2026-04-02 01:47:14
Somewhere, paid for with your tax dollars, are $12,540 worth of three-tiered fruit basket stands. It’s a symptom of a much larger problem.
Buried in the way Congress funds the government is a “use it or lose it” rule that forces federal agencies to spend whatever’s left in their budgets before the fiscal year ends September 30 or hand the excess money back to the Treasury and potentially lose it in the next year’s allocation.
This happens every year, and every administration does this. But last September shattered every previous record, according to a report released in March by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog that tracks federal spending.
The Defense Department spent $93.4 billion in September, with $50 billion of that spent in the last five working days. To put that in perspective, only nine countries on Earth have an annual military budget that large.
The shopping list included luxury items like $6.9 million for lobster tail, $15.1 million in ribeye steak, and $2 million for Alaskan king crab, as well as musical instruments ($21,750 for a custom handmade Japanese flute), ice cream machines ($124,000), sushi prep tables ($26,000), and $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands. This is the same administration that created DOGE—an entire department whose sole purpose was to eliminate government waste.
The month after the September splurge, the government shutdown left 42 million Americans—1 in 8—briefly cut off from SNAP food assistance. A federal judge eventually ordered benefits restored, but the disruption was immediate and real for millions of families.
And it may get worse. In July, President Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act restructured SNAP with new work and eligibility requirements and shifted part of the cost to states. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates as many as 4 million people could lose their food assistance permanently as a result.
Trump is now pushing to increase next year’s Defense Department budget by 66 percent, to $1.5 trillion, the largest increase since the Korean War.
2026-04-01 19:30:00
As Cuba’s worst economic crisis continues to ravage the country, its approximately 10 million people have endured nationwide blackouts, scarce food, and a pervasive sense of anxiety about their country’s political and economic stability. But no part of the infrastructure has been more affected than the island’s medical care. Once lauded as one of the best health care systems in the world, it has deteriorated in the last decade as many doctors migrated elsewhere, and medical supply shortages have worsened due to failing economic policies. The situation reached a breaking point earlier this year, following the US invasion of Venezuela on January 3, 2026. That’s when the crucial supply of oil to Cuba was cut off, and President Donald Trump threatened other nations with punishing tariffs should they send oil to the island. The US government recently softened its stance, the New York Times reported on Monday, and will decide which oil shipments can arrive in Cuba on a “case-by-case basis.”
The lack of fuel has prompted island-wide power outages that last several hours, sometimes even days. “You cannot damage a state’s economy without affecting its inhabitants,” Cuba’s Health Minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, told the Associated Press. “This situation could put lives at risk.” A recent New York Times story chronicled the myriad of problems affecting patients and providers: clinics struggling to provide treatments like chemotherapy and dialysis, ambulances left without gas, underweight pregnant mothers, and vaccine delays for tens of thousands of children. Last week, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, called the situation “deeply concerning.” He wrote on X, “Thousands of surgeries have been postponed during the last month, and people needing care, from cancer patients to pregnant women preparing for delivery, have been put at risk due to lack of power to operate medical equipment and cold chain storage for vaccines.”
Economic ties between the US and Cuba are restricted under the decades-old embargo, which began in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. As I reported last month, the embargo severely limits commerce with the island. It does, however, allow for some exceptions, such as humanitarian aid. Since 1994, the Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, Global Links, has shipped medical supplies to Cuba under a partnership with the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO Regional Office for the Americas. For more than three decades, the nonprofit has distributed surplus medical products from the US healthcare system locally and abroad.
I spoke with Global Links executive director Angela Garcia on a Zoom call last week about the organization’s mission to send supplies to Cuba’s medical providers in recent months. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
You last visited Cuba in February. What struck you the most about the country’s ongoing crisis during that trip?
Cuba has one of the fastest aging populations. With migration out of the country, there are a lot of older adults who are living in very challenging situations and now have to cook over charcoal outside due to the power outages. Malnutrition is hitting the oldest population and the very youngest the hardest. And doctors don’t have a lot of choices— triaging surgeries that they’re forced to do because of the shortages and the lack of power, consolidating hospital services, and triaging which patients get the highest level of care. They are being forced to make these types of decisions. More people will die of preventable things there than they would have before. That’s what’s most heartbreaking.
“More people will die of preventable things there than they would have before. That’s what’s most heartbreaking.”
What did you hear from medical providers on the ground about the state of their health care facilities? What resources are most needed?
They’re asking us for things that are so basic, for example, gloves. Best practice is that you use a glove, and then you throw the glove away. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re washing and reusing gloves, which we have seen in many places around the world. It’s not that they don’t know that’s not ideal. It’s the reality of [the fact that] there’s no glove after this, so we’re going to wash and reuse it. It doesn’t have to be this way. These are a series of human-made decisions that put patients in a position where they’re not able to get care, even if it’s known by doctors what the care needs to be. From a humanitarian perspective, this is not like after a hurricane. This is not like a civil war. This doesn’t have to be this way.
I was meeting with a group of hospital directors I’ve worked with for the past couple of years. When I ask them, what are the top three most needed products, they’ll say medical gloves, surgical gloves, sutures, or IV catheters. And I asked, what else besides that? And they said adult diapers. I just didn’t expect that. They said, well, because of the personnel shortages and because of the older population, before we leave at night, we want to make sure they have adult briefs on because if they get up in the middle of the night and slip and fall or have an accident, they have a much more serious health issue. That to me just spoke to the humanity of hospital leadership and top surgeons thinking, how do we minimize a severe situation? How do we do the best we can for our patients, despite the shortages, despite the power outages, despite the personnel shortage? That just sort of hit me.
What is the shipping process like for aid that goes to Cuba, and with all the different needs right now, how do you prioritize what to send?
We ship by the most cost-efficient method, which is the back of a 40-foot semi truck that goes on a container ship. We’ve sent one every time we raise $25,000. So, in the past 12 months, it’s been about every two to three months. We send large quantities of gloves, wound care bandages, gauze, incontinence products, supplies for intubation and delivering babies, and vaccine syringes. We look at how do we decide what we ship when the needs are so big? And we know what those things are. We have to continue to support women having their babies, the surgeries that are being planned, pediatrics, and the older adult population. So that’s what we look at with each container. And then just start on the next one and do the same thing over again.
What challenges has your organization faced in sending supplies due to the ongoing fuel shortage?
The logistics are the biggest challenge. Once you ship a container, it’s just as if you mailed a package. If you mailed it with FedEx or UPS, to actually change the end destination once it’s out there, is not easy—if you can do it at all. With each container that has left since last fall, we’ve had to update the shipping line with the final destination. We’ve had the WHO in Havana tell us, it can’t come into Mariel, it has to go to Santiago. And then one was destined for Santiago, we had to do the reverse, and that adds cost on our end. But if they can’t pull it out when it gets there, there’s no point, right? So there is a congestion that we have to work through on literally, a day-by-day basis to ensure that as the containers are heading down, they get to the port where WHO can get to the container and pull out the supplies, which we’ve never had to do before.
That sounds like so much work. How do you manage to adapt so frequently?
It’s what we’re set up to do. Cubans need us more than ever. They’re communicating what those needs are. People can support what we do, and that, in turn, supports Cubans in their time of need.
2026-04-01 19:00:00
Last week, Mother Jones published firsthand accounts of children and parents detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the nation’s only family detention center. The stories, which came from sworn oral declarations given to legal aid groups between July 2025 and February of this year, painted a bleak picture of life at the facility: wormy food, dangerously lacking medical and mental health care, water that makes children sick, nearly impossible sleeping conditions, and intimidating treatment by guards.
Now, dozens more sworn declarations included in a recent 361-page court filing reveal new details about life in the facility from January, February, and March of this year.
Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies.
Many of the detainees, whose declarations were translated into English by sworn interpreters, discussed the same issues that we highlighted in our first story. But they also talked about another trend: As media and political scrutiny of Dilley has increased—particularly since the arrival of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in January—so have threats of retribution against those who speak out. Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies. They recounted being hidden away from congressional delegations visiting the facility, or, conversely, receiving special treatment on the days that politicians and lawyers visited.
The Department of Homeland Security and CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates Dilley, have consistently said that the facility is a safe, family-friendly place where detainees have access to high-quality medical care, meals, clean water, and educational opportunities. DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, but in the past has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not destroy letters or confiscate art supplies. In an email, CoreCivic said that the facility has been the target of “baseless allegations” that “undermine the public-service centric work” of their staff.
We went through the detainees’ recent declarations and pulled out some particularly telling parts.
On Christmas they treated us so cruelly. They brought an ICE official in a Santa Claus outfit here, but he brought no toys or sweets, and the kids all did not understand why Santa did not bring them anything. Young children went up to hug Santa, but he would push them away. It was so cruel. They clearly did it as a photo opportunity to use us to pretend they were treating us humanely. It left the kids all upset.
—41-year-old mother of a 17-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, on their 74th day at Dilley (January 14)
The holidays at Dilley were awful. On Christmas, they told us they were going to have a special Christmas event for the children. They said they would put a good movie on, and they even had flyers at the gym about it. They had all the kids come into the gym and sit in the chairs. Then they put on a video clip of the Grinch movie. After a few minutes, someone came in the gym dressed like Santa. The children were excited and started to gather around him. Staff yelled at them all to sit down, and then the Santa just gave the children who were sitting a bag of chips. Then the staff took a picture of the kids with Santa, turned the video on for another few minutes, and told the kids the activity was over. It was humiliating and frustrating to be treated this way; it was worse than doing nothing actually.
—Parent of a 9-year-old girl, on their estimated 113th day at Dilley (January 15)
When we took part in a peaceful protest here, one guard here told us that they were going to charge all of us with crimes for obstructing the law and then separate all the fathers and send them to a prison if we ever did another protest. They also said they were going to use the cameras to identify who was participating in the protests. After hearing these threats, we felt overwhelmed with fear.
—33-year-old father of a four-year-old girl, on their 49th day at Dilley (February 11)
A couple weeks ago, when the congresspeople were here, the staff enclosed us in our room from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. At 12 p.m., they let us go to eat with guards flanking us on both sides to make sure we didn’t talk with the congressmembers.
That day, they passed around a list for people to sign up and talk with the congressmembers. We all wrote our names down, but staff only allowed two people from our hallway to talk with the congressmembers. We think they were punishing the people who were filing the most grievances by preventing them from speaking with them.
On that day, they didn’t even let my three children go outside to get medicine. Instead, they brought the medicine to our room. The nurse who came to our room said that [the] medical wing was closed for the day. She said, “This is the result of you guys for doing protests; this is the punishment…”
A few days ago, the officials here found out that I have spoken with reporters, and the staff have taken reprisal steps against my children and me.
For the past couple of days, my children and I have been locked down in our room. They put us on lockdown after a staff member pushed my daughter and took all of her coloring materials away.
This week, my young daughter wrote “liberty” on a piece of paper. One of the officers found me in the laundry room and told me that I needed to come to the recreation area with that paper. When I went there, a man named Officer __ took the paper and ripped it up. He said you cannot have papers that say this. Then, he threw it away. I told him I did not know that the children were not allowed to express themselves in writing. He told me that our family could have a report made against us for this. So, I apologized.
—31-year-old mother of 7-year-old boy, 9-year-old girl, and 15-year-old girl on their 49th day at Dilley (February 12)
Some families did a protest a few weeks ago. After the protest, the staff started searching our rooms. My 2-year-old had some crayons that another family had given her. CoreCivic staff confiscated her crayons and threw them away. She was crying. They said they were throwing away the crayons for our security and so the children would not write more letters about the conditions at Dilley. They also threw away our Tylenol, Advil, and VapoRub. They probably would have taken my daughter’s letters, too, but I keep them in a folder with all of our legal documents. I keep these documents with me at all times. A picture of two of my daughter’s letters are attached to this statement. They speak for themselves.
—34-year-old mother of two kids, ages 9 and 2, who had been at Dilley for more than 125 days (February 12)
I never got to see the little boy, Liam, when he was here, but I saw him on the news. I was happy when he was released, but I couldn’t help but think, “What about the rest of us?”
—33-year-old parent of children ages 14, 11, and 7, on their 53rd day at Dilley (March 11)
My 2-year-old has been having a severe medical issue. She has a swollen gum and an infected tooth, and has a fever anytime she isn’t taking ibuprofen from this infection. This has been going on since we arrived at Dilley, over 20 days ago. The top of her tooth is green at the root. I think the nerve there has been hit or opened…
When Congressmen Castro was here this past Monday, we begged for his help. He tried to advocate for us, Dilley ended up sending us to a hospital 15 minutes away. My husband went with my sick daughter. I had to stay here with my two other daughters.
Unfortunately, the hospital could not help. They just checked her blood pressure. The nurse at a hospital said this is not a dental clinic. They couldn’t help her.
The staff here think and say that I am beating my daughter, and that is why she cries so much. I tried to explain to them the toothache, but they threatened to separate us. They said if she keeps crying, we will take her away from you.
—22-year-old mother of 2-year-old, 1-year-old, and 10-month-old girls, on their 23rd day at Dilley (March 12)
The food here is really bad, but whenever reporters or congresspeople come they give us better food that they would never give us otherwise, like roast chicken, cakes, pizza, and ice cream. But that is just ICE hiding how it is the rest of the time to the outside world…
I have to pay to call my dad. There are times when we have Facetimed my dad and tried to explain what is happening and ICE cut the signal, like when we tried to tell my dad that they had locked us in our rooms because the congresspeople had come. This happened another time when we had a call with a reporter as well. I think they do not want us to share critical things about our experience here and interfere with these calls. The guards also completely change how they act anytime an outside congressperson or reporter comes. The guards start being kind to us and saying, “Hi,” which is something they would never do when they are not being watched…
If I stay in the US, I want to be an advocate for people who are innocent to get out of jail. I want to do whatever I can to make sure that more children do not get brought to places like this, because they are going to suffer.
—13-year-old child on their 86th day at Dilley (March 12)
2026-04-01 19:00:00
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Bradley P. Clawson spent more than three decades handling highly radioactive materials at Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear energy testing and production hub outside Idaho Falls. His work ranged from shipping and receiving nuclear naval fuels to helping bring hundreds of canisters of leftover fuel to Idaho for storage after the catastrophic Three Mile Island meltdown. He often handled nuclear fuel in “hot cells,” immensely contaminated areas reinforced with thick concrete.
Throughout, Clawson, a member of the United Steelworkers union, leaned on safety standards to argue for extra protections against radiation, including respirators and additional shielding.
But President Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda to expand nuclear energy and modernize nuclear weapons now includes easing the radiation standards that Clawson credits with keeping his exposure as low as possible.
“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these years,” said Clawson, who retired in 2021 and now serves on the advisory board on radiation and workers under the Centers for Disease Control. He spoke to High Country News in an unofficial personal capacity.
Last May, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reviving what he called an industry “atrophied” by regulation. The US Department of Energy quickly began stripping away regulations designed to reduce the amount of radiation exposure workers can face at its national laboratories, cleanup sites and energy infrastructure.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses and regulates commercial reactors and related infrastructure, is following suit. In response to another executive order that required it undergo “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance,” the agency recently announced that it’s considering easing long-held standards that limit workers’ and the public’s exposure to radioactivity.
The controversial changes promise to reshape nuclear sites across the nation—especially in the Western US, where nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were born and continue to hold an outsized presence.
And while some hailed the moves as a new dawn for industry, the United Steel Workers union called the directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”
Forty-one other organizations—community advocates, scientists and doctors—said it amounted to “a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests,” in a letter of protest to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
An Energy Department spokesperson told HCN that it “is committed to ensuring its radiation protection standards are aligned with Gold Standard Science,” as outlined in another executive order. “DOE is still evaluating what specific changes to these standards are needed,” the statement added.
A spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote that the agency was still in the process of amending the framework for radiation protection, adding that “public health and safety will always be our top priority.” A new rule will be released at the end of April.
For decades, radiation protection was based on the hypothesis that even a small amount of radiation carries some risk of harm. The Trump administration now rejects the very basis of this view, which could change how work is performed on dozens of projects in the West.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for instance, workers build the nuclear bomb cores or “pits” that will be used to arm the next generation of warheads. Besides the technicians handling plutonium are the pipefitters, ironworkers and carpenters renovating the facility, who are also exposed to at least some radiation. Meanwhile, the federal government has moved to double the facility’s annual output.
“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk.”
More than 50 reactors have been built and operated at the nearly 900-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory since 1951. Another extremely radioactive form of plutonium used to power Mars’ rovers is also produced there, and now, more reactors are slated to be constructed.
Nuclear laboratories, including the Los Alamos and Idaho facilities, send waste, old and new, to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico, the nation’s only long-term repository built for such waste.
At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, nuclear materials are handled for research, while the Hanford Site in Washington, a decommissioned nuclear production complex is undergoing a decades-long remediation effort. Elsewhere, at the Nevada National Security Site, plutonium pits from the current stockpile undergo tests—without nuclear explosions—to ensure their continued usefulness.
Other efforts include a push to power data centers with nuclear reactors on 16 national laboratories in the West. A February announcement said that Energy Department will no longer require environmental assessments in order to build advanced nuclear reactors.
Among the sites that the Nuclear Regulatory agency regulates in the region is the Palo Verde Generating Station, located in Wintersburg, Arizona, one of the nation’s largest, along with other nuclear waste dumps, and shuttered uranium mills.
An overriding priority of the Trump administration has been “to usher in a nuclear renaissance,” a credo that has manifested in the rollbacks. The major regulatory standard now in the crosshairs, called ALARA and short for “as low as reasonably achievable,” has long been central to radiation safety at numerous federal and international agencies.
At its core is the “Linear No-Threshold model,” which holds that no dose of radiation is safe. An agency would set limits on how much radiation exposure workers and the public were permitted. ALARA further required that exposures under that limit be reduced to the lowest amount possible under the circumstances. That could happen in various ways—curbing the amount of time employees worked with radioactive materials, requiring added protective gear, putting lead blankets over highly radioactive equipment to reduce exposures or maintaining greater distances from a radioactive source. For the public, it could mean lowering emissions from facilities below legal thresholds.
Because of the added guardrails, worker exposures have been substantially lower than the Energy Department’s limits, according to a 2025 report from Idaho National Laboratory. Without them, workers could be exposed to up to five times more radiation. The loss of ALARA doesn’t mean workers won’t have any protections at all; instead, experts believe that they may lose those additional layers of safety.
The policy shifts have been made possible by ongoing scientific debate over whether low doses of radiation pose harm. The most comprehensive epidemiological study to date, based on over 300,000 nuclear workers from the US, UK and France, found that cumulative exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation increased the rate of death from certain types of cancer by 50 percent. “These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures,” the authors wrote in 2023.
However, some critics in the field of health physics, which is dedicated to managing radiation safety, say ALARA is subjective and outdated. The Idaho report stated that rescinding ALARA would save money while still protecting workers. Some even argue that ALARA is scientifically unsound, while a small minority of health physicists insist that low levels of radiation are beneficial.
“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk,” said Clawson, who is only too familiar with the back-and-forth. When he started out, ALARA was not a rule at the Energy Department. It was codified in 1993 as part of a suite of worker protections created after the Cold War, when nearly every aspect of the nuclear landscape, including safety culture, came under scrutiny. Proof that the previously accepted practices were unsafe, he added, can be seen in the number of workers currently being compensated by the federal government for illnesses attributed to their exposure.
Clawson acknowledged that complying with ALARA could slow down planning because workers had to carefully consider how to accomplish high-stakes tasks while minimizing risks, especially in hot cells where a person’s exposure could change simply based on where they were standing. The effects of an exposure—potentially compounded by exposures to other toxic chemicals—may not be seen for years, however.
“In the long run it helped us as workers,” Clawson said. “It was keeping us from getting a higher dose.”
2026-04-01 18:00:00
Few political figures occupy the sort of space in American history that Al Gore does. A longtime member of Congress before becoming vice president, Gore lost the presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush after a highly controversial decision by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, Gore didn’t slink into history. Instead, he worked to sound the growing alarm on climate change, most notably with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which came out 20 years ago. A year later, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today, he’s still at it and in many ways more adamant than ever that now is the time to act on global warming, especially as the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and condemns climate science. But he also has more on his mind than the state of the planet, namely the state of democracy and the direction of the country under President Donald Trump.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“This is the most corrupt administration not only in American history, but more corrupt than I could ever have imagined a president would be able to get away with to the extent that he has,” Gore tells More To The Story’s Al Letson. “It’s shocking to me.”
On this week’s episode, the former vice president admonishes the White House for making an “astonishing mistake” in its attack on Iran, looks back at his groundbreaking climate change documentary, and talks about why he believes political will in America is still a renewable resource.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-04-01 03:41:37
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and other parents who are not permanent residents. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over the order’s legality. If Trump prevails, the case will fundamentally change American society.
“This is not an academic exercise,” says Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey, who led a coalition of states in challenging the executive order last year. “The consequences for the people in this country, for our government, both at the federal and state and local levels, and just for the fabric of this nation, would be extraordinary.”
When Platkin challenged the order the day after Trump signed it, practical concerns were top of mind. There is no workable way that the states could implement this order. Starting from the very first question—Who would be a citizen?—and cascading on down to what benefits states and local governments could provide to which people, the order threatened unmitigated chaos.
A Trump victory would unleash harm, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.
“States, I can just tell you, are not in a position to parse through someone’s citizenship status,” explains Platkin. “The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?” He added: “There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.”
The legal question in the case, Trump v. Barbara, is whether the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship applies to the children of undocumented immigrants and people without green cards. And on that legal and historical question, the near universal consensus is that it clearly does. But much less attention has been paid to the harms that a Trump victory would unleash, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.
Amicus briefs submitted to the court highlight how the order would fundamentally alter American society. As states pointed out in their litigation against the order last year, newborns around the country would be denied access to food security and health care. During Trump’s winter crackdown, immigrants in Minnesota had babies at home rather than risk being detained while giving birth in a hospital; it’s not hard to imagine ICE sweeps on maternity wards if the order is upheld. Newborns who are hungry, or suffer from untreated health conditions, or who miss their vaccinations, bear the immediate brunt of this cruelty. But the effects would ripple out.
A brief filed by municipal governments and local elected officials warned of a loss of social cohesion, and an increase in bullying and alienation for a new caste of children who know no other home. Barred from federal public assistance, they will be much less likely to have health insurance and ready access to vaccinations, and more likely to suffer preventable diseases. This will ultimately compromise public health more broadly.
The brief also warns of disaster to local economies if Trump implements the order. City and county governments will pay the price of communities unable to get federal food and health benefits, and their tax base will shrink. Businesses and universities may struggle to attract immigrant employees and students, who may fear that if they have children in the US they will end up second-class citizens in their own country. State coffers would be strained. A brief filed by multiple states points out that “states and their subdivisions would also lose millions in federal funding (often for services they must provide regardless of federal reimbursement) and would incur onerous administrative burdens.”
Citizens and those who should become citizens under the order are also vulnerable. A birth certificate would no longer suffice to prove citizenship, and the children of citizens might never obtain that status if their parents lacked the documents necessary to prove theirs. It’s not clear what documentation would suffice, or how far back the ancestry rabbit hole one would have to journey to prove that they are indeed birthright citizens. Citizens might find it difficult to obtain passports, enroll in school, or obtain food and health care assistance when needed.
The American dream is the idea that in the United States, people’s fate is determined by their own merit, not the status of their parents. But the executive order would create a caste of people who inherit a lesser status from which there could be no escape. “The Order would create a permanent underclass of unauthorized and potentially stateless individuals, perpetuating inequality, legal disabilities, and social and economic disadvantages across successive generations,” reads an amicus brief filed by 19 labor unions that warns of economic risk. Around 255,000 children born in the United States every year will be denied citizenship, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute. By 2045, the undocumented population would have swollen by 2.7 million, and by 5.4 million by 2075.
“Immigrants and their U.S.-born children—first-generation U.S. citizens—have been the driver of growth in the American labor force over the past 20 years,” the unions’ brief continues. Rather than contributing to the economy and providing critical services like health care, childcare, and education, “successive generations of children born in the United States will be stripped of U.S. citizenship and be excluded from public life, the formal economy, and the ability to live fully independent, productive lives.”
The US has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship.
Trump’s executive order purported to restrict birthright citizenship going forward, to all those born 30 days after the date of the order. But multiple briefs warn that this is not binding. After all, it’s just one president’s order. If the court agrees Trump’s 2025 order is constitutional, there would be nothing to stop him or any subsequent president from applying it retroactively, potentially stripping millions of people of citizenship based on their family histories. In this way, the rights and livelihoods of millions of people are at risk. “If, as the Administration argues, the Fourteenth Amendment does not make citizens of certain people, neither this Court nor the Administration has the power to create citizens of children of ineligible foreign nationals simply because they were born before issuance of the Executive Order,” a brief by three constitutional and immigration scholars warns. “In other words, a prospective-only application is not possible.”
The idea might seem far-fetched, but the United States has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship. As a brief from dozens of nonprofits dedicated to racial justice warned, the government specifically has a “long history of revoking the citizenship of racial minorities and women.” In just one example, after the Supreme Court held in 1923 that South Asians did not qualify as white and were thus incapable of becoming citizens because, at the time, naturalization was limited to Caucasians, the government began stripping citizenship from naturalized South Asian citizens.
The brief also warned that even if the federal government didn’t target anyone for citizenship-stripping, local governments and officials might embark on their own attempts to effectively denaturalize people by removing them from voting rolls and juries. The Trump administration is already encouraging voter roll purges on the false premise that noncitizens are skewing US elections. It’s entirely predictable that state and local officials would attempt to remove voters whom they deem non-citizens according to Trump’s order. This might be encouraged by the practical effect of striking Latinos and other racial minorities who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Jury pools could likewise grow whiter, reinforcing the white supremacy that the 14th Amendment and civil rights laws tried to end.
Supreme Court decisions change the country, but few are remembered for reordering American society. Dred Scott v. Sandford helped precipitate the Civil War by denying citizenship to all Black people; Plessy v. Ferguson blessed Jim Crow, which shaped American society for nearly 100 years; Brown v. Board of Education undid Plessy and transformed the country again. Trump v. Barbara threatens to be the next in this tradition of cases that determine whether or not we live in a multiracial democracy. As former University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps warned this week, “reinstating a hereditary, lifelong, inferior status” without political rights or welfare benefits “recreates the conditions for the growth of a racialized slave economy.”
America has been down that road before. No one will escape the consequences if the Supreme Court takes us there again.
