Ben D’Avanzo

Inside Trump’s New Tactic to Separate Immigrant Families

The Trump administration's reasoning for why it isn't separating families is something like "Well, families should just submit and accept being deported together."

They are horrific bullies, and the consequences are heart wrenching as this story illustrates www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/u...

Purdue student detained by ICE and taken to troubled Louisiana holding facility Yeonsoo Go, 20, was detained after her immigration hearing in Manhattan and taken away by ICE agents.

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center.
www.wthr.com/article/news...

Yosemite employees worked for weeks with no pay before the government hired them Seasonal employees counting on housing at Yosemite were asked to volunteer for the park while the government was unable to onboard them at the start of the summer.

Seasonal employees counting on housing at Yosemite were asked to volunteer for the park while the government was unable to onboard them at the start of the summer.

🚨NEW: Further stories of the horrors inflicted on people the Trump admin imprisoned in El Salvador without trial are emerging.

Three men describes how they were punished by guards — stripped naked, beaten for six days straight as men and women watching laughed and mocked them.

Lost in Translation: Interpreter Cutbacks Could Put Patient Lives on the Line  - KFF Health News Recent federal reductions in funding for language assistance and President Donald Trump’s executive order designating English as the official language of the United States have some health advocates w...

The Trump admin wants to move the U.S. to being an English-only nation. Despite that just not reflecting history and reality, it is completely unrealistic to expect people to learn English overnight.

But their cuts to language access reflect that false belief and will lead to medical harm and costs

Just when families are struggling to afford long term care, workers are being fired due to the Trump administration’s willingness to hurt anyone and everyone to rid the country of immigrants www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/u...

This policy will discourage lawfully present immigrants who are eligible for Medicaid from signing up, or signing their kids up, leaving them without health insurance. That, of course, is a feature, not a bug.

HIPAA only applies to patient information rather than Medicaid enrollees, so while there are separate privacy laws that one might question are at play here, that one unfortunately doesn't apply

Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients' personal data, including addresses, to ICE U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will gain access to personally identifiable information for all of the nation’s 79 million Medicaid enrollees.

ICE appears to be gaining access to the personal data of every single Medicaid enrollee.

This is a privacy violation of unprecedented proportions and betrayal of trust, as the government has explicitly said, for decades, that this information will never be used for immigration enforcement

Community clinics squeezed by immigration checks Federally funded clinics are supposed to serve everyone — but now, only if they fulfill a citizenship requirement.

HHS is prioritizing the Trump administration's anti-immigrant agenda over public health and clinics www.axios.com/2025/07/17/c...

Access to elections information in language is protected by civil rights laws but is under attack

This action, combined with the complete gutting of civil rights agencies across the government (or repurposing them to as a tool to harass academia) means people with limited English proficiency will have little recourse when their civil right to language access is violated

In yet another assault on not just immigrants, but people who speak ASL, tribal members, and people whose families have spoken Spanish in the U.S. for generations, the DOJ is starting the abandonment of decades of progress on language access

“I can’t tell you who to pay,” Carr told the family. “We haven’t been told where the money is to be sent.”

New fees catch immigration court officials in Minnesota by surprise Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill requires new or increased fees for many immigration applications, including asylum applications.

The reconciliation bill is unusually bad in that many of its provisions take effect immediately, with no time for implementation.

This family's experience shows the chaos that brings, typical of this administration

Props to @julierovner.bsky.social and her What the Health podcast crew in today's episode for correctly noting it is legal immigrants who lose health coverage under OBBBA!

U.S. Department of Education Ends Taxpayer Subsidization of Postsecondary Education for Illegal Aliens The U.S. Department of Education today announced it will end taxpayer subsidization of illegal aliens in career, technical, and adult education programs.

HHS claims to be banning many types of immigrants, including people with TPS, DACA, and asylum applicants, from the most basic of health and human service programs. Though they seem to admit they can't force grantees to verify status.

It is also the most absurdly written federal notice I've read

We want ICE out of our Hospitals.

Maybe they're uncertain about how they feel.

Maybe they're waffling

The Anti-Immigrant Policies in Trump’s Final “Big Beautiful Bill,” Explained Learn how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashes access to health care, nutrition, and tax credits, expands immigration enforcement, and harms low-income and immigrant communities—putting the U.S. eco...

Want the know the numerous ways that OBBBA terrorizes immigrants?
-Taking away health care and food aid
-Unaffordable fees
-Unprecedented funding for ICE and detention camps
-Raising taxes

We have it all in our new explainer

I was the corresponding author on a journal article earlier this year, and now every day I get an email inviting me to "conference" or "journal" that seem like the equivalent of low-quality scams. Many of them come from Gmail accounts!

What's the point of this fake academia?

Definitely put there by Alexandrians looking to sew regional conflict

NYT gets it right at least

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

The bill excludes refugees and other legal immigrants from health and food program. It is a myth meant, horrifically, to make the bill more socially acceptable to say that undocumented people are losing coverage

No, it really doesn't do this.

If you're going to write a column downplaying people losing health coverage, is it too much to ask for some basic fact checking?
wapo.st/3Iek0Oc

Watching the Andor episode tonight about imperial senators finding excuses to not upset the Emperor with a wrong vote... was a rough choice

The biggest cut to the social safety net in decades. The closest comparison is PRWORA in 1996, which opened up gaps that have never been filled.

And it’s paired with huge tax breaks for the rich, and tens of billions going to the apparatus of deportation and detention.

Really unprecedented harm.

Chart from KFF showing CBO’s estimated 10-year federal spending cuts by policy in the Senate Reconciliation Bill, focusing on total Medicaid cuts of $1 trillion. The tree map chart splits categories by ACA Expansion (work requirements, provider taxes, eligibility redeterminations, other) and all states (eligibility rule changes, limits on state-directed payments, other, and provider taxes).

The Senate bill would cut federal #Medicaid spending by $1 trillion over 10 years, per CBO.

Provisions that only apply to ACA expansion states account for $526 billion of the federal spending reductions.

Our analysis estimates the effects on states: on.kff.org/3ZWnUBp

And they'll be unworkable healthlaw.org/news/health-...