching the red and blue lights dance on the walls of their house as their world comes crashing down.

I don’t wish that on anyone. I just wish our president felt the same.

For years, Trump has been moving the mark on when he’ll release his tax returns. First, he was going to release them if he ran for office. Then, he promised we’d see them once the IRS finished its audit. Finally, in January, Kellyanne Conway dropped the pretense and said he’ll never release them, arguing that his win in November means Americans must not care about them.

The trouble is, Conway has it exactly backwards: It is precisely because Trump won in November that people care about his tax returns.

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The president’s tax returns will give us definitive answers about his ties to Russia. Trump has a long and troubling record of defending the Kremlin, praising Vladimir Putin, and doing business with Russian oligarchs. Earlier this month, a Reuters investigation found that “at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.” Donald Trump Jr. has even admitted that Trump Organization businesses “see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Only by revealing Trump’s full tax returns will we know if Trump is bought and paid for by Russia — and compromising our national security from the Oval Office.

The potential conflicts of interest go beyond just Russia. With Congress preparing to rewrite the tax code, President Trump could use tax reform as a vehicle to slash taxes for himself and the Trump Organization while cutting critical investments in our schools and neighborhoods. If he is going to propose reforms to the tax system, he needs to release his own taxes first. That is the only way Americans can know if he is pushing policies — including tax cuts — that will benefit himself, his Goldman Sachs cabinet, and super rich friends.

For decades, corporations, Wall Street, and CEOs like Trump have exploited loophole after loophole to cut down on their tax bill. Now, Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell are going even further by proposing dramatic tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, at the expense of critical programs like Meals on Wheels, food stamps, and FEMA.

Instead of slashing taxes for billionaires, a serious tax reform plan will fix the gross injustices in the tax code and build a fairer, more equitable system that closes loopholes, invests in communities, and puts more money in the hands of working Americans.

That’s why Americans are marching tomorrow. They’re standing against a president who has flirted with corruption, and sending a message to our representatives in Washington: It is time to start defending our country’s long tradition of open and ethical government.

Trump needs to come clean with the American people and release his tax returns. In our American democracy, We the People are Trump’s boss. He works for us. And we will not tolerate his dangerous attack on our country’s democratic principles of transparency and accountability.

In a party-line vote, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions advanced Acosta’s nomination today, putting 160 million American workers one step closer to having a protector-in-chief whose views are largely unknown. During his hearing, Acosta fought to keep his opinions concealed. He repeatedly dodged questions about the department’s most significant recent activities, including updating overtime rules, reducing exposure to deadly silica dust, and requiring retirement advisers to act in their clients’ best interest.

But, despite his relative silence on labor issues, Acosta’s past has a giant red flag.

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From 2003 to 2005, when Acosta was leading the Civil Rights Division of George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, the division became intensely politicized. An investigation by the Office of the Inspector General found the division violated federal law and DOJ policy by conducting hiring based on candidates’ political and ideological affiliations. Although the report did not find Acosta directly responsible for illegal behavior, former DOJ employee Kristen Clark wrote, “This egregious conduct played out under Acosta’s watch and the Inspector General found that, despite the special litigation section chief informing Acosta of the wrongdoing, Acosta failed to take sufficient action to address the illegal and unprofessional actions.”

Acosta’s worrisome record doesn’t end with turning a blind eye to illegal activity. During his tenure at DOJ, Acosta himself was accused of partisan meddling. Just days before the 2004 presidential election, Ohio Republicans challenged and purged the voter registration of thousands of mostly African-American voters through a practice known as “voter caging.” When the case was challenged in federal court, Acosta took the unusual step of sending a letter to the court claiming that the purge was allowed under the Voting Rights Act. Typically, federal agency chiefs go out of their way not to influence elections—but if this behavior sounds like déjà vu, you can thank FBI Director James Comey.

In other words, when the interests of the Bush administration—which favored restrictions on voting rights—conflicted with his responsibility as a civil rights chief, it appears Acosta chose to use his authority to push the administration’s agenda.

And if he is confirmed as labor secretary, Acosta will once again be tasked with protecting a marginalized group of Americans—workers. One of his first tasks will be deciding whether he will enforce a spate of new rules that are designed to protect workers, passed during the end of the Obama administration. The rules themselves are straightforward: companies would have to disclose worker exposure to a cancer-causing dust often found in construction, federal contractors would have to disclose labor law violations, and employers would have to pay overtime to additional eligible workers.  But in some cases, Trump has already criticized them.

If his previous actions are any guide, Acosta will likely place partisan loyalty above enforcement of his agency’s mission. And when he repeated during last week’s hearing that he’d defer to Trump as the “boss,” he gave little assurance that he won’t place ideology above the labor rights and civil rights of working Americans.

According to Trump’s “skinny budget,” African-American families and communities stand to lose billions in programs and services that touch every aspect of our lives. This budget makes it harder for black people to raise healthy children, get an education, live in a safe neighborhood, secure adequate housing, and maintain a good quality job.

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From the cradle to the grave, these billions of dollars in cuts will leave black Americans worse off—especially since African Americans are over-represented as beneficiaries for many of the programs. Cuts of approximately $150 million to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program—where blacks represent 20 percent of enrollment—guarantees fewer black families receive nutrition education and supplements necessary for small children. The elimination of $1.2 billion in grants to after-school and summer programs, which serve 1 in 4 black students, will leave millions of kids without opportunities that give them a chance to get ahead. At the college level, nearly two thirds of black undergrads at public four-year institutions depend on tuition assistance received through Pell Grants. Reducing the funding for this program by $3.9 billion ensures fewer black students go to college, even as the labor market demands more credentials for good quality jobs. And for blacks in the labor market, the cuts to the Labor Department—which provides training for people who decide against a four-year degree, and combats the discrimination that still plagues black workers—makes it harder to get and keep a decent job.

Trump’s campaign trail claim that black communities are “in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before” was more a prediction of his budget’s impact than a description of daily life for black people. Historic racial disparities in terms of unemployment rate, housing segregation, and wealth have remained essentially unchanged over the past several decades. But his budget calls to eliminate programs that are designed to lessen those disparities, as well as the ones that support communities that are already marginalized.

In many cases, the programs slated for elimination would literally take the roof from over people’s heads. Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which fund affordable housing, economic development, disaster relief, and infrastructure for communities of color across the country are first on the chopping block. In 2013 alone, 9.8 million people lived in areas that benefited from CDBG grants, and more than 1 in 4 of them were black. More than a quarter of cases closed by Legal Services Corporation grantees, which accounts for much of the legal aid in the U.S., were tied to housing and foreclosure—and nearly 30 percent of their clients are black. And more than one third of black households qualify for help heating their houses with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), but Trump’s budget would force them to choose between heating their houses and paying for other basic needs.  For families left completely in the cold, the US Interagency Council on Homelessness is a last resort. Again, Trump’s budget would completely eliminate this program, in which nearly half of all families with children served are black.

Trump believes to be black in America is to live in a constant nightmare of poverty, joblessness, and inadequate opportunities. This budget turns that belief into reality for African American families and communities.

The president’s budget doesn’t have the final say on how much money is spent on each agency and program—that’s Congress’s job. But it does frame the debate around government spending for the year. By putting out a budget that includes draconian cuts to the programs that Americans rely on, President Trump is trying to lower the standards for an acceptable outcome from Congress—and shift the entire conversation about federal spending to the right.

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Even without the Trump budget’s $54 billion in cuts, next year’s spending levels are already too low due to the sequestration caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Congress actually designed these caps to be terrible; the threat of sequestration was meant to force Republicans and Democrats to compromise on a “grand bargain” to reduce deficits. They never made that compromise, so lawmakers have been using short-term budget deals to mitigate sequestration’s worst impacts—but now Trump’s budget could make sequestration look reasonable by comparison.

As a reminder—because memories can be painfully short in politics—sequestration is not reasonable. In fiscal year 2018, it will limit nondefense discretionary spending—the same part of the budget targeted for cuts by President Trump—to roughly match its lowest level ever as a share of the economy since the federal government began tracking this category of spending in 1962.

The only way to get a good deal for working families is to increase the spending caps above sequestration levels.  Otherwise, Congress will continue to underfund programs that support basic living standards and invest in the middle-class, while rigging the system even further for wealthy and corporate elites.

Two years ago, Congress demonstrated what sequestration would mean for jobs and working families when they tried to use those caps to write spending bills for FY 2016. Like President Trump’s budget, these bills took money out of the Pell grants that help students afford college. The House of Representatives proposed huge cuts that nearly eliminated infrastructure grants funded by the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program—which President Trump’s budget proposed eliminating completely. Similarly, huge cuts in a Senate spending bill would have nearly eliminated the HOME investment partnerships program to support affordable housing—another program targeted for elimination by the Trump budget.

In FY 2018, the sequestration caps in current law would cut nondefense discretionary spending by $3 billion. A $3 billion cut may seem insignificant next to the Trump budget, but even flat funding would be grossly inadequate for many nondefense discretionary programs. Lawmakers have already provided a $3.1 billion increase for the Department of Veterans Affairs in FY 2018, since they fund veterans’ medical programs a year in advance. Accommodating this increase will require deeper cuts to other programs, where funding requirements are also generally increasing because of inflation and population growth. For example, flat funding for rental assistance programs could cause 100,000 families to lose their housing vouchers.

Sequestration doesn’t just cut programs that are essential to average Americans—it actively hollows out safeguards that are meant to level the playing field, giving even more power to corporations and helping the rich get richer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) were targeted for cuts in both the Trump budget and the FY 2016 sequestration spending bills. Preventing the EPA and other agencies from enforcing environmental laws is great news for big polluters who can increase profits by cutting corners without getting caught, but it leaves ordinary Americans to live with the consequences of unsafe water, toxic air, and catastrophes such as chemical explosions. And cutting the IRS budget makes its customer service even worse for ordinary Americans, as seen with the particularly “abysmal” problems caused by lack of funding in 2015. At the same time, IRS budget cuts also make it easier for wealthy households and big corporations to use complex accounting maneuvers to overwhelm the IRS and avoid paying their fair share.

The Trump budget provides a stark illustration of what steep cuts to domestic programs mean for working families. But it should not lower the standards for an acceptable budget deal. To the contrary, after seeing President Trump’s plans to attack programs that help maintain basic living standards and create ladders into the middle-class, it is more important than ever for Congress to support a budget that adequately funds these programs.

Failing to lift the sequestration caps would mean starting down the same path outlined in the Trump budget, and working families deserve better than that.

By the time Carson was confirmed last month, there had been a shift. Media coverage softened, as some newspapers moved from being incredulous about his qualifications to arguing that his health background made him uniquely suited to running the department. During his confirmation hearing, Carson made that case himself by noting “good health has a lot to do with a good environment.” Some housing advocates, in turn, were hopeful he could be a good partner to their communities.

Less than a month into his tenure as HUD secretary, Carson is already beginning to undercut this argument. The Trump administration’s FY 18 budget, released today, proposes a $6.2 billion cut to the HUD budget—targeting programs that keep families housed and healthy.

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Today’s “skinny budget” was light on detail, so it didn’t account for all of the resources that would be slashed as a result of the 13.2 percent cut to HUD’s funding. According to earlier documents, about $1.5 billion of the cuts would come from the funds local governments rely on to clear public housing of mold and lead. That would add to the backlog of major repairs needed for public housing, which already stands at  $26 billion. The budget does propose a $20 million increase in funding specifically for lead remediation, but that restores less than 1 percent of what is being cut.

The budget also cuts programs that help prevent and alleviate homelessness, which is associated with health problems due to weather exposure, untreated conditions, and inconsistent medical care. About 200,000 low-income households could lose the rental assistance they need to afford housing, and the development funds that local governments use to prevent homelessness stand to be gutted. These programs have reduced homelessness by 10 percent since 2010— including a 15 percent reduction in family homelessness, and a 33 percent reduction in veteran homelessness.

The cuts also eliminate programs that support entire communities in their effort to provide a healthy environment for children. Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and Home Investment Partnership (HOME) grants build and fix affordable housing, finance health care centers, and create community centers that give children safe places to play. In 2013 alone, 9.8 million people lived in areas that benefited from CDBG-funded projects, and HOME grants have helped build or saved 1.2 million affordable homes since the program was created in 1990.

Sec. Carson knows that living in poverty makes children sick. Living in structurally unsafe, substandard housing places children and families at a higher risk for fire-related injuries, asthma, and lead poisoning. It is also responsible for more than 18,000 preventable deaths each year. Carson has acknowledged this time and time and time again over the years. And, in one of Sec. Carson’s first messages to staff and the housing community last week, he pledged to “use every fiber of [his] being to work to improve America’s neighborhoods.” So, where is he this week when communities and families need him to defend the vital dollars they rely on?

During his confirmation hearing, Carson told U.S. senators, under oath, that he no longer supported the extreme cuts he had once campaigned on for President. He called such cuts “cruel and unusual punishment.” His support of this budget breaks his oath to Congress, and it calls into question the ethical oath he swore to live by when he became a physician: to do no harm.

Carson’s decision to support the current budget would dishonor his lifetime Hippocratic creed to uphold the human dignity of the people he serves—the people, families, and communities that rely on HUD. They deserve housing that keeps them safe from winter storms and summer heat. They deserve roofs without leaks, paint without lead, and walls that aren’t bubbling with black mold. They deserve to be able to turn the stove on without worrying if the apartment will catch fire.

They deserve to be healthy.

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These folks hope the new president will bring us back to this romanticized vision: the U.S. as Mayberry, the small town from the The Andy Griffith Show that has become synonymous with an idealized, folksy life.

The problem is, that America never actually existed.

At least not for my family, living in segregated Chicago in the 1940s—around the time when The Andy Griffith Show was set.  My grandparents lived in public housing. Other housing options weren’t available to them because back then, black people couldn’t just move into any home or neighborhood they wanted.

Their parents—my great-grandparents—had come north to the promised land of Chicago to escape racial violence in the South, only to find that black folks couldn’t escape America’s racist purgatory. My grandmother was born a month after the 1919 race riots in Chicago, which started when a black swimmer crossed the “invisible” color line at the 31^st Street beach. My great-grandmother, eight months pregnant at the time, had to run home to escape the angry white mob—tripping and falling on her stomach heavy with my grandma inside.

Such were the experiences of oppression, violence, segregation, and opportunities denied that were passed down to my grandparents.

My grandmother and grandfather were janitors. In fact, three of my four grandparents were janitors. When they first started working, jobs didn’t have benefits like pensions and health care. But there was a key development in their lives that would impact my family for generations to come–they joined a union. My janitor grandparents were members of the Janitors’ Union, SEIU Local 1, at a time when racial exclusion from the labor movement was too often the norm.

Those good-paying union jobs helped my grandparents save money and buy a home on the South Side. When they bought their house in 1954, they were the third black family on a block made up of working-class Irish and Italian families. By 1960, the entire block was black.

White flight was in full swing, because white families thought the presence of black families would cause property values to plummet. The result, almost 60 years later, is segregation that still isolates my community from good jobs, good schools, and the hope for something better.

Still, those good union jobs helped my grandparents send the first person in our family to college–my mother. In 1950s America, a smart black woman had only two options: nursing school or teacher’s college. My mom chose to become a teacher, and taught in public school for more than 40 years.

It was that union job as a teacher that allowed my mother—a single parent, in a working-class neighborhood, on the South Side of Chicago—to raise two boys and have economic opportunities not available to other black men and women of her generation.

Yet as any measure will show, the opportunities for most black Americans were—and still are—much more limited compared to opportunities for whites.

If you doubt that, consider my family today. My grandparents passed down the house they bought in 1954. My mother raised my brother and me there, and my brother and his wife are now raising my 20-month-old nephew there. This past fall, they had to temporarily move out of the house because my nephew had dangerously high levels of lead from the paint and windows in the house. I imagine white families with the income to remediate the lead in aging homes never have to worry about this.

The neighborhood remains segregated, and suffers from the toxic inequality that plagues many black communities today.

That’s the kind of inequality, racial segregation, and seclusion that so many of our fellow Americans want to remain steeped in. So far, the new president has tried to ban immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.; is now trying to take away health care away from millions of Americans; and is preparing to shred the safety net that protects working people and their families when work doesn’t pay enough or they fall on hard times. Trump and Congressional Republicans are also set on destroying the very union jobs that gave families like mine a chance.

We’ve made so much progress, and still have so far to go. It’s time we see our history for what it is, and leave those romanticized notions of Mayberry where they belong—in the past.

But the reality is, Trump’s proposal is essentially a tax break for the wealthy disguised as a child care plan.

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There is a real child care crisis in the United States. The current system doesn’t work for anyone: Parents are shelling out more for child care than they’ll need to pay for in-state college tuition, and providers are still closing their doors due to lack of funding. Low-income and middle class families need help affording quality child care, but the Trumps have something different in mind.

Here are five reasons why Trump’s child care plan doesn’t cut it:

1. It provides the biggest benefit to wealthy people

The Trump child care plan was written by Ivanka, for Ivanka. It’s centered around a tax deduction, which would let families earning up to $500,000 per year deduct their child care costs from their taxable income up to the average cost of child care in the state.

Unlike a refundable tax credit, which would give money to anyone who is eligible, a tax deduction lowers peoples’ taxable income and increases their tax refund at the end of the year. That benefits high-earners more than lower and middle-income families—under Trump’s plan, 70 percent of benefits would go to families earning at least $100,000.

2. It doesn’t help people when they actually need it

Under Trump’s plan, families would need to pay upfront for child care each week or month, and then wait until tax season to get a small deduction. Most families don’t have that kind of liquid income—a parent working full time at a minimum wage job would have to spend anywhere from 62.9 percent of their income (if they live in South Dakota) to 183.5 percent of their income (if they live in Washington D.C.) to pay for child care for an infant and a four year old.

If Trump was serious about helping middle class Americans, his proposal would provide support for families throughout the year, when they need it. For example, proposals for a High-Quality Child Care Tax Credit—where a family would contribute between 2 and 12 percent of its income on a sliding scale—would advance money to families on a monthly basis so that they would never need to pay full price out of pocket.

3. It won’t improve child care quality

Providing high-quality child care is expensive. Around 60 percent of funding for child care providers comes directly from parents, so providers depend largely on tuition to cover the cost of staff salaries, classroom materials, and building maintenance. So, high-quality providers tend to have higher tuition prices. That creates a gap in the type of care kids ultimately get—children whose parents have money get high-quality care, and kids whose parents don’t settle for less.

Trump’s plan doesn’t address the fact that access to high-quality early childhood education depends on a family’s income. That perpetuates the achievement gap that plagues students later on. Without access to high-quality early childhood education, low-income students and children of color start kindergarten behind their peers in math and reading. They struggle to make up the difference later on.

4. It won’t create more child care options

Many parents have trouble even finding a licensed child care provider in their community. A recent study found that across eight states, 42 percent of children live in child care deserts where child care supply does not meet demand. The problem is particularly pronounced in rural areas, where the majority of children—55 percent—live in child care deserts.

Trump’s plan doesn’t create incentives for new providers to enter the child care market, which would increase the availability of child care for families. A meager tax deduction is not enough to build a child care infrastructure, especially in rural areas where there is the greatest need for child care.

5. It doesn’t support the early childhood workforce

Trump’s plan does not even mention the 2 million—mostly female—early childhood educators that care for the nation’s youngest children every day. The median annual salary for child care workers is just $20,320, which is less than the median for animal caretakers and parking lot attendants. Almost half of child care workers rely on some form of public assistance, and they often lack basic benefits like health insurance. That has consequences for the children in their care.

Early childhood is a critical period when children grow, learn, and develop rapidly. In order to thrive, children need careful attention from adults that make eye contact, engage in dialogue using age-appropriate language, and respond to their expressions of emotion. High levels of stress—like the kind caused by economic insecurity—interfere with an educator’s ability to give a child the meaningful attention that they require throughout the day.

Last night we heard President Trump say that he wants to help financially-strapped families, but families cannot work unless they have affordable child care. Trump’s child care proposal won’t meet most families’ needs—it’s little more than a tax windfall for wealthy people like him. If he understood the child care crisis that low-income and middle class families face each day, he’d put forward a complete plan that addresses child care affordability, quality, and access.

In 2004, the parents of a then-ten-year-old boy known only as “Luke P.” enrolled him in a residential school. Luke, who was diagnosed with autism at age two, had been unable to carry over the functional behaviors and skills he learned at school to other environments. Although he was toilet trained at school, when he was at home he spread bowel movements around his room. And in some respects, he was actually regressing: an occupational therapist observed that school staff were even inadvertently reinforcing negative behaviors.

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But Luke’s home school fought his parents’ request that his residential placement be covered by the district under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), an education law that guarantees students with disabilities “a free, appropriate education” that is tailored to their needs. Jeff and Julie P. took on the district and won repeatedly, in Colorado administrative proceedings and then in federal district court.

Then they reached the Tenth Circuit and went before Judge Neil Gorsuch.

Gorsuch reversed the district court, holding that the IDEA only required a school to provide a “basic floor of opportunity,” and nothing more. Even though a residential program obviously provided far more benefits for Luke, Gorsuch ruled that his parents were not entitled to reimbursement for the additional cost because Luke had no right to an education that would allow him to function in environments outside of school.

Again and again, Gorsuch has acted against individuals’ rights and interests—usually to the benefit of big businesses. As a trial lawyer, Gorsuch represented a billionaire suing a company for a massive payout—at the expense of the Teachers’ Retirement System of Louisiana. On the bench, he’s ruled against workers again and again—most famously in the Hobby Lobby case, which held that for-profit companies can force their religious views on their employees. When there’s a choice between placing a burden on a corporation or institution and protecting people, Trump can count on Gorsuch to toe the line.

Gorsuch’s fondness for corporations is anything but subtle. One of his most troubling views has to do with the rules and regulations agencies make to implement critical laws like the Clean Water Act (or, say, IDEA). In short, he’s against them.

Gorsuch has been a vocal opponent of the 1984 Supreme Court decision that requires courts to defer to agencies when it comes to interpreting the laws they’re charged with enforcing. According to Gorsuch, that complicates life for businesses who may want to resist regulations. “Who can even attempt” to fight a rule, Gorsuch asked in a 2016 opinion, “without an army of perfumed lawyers and lobbyists?”

If it were up to Gorsuch, courts would be able to overrule agencies. That would be a massive blow to the means by which our government regulates businesses and protects Americans’ health and safety. People without the means to challenge corporations in court when they pollute or after financial institutions exploit them rely on government—on agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency—to keep them safe.

Gorsuch’s anti-regulatory stance is just another way he’s in line with Trump and his congressional allies. Trump has issued a sweeping freeze on regulation, and he’s signed an executive order creating new obstacles to rulemaking and suggesting agencies have to repeal two rules to make one new rule—with the explicit purpose of giving businesses a boost. Meanwhile, the House has passed a trio of bills that would let Congress and the courts strike hundreds of critical regulations—including fair pay and sick leave guarantees, nutrition standards for public schools, and limits on corporate pollution and contamination—and make it next to impossible for agencies to enact new protections.

It’s easy to paint Gorsuch’s nomination as “more of the same” from the Trump administration, but this nomination is different. The judiciary is supposed to be impartial. Gorsuch’s job as a justice on the Supreme Court would be to serve as an independent check on the other branches of government—a role that’s more important than ever in the wake of the recent spate of extreme executive actions that challenge the separation of powers.

But Gorsuch won’t check the Trump administration—he’ll aid and abet it.

Sounds pretty good, huh?  Except that a hiring freeze is a recipe not just for wasting taxpayer dollars but also for eliminating well-paying jobs.

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Here are four ways Trump’s hiring freeze will cause pain in communities across the U.S.—and leave taxpayers holding the bag.

1.    It will kill jobs

Trump campaigned on a promise to save and bring back jobs.  But his hiring freeze is a recipe for large-scale job loss. In fact, experts believe that the freeze could affect at a minimum some 800,000 workers, or more than one-fifth of the entire federal workforce.

Certain groups will be particularly hard hit, including African-Americans and people with disabilities, both of whom are employed in the public sector at disproportionately higher rates. Veteran employment will especially suffer—they get a hiring preference for federal jobs, and make up more than 40 percent of newly hired federal workers.

2.    It will likely cost, not save, money

While Donald Trump may claim that a hiring freeze will save taxpayers money, all evidence suggests the opposite. Hiring freezes make government agencies more dependent on private contractors, who are paid nearly double what federal workers are for the same amount of work. As political scientist John Dilulio points out, the growth of federal contractors (as a substitute for federal employees) is one of the main drivers of waste.

What’s more, hiring freezes can cripple the parts of government that bring money in. When the IRS was forced to cut its workforce between 2010 and 2014, it cost the country $2 billion in revenue. Even Trump’s own nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Steve Mnuchin, conceded in his confirmation hearing that the IRS needs more staffing, telling the Senate, “[If] we add people, we add money.”

3.    It could undermine public safety and health

A hiring freeze could put the nation at greater risk of cyberattacks. That’s because updating government computer systems and increasing security requires personnel—and many of the agencies that protect us against cyberattacks are already understaffed. In an era of ever-increasing cyberattacks (which Donald Trump has openly encouraged in the past), some agencies are already sounding alarms. Without the necessary staff, the work will most likely need to be outsourced. (In the past, lawmakers of both parties raised eyebrows about outsourcing cybersecurity to expensive contractors.)

Food and drug safety could also be jeopardized. For years, the Food and Drug Administration has suffered from staff shortages. In November of last year alone, the FDA was short 700 positions. Inadequate staffing at this critical agency puts Americans at risk of foodborne illness and can slow the time it takes for life-saving treatments to get to market.

4.    It will keep veterans and disabled workers from accessing Social Security and medical care

Two agencies that will be especially hard hit are the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Both agencies are significantly short-staffed, which leads to long waits for care and months- (or even years-)long delays for people to access benefits. Thousands of people die waiting for Social Security disability benefits each year due to unconscionable backlogs that the agency is unable to address without additional staff.

In addition, if Trump and his GOP colleagues in Congress move forward with repealing the Affordable Care Act, many of the 3 million veterans who currently get their care through employers or on the health care exchanges could be forced to turn to the VA to get the care they need, which would further worsen delays. As Peter Kauffmann of VoteVets noted, it would be the “ultimate insult to our men and women who serve to deny them the additional doctors, nurses, therapists, and administrators that are sorely needed at the VA” and if the order “leads to preventable deaths, that will be on Donald Trump’s hands.”

***

Trump has repeatedly proclaimed himself the head of a “workers’ party,” bemoaning in his inauguration speech that there has been “little to celebrate for struggling families across the land” and promising to ring in an era of shared prosperity.

Yet, for the millions of Americans who will lose jobs, suffer delays in accessing needed benefits or medical care, or have their families’ health and safety put at risk by the President’s hiring freeze, there will be even less to celebrate now.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that women will be particularly hard hit by the freeze.

Much of the conversation around the Affordable Care Act—and its potential repeal—has focused on numbers and figures: bending the cost curve, lowering the insurance rate, or slowing health care inflation. But lost in this conversation are the millions of people who owe their medication, treatment, preventive care, and in many cases their lives to the Affordable Care Act.

Representative Tom Price, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and oversee the ACA repeal, has proposed a replacement for the law that would leave young people, Americans with pre-existing conditions, women, and people with disabilities at the mercy of the health insurance industry. This would quite literally put the lives of his own constituents at risk.

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Below are the stories of three people from Tom Price’s district in Georgia who owe their health coverage to the Affordable Care Act.

1. Vicki Hopper

Vicki Hopper had been uninsured for nearly two years before she purchased health insurance on ACA exchanges in Georgia. Two days later she went to have a mammogram and was told to come back for a more extensive evaluation. Two days after that, she found out she had breast cancer. Since then, she has had 10 surgeries, including biopsies, a double mastectomy, and reconstructive surgery.

In Vicki’s case, the Affordable Care Act may have quite literally saved her life. Mammograms, let alone cancer treatment and surgeries, are incredibly expensive and would have likely been impossible without health insurance coverage. Even if Vicki had found out she had breast cancer, insurance companies would have been able to charge her exorbitant rates or outright deny her coverage because cancer qualifies as a pre-existing condition. But under the ACA, routine health benefits like cancer screening, treatment, and follow-up care are required.

As Vicki told us, “If it wasn’t for Obamacare, I would be homeless.”

2. The Kush Family

Patricia Kush knows exactly how devastating an ACA repeal would be, because she remembers what life was like before Congress passed the legislation. In 2004, Patricia’s husband was diagnosed with diabetes. He was working over 40 hours a week, but his employer didn’t offer health insurance. He tried to get individual coverage through the insurance market, but insurance companies refused to cover his diabetes-related expenses. Because he couldn’t afford an expensive insurance plan and the out-of-pocket costs for diabetes medications, he went without health insurance.

In 2007, Patricia’s husband was hospitalized for serious complications from his illness. He survived, but his time in the hospital cost the couple almost $30,000. “We were lucky, Patricia says, “He didn’t die. The hospital forgave a chunk of the costs, and because of good credit, we were able to get a 10-year loan to pay off the rest of the medical bills. But not everyone is as lucky as we were.”

These days, Patricia’s husband is on her health insurance, but their future is far from secure. “If something happened to me, or I lost my job, and Obamacare had been repealed, he would be in real trouble,” Patricia says. Because he has a pre-existing condition, insurance companies would not be required to cover him if Obamacare were repealed outright. “Even though we don’t currently use the health care exchanges, I feel as if it is very important to tell our story from when my husband wasn’t able to get insurance,” she told us. “It would be devastating for so many families if Obamacare is repealed.”

3. Josh Carter

When his son was born in 2014, Josh was working in a stressful and difficult job. According to his wife Sarah, the anxiety and long hours were placing a major strain on the whole family, but they needed the job to be able to support themselves. By the time their son turned one, Josh’s health and the family’s quality of life were suffering. Josh was eventually able to find a contract job to provide for his family, with one major catch—it didn’t include health benefits. But because Obamacare provides people with access to insurance marketplaces, he was able to find health coverage for him, his wife, and his baby through the exchanges and take a new job.

As important as coverage was for Josh, it was even more important for his son. Since the ACA was passed, nearly 2 million kids have gained health insurance that includes essential screenings and immunizations. Josh’s son benefited from blood pressure screening, vision screening, lead screening, and oral health risk assessments.

“My husband would never have been able to take this opportunity if it wasn’t for the ACA and the ability to buy affordable health insurance outside of his employer,” his wife Sarah says. His contract job turned into a permanent job that he loves—an opportunity he would not have had without access to safe, affordable health care.

If Tom Price listened to his constituents, he would hear thousands of stories like these. Vicki, Patricia, Josh and their families all benefited from coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In Vicki’s case, it probably saved her life. Repealing the Affordable Care Act without a replacement that covers the people who currently depend on it would simply cost lives.

If Tom Price is going to continue his plot to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he owes people like Vicki, Josh, and Patricia a plan that ensures they can continue to get the coverage they need.

For months, Trump has been all over the map: One day he’s pledging to provide “insurance for everybody,” the next he’s considering a so-called “replacement” plan that would pull the rug out from under some 21 million seniors, people with disabilities, children, and workers.

But on Wednesday, he took his cluelessness and unpredictability to a new low when he declared, “Whether it’s Medicaid block grants or whatever it may be, we have to make sure that people are taken care of.”

As fans of the 1980s cult classic The Princess Bride, there is only one appropriate response:

There are few surer ways to guarantee that people will NOT be “taken care of” than converting Medicaid into a block grant—a technical term that in reality means massive cuts.

Converting Medicaid into a block grant would end the program’s promise of health insurance for all eligible individuals. It would also slash the federal funding that states receive to run their Medicaid programs, forcing them either to make up the difference with money from their own coffers, or (much more likely) to make huge cuts in the coverage they provide to their residents. Faced with inadequate resources, states could have little choice but to institute waiting lists for coverage or cap enrollment—leaving millions of Americans without the care they need.

In fact, an Urban Institute analysis of a past GOP proposal to block grant Medicaid estimates that an additional 14 million to 20 million Americans would lose coverage under a Medicaid block grant—that’s on top of the 30 million who would lose coverage under ACA repeal and elimination of Medicaid expansion.

This isn’t a new idea. Congressional Republicans—including Representative Tom Price, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—have long had Medicaid block grants on their wish list. But what’s still unclear, as Trump swings recklessly from promising universal coverage to considering slashing health care for people who can’t afford insurance, is whether the President-elect is actually changing his opinion or if he is just so ignorant on health care policy that he doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

In either case, we can be sure of one thing: Trump’s willingness to embrace life-threatening policies without even making an effort to understand them is:

Now that his administration is taking shape, the answer is becoming very, very clear. His nominee for Attorney General has called the NAACP “un-American,” his nominee for the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development has referred to desegregation as “a failed socialist experiment,” and his chief strategist led the website credited with making blatant racism mainstream again. Now, with the nomination of Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump is signaling an attack on public health—which has pronounced health hazards for communities of color.

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Pruitt’s confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday, and his record is providing ample questions for the process. As Attorney General for Oklahoma, Pruitt has spent much of his career trying to dismantle the EPA. He led state attorneys general efforts to sue the EPA over its Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon pollution from dirty-fueled power plants. As Attorney General, he eliminated the office’s Environmental Protection Unit. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from oil and gas interests, and then repeated their calls to allow greater pollution—almost verbatim—to the very agency he is nominated to now serve. An investigation found him to be part of a secret, collaborate alliance between attorneys general and the energy industry. He also denies the science of climate change, despite global scientific agreement.

“Pruitt personifies environmental injustice,” according to Earl Hatley, Grand Riverkeeper and co-founder of the Oklahoma-based nonprofit Local Environmental Action Demanded Agency. Hatley expects Pruitt to provide the oil and gas industry exemptions from air and water protections—first by targeting the Clean Air Act, and then by remove fracking regulations. “Oklahoma is an oil state; it always has been,” says Hatley. “We’re trying to fight it, but with people like Pruitt, the pushback is really hard.”

Pruitt’s record of attacking public health, clean air, and safe drinking water safeguards should concern everyone, but African-American and Latino communities face some of the most serious health risks. Due in part to the enduring legacy of discriminatory housing policies, communities of color are more likely to have lead poisoning or contaminated water, be exposed to hazardous levels of air particle pollutants, and have their homes damaged during extreme weather.  In 2007, nearly half of all people of color in the United States—an estimated 46 percent to 48 percent—lived within six miles of a hazardous waste facility.

Given these risks, it is vital for communities of color to have an EPA Administrator who embraces the environmental justice movement, which fights to give communities of color equal access to clean air and water. The EPA has been criticized for ignoring this movement in the past, but in recent years the agency launched a series of actions to support it—including the EJ 2020 Action Agenda, which includes defining priority areas and engaging in community-based work, and provides roadmaps for outreach and engagement with tribes and communities. The EPA also released a mapping tool that illustrates exactly which communities are most exposed to pollution.

This provides some hope to communities of color, but the EPA has much more work to do.

In the wake of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—and multiple cities throughout the United States—marginalized communities are relying on the EPA now, more than ever, to protect their health from the hazards of water and air pollution. The EPA needs leadership that will protect Americans from pollution and climate change impacts, rather than destroy the EPA’s mission to give people clean air and water.

If there was any question about President-elect Trump’s interest in helping communities of color, he answered it himself. He had the option to nominate an EPA Administrator who pledged to support the agency’s mission to set and enforce air and water quality safeguards, work to reduce air and water pollution, and continue to incorporate environmental justice efforts throughout the agency. Instead, he selected a nominee who wants to attack decades of environmental progress, with no record of helping communities of color fight for environmental equality.

With Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, we have a lot to lose.

On the surface, I don’t have much in common with its residents. I’m a black American. I’m pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, and a feminist. I’m a lifelong progressive. According to multiple media outlets, Owsley’s residents see my beliefs as a direct threat. But we also have deep a bond.

Poverty.

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The median household income in Owsley is just $19,146 per year. The unemployment rate is double the national average, the majority of children live below the poverty line, and in 2011 more than half the county’s residents received food stamps. When Medicaid was expanded under the Affordable Care Act, a whopping 66 percent of residents became eligible. And if you ask them about it, they express deep appreciation. Again and again.

“It’s been a godsend to me,” said a school custodian who suffered from a thyroid condition that practically immobilized her. Medicaid let her get treatment—and it paid for her cataract and carpal tunnel surgery.

Another resident lamented that without Medicaid, she couldn’t pay for the doctor’s visits to keep her hyperthyroidism in check. “If anything changed to make our insurance more expensive for us that would be a big problem,” she said.

Resident after resident in news article after news article acknowledged the price they would pay if these services disappeared. But in the past two years, the residents of Owsley overwhelmingly voted for a governor, and then for a president, who want to eliminate the Affordable Care Act.

Now that the heat of the election has passed, they are anxious. And I understand why.

I’m on Medicaid—a new recipient since the expansion. I have a feeling that several thousand poor white Kentuckians—like this black American—still suffer a twitch of anxiety when they hear the words “payment is due at the time of service,” at the doctor’s office. If you are uninsured and facing a health crisis, those are the scariest words you can hear.

I remember that feeling.

I used to save the change from every purchase I made. I called it “health clinic money,” and I’d collect it for weeks so I could pay for my next $50 doctor’s visit. For more than a decade, my blood pressure readings were at heart attack levels. The doctors at my clinic wanted to see me every month, but I couldn’t always afford it. So I skipped my appointments.

In 2011, I learned my high blood pressure was due to kidney cancer. I was still uninsured, so getting the treatment that could save my life entailed a maze of forms that delayed my surgery for months. I eventually got help from a program in my state called “the Indigent Health Care Fund,” but the funding was spotty before Medicaid was expanded. When I applied, I was told the program was no longer accepting new clients—which happened often, once money for the year ran out—so I didn’t know my surgery had been given the green light until three weeks before it happened.

That’s what life was like for millions of us (and what it has remained like for Americans living in the states that stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA). We languished in fear, and said prayers instead of visiting a physician. That’s inhumane. Free or low-cost health care for those who can’t afford it is a matter of basic decency.

If you don’t believe me, ask my friends in Owsley, Kentucky.

The incoming Republican Senate, House, and the new president are determined to repeal Obamacare, and it’s still a mystery when—or if—it will be replaced. Undoing Medicaid expansion and replacing it with a fee paying system will return millions to the days of saving their change before seeking help. Preventative care (the kind that could have caught my cancer earlier) or regular monthly appointments (the kind that could protect me from a cancer recurrence) will be curtailed or gone.

Instead, the poor everywhere will see the familiar front desk sign that reads “Payment is Due at the Time of Service.” And we’ll go home.

Diaz-Castro is one of tens of thousands of immigrants who came to New Orleans in the years following Hurricane Katrina, which damaged more than one million homes. After helping rebuild the city, this community is now being detained, prosecuted, and deported en masse.

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The federal government now spends more on immigration enforcement than it does on all other law enforcement agencies combined. In addition to funding deportation efforts, this includes more than $2 billion to lock up immigrants in federal detention centers. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains hundreds of thousands of people each year, in part because a little-known congressional directive known as the bed mandate requires ICE to keep a minimum of 34,000 “beds” per day.

In 2012, ICE targeted Diaz-Castro as he was leaving for work. He and his friend were trying to jumpstart his car in the parking lot of his apartment complex when eight armed ICE officers surrounded them. Upon discovering that he was undocumented, ICE promptly arrested and deported him.

This was during the early days of the Criminal Alien Removal Initiative, or CARI, an aggressive ICE pilot program that resembled stop-and-frisk policing. According to ICE, the program was supposed to focus on undocumented immigrants with criminal records who posed a risk to community safety. But according to Fernando Lopez, a lead organizer for the Congreso de Jornaleros (Congress of Day Laborers), an organizing and advocacy group in Louisiana, that’s not how it worked in practice. Lopez says that the result of the program was “totally racial profiling,” and that whenever ICE would see two or three Latino people, “they would just surround them with their guns drawn.” These raids happened all throughout the Latino community—in laundromats, bible study, at a Latino market in the suburbs.

Diaz-Castro and his partner, Linda Guzman, were expecting when he was deported in 2012. He knew that without his support, his partner would struggle to provide for their newborn son. “I couldn’t abandon them,” he says. So he came back, just in time for their son Willie’s birth.

After a few years of relative peace, on March 22, a team of ICE officers swarmed Diaz-Castro’s apartment without a warrant. Three-year-old Willie watched as the officers interrogated his father, handcuffed him, and took him away.

Diaz-Castro’s absence has been hard on his family. Guzman makes $8 per hour in her job at a laundromat—not nearly enough to pay for rent, utilities, food, and a babysitter for Willie. Without Diaz-Castro’s wages to help, Guzman could no longer afford rent, so she—and Willie—became homeless.

***

In 2014, President Barack Obama announced his resolve to fix our immigration system. He put forth a plan to grant deferred action to undocumented parents, and he expanded the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He also vowed to focus on “actual threats to our security,” and promised to punish “felons, not families.” But these words have been little comfort for Diaz-Castro, who’s never even had a speeding ticket, let alone committed a violent offense. As he puts it, “My only crime is to be an immigrant.”

After his arrest in March, Diaz-Castro spent a month in one of ICE’s privately-owned detention centers. Since he had no prior criminal record, he didn’t qualify as a priority for deportation, so ICE referred his case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and transferred him to federal prison. When he was finally charged with illegal entry 6 months later, he’d already served his entire sentence. He was released from prison, but ICE didn’t let him go free—instead, they transferred him back to detention, using his entry charge as a new justification for deportation.

***

Diaz-Castro has been an active member of the Congreso de Jornaleros since 2013, and they’ve been providing legal support throughout his case. In addition to direct legal support, the group also conducts large-scale grassroots organizing and direct action. They were instrumental in stopping the CARI raids: They ran an escalation campaign that included a large protest at ICE headquarters in which dozens of Congreso members chose to get arrested, risking deportation to draw attention to the brutality of the raids.

It’s partly through Congreso’s help that Diaz-Castro got his charges reduced from felony re-entry to misdemeanor entry. After ICE transferred him from federal prison back to immigration detention, Congreso urged ICE to exercise prosecutorial discretion and release him, arguing that he didn’t meet any of the criteria ICE uses to prioritize people for deportation. ICE relented, and on December 20, they released him.

Under President Trump, demand for groups like Congreso will likely increase. Trump has promised to end sanctuary cities, triple the number of ICE agents, and deport “criminal aliens” on day one of his presidency. Lopez says they must fight against the normalization of racism, hate, and bigotry that will accompany a Trump presidency. To do this, Congreso is mobilizing more people than it has in the past, including people who aren’t as directly affected. “Allies need to step up,” he insists.

Lopez says they’re recruiting people to join a larger movement that’s “not just about immigrants.” It’s a movement that’s broadly anti-hate, anti-racism, anti-family separation; a movement that includes hundreds of groups like Congreso that have been fighting—and winning—local battles against injustice.

“I love people,” she said. “It’s like a gift, a passion.”

Coleman is a home care aide in Tennessee, helping older and disabled people with daily tasks like bathing and cooking in their own homes. Over the 20 years she’s been on the job, she’s learned about golf by taking a client out to play, gone dancing with another, and listened to others talk about their travels around the world. She takes special pride in helping the men and women she cares for stay in charge of their own lives.

“I come into their homes [and] let them know I’m just there to help them,” she said. “I still respect them, that they have independence and are able to function.”

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For all the talk about factory jobs Donald Trump spurred with his rhetoric on trade, one of the clearest ways to improve American jobs has nothing to do with manufacturing. Demand for jobs like Coleman’s—in-home care aides and other direct care workers—is growing fast as the U.S. population ages.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the number of personal care aides, who provide non-medical home care, will grow by 458,000 between 2014 and 2024—the most of any single profession. It projects another 348,000 new jobs for home health aides, who do similar work with a greater focus on medical care like checking vital signs and administering medications.

Despite the increase in demand, these jobs are also some of the worst paid in the country: the median annual wage is under $22,000.

Coleman currently makes $8.25 an hour, and the hours she gets can change dramatically from month to month as clients cycle in and out of home care. She doesn’t get paid time off, so she has been putting off surgery for painful uterine fibroids. Her car needs work that she can’t afford, and she’s been paying her rent in installments as her paychecks come in. Lately she’s been particularly low on hours, so she often eats only one meal a day.

“I’ve trained my body to do that,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for a while, so I kind of know my ups and downs.”

The new administration’s plans are unlikely to improve working conditions. Eighty-three percent of home care funding, and 64 percent of health care spending overall, comes from government sources like Medicaid and Medicare. Instead of bolstering the programs so that direct care jobs can pay higher wages, Congress is poised to roll back the Medicaid expansion that has extended coverage to about 10 million people. Tom Price, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has also signaled that he’ll push to privatize Medicare benefits. And House Speaker Paul Ryan and Tom Price have both promised to convert Medicaid into block grants for states, which would slow the program’s growth and prevent it from automatically expanding to meet increased need during economic downturns.

This would all add up to less money for care workers—whether it’s funding for new jobs, or to make existing jobs pay better. That’s a burden on the workers themselves, and a danger to the people they care for. During economic boom years, nursing homes sometimes can’t pay competitive wages and end up understaffed. As a result, more of the facilities’ residents end up dying when the economy is strong.

Trump, Ryan, and many others say that we need to spur private-sector hiring and keep government spending down. But industries that create profitable products, from air conditioners to financial derivatives, are increasingly funneling money to the wealthy while employing fewer workers. Meanwhile, the human labor jobs where we are beginning to face shortages, in sectors like education and direct care, don’t lend themselves to for-profit enterprises.

An economic policy designed to work for workers would shape the economy so that the work we really need gets done at a fair wage. That means listening to people like Sepia Coleman, who see their own needs and their clients’ as inseparable. Coleman said she wants to be a professional, unionized worker with the leverage to speak up for her clients and make sure they’re getting the resources they need. She also needs to be able to take a day off when she’s sick and pay her bills on time.

“I deserve to live, not struggle,” she said. “Nobody deserves to struggle every single day.”

Earlier this month, when rumors of erstwhile presidential candidate Ben Carson’s role in a future Trump administration started flying, Carson made it clear that he wasn’t interested in an agency appointment. In the words of his business manager, “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he’s never run a federal agency. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency.”

A lot can change in a month.

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Despite Carson’s earlier objections, last week it seemed like President-elect Trump was on the verge of nominating the former neurosurgeon as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). And Carson, citing the fact that he once lived in a city, now believes he’s up to the task.

Here’s the problem: HUD is a critically important federal agency with a budget of almost $50 billion, 9,000 employees across the country, and programs that affect the lives of millions of people. The Secretary of HUD isn’t a vanity appointment to be bestowed upon any half-willing volunteer.

Here are six reasons why the agency deserves a qualified leader who is up to the task.

HUD Makes It Possible for Families of Color, Middle-Income Families, and Millennials to Buy Homes

One of HUD’s core missions is to help families buy a home, which is critical for building wealth. That’s why it manages the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insures private mortgage loans against the risk of default by the borrower. That makes financial institutions more willing to provide credit—particularly to groups who have been historically excluded from homeownership, like families of color.

FHA has insured more than 40 million homes since it was established in 1934, and it’s becoming even more important in the current tight credit environment.  FHA’s market share of single-family purchase loan originations more than doubled between 2004 and 2015, and many of those loans are going to underserved communities of color where conventional credit continues to be limited.

HUD Makes Sure Low-Income Families Have Access to Housing

For many years, the private market has failed to provide enough affordable rental housing for low-income families. HUD helps fill this gap through a variety of rental assistance programs—from public housing to housing vouchers—in order to ensure that more low-income families have a decent, safe, and affordable place to live. More than 5 million low-income households use federal rental assistance, and without it, many of these families would likely experience homelessness.

HUD Promotes Economic Mobility for Whole Communities

HUD is working to break up the concentrated poverty and de facto segregation that put some communities at a major disadvantage. Last year, the department finalized a rule that requires local governments that use HUD funding to examine patterns of poverty and residential segregation—and to put forward a credible plan for addressing these challenges. That’s essential in a country that is becoming increasingly diverse—and where discrimination in housing is still alive and well.

Through programs such as the Housing Choice Voucher Program, HUD also helps many families move out of distressed neighborhoods to higher opportunity areas, where there is better access to jobs and good schools.

HUD Addresses Discrimination in the Housing Market

HUD is able to process significantly more housing discrimination complaints than any other government agency—an average of 9,201 per year from 2010 to 2013. The complaints are typically rooted in someone’s race or disability, and nearly a third result in some form of penalty against an offending lender or landlord.

There are a few other agencies that share some of the responsibility for enforcing fair housing law—specifically the Justice Department’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section—but they are not set up for efficient, large scale enforcement. As a result, the Justice Department’s annual case load is a tiny fraction of what HUD processes each year.

HUD is the Biggest Source of Funding to Prevent Homelessness

HUD provides more funding for homeless assistance than any other federal department. The department has also been responsible for the development of tens of thousands of housing units to house people who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness. HUD also helps to ensure that residents living in these units receive the social support services they need to get back on their feet, and to avoid homelessness in the future. Since hundreds of thousands of Americans still experience homelessness every day, these services are critical.

Too often, the root cause behind homelessness is domestic violence. Through its Office of Special Needs Assistance Program, HUD plays a key role in rapid re-housing and in providing homeless families and survivors of domestic violence with options that let them transition into safe, stable, and affordable housing.

HUD Helps Rebuild Communities After Natural Disasters

HUD serves as an important partner to communities rebuilding after disasters have struck. For example, the department played a major role in the recovery of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 1 million people, through the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program.  The department invested $20 billion in affected states, which supported the long-term recovery of the region’s housing stock, economy, and infrastructure.

HUD can deploy CDBG-DR funds in the case of any presidentially-declared natural disasters, as long as funds are available. Just this fall, HUD deployed $500 million to help communities in Louisiana, West Virginia, and Texas recover from historic flooding. As extreme weather events increase in frequency, HUD’s role in rebuilding communities will be even more vital.

Housing is one of the biggest determinants of where and how we live, and it is intimately linked with broader issues of wealth and poverty. HUD’s vital role necessitates engaged, qualified, and experienced leadership.  Ben Carson—by his own admission—is simply not up to the task.

If you were wondering whether Donald Trump would keep his promise to protect Medicare from cuts, you just got your answer. Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services is none other than Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), one of the country’s leading advocates for turning Medicare upside down.

Over the course of his campaign, Donald Trump assured voters that he would not take an ax to Medicare. In May of last year, he made that particularly clear when he told the Daily Signal, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” That fits in well with Trump’s allegedly populist campaign message—in fact, it would fit even better if he pledged to expand Medicare and other social safety net programs.

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But with the election just three weeks in the rearview mirror, Trump is already wrapping his arms around various proposals to gut the social safety net that conservatives have long advocated for—including schemes to weaken Medicare. Price’s appointment is just the latest signal that the incoming administration is willing to put seniors’ health care on the chopping block.

Price has spent his career attacking Medicare. In 2009, he marked Medicare’s 44th anniversary by bashing it. “Nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare,” Price wrote. Two years later, Price introduced a bill to shift more Medicare costs onto seniors by partially privatizing the program.

After Trump’s election, Price said that he hoped to have a Medicare overhaul “within the first six to eight months” of the Trump administration. He’s planning on using a process called budget reconciliation—which would allow conservatives to push through major policy changes without needing to secure a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate.

Privatizing Medicare has been on conservatives’ wish list for years—Speaker Ryan advocated for it as a way to cut the program’s costs as early as 2010. In a budget proposal that year, Ryan pushed the idea of “premium support,” which would effectively swap out the current Medicare system—where the government pays hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers—for one where every person essentially gets a check to buy their own insurance on a private market. Effectively, the plan takes power away from Medicare enrollees and puts it squarely into the hands of private insurers. Ryan’s most recent version of the plan would not eliminate traditional Medicare right away, but it would undermine the program and raise the eligibility age.

The devil is, as always, in the details, and so far Price and Ryan have declined to specify exactly what their Medicare overhaul would entail. But the consequences are potentially very grave: previous proposals would hollow out the current program and replace it with one that covers fewer people, offers its enrollees fewer benefits, and opens the door to charging much higher premiums to seniors facing the most significant challenges to their health.

Despite his campaign promises, it seems Trump is now falling in line . Price’s appointment follows a statement the president-elect put out on his transition website, where he pledges to “modernize Medicare, so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation—and beyond.” In the world of political parlance—especially after an election where Trump made a number of explicit attacks against many groups of Americans—this may not sound like much. But in fact, this phrasing strongly suggests that Trump is getting ready to join conservatives’ long-running effort to gut Medicare as we know it.

This is what makes Trump’s pivot on Medicare so disconcerting: It appears to be yet another example of how the populist rejection of establishment politics that defined his campaign’s narrative was just a ruse. Another broken promise originally made in bad faith.

My late grandfather, a New Deal Democrat who proudly cast his first vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third term in 1940, taught me many things: The airy pleasure of crooners Bing Crosby and Perry Como, how to handicap a horse race, the importance of being on time. (Incidentally, I’m still working on that last one.)

One lesson in particular is sticking out as we get more information on President-elect Trump’s plans for office. It went something like, “A person breaks a promise every single minute. If they’re acting in good faith, you give ‘em another chance. But if you know they aren’t, just go ahead and throw the first punch.”

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the American people appear to be ready to throw a punch. They happen to like their Medicare the way it is, and fiercely oppose turning it into a premium support-based system. According to a June 2015 poll, only 26% of respondents support transitioning Medicare to a premium support model. In contrast, an overwhelming 70% of respondents said they preferred keeping Medicare structurally as it is.

There is no doubt Donald Trump was wise to the popularity of Medicare when he promised not to cut it a year and a half ago. Now that he seems likely to join in Speaker Ryan’s barrage of attacks on the social safety net, he may be surprised by how his supporters respond.

But evidence of the flaw in Trump’s plan was right in front of him. The charter school he was speaking at—the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy—is not doing well. The state of Ohio gives the school a grade of D for its students’ test performance.

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School choice is not a new concept. For decades, states have been trying to encourage competition among different school models. That has led to an explosion in the number of charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate outside of the control of local school districts. The trouble is, researchers have found that these schools have mixed effects. In some cases charters improve test scores, while in others students do significantly worse than they would in neighborhood schools. Some districts have also tried giving students vouchers to go to private schools—which Trump has also called for—and have had similarly mixed results.

Many public school advocates argue that even the best charter schools can cause problems, because they drain money from other schools. That raises a big question about Trump’s plan, which would redirect $20 billion in federal funds to let students choose different schools. If that comes from the Department of Education budget, as some analysts expect, it would likely come from the two big buckets of federal money that go to K-12 schools now: $15.5 billion in Title 1 funds for schools with low-income populations and $12 billion for special education. Using that money for vouchers could mean decimating before- and after-school programs, tutoring in reading and math, and other supports for students facing the most serious academic challenges. The plan would also encourage states to dig money out of their own education spending for school choice.

Though his plan is misguided, the education crisis Trump points to is real—and really serious. There’s a huge and growing gap between the academic achievement levels of rich and poor kids. Today, students from wealthy families outscore their low-income counterparts by nearly 400 points on the SATs and are far more likely to graduate from high school.

One of the most successful ways to help low-income kids do better is to reduce income segregation, which has grown by 40% since 1990. That has a serious impact: One eye-popping study found that students from lower-income, less-educated families who attend school with wealthier peers are 68% more likely to attend a four-year college than those who go to an income-segregated school with peers from similar backgrounds.

The study’s author, Gregory Palardy of the University of California at Riverside, said segregation is the single biggest way that U.S. schools shortchange low-income students. Schools serving poor children tend to get less funding, hire less-skilled teachers, and offer fewer advanced courses than their counterparts in wealthier areas. And, Palardy said, poor kids simply have a harder time succeeding when their peers are all facing similar disadvantages. He said lower-income kids are far more likely to succeed if they go to school with more affluent peers who know a lot about college and expect, as a matter of course, that they’ll continue their education beyond high school.

“They rub off on you and your view of the world,” he said.

One of the arguments behind school choice is that it would reduce segregation by letting parents send their kids to schools that are more diverse than their neighborhoods. But studies have found that the proliferation of charter schools has led to greater economic—as well as racial—segregation. There are essentially two sets of charter schools. One enrolls predominantly privileged white students—often pulling them from more diverse neighborhood schools—while another serves mainly poor black and Latino communities.

The importance of integration hasn’t gone unnoticed in education policy circles. Across the country, some school districts are working to reduce economic segregation, and earlier this year President Obama proposed a $120 million grant program to support these efforts. But all these plans depend on higher-income parents’ voluntarily participation, which isn’t always easy to achieve.

Dr. Catherine Cushinberry, executive director of the national organization Parents for Public Schools (PPS), said that richer, white parents may want to keep their children out of poorer, more heavily minority schools because they mistakenly worry that these schools won’t be good for their kids. But, she said, it’s often possible to convince them that a more diverse school has advantages. That’s part of PPS’s mission.

“The source of our beginning, really, is in Jackson, Mississippi in the early ’90s,” Cushinberry said. “It was around this notion of white flight. We’re still dealing with similar issues as we did in 1991.”

Today, PPS supports parent activists in school systems from the Deep South to San Francisco, where rapid gentrification is raising new questions about school segregation. In addition to encouraging school integration, the organization works to get parents involved in improving the schools.

One recent, hopeful story comes from Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. Two low-income, mostly African-American high schools were closed, and the students moved to the more affluent Starkville High. Fearing that wealthier white families would pull their kids from the school, members of PPS Starkville worked with the state legislature, Mississippi State University, and other local groups to help smooth the transition. They found ways to get new funding for computers, books, buses and equipment, and to open new programs—including a pre-K. In the end there was no white flight. A number of white students actually left private schools for the new, more integrated district.

As far as Trump’s plan to increase school choice goes, Cushinberry said there just aren’t enough details available yet for her to comment. But, she said, in the wake of the election, she’s been thinking about how Americans can work together across social divisions.

“Certainly one way to unify communities is around bringing together strong, quality schools,” she said.

That upbeat report is likely to be the last burst of good news that the poor will see for quite some time. Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and the bellicose tribunes of the hard right are in complete charge of the federal government. Their hostility to such crucial anti-poverty efforts as the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, food stamps, and substantial increases in the minimum wage is hardly a secret.

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With both houses of Congress under Republican control, big tax cuts (heavily weighted toward the richest among us) are a virtual certainty. As a result, trillions of dollars in revenues will likely be lost and Congress will be on the hunt for spending cuts to offset them. Social programs will be among the first items in their sights.

We’ve already seen something of a blueprint for what’s coming: Paul Ryan’s wish list was in his 2015 budget proposal. Nearly 70% of its heart-stopping spending cuts would have come from programs designed to help moderate or low-income people. Last spring Ryan came up with another proposal—this one specifically addressing poverty. He recommended, among other things, cuts to unemployment assistance, a phase-out of the Head Start program, and rollbacks in the federal Pell Grant program, which provides desperately needed assistance to low-income students pursuing higher education.

Ryan’s poverty plans seem peculiarly designed to increase the hardships faced by the poor.

Trump’s approach will likely align with Ryan’s, since his fundamental take on poverty is that people are poor because they are not willing to work. In an interview with Sean Hannity last year, Trump was asked if he would be able to lift America’s 50 million poor people out of poverty.

“I would,” said Trump. “I would create incentives for people to work. People don’t have an incentive. They make more money by sitting there doing nothing than they make if they have a job.”

That, of course, was ominous. The man who is now president-elect did not seem to know that the majority of those who are poor in America are children, people with disabilities, and seniors. Nor did he seem to understand that many adults who are poor actually have jobs and are working every day. There are also millions of people in America who are jobless but frantically seeking work, and millions more who are working part-time but would much rather have full-time employment.

Trump has never given any indication that he knows much or cares much about the poor. Early in his campaign he seemed to be strongly against a higher minimum wage, one of the most important weapons in the anti-poverty arsenal. A year ago, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Trump said, “Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high, everything is too high.” And in one of the GOP primary debates, when asked if he would raise the minimum wage, he replied, “I would not do it.”

Since then, Trump has modified his position somewhat, saying variously that he would look at the possibility of a higher minimum wage, that people need more money, and that states should determine whether minimum wage levels should be raised.

It is, of course, always difficult to glean what Trump’s position is on any given policy. His approaches to policy matters are typically incoherent. But there is nothing that he and the rest of his party have said that would signal anything other than a relentless assault on programs that aid lower-income Americans. Paul Ryan has long been trying to undermine Social Security and Medicare—programs that are cherished by his own Republican constituents. Trump has said that he would protect the benefits of both programs, but who knows what he would do when the tax cuts kick in and deficits start to rise.

For those concerned about the well-being of lower-income individuals and families, it’s dismaying to hear how falsely the right has portrayed the state of the economy during the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Congressional Republicans have shamelessly bad-mouthed the economy at every turn, and their goal was not just to win elections. By trashing all things Obama, they have laid the groundwork for their campaign to undo many of the policies and initiatives that have helped so many Americans, including the poor, since the darkest days of the Great Recession.

This false portrayal of the economy was absorbed by an awful lot of voters. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic magazine:

“More than half of Republicans think that unemployment has increased under Obama. It has in fact fallen from 10% in 2010 to below 5% today. The labor market is in its longest continuous expansion ever, and the last 12 months have been the best period for wage growth this century.”

Memories are short. When Obama took office, the economy was hemorrhaging 700,000 to 800,000 jobs a month. Since 2010, the economy has grown by nearly 200,000 jobs a month. Twenty million more Americans have health insurance coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Hillary Clinton may have lost Michigan in the presidential election, but if not for Obama and a willing Congress, America would have lost the automobile industry. Try to imagine the impact of that on Michigan and the rest of the country.

Sure, there are plenty of people who are still hurting. But the way to address the concerns of those who are struggling is not to demolish the policies that have already helped millions. We should build upon those policies, improve them, and make every effort to expand the economy and raise the living standards of those who continue to struggle.

What is difficult for so many people of goodwill to comprehend is that improving the lives of poor and low-income Americans is not the objective of conservative politicians. The overriding goals of Donald Trump and his allies in Congress are the same as the goals of the conservative movement throughout the modern era: to expand the wealth, status, and power of the privileged few at the expense of everyone else. That’s why big tax cuts for the rich are the top priority.

All of history tells us that the poor will suffer when Donald Trump comes into office. Just trace how the poor have fared under various administrations from, say, the beginning of the 1930s until now. There’s a reason why George H.W. Bush ridiculed his own party’s trickle-down theories as “voodoo economics.”

In contrast, here is what the policies of the Obama Administration have led to, as recently described by Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

“For the first time since 1999, all three key indicators of well-being in the annual Census data moved decisively in the right direction in 2015. The number of uninsured Americans fell by 4 million from 2014 to 2015, on top of a drop of nearly 9 million the year before, with the uninsured rate falling to a historically low 9.1%. The typical household’s income rose by 5.2% or $2,798, after adjusting for inflation, the largest increase on record with data back to 1967. The poverty rate dropped from 14.8% to 13.5%, tying the largest improvement since 1968. Moreover, data to date for 2016 indicate further progress so far this year.”

That was the good news. The bad news is that President-elect Donald Trump and a like-minded Congress are barreling ahead with plans that will undo much, if not most, of that very substantial progress. Unless advocates for the poor in and out of Congress mobilize for a fight like they haven’t seen in decades, an awful lot of poor people will face many long years of extreme—and I do mean extreme—suffering.