Sophia Arshad, a Merrillville attorney who handles immigration cases, said she has already received a dozen calls or emails from clients concerned about the status of their cases after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory Tuesday.
“It goes beyond being nervous, it’s anticipating what’s to come,” Arshad said. “I have had many desperate emails and phone calls from current customers who are just very scared of what may or may not happen.”
Jane Hartsock, a founder of The Good Trouble Coalition, said her non-binary child woke up Wednesday morning feeling terrified and crying. As a mother, Hartsock has had to find a balance between reassuring her child that they are safe, protected and loved by their family, while ensuring they don’t “give a false impression of things.”
“This government is targeting them and trying to harm them. I feel the need to know that somewhat and not to deny their sense of reality. I don’t want to tell them things aren’t what they are,” Hartsock said. “I don’t know if I have any easy answers when it comes to what to tell children. That we love them. That we fight for them. That they are valuable. That they are important to their community.”
Project 2025, a 900 policy manual created by the Heritage Foundation and many former Trump administration officials, would expand presidential power and impose ultraconservative views on social issues. It shows how a second Trump administration would address issues like public health and immigration. impacting the most marginalized people, officials said.
Healthcare
Gabriel Bosslet, president and co-founder of The Good Trouble Coalition, said the organization was founded in 2022 and consists of more than 1,300 healthcare and public health stakeholders whose mission is to educate, strengthen and engage in political advocacy on patient-centered care facilitate. , public health and healthcare equity.
Under Trump’s presidency, the group will continue to do that work, focusing on the Indiana statehouse, which is controlled by a Republican supermajority that often takes cues from Trump, Bosslet said.
The second goal of Project 2025 for the Department of Health and Services states that the traditional nuclear family is the only way Americans should live, Bosslet said. It’s clear the Trump administration believes the nuclear family is “demonized and threatened” and wants to remove that threat, he said.
“I don’t know why they are so interested in how I decide to live my life within the walls of my home, or in who I decide to love. I don’t know how that affects anyone else, so I don’t understand at all why that’s the government’s role,” Bosslet said.
Overall, Hartsock, an attorney, bioethicist and professor of medical humanities at Indiana University, said the group expects the Trump administration’s approach to health care to undermine access for the LGTBQ community and women’s reproductive rights would limit.
Medicare funding was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s way to force the racial integration of hospitals in the South, Hartsock said. Now Hartsock says she worries that the same funding source will be used to ban gender-affirming care, abortion and certain forms of contraception.
“In the long run, this will harm Indiana’s most vulnerable people. It will hurt people who are already struggling to access health care because the public health infrastructure is the safety net there,” Hartsock said.
Hartsock said one of her concerns is that Americans “do not sufficiently appreciate” the kind of power the Trump administration will have over departments like Heath and Human Services and the Department of Education. With that control, Trump will be able to push an ideologically informed agenda that focuses on LGTBQ people, especially young people, and reproductive rights, she said.
Through the Department of Education, Hartsock said the Trump administration will limit funding and resources to schools that do not adhere to his agenda. Hartsock expects to use health care resources within schools, such as nurses, counselors and teachers, to end pronoun use, name changes and address gender identity.
Furthermore, the Trump administration will try to ban books that focus on LGTBQ stories and narratives, Hartsock said. All of these elements, she said, will negatively impact the mental health of LGTBQ students, she said.
“It isolates them from the human story, from the human condition, suggests that they are not part of a larger community and that health overall will deteriorate,” Hartsock said.
Trump has hinted at giving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a role. in public health administration. If Kennedy were appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, Bosslet said, it would set public health in the United States back centuries.
“Not years, not decades, but centuries,” Bosslet said.
Kennedy promotes himself as not an anti-vaxxer, but he is an anti-vaxxer, Bosslet said. If appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services, Bosslet said Kennedy would have the authority to eliminate vaccine guidelines, which would cause states to roll back vaccine requirements for children attending public schools, he said.
“We will see an increase in illnesses and deaths from diseases that I have never seen in my life,” Bosslet said.
Trump will strip public health-related agencies of their expertise, which is the whole point of the agencies, Hartsock said. That will impact public health on many levels, she said, from vaccine availability to vaccine requirements in schools.
“Trump is a small, small man. He uses revenge, he wields that sword quite generously, and he is crazy,” Hartsock said. “He’ll be more than happy to see those regulators just crumble, regardless of what it does to people.”
Immigration
Arshad said about 50% of her practice focuses on family immigration and citizenship issues, which require many legal filings with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and not appearing before a judge. The only immigration cases she has not handled are deportations, Arshad said.
Arshad previously worked as an immigration attorney under the Trump presidency and said she has some idea of what lies ahead.
Under the first Trump administration, there were many intentional delays and unconstitutional executive orders within the immigration process, Arshad said. Under those circumstances, Arshad said she worked with nervous clients and many attorneys left immigration law.
“It was basically a daily battle with the government,” Arshad said. “During the Trump administration, one of the things they did was basically make a lot of different types of routine immigration fillings very difficult. That is to be expected.”
Under a second Trump administration, Arshad said she expects it will be just as challenging, if not worse. In his second term, Arshad said Trump has promised to eliminate several visa categories without restructuring the process.
“They call it a proposal. From my perspective, it is more of a threat,” Arshad said.
What people may not understand, Arshad said, is that Trump’s proposal for mass deportation would shift funding within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to deportation proceedings, meaning less funding and resources, such as workers, for people seeking legal status within search the US.
The ripple effect, Arshad said, would result in immigrants who are entitled to benefits and protections not receiving them in a timely manner. For example, if a client files a petition on behalf of their parents, Arshad says the process typically takes nine to 12 months, but under the Trump administration it took three to four years.
The ultimate impact, Arshad said, is that immigrants, who qualify for some form of immigration status, ultimately decide not to apply and “stay in the shadows” for fear of deportation, regardless of whether or not they request a status.
In the past, within the transition period between governments, the outgoing government has issued a directive to the Immigration Department to expedite the assessment of immigration cases. It is not yet clear how the Biden administration will respond, Arshad said.
Future support
People in marginalized groups could seek support from “the helpers,” such as organizations and communities that work to protect them and their rights, Bosslet said.
LGBTQ Outreach of Porter County issues a statement affirming its support for the LGBTQ community as the community faces an increase in harmful rhetoric and other risks.
“Nevertheless, we maintain that our community embodies resilience. We will continue to grow and cannot be marginalized. United, we are stronger, more resilient, and prepared to create lasting change in the lives of those within the LGTBQ+ community,” the statement said.
Chris Daley, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, said the national ACLU network has spent the past year or so preparing for the outcomes of the 2024 elections. The ACLU is prepared to oppose any unconstitutional action that Trump administration is taking.
Any attempt to deport large numbers of immigrants from the US, especially at the level Trump promised during his campaign – to launch the largest mass deportation effort in US history on his first day in office – would be inconsistent with their due process rights, Daley said. . The ACLU would file lawsuits to ensure immigrants have the right to due process, he said, but the fear is that Trump will deport people so quickly that their due process rights will not be respected.
Family separation is also a fear, Daley said, because children may have U.S. citizenship, but their parents are not U.S. citizens.
“Almost always, immigration is a proxy for racial discrimination. We’re going to see people with legal status, including people who are U.S. citizens, get caught up in this if they don’t have documentation on them or if their name is similar to someone who has an immigration case,” Daley said.
Daley said the ACLU of Indiana and its national network have already filed lawsuits to protect reproductive rights following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to abortion for nearly fifty years. The ACLU has also been preparing to fight for access to contraceptives and in vitro fertilization, he said.
During his campaign, Trump denigrated the dignity of transgender people, so Daley said the ACLU anticipates his swift action on transgender rights, from protections against discrimination by employers to access to health care. The ACLU will help protect the rights of transgender people, he said.
To anyone feeling uneasy following the election results, Daley said the ACLU understands.
“We get it. We are afraid too. You’re not alone,” Daley said. “As heartbreaking as this election was, as a nation we have been through challenging times before and if we continue to believe in the core values and principles of this country, which this election unfortunately did not reflect, we can get our country back on track. right path.”
akukulka@chicagotribune.com
