“It made me physically nauseous,” said Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, reflecting on the massive sums Democrats raised and spent on the 2024 presidential election, “thinking about how many people could be fed, or how many clinics could be funded, or how much student debt could be paid off.”

So after Abughazaleh announced her candidacy for a highly competitive primary in March, she transformed her campaign headquarters in Rogers Park — a lower-income neighborhood in Chicago’s North Side— into a mutual aid hub.

Situated at the front of her 9th Congressional District campaign office are rows of basics like diapers and winter clothes to medical supplies like Narcan. “We’ve also had people bring in stuff like nail polish,” said Abughazaleh, adding, “everyone deserves good things.” Anyone is welcome to come off the street, she explained, without checking for income or immigration status.

In addition to offering supplies while the office is open, the campaign also helps stock a community fridge available any time of day and hosts drives to collect specific supplies. A request for tampons for Chicago’s Period Collective, for example, resulted in a massive outpouring of support. “We ended up getting over 5,600, and my campaign manager’s car was just filled with tampons,” said Abughazaleh through laughter. “I wanted him to get pulled over so bad.”

The point here is to “show” the campaign’s values through providing for the community, rather than simply telling people why they should vote for her, said Abughazaleh.

“I grew up Republican,” she said, “and I can’t think of anything that would have made me be a Democrat faster — especially if it were today, when people have lost all faith in the political system — than people showing their values rather than just saying them.”

Abughazaleh faces off against a competitive field to replace retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. As of early November, 21 candidates had filed to run in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District — including a whopping 17 Democrats and four Republicans. The Democratic primary race will be held in March.

Abughazaleh, a former journalist with a large social media following, is ahead of the pack in conventional fundraising, and hopes that her “experimental” approach to campaigning will help pull her over the finish line. In fact, she thinks the Democratic establishment could learn a thing or two from her.

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In November, with SNAP benefits paused due to the government shutdown, Abughazaleh’s campaign donated $2,500 to the Niles Township Food Pantry.

“I can’t think of anything more convincing for voters, but also just the right thing to do during that period, and during all of this, than the Democratic Party using its immense resources to — with no strings attached — stock food banks, fund clinics, and make sure people have what they need,” she said.

“We don’t need to spend $20 million to make lefty Joe Rogan in a lab,” Abughazaleh added, in a nod to a strategic pitch Democratic operatives offered earlier this year. “We can spend $20 million on making sure kids have enough to eat, or making sure that parents have baby formula, or making sure that older folks are having meals actually delivered.”

Abughazaleh’s approach has not been without its detractors. On social media, some people have accused the campaign of attempting to buy votes by offering free food, water, and clothes, in the same place as advertisements for the candidate.

Accusations of “vote buying” are a serious risk for candidates implementing strategies like Abughazaleh’s, said Jessica Byrd, a political strategist who served as chief of staff for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “One accusation of buying votes, and your entire campaign is under a microscope. It slows you down, it makes you less effective, and then you have to spend money to defend yourself,” explained Byrd. “So it really is a risk.”

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Abughazaleh has already faced significant scrutiny in her race. In October, she was indicted along with five other activists on federal conspiracy charges over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest. She and her co-defendants are pleading not guilty.

“It’s incredible” that the Abughazaleh campaign is going ahead with its mutual aid efforts despite the reputational risks and associated costs, Byrd said. The Abrams campaign instituted a similar strategy in 2022, forming a program to connect Georgians with existing services, from legal support to food assistance. “We were barely out of COVID, and it was really clear that we couldn’t just ask for people’s votes,” said Byrd. “We actually needed to ask how everybody was doing.”

Byrd said she appreciated seeing another campaign focus on how they can help their constituents before coming into office.

“People are suffering deeply, deeply suffering,” said Byrd. “Every single person running, their constituents are looking at them saying, ‘How are you helping me right this moment, right now, not in the future, not when you get it through the legislature? How are you a hero right now?’ And it’s on all of us to figure out how we can serve people right this moment.”

From a political perspective, it’s hard to know whether this type of strategy will pay off in more votes. Andre Martin, who serves as Abughazaleh’s deputy campaign manager and runs the mutual aid operation, said while most of the items are donated, there’s still a cost associated with pulling something like this off.

“It’s really, really taxing. It’s not an easy thing. It takes a lot of our resources,” he said. “It’s not something that comes without cost to our ability to do more conventional organizing. We spend a lot of time helping folks.”

Part of that cost is spending a significant amount of time on compliance with campaign finance regulations. Abughazaleh told The Intercept that the campaign works with a compliance firm that carefully monitors the pools of resources being donated to, or by, the campaign’s mutual aid arm.

According to Martin, the purpose of the hub isn’t to actively campaign to people coming in for resources. “Sometimes people will ask because they see the signs,” he said, adding, “We are mostly just asking people if they need help, like, finding things on the shelves, navigating our sorting system, things like that. That’s the only information we solicit from them.”

However, Abughazaleh said canvassing isn’t the goal here. “I wanted to figure out the best way to use our funds to not just run a race, but also help the community,” she said, “because if every campaign did something like that, then every election would be a net benefit to the community, win or lose.”

The post Kat Abughazaleh Thinks Campaign Funds Should Help Feed People appeared first on The Intercept.

The template agreement, which references the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — but also applies funding to fight malaria, tuberculosis, and other pathogens — would require countries that receive global health assistance to share a broad range of health care and pathogen data for the next 25 years.

The model document would also require foreign governments to provide the United States with “any data access or information needed to monitor compliance” with the Helms Amendment, which prevents U.S. federal funds from being used to provide abortion care abroad. This stipulation would give the United States broad authority to collect data on abortion care and policy for decades to come.

“The [agreement] is just another example of the Trump Administration’s playbook for using its power and influence to further its anti-choice agenda and undermine critical national public health responses,” wrote Melissa Cockroft, global lead on abortion for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, in a statement to The Intercept.

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The document was developed in line with the State Department’s new “America First Global Health Strategy,” which seeks to broadly eliminate multilateral cooperation on international health care initiatives, like the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system being negotiated by the World Health Organization, in favor of direct agreements between the United States and other countries.

After the government shutdown brought negotiations to a screeching halt, the department has renewed its efforts to reach bilateral global health agreements with dozens of countries, primarily in Africa, identified in its America First Global Health Strategy. The State Department is supposed to complete the deals by the end of the year.

Global health experts who spoke to The Intercept cautioned that these agreements appear to be highly unbalanced, giving the Trump administration sweeping authority to extract data on a number of issues, including on abortion, raising significant concerns about misuse at a time when the Trump administration is looking to limit access to abortion globally.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Collecting data itself isn’t an unusual function of a global health initiative, said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization focused on HIV prevention.

PEPFAR, in particular, “has always been very data rich, lots of data collected and analyzed, but in a very collaborative nature between governments, civil society, and the United States government … and there’s always been great clarity on why we’re collecting this data,” he said.

However, Warren also noted that the section around “any data access” necessary to monitor compliance with the anti-abortion Helms Amendment — which gives broad discretion to the United States to request access to abortion-related data for decades — goes far beyond that scope.

“The part about Helms and requiring compliance information on that for 25 years, along with everything else, does raise some concerns about what [the administration] is doing with this,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and CEO of Global Health Council. “Is there a larger play at foot to use data to monitor countries’ regulatory moves around liberalizing restrictions on abortion?”

While it’s unclear exactly how the Trump administration plans to use this data, Cockroft said the model agreement is concerning against the larger backdrop of its anti-abortion agenda.

In January, President Donald Trump reinstated the global gag rule, a policy that prevents foreign organizations that receive global health assistance from providing information, referrals, or services related to abortion care or advocating for abortion access.

“We know the Trump administration is seeking at all costs to restrict abortion access globally,” said Cockroft. “Requests from the Trump administration in the MoU for ‘any data’ for compliance monitoring are very concerning, as it is unclear how exactly the data will be used and to what ends.”

Dunn-Georgiou told The Intercept that the administration is also in the process of expanding the rule, potentially to encompass all non-military foreign assistance, U.S.-based nonprofits, and foreign governments, massively expanding its scope and impact.

While there’s no public information on how exactly these final agreements will differ from the template produced by the Trump administration, most recipient countries, particularly in Africa, don’t have much negotiating power to change the terms to their benefit.

“People are getting sick. Medicine is hard to find. I’ve even heard of condom shortages in some countries because the prevention funding for HIV has been stalled,” said Dunn-Georgiou. “Many countries are feeling so squeezed for funding that they will take the deal.”

The post Trump Wants to Make African Countries Share Abortion Data to Get AIDS Funding appeared first on The Intercept.

She had been rationing her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits for over a month, unsure of when, if ever, the deposit would hit her account again. “It’s been awful,” said Sarah, who asked to be identified by her first name only because she fears speaking out could hurt her job search. But the Maryland mom said she was willing to sacrifice if it meant millions of Americans could afford their health insurance.

“The pitch they made, it made sense,” Sarah told The Intercept. “Everyone knew it was going to be painful, but it was important … and they just wasted it all.”

On Sunday, a group of eight Democratic senators, including Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., cut a deal with Republican leadership to end the government shutdown. They did it without forcing Republicans to agree to any of the major concessions Democrats said they were fighting to secure, which included a reversal of Medicaid cuts and an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The deal is slated for a vote in the House on Wednesday evening, and it looks likely to pass.

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While Senate Republican leadership agreed to hold a vote on the subsidies, the legislation is more than likely dead in the water, especially since Democrats forfeited their main piece of leverage. As a result, tens of millions of Americans are projected to see their premiums skyrocket, and an estimated 7.8 million low-income Americans will outright lose their insurance through Medicaid.

The Intercept spoke with four SNAP recipients who said they’re furious that Democrats squandered the sacrifice they made for the last month to ensure access to health care for millions of Americans — just as voters rewarded the party for finally fighting back against Republicans with major electoral victories last week.

“We sacrificed and we would continue to sacrifice because we understood what the stakes were. People’s health care was at stake,” said Delight Worthyn, 67, a SNAP recipient with lupus living in New Haven, Connecticut. “And that they would cave for nothing after we have all gone through this. … I only feel betrayed.”

Though the Supreme Court has paused a federal judge’s order that the Trump administration pay full SNAP benefits for the month of November, some recipients have started receiving full or partial benefits. The SNAP funding available varies by state.

Sasha Slansky, 33, a full-time master’s student at Queens College at the City University of New York who works a series of odd jobs to pay her bills, said it’s “insulting” for Democrats to use SNAP recipients as a justification for caving to Republicans and President Donald Trump. In his floor speech, Durbin invoked SNAP recipients as one of the reasons he was agreeing to Republicans’ shutdown deal.

“Don’t talk about me and my food insecurity to justify kicking people like me off of my health care,” said Slansky, noting that Democrats seem not to have taken into account the overlap between SNAP recipients and people who receive Medicaid and their insurance through the Affordable Care Act. “It’s insane, and it’s insulting, and it’s also just so wildly out of touch.”

Nearly 30 million of the 38.3 million people who received SNAP in 2022 were enrolled in Medicaid. The number of SNAP recipients has since risen to 42 million people, as of this year.

“I’m also on Medicaid,” Slansky said. “And as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani and many, many Democrats have made clear, this has the potential to kick [millions] of Americans off of Medicaid, which likely includes me.”

Natalie, a delivery driver living in Lynnwood, Washington, said she managed to spend only half of her SNAP benefits for the month, stretching meals that would normally last her two days to three or four. She received her benefits for the first time since October on Tuesday, but she said it doesn’t erase the hardship of the last month.

Though the Supreme Court has paused a federal judge’s order that the Trump administration pay full SNAP benefits for the month of November, some recipients have started receiving full or partial benefits. The SNAP funding available varies by state.

“It felt like we were making a small sacrifice, skipping [meals], because we felt like we were doing something to help save people, and that we were doing something good for the country, and to have our only leverage just handed over,” said Natalie, who asked to be identified by her first name because she’s transgender and wanted to avoid transphobic harassment. “It feels like it wasn’t for anything.”

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Natalie said she wishes that Democrats had built off of their electoral victories in New York, Virginia, New Jersey, and California earlier this month to pressure Republicans, instead of immediately disarming when they had the upper hand.

“The MAGA Republicans were on the ropes. They were getting the blame. Why didn’t they keep using that and pushing the narrative, the truth, on social media and traditional news that Republicans are doing this to people?” said Natalie. “That was a really strong message, and it was one that people were willing to sacrifice for.”

The post SNAP Recipients Crushed by Democrats Caving on Shutdown: “They Just Wasted It All” appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats had spent weeks arguing that the longest shutdown in history was necessary to make sure health care subsidies administered under the Affordable Care Act were preserved in the next spending package. They won’t be: Instead, Senate Republicans agreed to hold a separate vote on ACA subsidies by the end of the year. With Republicans in the majority, Democrats are almost guaranteed to lose. 

Speaking to The Intercept, a key Democratic leader who voted to end the shutdown argued the party did get something out of the fight: the illustration of a point. 

“It proved the point that Republicans are not sensitive to health care insurance premiums and we are sensitive to health care insurance premiums,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., “and the national polls show that we’ve made a national issue out of [it].” 

Durbin, who is retiring at the end of his current term, is the only member of Democratic leadership to vote for the deal to end the government shutdown. He told The Intercept that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was “disappointed” by his decision but understood. 

Without Republican votes to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, millions of Americans are expected to see their health care premiums double next year. And despite agreeing to allow a vote in the Senate, Republicans seem unlikely to pass a bill to keep those subsidies in place. 

“No,” Republicans will not vote to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told The Intercept. “Why would I continue to give tens of billions of dollars to insurance companies?” said Graham. “That’s insane.”

In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., would not even commit to holding a vote on the Affordable Care Act subsidies. “I’m not promising anybody anything,” Johnson told reporters last week. “We’re not taking four corners, four leaders in a back room and making a deal and hoisting it upon the American people.”

Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., called the outcome a “betrayal” of working-class families. 

“The American people have endured the pain of the longest government shutdown in history only to see a small group of Senate Democrats concoct a so-called ‘deal’ that guarantees nothing on health care and is a betrayal to the working families whose insurance costs are going to skyrocket,” Rep. Lee told The Intercept. “I am strongly opposed to capitulating to false promises that will hurt people in the long run.”

None of the eight senators who broke to support the deal are up for reelection, suggesting that Democrats understand how unpopular the decision is with their base. Beyond Durbin, the seven other senators who voted to end the shutdown are Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; Angus King, I-Maine; Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.; and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. 

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It’s a stark contrast to last week’s election, when Democrats swept races in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, and California. Many credited Democrats’ success with their sudden willingness to fight back against Republicans in defense of health care. 

Backlash has been so severe that some Democratic members of Congress are calling on Schumer to resign from his leadership position. So are some of the party’s 2026 hopefuls — including Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner.

“Sen. Schumer has failed to meet this moment and is out of touch with the American people. The Democratic Party needs leaders who fight and deliver for working people,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., in a post on X. “Schumer should step down.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., also called for Schumer to step down. 

“I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. We need courageous leaders who put working families at the center of all they do. 8 democrats caving to empty promises is an indefensible leadership failure,” wrote Ramirez on X. “For the sake of our country, Schumer needs to resign.”

Schumer’s office did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

So far, legislation to reopen the government has been stalled in the Senate due to objections from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., over a hemp-related provision in the bill. But Johnson has ordered representatives to return to Washington to vote on reopening the government as soon as the Senate passes its version. 

Even though Graham said Republicans won’t extend the enhanced subsidies, the South Carolina senator agreed that Democrats did get something to show for the shutdown fight. 

“We get the government reopened,” Graham said. “They get a vote on health care. Everybody gets something.” 

The post Key Senate Dem Says Party Caved on Shutdown to Make a Symbolic Point About the GOP appeared first on The Intercept.

The announcement stands in stark contrast to another recent decision from the administration to give Afrikaners priority for asylum, even as the State Department moved to severely limit refugee admission to the United States. The president has justified prioritizing white South Africans by spreading misleading claims about the persecution and killings of white farmers.

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While Trump’s immigration and foreign policy stances in relation to these three countries may seem disjointed, experts on white supremacy and Christian nationalism told The Intercept that it all fit into the white Christian nationalist playbook. Trump’s strategy feeds into his base’s fears over immigration and demographic change while positioning the president as a defender of Christian values.  

“There is this myth that if [white Christians] lose a majority in the United States of America, then the white Christian civilization that we have built here is fundamentally going to be threatened … and that’s why you have to open your borders to the Afrikaners and close your borders to people who are not white and not Christians,” said Stephen Lloyd, a professor of theology at Loyola University Maryland who specializes in world Christianity as well as theology, ethnicity, and race in South Africa.

Trump’s narrative, however, flies in the face of facts on the ground. 

After Trump threatened to deploy military action in Nigeria over claims that Christians were being persecuted, and designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” for alleged violations of religious freedom, Nigerian officials and regional experts quickly fired back.

“We are not proud of the security situation that we are passing through, but to go with the narrative” of a Christian genocide, Kimiebi Imomotimi Ebienfa, a spokesperson for Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Al Jazeera, “no, it is not true. There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria.” 

While Nigerians have undeniably experienced violence at the hands of militant groups like Boko Haram, Christians have not been the exclusive target. In fact, much of the violence has been directed at Muslims who practice their faith in a way these groups disagree with. 

“There are many Christian victims of violence in Nigeria. Nobody disputes that,” said Alex Thurston, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, who specializes in Islam and African politics. “[However], the idea of a genocide against Christians is the wrong framing. The violence in Nigeria affects many different Nigerians of many faiths.”

Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent global monitor of conflict and protest data, found that of the 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria, so far this year, roughly 50 of those attacks targeted Christians because of their religion. 

The alleged persecution of the Afrikaners serves a similar narrative purpose for Trump, while also being riddled with many of the same fallacies. 

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For the most part, Afrikaners don’t see themselves as refugees, said Lloyd. “Even some very conservative Afrikaner separatists talk very much in terms of wanting to build their future in South Africa, not outside of it,” he said.

Afrikaners who grew up under apartheid were taught to view themselves as their “own distinct culture,” explained Lloyd, which includes heavy ties to Christianity but is distinct from white Christian culture in the United States. “Afrikaners often feel themselves to be a tribe in the way that the Zulu or the Xhosa people are a tribe. And so there is still that sort of national sentiment that you look out for each other, you try to care for each other. You care for each other’s political future.” 

Notably, there hasn’t been a “mass exodus” of Afrikaners to the United States since Trump announced an expedited refuge process, Lloyd said. Of the roughly 2.7 million Afrikaners in South Africa, only 400 have immigrated to the United States under the fast-tracked refugee process Trump initiated.

However, framing these complex political scenarios in the context of a genocide of white people or Christians is politically beneficial to Trump, said Christine Reyna, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. It allows him not only to drum up concerns over immigrants, she said, but it motivates his base to support him out of that fear. 

“In Nigeria, it’s genocide against Christians, and in South Africa, it’s the supposed genocide against these white Afrikaners,” said Reyna. “And so in absence of an actual genocide in the United States against either of these two groups, you can keep that narrative of that existential fear of extermination and genocide and oppression that is alive and well within a certain subset of white Americans.”

Despite crafting similar narratives in Nigeria and South Africa, Trump’s policy prescriptions are quite different. 

“One of the ideas of Christian nationalism is that racial and ethnic groups have their own particular territories,” said Lloyd.  

So while members of the Christian right in the United States may view themselves as the saviors of Nigerian Christians, they believe that they should remain in Africa and not mix with white Christians here. Whereas white, or “Western,” Christians in Africa should be brought into the United States. 

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This racist logic allows them to justify limiting immigration of the “other” as somehow biblical, as is the case with South Sudanese immigrants. “One of the key things about Christian nationalism is the love of your own,” said Lloyd. 

“That’s why I think they are signaling that immigration policy is going to preference Afrikaners,” Lloyd said. “The idea that you’re preferencing conservative white Christians is, in essence, preferencing ‘your own people’ over those in Haiti, those in South Sudan, those in Venezuela.” 

In a January Fox News interview, Vice President JD Vance said that God requires Christians to “love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” 

“There’s this sense that we have to keep America Christian because when Christians become a minority, they’re persecuted,” Lloyd said. “And also, if we maintain our Christian majority, then we can be the defenders of Christians around the world.” 

The post How Christian Nationalism Is Shaping Trump’s Foreign Policy Toward Africa  appeared first on The Intercept.

The 11-page indictment, which was filed on October 23 and unsealed Wednesday, accuses Abughazaleh and the other protesters of using “force, intimidation and threat” as part of a conspiracy to prevent an unnamed ICE agent from “discharging his duties” and to “injure him in his person or property.”

The conspiracy, as the charging document describes it, involves allegations that the protesters “banged aggressively” on a federal agent’s car, “crowded together in the front and side of the Government Vehicle and pushed against the vehicle to hinder and impede its movement,” and “scratched the body of the Government Vehicle, including etching a message into the body of the vehicle, specifically the word ‘PIG.’”

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“This is a political prosecution and a gross attempt at silencing dissent, a right protected under the First Amendment,” wrote Abughazaleh, in a statement to The Intercept. “This case is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish those who dare to speak up. That’s why I’m going to fight these unjust charges.”

The indictment alleges that Abughazaleh, a former journalist and candidate in the Democratic primary for Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, put her hands on the hood of the car and “braced her body and hands against the vehicle while remaining directly in the path of the vehicle.”

The disruption, according to the indictment, forced the federal agent “to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators.”

If convicted, the protesters could face up to six years in prison for the conspiracy charges and eight years in prison for the intimidation charge. Conspiracy charges are a common tool for prosecutors to use against protesters.

Abughazaleh — who went viral earlier this year after video emerged of ICE agents slamming the 26-year-old Democratic candidate to the ground at the same facility — pointed to the irony of the Trump administration accusing protesters of violence.

“As I and others exercised our First Amendment rights, ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, and teargassed hundreds of protesters, myself included. Simply because we had the gall to say masked men abducting our neighbors and terrorizing our community cannot be the new normal,” she wrote.

The Broadview ICE processing center has been noted for its violent clashes between federal agents and protesters — with ICE agents deploying aggressive tactics at demonstrators — including an infamous incident where agents shot a pastor in the back of the head with a pepper ball.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis issued a temporary restraining order against federal agents in the Chicago area earlier this month, requiring them to wear a body camera and give at least two advanced warnings before deploying tear gas.

Abughazaleh, who is running in a crowded field to replace Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said she won’t be intimidated by the charges brought against her. “I’ve spent my career fighting America’s backwards slide towards fascism, and I’m not going to give up now,” she wrote.

The post Trump DOJ Charges House Candidate Kat Abughazaleh With Conspiracy for Protesting ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this year, the State Department announced plans to incinerate the contraceptives, which were originally intended for distribution by the U.S. Agency for International Development before Trump dismantled it. The medication includes $9.7 million worth of IUDs, implants, and birth control pills, some of which will get too old to deliver starting in December.

An estimate from the Guttmacher Institute found that the contraceptives could provide pregnancy prevention to roughly 1.6 million women.

The Trump administration isn’t just wasting money, said Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange, “it’s wasting lives.” Because of high rates of maternal mortality, she said the undelivered aid could result in “millions of unintended pregnancies, thousands of preventable deaths.”

The Belgian government initially foiled the Trump administration’s plans to destroy the contraceptives by intervening to block the incineration. Now, the U.S. is using another weapon to destroy the medical aid: time.

Tanzania, which was supposed to receive the largest bulk of the contraceptive haul, requires that these medical products have 60 percent of their remaining shelf life when they enter customs, said Marcel van Valen, head of supply chain for the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

“That threshold is actually being reached for some of the products by the end of December,” he said, “and for most products towards mid-2026.”

Experts in reproductive health and supply chains told The Intercept that the Trump administration is attempting to “run out the clock” on the contraceptives’ shelf life, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and putting countless lives at risk.

“The U.S. government is waiting to run out the clock on this, which is basically the same thing as lighting them on fire,” said Beth Schlachter, senior director of U.S. external relations for MSI Reproductive Choices, one of the organizations offering to distribute the contraceptives.

Over the last several months, the Trump administration has provided a litany of excuses for leaving the contraceptives in storage. 

One explanation has been the cost. “Their claim is that incinerating the full stock would cost them approximately $167,000 and they hold that against distributing the stocks to their intended destination,” said van Valen. International Planned Parenthood estimates distribution would cost between $1 million and $1.5 million.

Multiple reputable international nonprofit organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund, the Gates Foundation, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, have offered to purchase, re-label, and distribute the products themselves — at no cost to the Trump administration.

While her organization, MSI Reproductive Choices, also placed a bid to distribute the contraceptives, Schlachter said the work could have easily been done by the United Nations Population Fund, also known as UNFPA. 

“UNFPA already had a supplies process that was able to move large volumes,” she said, “and it could have easily absorbed these commodities because it was already doing that, and is already still doing this for many countries.” 

The problem here isn’t money, argued Schlacter — it’s ideology. She pointed to an extremist right-wing ethos that views contraception as an extension of abortion.

The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. However, in statements to other news outlets, the administration has claimed that the contraceptives were abortifacients, and that they couldn’t find an “eligible buyer” because their internal policies prohibit them from providing funds to organizations that provide abortion care or offer information on abortion.

“President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world,” a spokesperson for USAID told The New York Times in September. “The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”

The Intercept obtained the manifest for the contraceptives, which includes the intended recipient countries as well as the products being warehoused, and none of them are abortion drugs. Additionally, experts told The Intercept that multiple organizations that would not have violated that policy stepped forward to offer to distribute the contraceptives.

“There are some very religious conservative folks who are now the skeleton [crew] of the global health team,” said Schlacter, who previously served as a senior policy adviser on sexual and reproductive health and rights at the State Department. “Many of them were blocking this contraception because they want to cut off all contraception, because they believe anything other than a barrier method is actually tantamount to abortion, which is outrageous.”

Access to contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa is a matter of life or death, said Saifuddin Ahmed, a professor in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

Despite making up roughly 16 percent of the global population, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 70 percent of maternal deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization.

“In family planning literature, there’s something called too early, too late, too many,” Ahmed explained. “Basically it’s simply saying that if a woman has a birth, let’s say before their pelvic organs develop, that is too young, in an adolescent period, they’re likely to die more. If they have too many children spaced very narrowly — we call it a short birth interval — they will die at a higher rate.”   

The same goes for older women, he said.

Access to birth control can disrupt that deadly cycle. “Our research has shown family planning is probably the most cost-effective tool for reducing maternal mortality,” said Ahmed. “Not providing this type of commodity to the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa means that their maternal mortality rate will go much, much higher. Child death will also go higher.”

According to UNFPA, in 2022, contraceptive use averted more than 141 million unintended pregnancies, 29 million unsafe abortions, and nearly 150,000 maternal deaths.

Elizabeth Sully, director of international research for The Guttmacher Institute, said while it’s worth focusing on saving the contraceptives stored in Belgium, this is just the beginning of the impact the Trump administration is having on family planning and maternal mortality efforts globally. 

The United States’ family planning programs accounted for 40 percent of all donor funding for family planning globally. But earlier this year, the Trump administration ended their financial support for global family planning programs.

An estimate from the Guttmacher Institute found that the cuts to family planning grants will result in 34,000 more maternal deaths just this year.

Mallah Tabot, lead sexual and reproductive health architect of cooperation at the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Africa regional office, described the Trump administration’s move as pure “wickedness.”

“Life-saving drugs are sitting somewhere withheld from those who need them the most, and rather than just doing the decent thing … they would rather play the waiting game until the products are no longer viable,” said Tabot. “What can the government say that would justify this level of wickedness?”

The post Trump Would Rather Let Birth Control Expire Than Give It to Africans as Aid appeared first on The Intercept.

Heavener had heard rumors that ICE was planning to detain unaccompanied minors and that schools could be a target, but this scenario had never crossed her mind. “We definitely didn’t expect what happened,” she said. “We didn’t expect them to throw tear gas right outside of our school building.”

For the last month, the Trump administration has kept Chicago under siege. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested a 15-year-old U.S. citizen earlier this week after unleashing tear gas into a crowded residential neighborhood. Earlier in October, masked federal agents raided a five-story apartment building in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Chicago and zip-tied naked children as they dragged their parents away.

The Trump administration claims that Chicago is unsafe and needs order, despite the fact that the city experienced its lowest homicide rate in 60 years this summer. But instead of investing in underfunded schools or attempting to eradicate poverty, which have been shown to increase public safety, the administration is pouring millions into the militarization of American cities and fighting a court battle to federalize the National Guard in Chicago. 

The Trump administration’s war on immigrants has had a disastrous impact on the city’s children, Chicago teachers told The Intercept. 

“The smoke bombs that they dropped in front of school right at dismissal, the detainment of grown-ups after they drop off their children, or as they’re picking them up. All of that is violent. All of that is traumatic,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “And for the first time, that is what many students in this city are experiencing.”

Heavener said she struggled to explain the events that occurred on October 3 to her class of 6 and 7-year-olds. “A lot of them were sad, worried, scared, nervous,” she said. “Some of them said they’re scared because they don’t want their own family members to be taken away.”

One of her students became so overwhelmed that he had a panic attack. “It’s very scary because this is their normal,” said Heavener. “You start forming your memories more solidly around 4 or 5 years old, so they have some happy kindergarten memories. But now all of sudden, this is going to take over their experiences and worldview, and it’s going to shape a lot for them, and it’s traumatic, and they’re all going to hold that in their bodies as they grow up.”

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The stakes feel even higher at schools with older kids, where Heavener and other staff fear students will become targets. The recent arrest of the 15-year-old, Heavener said, has had a particular chilling effect. His lawyers allege that the teenager was detained in a federal facility for five hours without anyone telling his family where he was being held. The Department of Homeland Security denied that CBP “kidnapped” the teen, noting that “a U.S. citizen teenager threw eggs and hit a CBP Officer in the head.”

“The media is sadly attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement. These smears are contributing to our ICE law enforcement officers facing 1,000% increase in assaults against them,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement. “ICE is not conducting enforcement operations at, or ‘raiding,’ schools. ICE is not going to schools to make arrests of children. Criminals are no longer be able to hide in America’s schools to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

“Attendance at a lot of [schools] is down,” Gates told The Intercept. “Senior nights have been cancelled. Fall sports and after-school activities have been sparsely attended … because of the unpredictability and the violence of Trump’s troops.”

“It makes me want to cry,” said Heavener. “Generally, the societal norm is that children are sacred, and we take care of our children. Now it seems like they’re being targeted.”

Amid the chaos, Gates said that teachers, parents, students, and community organizers had come together to help make students safer. At Funston Elementary, for example, community members lined the streets to form a safe walking corridor for students and their families after the tear-gas incident. Heavener said the community has remained vigilant for ICE activity — although Facebook shuttered local groups used to alert schools about ICE’s presence. 

Kathryn, an elementary school music teacher who wanted to use her first name to protect her school from being targeted by ICE, has tried to make her classroom a safe space for her students. 

“It’s even more important right now that we have stable, predictable classrooms and especially places where students can continue to be imaginative and experience joy and learn to work with other people,” she said, “and especially learn to work with people who are different from them.”

Still, she said normalcy and joy are difficult to achieve in the current environment. 

“I’m worried every day,” said Kathryn. “I’m worried that we’ll have kids here waiting to be picked up and nobody will ever come for them, because we’ve seen it happen.”

A middle school student was recently at home when ICE came to detain their parents. Through the process, Kathryn learned how to navigate the fact “that you can set up temporary guardianship for a minor if it’s less than a year,” she said. “I would like to live in a world where that’s not a thing I need to know, but I do.”

Despite claims from the Trump administration that Chicago is unsafe, Kathryn argues they’re the ones who’ve turned the streets into a war zone. “I was born and raised in Chicago,” said Kathryn. “I’ve never seen the city as unsafe as it is right now with them here.”

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What makes it worse is that the money the administration is spending to deploy federal agents to patrol outside of elementary schools could genuinely make a difference in Chicago Public Schools. An estimate from the National Priorities Project found that a National Guard deployment to Chicago, currently blocked in federal court, could cost roughly $1.59 million a day. The latest Republican spending bill added $29.9 billion to ICE’s enforcement budget — a boost that nearly triples the $10.25 billion operating budget for the entire Chicago public school system, which includes 630 schools.

“Our afterschool budget was slashed by two-thirds here,” said Kathryn. She pointed out that ICE is offering “$50,000 signing bonuses for people who are willing to kidnap other people,” while she finds herself telling kids: “Sorry, you can’t join the band right now because I don’t have enough instruments.”

Correction: October 21, 2025

This story has been updated to correct a quote from a Chicago teacher. She was describing a budget cut for her afterschool program, not the whole school.

The post Teachers Scrambled After ICE Released Tear Gas Outside a Chicago Elementary School appeared first on The Intercept.

“This is not a place for me,” Daniela, whose name has been changed to protect her from retaliation from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in Spanish in a message to The Intercept. 

She’d been having abdominal pain, and she caught Covid in early September. According to Amanda Heffernan, a nurse midwife and professor at Seattle University who reviewed Daniela’s medical records at her request, for roughly two months, Daniela never received a prenatal visit with an OB-GYN.

Pregnant people generally aren’t supposed to be held in immigration detention at all. Official guidance in place since 2021 directs ICE to avoid detaining pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women, unless their release is “prohibited by law” or in “exceptional circumstances.” In cases where the government determines that pregnant women must be detained, the guidelines impose strict obligations on detention facilities to monitor their conditions and ensure that facilities meet their mental and physical needs.

The Trump administration appears to be ignoring that directive, according to immigration experts, advocates, a pregnant detainee, and The Intercept’s analysis of congressional reports and letters. Taken together, the evidence indicates that the Department of Homeland Security is detaining pregnant women at alarming rates, in rapidly deteriorating detention conditions.

“This is the first time I’ve seen so many pregnant people in [ICE] detention,” said Tania Wolf, the Southeast advocacy manager at the National Immigration Project. Experts at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women’s Refugee Commission made similar observations.

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“There are cases of people who clearly meet the criteria not to be detained, and that ICE has gone ahead and detained anyway,” said Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the ACLU National Prison Project. Zain Lakhani, the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said her group has noticed “a significant increase in the number of pregnant detainees, of pregnant women, postpartum and lactating women in detention,” in the months since President Donald Trump returned to office. 

Hard numbers on the number of pregnant women in immigration detention are nearly impossible to find. The Trump administration has stopped publishing semiannual reports on the condition and number of pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women in immigration detention facilities. Congress used to require that DHS compile the reports, but as of the last funding bill, it had dropped the mandate. 

“Right now, we don’t have functional transparency and oversight mechanisms for DHS and for immigration detention,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, policy attorney and strategist for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

That leaves the public unaware of how many people there are like Daniela, who said there were two other pregnant women in her unit at the detention facility. The Intercept was not able to speak with the women directly. 

Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for GEO Group, the for-profit prison company that operates Northwest Detention Center and 19 other ICE detention facilities, told The Intercept that GEO provides “high-quality services,” including medical care, “governed by standards set by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and independently accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.” Ferreira also noted that at the center where Daniela was detained, ICE provides government-administered health care to detainees. 

Daniela, who is 27, immigrated to the United States in 2023 from Venezuela to seek asylum while pregnant with her first child, now a 2-year-old U.S. citizen. She missed her daughter while in ICE detention, she told The Intercept. They were kept apart for those two months.

“I have never left her alone,” Daniela said of her daughter.

Last week, after The Intercept made inquiries to DHS and GEO group, Daniela was released from ICE custody and reunited with her daughter.

“Detention is inherently dangerous and damaging for children and pregnant women,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., at a press conference in August. He was announcing a report his staff compiled over the summer, which found 14 credible accounts of pregnant women being mistreated within immigration detention. 

Pregnant detainees, their partners, ICE officials, and their attorneys have reported pregnant women being denied adequate medical care, being forced to sleep on the floor, and being denied sufficient meals and snacks. Attorneys claimed their pregnant clients had waited “weeks” to see a doctor. 

The partner of a woman in DHS custody told Senate staff that the woman was pregnant and had been left to bleed for days before facility staff would take her to the hospital. According to their report, once the woman arrived at the hospital, she was left alone in a room to miscarry without any water or medical assistance for 24 hours.

A Senate Judiciary Committee report released in May found similar allegations of abuse against pregnant women within two Louisiana detention facilities. 

One of the women described in the report, who was roughly four months pregnant and had experienced bleeding, said she had not seen a doctor in months. Another woman detained at the facility, who was two months pregnant, alleged that she had not been seen by a doctor since her arrival. Many women told staffers about a pregnant woman who had miscarried while detained and was allegedly still bleeding while being deported.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin denied allegations of the mistreatment of pregnant women. 

“There have been no miscarriages on removal flights since President Trump took office,” McLaughlin wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review. No pregnant woman has been forced to sleep on the floor. Meals are certified by dieticians, and they are given their prenatal vitamins. These smears about ICE mistreating and denying women medical care are contributing to our ICE officers facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”

Access to medical care is practically nonexistent within detention facilities, said Amanda Diaz, organizing director at Freedom for Immigrants, an immigrant-led advocacy organization that runs a national reporting hotline for people in detention. 

“Medical care inside of detention facilities is insufficient in general. So, when we add in more specified procedures or medical care, that’s just completely inexistent,” said Diaz. 

Diaz’s group runs a national detention hotline, and she said that in June, they received a call from a woman who was two months pregnant and said she was detained in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, another GEO Group facility.

The woman said she began experiencing abdominal pain and bleeding large blood clots. “The people around her in her pod and her cell started to call the nurse, and the medical care team, but they did not have a doctor present, nor did they have urgent medical staff there to respond,” said Diaz.

Diaz said the woman said she was forced to wait days to be seen at a hospital. Her organization has not been able to get in touch with the woman since her initial disclosure in June 2025. 

Ferreira, the GEO Group spokesperson, said that people incarcerated at GEO Group facilities “are provided with access to teams of medical professionals including physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, and psychiatrists” as well as off-site specialists, emergency services, and hospitals. 

In March, Homeland Security announced massive cuts to its civil rights and immigration oversight offices, which collected complaints about detention facilities and monitored conditions, leaving much of the agency’s conduct a black box. While the offices “haven’t been fully shut down,” according to Nathan-Pineau, “they’re essentially not functioning according to their mission.”

“They don’t want people to be able to report out what’s happening, what conditions are like, how they’re being mistreated,” said Nathan-Pineau. 

In addition to allegations of inadequate medical care, experts also attest to poor food quality and inadequate nutrition within ICE facilities. “Food is usually expired or moldy or has maggots in them,” said Diaz. 

Seven experts on immigration detention told The Intercept that the food quality within most ICE detention centers was extremely poor. “People report that they’re being fed maybe only once or twice a day, and that what they’re given is like a small sandwich or a burrito and like maybe a juice box, and that sometimes the food that they’re getting smells like it’s gone bad, or it might be expired,” said Nathan-Pineau. “I saw one report of a person who said they were given food that had visible mold on it.” 

ICE facilities, which are often run by private contractors like the GEO Group, take “the lowest possible bid” they can get for a food contractor, said Heffernan, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on pregnancy and immigration detention.

Because of the low-quality meals available, one of the only options for people detained in immigration facilities is purchasing food from the commissary, often at exorbitant prices. 

“It’s a giant exploitation machine for private companies because they make the telecommunications and commissary food really expensive,” she said. “In most detention centers around the country, people are working for like $1 a day and then the can of tuna fish is like $6. … It’s just a whole racket.”

McLaughlin also denied these allegations.

“Another day and another hoax about ICE facilities. These FALSE allegations about mistreatment and denying pregnant woman medical care are disgusting. Pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support, and accommodations aligned with community standards of care,” she wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

With transparency eroded, the massive ramp-up of the Trump administration’s deportation machine has almost certainly contributed to an uptick in pregnant women in immigration detention. 

Lakhani pointed to the Trump administration’s immigration arrest quota of 3,000 people per day. “Given the commitments of the administration to ramping up immigration enforcement,” she said, she expects to see “an extreme escalation.”

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Experts predict that the recent $45 billion cash infusion from the Big, Beautiful Bill for immigration detention facilities is going to make the situation worse. The funding change will give immigration enforcement a budget that is 62 percent larger than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons, making immigration detention the largest carceral network in the country.

The issues predate the second Trump administration, said Heffernan. “Neither recent Democratic nor Republican administrations actually take the well-being of detained pregnant folks into account in a very real way,” she said. 

Diaz agreed that the lack of compliance preexisted the current administration. But, she wrote, “this problem is even worse now that ICE is emboldened to act with impunity and zero accountability.”

The post The Trump Administration Is Hiding How Many Pregnant People Are in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

When the White House unveiled its comprehensive report on how to “Make Our Children Healthy Again” in May, it slammed “corporate capture” of regulatory bodies and argued that companies responsible for making children less healthy wield undue influence in Washington. A subsequent strategy report, released last month, called to “protect public health from corporate influence.”

“It was one of the first times I saw the federal government actually call out corporate capture and how chemical companies influence regulation,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy.

But the Trump administration’s political marriage of unbridled crony capitalism and fringe health conspiracism is not without its contradictions.

While the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement preaches a healthy utopia for the nation’s children free of real and imagined toxins, public health experts say the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deregulation campaign that has opened the floodgates for toxic chemicals in our food, water, and air — while also defunding vital medical research and spreading dangerous medical misinformation. 

“There’s a lot of rhetoric about problems that they’re solving,” Minovi said. “But when I’m looking at the actual actions that the administration is taking, largely, these actions are not making any kids or families healthier.”

A glaring tension between the MAHA movement’s purported goals and the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory strategy is the issue of environmental toxins, particularly PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, found in many household items. 

These chemicals, which can disrupt liver, kidney, and thyroid functioning, are especially harmful to children. 

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The strategy report, drafted by the Make America Healthy commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid out a series of recommendations to “end chronic childhood disease,” which included studying the cumulative effect of chemicals in the environment. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was rolling back restrictions on the acceptable levels of these forever chemicals within drinking water, which were put in place during the Biden administration. And in the spring, the agency ended a grant to research children’s exposure to chemicals from soil and dust, according to the KFF Health News. 

“When it comes to actually taking action, we’re not really seeing policies that are getting ahead of corporate capture and holding the chemical industry responsible,” Minovi said. 

Over the coming months, the EPA has announced it will take 31 separate deregulatory actions, including loosening restrictions on power plants that emit air pollution and eliminating safeguards put in place during the Biden administration for petrochemical accidents. 

Alongside pursuing a deregulatory strategy that experts predict will introduce more chemicals into the air, water, and food supply, the administration has also moved aggressively to cut research, including on childhood diseases. 

For example, in August, the Trump administration announced it was cutting federal funding to a network researching pediatric brain cancer. 

White House spokesperson Kush Desai denied cutting cancer research funding, saying HHS canceled grants supporting “DEI and other ideological pet projects,” and that the money was reallocated.   

“President Trump made a pledge to Make America Healthy Again by restoring accountability, transparency, and Gold Standard Science in public health decision-making,” wrote Desai. “The President and White House maintain complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and the rest of the HHS team to deliver on this pledge.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

Food assistance and educational programs have also come under fire during the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Republicans enacted the most significant cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in history. The program provided food assistance to roughly 1 in every 5 children in the United States, as well as nutrition education. 

“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air,” said Minovi, as opposed to “everyday people who might actually depend on public policies to ensure they have healthy food, clean air, clean water in their community.”

The recommendations emerging from HHS and the MAHA movement about vaccines and autism are particularly troubling, said Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s a matter of promoting a personal agenda that RFK has rather than following decades of good science,” she said.

Riddled throughout the MAHA strategy and separate report are concerns over vaccines and the vaccine schedule, which is used to determine the timing for childhood vaccinations. 

Both RFK Jr. and Trump have peddled pseudoscientific conclusions connecting autism to vaccination, suggesting that the vaccine schedule needs to change. During the press conference last week, Trump advised against vaccinating children for Hepatitis B until they’re 12 years old, which runs at odds with medical guidelines.

“They’re making it more difficult for children to get routine childhood vaccinations. We know that vaccination has saved millions of lives, and so any efforts that make it harder for children to access vaccines are really, really jeopardizing kids’ health,” said Rosenthal. “Instead of following the science and believing what evidence we already have, we’re just creating a lot of distrust and making it harder for people to keep their kids healthy.”

The recent recommendations that pregnant women avoid Tylenol also carry risk for pregnant people and their future children. 

“In the near term, I think that pregnant patients are going to be worried enough that they seek alternate forms of medication to treat their pain,” said Dr. Mariana Montes, a former pediatrician and obstetric anesthesiologist. “That’s extremely concerning, because there is nothing that’s been proven safe for pregnancy except for acetaminophen.”

Ibuprofen, the active ingredient in Advil, has been known to lower amniotic fluid — the liquid in utero that surrounds and protects the fetus — and can have negative effects on kidney and heart development, said Montes. 

“Patients might choose to take ibuprofen without knowing the effects, and then unknowingly actually harm a healthy pregnancy because they’re so worried about taking Tylenol,” she said.

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Left with fewer options they believe are safe, Rosenthal warns that pregnant people might forgo medication altogether, even when they have a fever. “If women avoid taking Tylenol, for instance, when they have a fever, it can increase the risk of birth defects,” she said. “So by scaring women away from taking needed medication, it can actually impact their health and the health of their developing babies.”

The stigma these types of pronouncements cause for people with autism is also a serious concern.

“It’s necessary to point out the ableist language in this whole autism debacle,” said Minovi. “Of course, it’s a condition that needs to be understood and studied, and obviously impacts families significantly, but the way in which the administration, particularly RFK, talks about it is dismissive and negative about people’s lived experiences.”

Republicans, who once denounced former First Lady Michelle Obama for attempting to make school lunches moderately healthier, now inhabit a coalition whose purported goals would have instantly launched “nanny state” accusations just a few years prior.

But the MAHA movement has been so successful despite its inherent contradictions, Rosenthal said, because there’s a “kernel of truth” to what it’s preaching. 

“For instance, ultra-processed food is not the first choice for how we want to take care of our bodies,” Rosenthal said, “but at the same time, is that the best way to use limited resources and protect or promote child health? Not when we have kids who don’t have enough to eat, right?”

Minovi said it’s understandable that people are drawn to this movement — which only heightens culpability for people like RFK Jr. and Trump. 

“These are families that are just trying to do right by their kids, and the concerns that folks are raising are valid,” said Minovi. “The behavior of the leaders in this movement is nothing short of predatory.”

The post MAHA Slams “Corporate Capture” by Food and Pharma Giants — While Trump Strips Regulations appeared first on The Intercept.

Immigration experts warn that the administration’s tactics could be used as a backdoor to expel those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which offers temporary protection from deportation to some formerly undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

On August 3, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents detained Santiago, 28, at the airport while she was attempting to catch a flight to Austin. Nearly two months later, she’s still being held in an immigration processing facility in El Paso.

“She’s holding on,” said her brother Jose, who wanted to be identified by his first name only in case of retaliation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. “[But] it’s been over a month, so that takes a toll.” 

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. However, in statements to other media outlets, DHS cited a past arrest for narcotics and trespassing as a reason to keep Santiago detained. However, she was never prosecuted for that arrest due to “insufficient information.”

On Tuesday, federal Judge Kathleen Cardone extended a restraining order blocking the Trump administration from deporting or removing Santiago to a different facility. However, she did not rule on her release. 

A separate judge already terminated the immigration case against Santiago in early September, ruling that she cannot be deported because she has lawful status through DACA. 

Despite an immigration judge dismissing Santiago’s case, the Trump administration has refused to release her. “They’re arguing, even though they can’t support it, that they can detain her indefinitely,” said Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, who has worked on Santiago’s case.

More troubling still, the 28-year-old community organizer is set to renew her DACA status in 2026. Pranzatelli raised concerns that she won’t be able to renew if she’s still in government custody, putting her status at risk. 

“If they keep her in detention until her renewal period comes up and she is unable to renew,” said Pranzatelli, “then they will have de facto terminated her DACA status without going through the processes that are required by the regulations.”

The consequences of this case could extend far past Santiago. “The government holds this position that they are able to initiate removal proceedings against anyone who is not a citizen of the United States,” said Pranzatelli, “and that during the pendency of those removal proceedings, a person can be detained. … That is just not what the law says.” 

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Immigration experts told The Intercept that the Trump administration is attempting to end protections for Dreamers without the risk of the public outrage that followed President Donald Trump’s attempt to end the program during his first term.

“It’s obvious that they’re trying to evade a public reaction,” said Diana Pliego, a senior strategist at the National Immigration Law Center. “What they’re trying to do is quietly end it, essentially slashing and killing DACA in front of us, one case at a time, one individual at a time.” 

According to a tracker launched by a coalition of immigration organizations, including the National Immigration Law Center and United We Dream, nearly 20 DACA recipients have been detained within the last year. 

“We’re really concerned,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of federal policy for the immigrant advocacy organization, United We Dream. 

Macedo do Nascimento said that the Trump administration appears to be intentionally going after DACA recipients, who should not ordinarily be targets for deportation.

“There are two cases right now, that we’re aware of, Jean Carlos and [Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira], where ICE showed up to in Paulo’s case, to his mother’s house while he was dropping off his kids, specifically to apprehend him, and then in Jean Carlos’s case, to his own house specifically to detain him,” she said. “So that shows that de-prioritization is not happening anymore.” 

They’re trying to “kill DACA by 1,000 cuts,” said Macedo do Nascimento, noting that the administration has been urging Dreamers to “self-deport.”

Santiago’s friends and family told The Intercept that detention has taken a significant toll on her. 

“Physically and psychologically, the conditions are extremely dehumanizing,” said Christine Miranda, a close friend and colleague of Santiago’s. 

Miranda, who met Santiago a decade ago while working together as organizers, said that Santiago was committed to standing up for her community despite the risks. Now, as she sits in detention, Miranda said that community has shown up to support her, hosting rallies and organizing on behalf of her release.

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“She is truly a lifelong community organizer, both at the small scale of connecting with people personally, and the big scale of leading massive actions or rallies or marches,” Miranda said. “She had a lot of personal clarity that fighting for yourself and for others is worth it.” 

Santiago’s brother shared similar sentiments. “She was very kind as well, and very compassionate,” said Jose. “That led her to become a community organizer and fight for everyone’s rights, especially the immigrant rights.”

Santiago arrived in the United States when she was only 8 years old from Oaxaca, Mexico. Her brother said it would be “devastating” if his sister were deported. “She’ll be torn away from her community,” he said. “We don’t really have connections in Mexico, so it will be a very harsh reset to life.”

Looking beyond this specific case, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., said the Trump administration could not be allowed to disappear its critics. 

“As authoritarians, Trump, Noem, Miller, and the rest of the Administration are abusing their power to silence dissent. Despite the legal protections for DACA recipients and green card holders, we are witnessing the disappearance of community activists, like Catalina Xóchitl Santiago, who are challenging the rise of fascism in our nation,” wrote Ramirez, in a message to The Intercept. “We have to stand up for Dreamers and immigrants and protect our civil and constitutional rights.”

A ruling on whether to release Santiago from detention is expected any day now.

The post The Trump Administration Is Arguing It Can Hold Dreamers Indefinitely  appeared first on The Intercept.

PayPal canceled its planned expansion into North Carolina. The NCAA pulled its seven tournaments from the state. And 68 companies, including Apple, Yelp, American Airlines, and Nike, signed an amicus brief with the Obama-era Department of Justice denouncing the law.

Late last month, the Texas Legislature passed its own, inarguably harsher, version of the “bathroom bill.” But in the first year of a second Trump administration hellbent on targeting the trans community, those corporate crusaders have been notably quieter. 

The Intercept reached out to 59 of the companies whose names appeared on the amicus brief in 2016 — the other nine had gone out of business, been acquired by larger corporations, or spun off into separate subsidiaries — to get their thoughts on the Texas bill. 

Their response: crickets.

Except for Affirm and TD Bank, which both declined to comment, none of the corporations responded to our inquiry or issued prominent public statements against the bill.

“The rise and fall of corporate support for things like LGBTQ rights and representation shows how weak corporations’ support for LGBTQ rights is,” said Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University.

Wuest, who has been researching corporate support for LGBTQ+ rights since 2020, said that she used to find the decline surprising. But by now, she finds the lack of support from the 59 companies standard.

Those companies are Accenture, Affirm, Airbnb, American Airlines, Apple, Biogen, Bloomberg LP, Boehinger Ingleheim USA, Box, Capital One Financial Corporation, Cisco Systems, Consumer Technology Association, Corning Incorporated, Cummins, Dropbox, Dupont, eBay, Etsy, Everlaw, Expedia, FiftyThree, Gap, General Electric Company, Glassdoor, Grokker, Hilton Worldwide, Honor, IBM Corporation, IKEA North American Services, Instacart, Intel Corporation, John Hancock, Levi Strauss & Co., LinkedIn Corporation, Logitech, Marriott International, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Microsoft, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, Morgan Stanley, Nextdoor, Nike, PayPal, Quotient, RBC Capital Markets, Red Hat, Replacements Ltd., Salesforce, Slack, SV Angel, TD Bank NA, The Dow Chemical Company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, ThirdLove, Tumblr, United Airlines, Williams-Sonoma, Yelp, ZestFinance, and Zynga.

The Intercept first reached out to 56 of the 59 companies between August 29 and September 2. ZestFinance and RBC Capital Markets were contacted on September 8, and Box was contacted on September 9. Most were reachable via email, but three companies, Accenture, Slack, and Yelp, had to be contacted via web form. The Intercept followed up with all of the companies that did not provide comment.

The Intercept was unable to reach SV Angel and Quotient. Slack was acquired by Salesforce but was contacted separately by The Intercept.

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In the past year, corporate support for transgender and LGBTQ+ rights has dropped precipitously. A survey of more than 200 corporations by Gravity Research, a risk-management advisory firm, found that roughly 39 percent of companies planned to reduce Pride Month-related engagement in the first months of the second Trump administration.

Major corporations, including Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch, ended their support of Pride festivals across the country this year. And several companies have ended their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which rates companies based on their treatment of LGBTQ+ employees. 

“One simple way of putting it is that many of these corporations just don’t see the added benefit to putting themselves on the line anymore,” said Wuest.

An obvious part of the equation is President Donald Trump. 

“This current administration has made it a mission to impose harsh consequences on those who support and protect transgender people’s rights to exist freely and thrive,” said Heron Greenesmith, the deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center, in a statement. 

More broadly, the administration has targeted companies and nonprofits showing any support for marginalized communities. 

Jared Todd, a press secretary for the Human Rights Commission, which authored the 2016 amicus brief, told The Intercept in a statement that “the Trump Administration’s baseless crusade against diversity and inclusion has led to businesses operating in fear and uncertainty, trying to piece together the constantly moving threats from countless executive orders and DOJ guidance.”

In the past, Wuest said, companies tried to curry favor with more progressive consumers and employees — and viewed support for trans rights as beneficial to their brands. But the right’s relentless targeting of companies that have shown a modicum of support for the LGBTQ+ community have flipped their perceived incentives.

“They’re making considerations based on conservative boycotts,” she said, pointing to protests against Target and Budweiser as examples. “That makes even advertising appeals to the queer communities to be fraught.”

Past corporate activism on behalf of transgender rights was arguably performative — but it was at times incredibly consequential. 

North Carolina was forced to repeal its 2016 law or lose out on billions in revenue from the corporate backlash. In South Dakota, then-Gov. Kristi Noem — now the secretary of Homeland Security — vetoed a bill banning trans girls and women from playing sports with their gender after facing significant backlash from the state’s chamber of commerce in 2021.

“[Corporate activism] can have huge effects, but at the same time, it’s ultimately downstream from a lot of bottom-line interests, and so when those things disappear, the corporations aren’t going to put their necks out,” said Wuest.

Today, 19 states have some iteration of the transgender bathroom ban first modeled in North Carolina. 

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In the case of Texas, the consequences for both transgender and cisgender Texans are dire. The bill, which passed after roughly 16 attempts from conservative legislators over the last decade, would ban trans people from using public bathrooms, locker rooms, and even prisons and jails that align with their gender. Unlike the North Carolina version, the Texas bill would also impose significant penalties for government agencies and public institutions that allow trans people to use facilities that match their gender. 

The fine is $25,000 for first-time offenders and $125,000 for the second time — the most significant penalty of any of the states with similar bans.

“The implications for trans, intersex, and nonbinary people in Texas are staggering: this bill deputizes a legion of potty-police who are incentivized to tattle on anyone whom they suspect is trans or nonbinary using the bathroom,” wrote Greenesmith of the Transgender Law Center. “Gender nonconforming people of every gender — cis, trans, and nonbinary alike — will face the ramifications of this bill.”

The post These 59 Companies Fought the Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill in 2016. In 2025, They’re Silent. appeared first on The Intercept.

“What is happening in Gaza has shaken the conscience of the world,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at her annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg, France. “People killed while begging for food. Mothers holding lifeless babies. These images are simply catastrophic.”

Von der Leyen’s proposed sanctions signaled a possible shift in the West’s relationship with its decadeslong ally. She said the commission, which operates as the executive branch of the European Union and can take limited unilateral actions, would end its bilateral support of Israel and suspend funding for projects within Israel, with exceptions for work with Israeli civil society and Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center. But more dramatic actions — like sanctioning Israeli ministers and partially suspending the EU’s trade agreement with Israel — would require potentially difficult votes from EU member states.

In the United States, meanwhile, the chorus of progressive voices calling for an end to the country’s complicity in the ongoing genocide escalated — but remains stymied by the status quo in Washington.

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Gathered in the pouring rain on Wednesday morning, progressive Democrats in Congress joined activists including the freed Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and the actors Cynthia Nixon and Morgan Spector to urge Congress to pass the Block the Bombs Act. The legislation would block the United States from sending some U.S.-made weapons to Israel. 

“Netanyahu is using U.S.-supplied weapons to perpetrate this campaign of starvation, displacement, and death in violation of U.S. and international humanitarian law,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who introduced the Block the Bombs Act in the House.

The legislation now boasts 45 co-sponsors, including several Democrats who’ve received funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in recent election cycles.

Even with the growing support for ending the U.S. shipment of certain types of weapons to Israel among Democrats, passing the Block the Bombs Act in either chamber is an uphill battle. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have remained steadfast in their support of supplying weapons to Israel.

No Republicans have signed on to co-sponsor the Block the Bombs Act in the House. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced similar legislation in the Senate, but despite gaining some momentum among Democrats, it has not been able to garner enough support to pass.

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Dramatic penalties against Israel have similarly gained vocal support in the EU but still struggle to gain final approval. Von der Leyen’s proposals to sanction “extremist ministers” and “violent settlers” and partially suspend the EU’s trade agreement with Israel likely faces long odds, as less ambitious proposals to sanction Israel have stymied — leaving the fate of these two proposals unclear — even as some European nations have condemned Israel for its actions in Gaza and Qatar. 

But in the U.S. and EU alike, critics of Israel’s genocide highlighted the moral imperative of action despite political opposition. 

“Man-made famine can never be a weapon of war. For the sake of the children, for the sake of humanity, this must stop,” von der Leyen said Wednesday in Strasbourg.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., made similar comments in Washington.

“Our humanity is at stake here,” she said. “Vengeance and greed cannot be the United States’ policy doctrine. No country can bomb their way to peace. Starving a child is violent. The children are all of ours, always. History has its eyes on us. Our children will ask what we did in this moment. And the only acceptable answer is everything we could.”

Khalil, an Algerian Palestinian activist who was detained by the Trump administration for his advocacy against Israel’s genocide at Columbia University, said he’d braved a trip to the seat of the federal government to fight for his people. 

“The U.S. government has sent over $30 billion worth of weapons and equipment to the Israeli occupation power over the past two years,” Khalil said. “These weapons and equipment are being used by Israel to kill Palestinians to carry out mass atrocity after another mass atrocity against my people. There is one clear and obvious way for Congress to act and save lives. They should stop all weapons, all weapons. Stop sending all weapons to Israel.” 

The post EU Leader Calls to Sanction Israel as U.S. Progressives Push to End Arms Sales appeared first on The Intercept.

Instead of worrying about having the right notebooks for the school year, many families are now afraid of getting detained by ICE on their way to school drop-off and pickup, three school staff members and local organizers told The Intercept. Teachers claim that the D.C. school system has been unhelpful, treating the situation as business as usual and even discouraging organizers from providing guidance to families on school grounds.

“Most parents’ biggest concern is that something will happen to them on the way to school in front of their children,” said Hillary, an elementary school teacher in the city who asked to be identified by her first name because she was concerned her activism might get her school targeted by ICE, “or it’s going to happen before they’ve been able to pick up their children from school, and there will be no one to come get their kids.”

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The climate of fear is fueled by multiple levels of intensified federal policing. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to deploy the National Guard to the District of Columbia. The Trump administration subsequently federalized the local police force and ordered further co-operation between them and ICE officials. And upon entering office in January, Trump revoked the sensitive zones memo that once prevented ICE from operating within schools, hospitals, and churches. 

In May, Hillary and a group of other teachers, parents, and community volunteers formed a rapid response team to counter increased ICE and homeland security presence in D.C. They alerted families of suspected immigration enforcement presence and offered services like walking children to their parents’ cars. They’re anticipating they’ll need to increase their efforts as school starts in the coming week.

“[We’re] trying to get walking groups. So if parents are maybe uncomfortable walking students to school by themselves or picking students up by themselves, we might have school staff, volunteers in the neighborhood, parents in the school who are providing a safe passage,” Hillary said, adding that she knows several other schools are pursuing similar efforts.

Amy Fischer, an organizer with the D.C. group Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, said she’s been working alongside volunteers like Hillary to protect immigrant families as they head back to school next week. She said undocumented parents weren’t the only immigrants who needed community protection.

“So many of the people are asylum-seekers who have pending asylum applications, they have a work permit, and under the law, should not be detained because they have a pending asylum claim,” Fischer said. “But many, many of those people are being picked up.”

Fischer said that this is all uncharted territory for D.C. residents. “We previously never had checkpoints in D.C., and the previous types of enforcement that we had were much more targeted, so they would be going after a specific individual, not just sort of random pickups on the street,” she said.

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Despite the fear, Fischer said that residents have been largely stepping up to help find solutions for families, whether that’s offering to give students rides or walking them to school. 

But even with added support, some families are still scared to return to school next week.

“I talked to a parent today who has been hiding in their apartment since there was a raid next to their building,” said an elementary school teacher who has been assisting with the emergency carpools. “They’ve not left their house since over a week ago. So they weren’t planning on sending their kids.” 

The teacher, who requested anonymity because they were concerned about retaliation from the school district and ICE against their school, said they offered to arrange for someone else to take their child to and from school, which the parent is considering. 

“A fear of being detained is kind of consistent across the board,” the teacher said. Some parents have even suggested that schools should offer remote learning, despite the evidence that it can bring worsening educational and mental health outcomes for children.

Both teachers who spoke to The Intercept said the District of Columbia Public Schools system, known as DCPS, has been slow to provide schools and teachers with guidance on how to protect their classrooms in the event of ICE activity and actively discouraged school staff from sharing information with families about their rights. “They’ve just been sitting on their hands,” said the elementary school teacher.

According to Hillary, the district is “almost acting like nothing has really changed, and that we do not have families who are in an increased amount of danger right now.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a DCPS spokesperson said, “Our leaders, educators, and staff care deeply about the safety of our students, and DCPS will continue to share safety guidance and reminders with students as they commute to and from their school campuses next week and beyond.”

Hillary added that the school district discouraged her and other teachers from providing families with information about their legal rights on school grounds. And the other elementary school teacher said that DCPS told principals “not to speak up” on the issue.

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“We were doing a lot of that in May. Unfortunately, the district kind of let it be known that they were not super supportive of us doing that on school grounds,” she said. “It has had to kind of be in quieter ways that we’re getting that information out to parents, and it’s having to come a lot more through not official channels.”

The DCPS spokesperson did not comment on whether staff had been discouraged from organizing, but said the district “has not discouraged parents or caregivers from hosting information sessions or organizing carpools.”

“DCPS cooperates with law enforcement officers bearing lawful court orders,” the spokesperson said. “Our principals have been advised to alert the district’s legal team for immediate assistance and support.”

Hillary said she worried about the impact on children whose families ultimately felt they couldn’t risk sending their kids to school. 

“We saw from Covid, even a couple weeks’ absence can have a really big effect on kids’ learning and on their mental health,” she said. “You’re not going to get a chance to build community with your classmates. And then we also know school is a place where a lot of kids get fed.” 

She said she’s been encouraged by the outpouring of community support, but she worries about keeping up the momentum if the ICE presence remains as the year drags on.

“Right now people are really activated,” Hillary said, “but how long are we going to be able to keep that going?”

The post Trump’s D.C. Takeover Is Scaring Immigrant Parents Out of Taking Kids Back to School appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, the Trump administration posted on the Office of Management and Budget’s website that it is reviewing a new rule eliminating a Housing and Urban Development Department requirement that property owners and public housing agencies provide a 30-day eviction notice for people they intend to kick out of certain types of federally subsidized housing for lack of payment.

If the rule change takes effect, public housing tenants could receive as little as 14 days of notice prior to eviction proceedings beginning, and in some jurisdictions, people in project-based rental assistance programs could receive no notice at all before formal eviction procedures begin.

The 30-day notice rule was drafted during the Biden administration to give tenants facing eviction for nonpayment time to pay the amount due to stop the eviction or secure new housing. It requires property owners and public housing authorities to give tenants a month’s notice in writing, and mandates that property managers include a monthly breakdown of overdue rent charges, the deadline for paying overdue rent, and instructions on how the tenant can pay their fees. 

The 30-day notice rule only took effect in January, but housing experts say that it has already made a significant difference for people facing eviction. Experts told The Intercept that should the Trump administration move ahead with the rule change, millions of people could be at risk of losing their housing to benefit Trump’s corporate allies. 

“It would be really a huge step backwards to see this protection be taken away at a time like this when people are really concerned about the ability to make rent and the ability to stay housed,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, the Evictions Initiative Project Director and a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project.

Some 2 million people live in project-based rental assistance housing, and an additional 1.6 million in public housing. Some housing assistance programs, such as the Housing Choice Voucher programs, were excluded from the 30-day notice, said Tran-Leung. 

The 30-day notice period significantly decreased evictions, said Tara Raghuveer, founding director of the Tenant Union Federation. “For many households, that notice initiates a process of figuring out how they’re going to make rent, so that the eviction doesn’t happen,” she said. “Many of the households impacted, disproportionately, these households are made up of single parents and children. And this will have devastating consequences.” 

The more notice, the better chance a family has to find alternative housing. “Without the full 30 days, it’s going to make it a lot more challenging,” said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst with the housing and income security team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Given the rental markets across the country, it’s not an easy thing to find an apartment to rent in just a few weeks.” 

Eviction doesn’t just impact the immediate stability of a family. It has devastating long-term consequences, explained Tran-Leung. 

“Being evicted … can create a record that often leads to barriers down the line when you’re trying to find other housing because of eviction record screening practices that landlords are increasingly using in the private rental market,” said Tran-Leung. 

Health outcomes for children who’ve faced eviction are also poor. “Children suffer a lot after evictions, like increased food insecurity and higher rates of anxiety and depression,” she said. “So it just reverberates throughout the household, through different members, and really impairs housing in the future.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to respond to a request for comment. 

Because the Trump administration introduced the rule change as an interim final rule rather than as a proposed rule, it could take effect on an accelerated timeline, said Acosta. 

Generally, as part of the federal rulemaking process, an agency issues a proposed rule that goes into the federal register and is open for comment, Acosta said. In the case of HUD, comments are typically open for 60 days to give various stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in. “The interim final rule skips all of that public input stage and just goes straight to ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” she said. 

The rule still has to be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, but it could go into effect swiftly post-review.

That means tenants are going to feel the consequences sooner. “This is going to be a lot trickier for everyone on the ground to make sure that people understand what can and cannot happen if they find themselves in that situation of facing eviction,” said Acosta.

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Tran-Leung said that this is a part of a larger push from corporate landlords who have lobbied the Trump administration to reduce eviction protections for tenants. “Housing providers right now are looking for ways to speed up the eviction process to make it easier to get tenants out,” she said.

Trump — a landlord who inherited his real estate empire from his father — has repeatedly sided with the interests of corporate landlords and property owners.

Trump and other Republicans ran a platform of making America more affordable, but in practice they’ve spent the months since the election doing the opposite, said Acosta. 

“You have them then pushing policies like this, where it’s giving people less time to just get things together in the event of an eviction, while they’re also pushing for major cuts in all of these different rental assistance programs that make housing more affordable,” said Acosta. “You just have all of these things piling up, particularly on people with low incomes, just completely contradictory to what they are trying to message.” 

The post Trump the Landlord Plans to Speed Up Evictions From Public Housing appeared first on The Intercept.

“I have two sons,” said Wallis. “I don’t want to leave them motherless.” 

Wallis, 40, begged her health care provider to give her an IUD — her best chance at preventing another pregnancy and protecting her life. But her provider, the Department of Veterans Affairs, refused to cover the procedure. Despite three years of service in the Army, Wallis was forced to pay out of pocket at a local clinic.

“The risks of me getting pregnant and there being a significant health issue were too much risk for me to gamble on,” she said. 

Access to reproductive care and abortion has long been a problem for those who rely on VA care. But a policy change by the Trump administration stands to make reproductive health for service members and veterans even worse. Last week, the administration posted a proposed rule for VA facilities that would severely narrow access to abortion — eliminating exceptions for health, rape, and incest, and only allowing the procedure in situations deemed to threaten the life of the mother. The rule would also ban any counseling for abortion through the VA. The proposed policy now enters a mandatory 30-day comment period, after which it can go into effect. 

Experts told The Intercept that the rule change will have devastating consequences for the millions of service members and veterans reliant on health care through the VA, as well as their families.

“It’s the worst-case scenario,” said Rachel Fey, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at Power to Decide, a nonprofit focused on reproductive and sexual health. 

The Department of Veterans Affairs has long excluded abortion care and abortion counseling from its medical benefits package, with a narrow exception for the “life of the mother.” That changed in 2022 when the Biden administration, recognizing the danger posed to veterans and service members by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, instituted a new rule allowing for abortion counseling and abortion care in an expanded list of circumstances.

It’s this Biden-era change that is under attack by the Trump administration. The administration describes the proposed policy shift as a return to form.

“Prior to the Biden Administration’s politically motivated change in 2022, federal law and longstanding precedent across Democrat and Republican administrations prevented VA from providing abortions and abortion counseling,” wrote Gary Kunich, a Veterans Affairs spokesperson, in a statement to the Intercept.

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Fey and other reproductive health experts had anticipated the Trump administration would institute an abortion ban at the VA. But they told The Intercept that this version is particularly draconian considering the dramatic fall-off in abortion access following the Dobbs decision. 

“This new policy would be one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, and for veterans living in the 12 states that ban abortion, it would further close off what may be their only opportunity to access urgently needed abortion care,” said Liz McCaman Taylor, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a statement. “For veterans living in these states, they may now be forced to carry pregnancies to term even if they were raped or the pregnancy puts their health in jeopardy.” 

The proposed rule would “reinstate the full exclusion on abortions and abortion counseling.” Unlike under the Biden rule, which allowed for abortion counseling and abortion care to protect the health of the mother or in cases of rape and incest, the new proposed rule only includes a vague, narrow exception for “life of the mother.” 

“For the avoidance of doubt, the proposed rule would make clear that the exclusion for abortion does not apply ‘when a physician certifies that the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term,’” wrote the administration in a summary of the draft proposal. 

However, in a potentially complicating line, the administration wrote: “Taken together, claims in the prior administration’s rule that abortions throughout pregnancy are needed to save the lives of pregnant women are incorrect.”

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Jaclyn Dean, director of congressional relations, reproductive health, at the National Partnership for Women & Families, said that the lack of medical clarity around when doctors are allowed to intervene is going to cost lives. “If I’m a doctor for the VA,” said Dean, “I’m very confused about what I’m legally allowed to do.”

Fey said her organization, Power to Decide, was “not aware of any circumstances” where the VA covered abortion care under the life exception in place before the Biden rule. “There was always sort of supposed to be this very, very narrow life exception, but similar to what’s happening now in the post-Dobbs world, we’re seeing that those life exceptions don’t work in practice,” she said.

Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America, said the counseling ban adds another layer of risk because providers are prevented from even discussing the option of abortion until it may be too late. 

“Good luck if you get to a place where you’re dying,” said Church, “because you can’t get abortion counseling before that. And that, to me, is insulting. Not only that, but it could have deadly consequences.”

The counseling ban also means veterans or active-duty service members referred to the Veterans Affairs administration for care after being sexually assaulted can’t discuss abortion as an option with their provider. 

“We already know that women veterans experience Military Sexual Trauma at alarming rates, and many of us continue to fight battles long after our service ends,” said Stephanie Gattas, founder of the Pink Berets, which offers support for women veterans struggling with PTSD, military sexual assault, and other mental health issues.

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Over 8,000 service members, who can also be referred to the VA for care, reported being sexually assaulted last year. And nearly 500 people reported being sexually assaulted while on a VA campus last year, according to Church. Both numbers are likely a severe undercount.

“The military community is wrought with sexual violence,” said Church. “Now, if you get raped and become pregnant … because of assault at the Department of Veterans Affairs, they won’t help you.” 

Sylvia Andersh, a former service member who worked at Veterans Affairs hospitals as a nurse, called the lack of exceptions for rape “cruel.” 

“My faith in humanity has been quite tested with the fact that they’re willing to blatantly hurt women,” said Andersh. 

For Wallis, who was sexually assaulted while serving in the military, the lack of rape exceptions is especially troubling. “It feels like being spit in my face,” she said. 

“I wrote a check up to and including my life for this country, and I’m not provided equal access to care,” Wallis said.

Wallis also worries that this new policy could increase suicidal ideation among service members. “An unexpected pregnancy, whether it’s due to rape, incest, or contraceptive failure, doesn’t matter what the cause is,” she said, “it increases suicidal ideation, and in the lack of access to care, you add that in, and that risk increases further.” 

The biggest impact is going to fall on veterans and service members living in states with abortion bans, experts told The Intercept. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest integrated health care system in the United States, serving 2 million women veterans, over 400,000 of whom live in states with abortion bans.

Though the Trump administration insists the policy change would be a return to standard VA practice, Taylor, of Center for Reproductive Rights, points out that the landscape has changed following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

“We were living in a much different world the last time this total ban was in effect. This is the first time there has been a total abortion ban in VA health care facilities since Roe v. Wade was overturned,” said Taylor. “Before Roe fell, if a veteran couldn’t get an abortion at a VA health care facility, they could seek one elsewhere in their state. Now, abortion is banned in many states, and over 100 clinics have closed, meaning veterans living in those states will be totally out of options.”  

Wallis said she feels as if the administration is testing how far it can restrict access to care, pointing to the abortion ban and new restrictions on gender-affirming care at the VA.

“We’re the guinea pigs they want to test what they’re able to do to the general public,” she said. “I truly feel like they’re testing what they want to do with the rest of the country on us, and it’s scary to me.”

The post Veterans Are “Guinea Pigs” in Trump’s First National Abortion Ban Experiment appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday it will offer student loan forgiveness and repayment options to new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits — along with a $50,000 signing bonus. 

The announcement comes as the Trump administration works to limit the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for groups the president considers political enemies. Since 2007, borrowers employed by the government or nonprofit organizations serving a wide range of public interest causes have been eligible for forgiveness through PSLF. 

But in July, the Department of Education took a major step in altering the program’s rules to exclude certain employers in accordance with Trump’s executive order “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” which claims the loan forgiveness “has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values, sometimes through criminal means.” Under the revised rules, nonprofits that help transgender youth access gender-affirming care and attorneys who provide legal assistance to undocumented immigrants, among others, might no longer qualify, according to the press release from the Department of Education.

Final language has yet to be published; before it takes effect, there will be an opportunity for public comment. 

Experts in higher education and student debt told The Intercept that the administration is deploying the financial aid system as a tool to advance its political agenda, punish perceived enemies, and reward allies. 

“This just shows the lengths that the Trump administration will go to to weaponize Public Service Loan Forgiveness and debt more broadly to achieve their fascist objectives,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center. 

Over the last few years, Republicans have fought to limit student debt relief for borrowers. Last year, Republican attorneys general successfully lobbied the Supreme Court to pause the SAVE Plan, an income-based repayment plan implemented by the Biden administration that allowed borrowers to make smaller monthly payments and achieve debt relief within a shorter time frame. The Big, Beautiful, Bill signed by Trump in July eliminates the SAVE Plan as of July 1, 2028, and replaces it with significantly less generous repayment options for student loans. 

On Friday, the Department of Education resumed interest accrual on SAVE Plan loans, meaning nearly 8 million borrowers are now seeing their debt grow. 

On top of that, the spending bill creates new limits on federal borrowing for graduate students and parents taking out loans on behalf of their children — meaning families and people attending higher cost educational programs such as medical school will likely have to take out higher interest private loans.

“We’re going to see a wave of defaults happening, and we’re going to see more people who can’t afford their payments,” said Sara Partridge, associate director of higher education at the Center for American Progress.

Partridge said implementing changes that will make life harder for millions of borrowers while championing debt forgiveness for ICE agents is peak hypocrisy. “It is hypocritical to provide additional funding for debt relief for certain categories of workers while seeking to deny it to everyday Americans,” said Partridge. 

Sam Alig, 36, a borrower enrolled on the SAVE Plan, said Republicans and the administration have left borrowers in chaos as they scramble to figure out how much they’ll owe under the new income-based repayment systems.

“It’s such a mess,” said Alig. “Every single time I call, they tell me something else. … It’s $400 [per month] now. Six months from now, it could be $800, I have no idea.”

The irony of the new DHS announcement isn’t lost on Alig. “It’s also funny that Republicans are going to get behind student forgiveness when it comes to ICE agents, because they’re so against student loan forgiveness for the entire working and middle class.” 

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It’s not completely clear how the ICE loan forgiveness program will be funded. The departments of Homeland Security and Education did not respond to requests for comment. The influx of $170 billion for DHS from the new spending bill could be a mechanism to help pay off new recruits loans.

Government agencies can use their own funding to offer loan assistance as a recruitment and retention strategy via a separate initiative, the Federal Student Loan Repayment program, which allows agencies to repay federal student loans for their employees up to $10,000 a year and $60,000 per employee.

The contrast between how the Trump administration is treating most borrowers and ICE agents is “shocking,” said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at EdTrust, an education-focused nonprofit. 

“The Department of Education is effectively putting other people’s cancellations on hold, while fast-tracking this other group of folks who haven’t done anything to warrant cancellation,” said Pilar. “To me, it’s outrageous, and it shows where the priority of this administration is.” 

The expected changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program will likely face legal challenge, Partridge said. 

“I’m sure there’s going to be a lawsuit against it, but still,” said Partridge, “it’s a major abuse of power for the government to wield this tool to advance its political ends and to propose denying loan forgiveness to borrowers who work for organizations that this administration disfavors.” 

The rule hasn’t been published yet, but Partridge said it’s expected to impact a wide range of people who have been targets in the Trump administration.

“If enacted, [it would] deny Public Service Loan Forgiveness to people at organizations doing work that this administration disagrees with, particularly those who do things such as providing legal services to immigrants or providing gender-affirming care,” said Partridge. 

The vague language around “substantial illegal purposes” also opens the door for more groups to be cut out of the program. “It also would allow the administration to deny loan forgiveness to people who work at organizations that they say violate state law, and that includes trespassing, which we know historically has been used against protesters,” she said. “So there are ways that this administration is wielding the power of the federal financial aid system to advance its ideological goals.”

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The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan Adviser Warned Free College Would Create a Dangerous “Educated Proletariat”

Weaponizing the cost of an education isn’t a new tactic from the right. Amid nationwide campus protests against the Vietnam War, then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan and his political allies slashed the budget for public universities, forcing them to charge tuition, arguing that students had become too radical. “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go through higher education],” Reagan’s education adviser, Roger A. Freeman, told the San Francisco Chronicle. 

“There is a very robust history about how debt has been used as a lever of social control,” said Yu. “[Student debt] is a force that can keep people in place, keep people in line. … That is why it is being wielded as a weapon against people who work in fields that they don’t like, and rewarding folks who work in fields that they do like.” 

The post Guess Who’s Eligible for Student Loan Forgiveness: New ICE Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

The Office of Management and Budget concluded its review last week of a Veterans Affairs rule titled Reproductive Health Services, clearing the way to implement it at the VA.

Experts believe the rule is a reversal of a Biden-era policy of the same name which ended the agency’s ban on abortion counseling for veterans and allowed for VA providers to offer abortion services in limited circumstances, such as rape, incest, or endangerment of a pregnant person’s life or health. If the policy is overturned, hundreds of thousands of veterans in states with abortion bans could lose access to abortion care and counseling.

Sara Outterson, chief federal legislative counsel for Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the change appears to be “the first nationwide abortion ban that Trump is supporting and putting in place.”

The new rule has not yet been published, and until it is, experts can’t be certain what exactly is in it. The VA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. But Rachel Fey, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the reproductive and sexual health advocacy organization Power to Decide, said that based on the Trump administration’s posture and explicit calls in Project 2025 to reverse the Biden policy, she expects one of two outcomes. 

“We think either they would roll back the exceptions to an extremely narrow set that mimics the Hyde Amendment,” Fey said, referring to a law that bars federal funds from being used for abortion care except in cases of rape, incest, or to save a person’s life. (The Hyde Amendment does not allow exceptions to preserve a person’s health in non-fatal circumstances, as the Biden rule does.)

Or, Fey said, another possibility is “just striking [the Biden rule] entirely and saying abortion is not allowed in any circumstances at the VA.”

The Biden administration implemented the Reproductive Health Services rule for the VA in 2024, two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Though the rule only allows VA hospitals to provide abortions in extreme circumstances, it was designed to provide basic protections in states that moved quickly to institute abortion bans.

Over half of all women veterans of reproductive age in the U.S. live in states where abortion is banned or likely to be banned, according to analysis from the National Partnership for Women & Families. 

“So that’s 345,000 women veterans that live in states that have banned or are likely to ban abortion,” said Jaclyn Dean, director of congressional relations, reproductive health, at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “For many of the women veterans living in any of those 12 states with total abortion bans, the VA is the only place that they can get abortion care. So you can expect those people to lose abortion care in cases of rape, incest, in the life and health of the pregnant person.”

In that climate, Fey stressed, even narrowing the exceptions could be devastating. 

“What we’ve seen in states like Texas and Idaho is women coming close to death, suffering the loss of future fertility sometimes, suffering long-term disability because they were not given the standard clinical care they needed when they needed it,” Fey said. “That’s what we’re talking about when we get to a life exception versus a health exception.”

Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who co-authored a letter in April opposing the rule change along with 130 House Democrats, said reversing the Biden rule was a “betrayal.”

“As a physician, I trained at the VA, where a sign at the entrance read: ‘The price of freedom is visible here.’ Our veterans sacrificed everything for this country, and in return, we promised them the best care possible,” Dexter wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “For Trump to reinstate a complete ban on abortion care and counseling at the VA – even in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life or health of the mother — is an utter betrayal of that promise.”

Veterans also face unique health risks related to pregnancy, said Outterson with the Center for Reproductive Rights. 

“Pregnancy is just riskier for veterans,” said Outterson, “because of the different health risks that they face, higher rates of sexual assault, higher rates of PTSD … and the higher [rates of] other chronic conditions.”

And restricting or cutting off access to abortion would only compound the additional barriers to accessing quality health care that veterans already face, Fey noted.

“Serving in the U.S. military is often a way out of poverty for a lot of people in this country, and because of systemic racism, a disproportionate number of the people looking for that way out are Black and brown women when they serve in the military,” said Fey. “When we talk about reproductive health care in this country, the harms don’t fall equally.”

Related

Trump Puts Lives at Risk by Revoking Emergency Abortion Guidelines for Hospitals

The Trump administration has been steadily chipping away at policies put in place by President Joe Biden to protect access to reproductive health care. In June, Trump rescinded guidance from the Biden administration that directed hospitals under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act to provide stabilizing treatment to patients in medical emergencies — including abortion care. 

“It’s all part of this larger plan of extremists to ban abortion wherever they can and to interfere with people’s personal medical decisions,” said Dean. “They’re weaponizing control over veterans’ health care, instead of doing what’s actually best for our country’s veterans, which is giving them the health care that they need.”

Correction: July 29, 2025, 5:18 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to correct the attribution of a quote from Sara Outterson at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The post Trump Prepares to Revoke Lifesaving Abortion Care for Veterans appeared first on The Intercept.

“I haven’t been following it closely,” said Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who’s made defending Israel a key part of his political career.

The response was one of a mixed bag among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill interviewed by The Intercept, but Fetterman’s tone was the most strident in its lack of regard.

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Israel’s West Bank Attacks Fuel Its Annexation Plans

Despite its most powerful ally and arms dealer’s stated preference for a two-state solution, Israel’s Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of a symbolic measure to annex the occupied West Bank on Wednesday.

The nonbinding resolution, which was advanced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and passed 71-13 in the Knesset, won’t legally change the reality in the West Bank — but it marks an escalation in the Israeli government’s efforts to annex the territory.

Four Democrats in the Senate and House who spoke to The Intercept condemned the Israeli government’s vote. Others said they hadn’t been following the issue. Fetterman was one of three senators who told The Intercept on Thursday they were unaware of the Knesset vote. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declined to comment.

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The Companies Making It Easy to Buy in a West Bank Settlement

The resolution in the Knesset, or Parliament, called to apply “Israeli sovereignty, law, judgment and administration to all the areas of Jewish settlement of all kinds in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley” — which is how most Israelis refer to the West Bank.

Currently, 3 million Palestinians reside in the West Bank, alongside over 500,000 Israeli settlers, who’ve established settlements in the occupied territory in violation of international law.

No Denying Apartheid

Annexation of the West Bank would be at odds with the U.S. official policy goal for two states — one for Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, and one state for Israel comprising its pre-1967 borders.

Related

The ICJ Ruling Confirms What Palestinians Have Been Saying for 57 Years

The two-state solution has won official backing from successive presidents dating back to the late 1990s — except for Donald Trump — to assuage concerns over Israel having permanent control over millions of Palestinians without full civil rights.

Though the conditions already exist — there is a growing consensus that Israel in an apartheid state — making this control officially permanent would make apartheid indisputable.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have repeatedly undermined the possibility of a two-state solution by arming Israel as it continues to attack Palestinian people and seize their territory, which lawmakers in Congress have made excuses for.

As public sentiment turns against Israel, however, with voters increasingly opposing the Netanyahu government’s genocide in Gaza, some members of Congress have been more willing to criticize the Israeli regime.

Some Condemnations

Though President Joe Biden claimed to be interested in a two-state solution, his administration continued policies such as keeping the U.S. Embassy in occupied Jerusalem, which experts view as undermining the possibility of an independent Palestinian state that includes the West Bank.

In his second term, Trump escalated his efforts to thwart the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state. On Thursday, State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott told reporters during a press briefing that the U.S. would not be attending a United Nations conference on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. And Trump has repeatedly called for Palestinians in Gaza to be relocated and for the region to be turned into a luxury resort.

Fetterman’s response to the vote stood in stark contrast to the four other Democratic members of Congress.

“The Knesset’s vote to symbolically annex the West Bank is not just reckless — it’s a betrayal of the values that have long underpinned America’s support for Israel. I’ve visited the West Bank. I’ve spoken with people whose lives are shaped by fear and violence,” wrote Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., in a statement. “A negotiated two‑state solution is the only path to lasting peace and true security for both Israelis and Palestinians. This vote rejects that path.” 

Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vt., on the other hand, told The Intercept that now is the time for the U.S. to push back on Netanyahu’s government’s “racist, reactionary” policies.

“Israel is now run by right-wing extremists who are in Gaza starving children and shooting people lining up for food, and now in the West Bank, we’ve seen vigilantism,” said Sanders. “I think the time is now for the United States government to make clear that we are not going to continue to support these racist, reactionary policies of the Netanyahu government.” 

Sen. Tim Kaine. D-Va., argued that this would harm peace talks and threaten long-term regional stability.

“It’s going to hurt Israel in the long run,” said Kaine. “You got a peace discussion that’s going on right now where Arab nations are saying we want to be peaceful partners with our neighbor, Israel. But this also means that we need to have a future for Palestine as was promised to Palestinians in the U.N. resolution in 1947, and we’re not willing to find this regional peace unless you agree to do that.”

Kaine argued that the Knesset vote further isolates Israel in the region.

“It looks like the Knesset is just shutting the door in the face of Arab partners who want to try to work together to promote regional stability,” he said. “There is a credible opportunity for Israel to be less isolated in the neighborhood, but a vote like this makes it harder, not easier.”

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., told The Intercept that the vote speaks to the broader “endgame” for the Netanyahu administration.

“For Netanyahu and his administration, annexation and control have always been the endgame,” said Ramirez, in a statement. “We must end the U.S.’s complicity in the Netanyahu Administration’s regime of terror. Congress must do its oversight job, demand an end to the blockade and pass Block the Bombs.”

The post Israeli Parliament Votes for Making Apartheid Official. Fetterman: “I Haven’t Been Following It.” appeared first on The Intercept.

Last Wednesday, the Trump administration posted a proposed rule for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA. While details were scant on the website, the language mirrors an abandoned 2019 proposal that would have increased documentation requirements for federal housing assistance — and likely forced tens of thousands of mixed-status families to choose between homelessness, financial ruin, or family separation. 

Undocumented people are currently ineligible for most federally funded rental assistance programs, but in families where some people have legal status, members who qualify can receive pro-rated housing assistance, allowing the whole family to live together in public housing. Under the proposed 2019 rule, those families would become ineligible for most federally funded housing assistance programs if at least one member of the family is disqualified by their immigration status.

Housing and immigration experts told The Intercept that the new proposal looks like a revival of that attempted rule. 

“The choice that families will be faced with,” said Anna Bailey, a senior analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “is going to be staying together but losing the assistance that makes housing affordable — putting them at risk of eviction and instability and homelessness — or splitting up … that’s a really agonizing decision.” 

The Washington Post reported in April that the Trump administration was drafting a rule to exclude mixed-status families from public housing, which they’d previously attempted to implement in 2019. 

Now, experts believe the administration may have taken the first step in enacting that policy by posting the proposed rule to OIRA — a subset of the Office of Management and Budget that has to review the rule before it can go to HUD. 

A HUD spokesperson confirmed that the draft rule was under review and said more information would be available afterward.

“[The 2019 rule] was met with overwhelming opposition,” explained Marie Claire Tran-Leung, evictions initiative project director and a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project. “There were 30,000 comments, which was the record at the time.” 

The first Trump administration ran out of time to finalize the rule, Tran-Leung said, and the Biden administration withdrew it. 

Though undocumented people can’t access housing assistance programs themselves, the current rules allow them to benefit from limited financial assistance and increased housing stability for their families. A family with one undocumented parent and two U.S. citizen children, for example, would receive pro-rated assistance based on the two children. A family with one undocumented parent, one U.S. citizen parent, and two U.S. citizen children would receive assistance based on the three citizens in the family. 

Analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities based on the 2019 version of the rule found that the primary victims of this policy would be children, who made up over half of the population in public housing living in mixed-status households. According to their findings, roughly 58,200 children could lose housing as a result of the policy change — an estimated 56,000 of those children are U.S. citizens. 

Latino families would also be disproportionately impacted by the rule change. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report, roughly 85 percent of mixed-status families living in public housing were Latino. The analysis found that, on average, these families typically earned around $13,000 a year. 

“These are families who also very much need this to stay stably housed,” said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst with the housing and income security team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Losing this will automatically destabilize them.” 

Esther Reyes, a campaign strategist for the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition, said this change would have a “profound” impact on children in mixed-status families. 

“The impact is going to be not just widespread, but very profound. Stable housing is a really important determinant of a child’s well-being,” she said. “It’s one of the foundational sources of stability that children need to be able to meet their other needs and milestones.”

Research has consistently shown links between housing instability and a host of adverse outcomes for children — including mental health effects like depression and anxiety, and dangers to physical health, including increased emergency room visits. 

Acosta and Bailey noted that this time around, they expect a similar rule change could affect fewer families — because the Trump administration has effectively scared many mixed-status families out of accessing public benefits. 

In addition to prohibiting mixed-status families from living in public housing, the original rule also included new documentation requirements to check citizenship status. Experts predict the change would not only be difficult for many low-income families to obtain, but could also scare immigrants from applying for assistance in the first place. 

“Already, a lot of families with immigrants are afraid of applying for assistance that they actually are eligible for,” said Bailey. The change could intensify that fear, she said, so “even folks who are absolutely eligible for assistance may not apply and seek help that they need to have housing stability.” 

Experts also expressed concern that the spread of fear and misinformation around the potential rule change could drive families out of their homes prematurely. 

“The danger is that families make the calculus that they have to leave the housing that they currently have,” said Tran-Leung at the National Housing Law Project. “We are trying to really prevent that, because until this final rule is passed, the law hasn’t changed, and they have the right to stay there.”

For now, the rule change is only in its initial stages. The administration still needs to post the proposed rule to HUD’s website, along with a detailed policy proposal, and allow for public comment. Until that happens, its exact details will remain unclear. 

Acosta said she expects the rule to be “essentially the same,” as the 2019 version, especially in its goals of excluding mixed-status families from subsidized housing. “But at this point, it’s pretty unclear.” 

No matter how the details turn out, the rule is another attempt to scapegoat immigrants for a housing crisis entirely within the U.S. government’s power to solve, Acosta said. 

“In a country as wealthy and as powerful as ours is, we actually could make sure that everyone has a safe place to live,” Acosta said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant or how long you’ve been in this country; everybody needs a safe, stable place to live. So part of what this kind of policy proposal is trying to do is pit the needs of some people against other.”

Update: July 22, 2025, 8:03 p.m. ET

This story has been updated with a response from a HUD spokesperson.

The post Trump Admin Prepares to Kick Mixed Immigration Status Families Out of Public Housing appeared first on The Intercept.