The following statement can be attributed to Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy executive director for policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP).
Washington, D.C., June 27, 2024–Today in a pair of cases, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned a 40–year–old precedent, known as “Chevron deference,” which generally required courts to defer to the expertise of agency rulemakers. This precedent has supported tens of thousands of rules used by federal agencies to execute regulatory authority on topics from the environment to financial services to patient, consumer, and worker protections, and protected them from frivolous lawsuits. With this change, all regulations will be much more vulnerable to litigation – which will delay implementation even when the regulations are eventually upheld – and judges will be able to make decisions grounded in their personal opinions rather than the substantive knowledge of agency experts.
Exactly how damaging this decision will be remains to be seen; Justice Roberts in his decision claims that it “does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.” But the decisions in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce raise the stakes for judicial appointments at all levels, as well as increase the need for Congress to pass detailed legislative instructions that leave less room for judicial meddling. Because countless federal regulations support people with low incomes, these decisions have the potential to significantly affect their lives.
By Gabrielle Chiodo,
For decades, the United States has enacted policies that have prevented immigrants, regardless of their documentation status, from accessing quality health care, including abortion and other essential reproductive health services. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 prevented green card holders from accessing Medicaid, CHIP, and other public benefits for five years. Other immigrants, such as Temporary Protected Status holders and DACA recipients, as well as undocumented immigrants, were almost entirely barred from coverage. Until this year, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continued restrictions by excluding undocumented immigrants from purchasing health plans on the marketplace.
By Yasmine Elkharssa,
Asylum seekers have a moral and legal right to be in the United States, and we must ensure their needs are met so they can thrive. This includes access to housing, health care, nutrition assistance, workforce support, and legal assistance. However, as asylum seekers arrive in cities across the country there have been news reports about local tensions created from the idea of resource scarcity. Any scarcity is caused by restrictive eligibility policies and inadequate funding.
By Alycia Hardy, Stephanie Schmit, and Rachel Wilensky
This report analyzes variations in eligibility and access to Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) subsidies in 2020. State decisions on implementation within the CCDBG program, along with historically insufficient federal and state funding, limit parents’ access to child care assistance. We analyze state-level Administration for Children and Families CCDBG participation data by state, race, and ethnicity, with analysis on both state and federal income eligibility limits. As an update to our previous report with 2019 CCDBG data on inequitable access, this iteration includes a new analysis of data on potentially eligible children, or children who qualify for receiving CCDBG assistance based on the outlined eligibility requirements.
This fact sheet outlines CCDGB subsidy eligibility and receipt for children ages 0-13 across the country, analyzing national totals including variations by race and ethnicity, based on state income eligibility.
Inequitable Access to Child Care Subsidies by State in 2020
These fact sheets outline CCDBG subsidy eligibility and receipt for children ages 0-13 in each state, including variations by race and ethnicity. (See note below about states marked with *, indicating data limitations.)
By Maddie Trice & Clarence Okoh
The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s recent decision to dismiss a case brought by survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre is a powerful reminder that American legal and political institutions can engineer unjust futures from unjust pasts. But advocates must reject the future that white supremacy insists is inevitable and instead nurture radical imagination by reaching across disciplines to experiment with authoring our own future.
As we commemorate the Juneteenth holiday and Octavia Butler’s birthday, advocates should revisit Afrofuturism, an idea that the scholar and artist Ytasha Womack defines as “the intersection between Black culture, technology, liberation and imagination … a way of bridging the future and past and essentially helping to reimagine the experience of people of colour.” Afrofuturism offers vibrant, Black-constructed, artistic, and political visions of the future that are often rooted in but not constrained by histories of racial injustice. This is an imaginative terrain where artists and activists can speculate, anticipate, and predict what the future holds for Black people, providing a powerful tool to think past the political constraints of the present to discern how we might defeat encroaching racial dystopia. Afrofuturists can help us imagine a world where Tulsa survivors are offered the justice long denied by state actors. And those speculative, liberated futures can become the North Star guiding us toward justice and liberation.
Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, lend particularly vivid insights on ways to approach radical social change amid our current political (and literal) climate. The series follows Lauren Oya Olamina as she navigates the “Pox,” a dystopian version of the United States facing total economic collapse, mass displacement, neoslavery, and paramilitary racial terrorism motivated by a white, Christian nationalist president promising to, as Butler writes in the 1990s, “make America great again.” Olamina confronts this reality by overcoming a series of moments similar to the Tulsa massacre where her idyllic, multicultural communities are destroyed by mob violence without legal or political accountability.
Olamina’s strategies for surviving racial dystopia invite critical questions that advocates should consider in navigating real-world challenges:
In the Parable series, the consequences of the climate crisis have led to mass displacement, hunger, and violence. These conditions enable racist ideologies to spread and justify violence against groups falsely blamed for the country’s problems. Despite these circumstances, Olamina leads humanity into a “destiny among the stars.” Her survival begs the question: in working to eliminate injustice, what does it mean to act abundantly in a world of scarcity?
The Parable series also speaks to the role of empathy in advocacy and activism. Lauren Olamina has a condition known as “hyper empathy,” where she literally experiences the pain of others if she sees it. In her world, this is a critical weakness and liability, so she hides it. However, it is hyper empathy that awakens Olamina to alleviating the pain of others, by forming safe communities and protecting other vulnerable people from suffering and violence. The novels position empathy as a strength even when others perceive it as a weakness. What could it look like to presuppose empathy as a foundation for legal and policy decision-making?
From a disability justice lens, the Parable series also brings into stark focus the ways that a violent world disables and disposes of Black women and femmes. Though COVID had not yet occurred when she wrote these books, Butler observed that disability and gender would be treated as weaknesses and liabilities in a future riven by climate change. The policy failures of the COVID pandemic and rollbacks on reproductive freedom offer real-world examples of Butler’s fictional admonitions. These circumstances might lead us to ask, how can we replace a politic of disposability with an ethic of mutuality and collectivism as reflected in Olamina’s Earthseed communities?
The utility of Afrofuturism in advocacy is only limited by our collective imagination. In moments of total defeat, our ability to author new worlds becomes a bulwark against despair and an invitation to principled struggle. Octavia Butler’s work reminds us that even amid our Tulsa moments, other futures remain possible.
By Hannah Liu
For the past twelve years, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has allowed hundreds of thousands of Dreamers — immigrants who entered the country as children — to go to school, work, and build their lives with lessened fears of deportation. However, this program was always meant to be replaced with a path to permanent status. This new CTAN fact sheet outlines how the consequences of Congressional inaction for the undocumented community will affect recipients, their families, and families across the country as a whole whether or not the courts decide to strike DACA down in imminent years.
CLASP, along with the Children Thrive Action Network, urges Congress to pass legislation like S. 365/H.R. 6 to secure a pathway to citizenship as permanent relief for all Dreamers. DACA recipients and their families should not have their livelihoods tied to the whims of the courts, and undocumented youth who call this country home should not continue to face an uncertain future.
In the meantime, we urge the Biden Administration to use all possible administrative levers to protect DACA recipients at risk of losing their status. Possible avenues include expanding and modernizing administrative immigration relief options for undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizen spouses, children, and other dependent family members.
CLASP submitted this statement for the record on June 4, 2024, to the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education for a hearing titled, “The Consequences of Biden’s Border Chaos for K-12 Schools.” The statement makes the case for the need to support schools in meeting their legal obligations to equitably serve immigrant students, including newcomer students. It also addresses the importance of protecting the constitutional right for all children in the United States to receive a public K-12 education regardless of immigration status.
CLASP Media Contact: Archana Pyati apyati@clasp.org
TYP Collaborative Media Contact: Nia West-Bey, nwestbey@typcollaborative.org
Washington, D.C., June 3, 2024—CLASP is pleased to announce the spinoff and launch of a new youth-focused nonprofit that builds upon two decades of youth policy work. The National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy (TYP Collaborative) is a new independent organization that will translate young people’s radical imagination and aspirations into transformative policy and systems change by building power with young people and their communities.
The TYP Collaborative will officially begin operating on July 1, 2024 and will be led by CLASP’s current director of youth policy, Dr. Nia West-Bey, who will be the new entity’s executive director.
“We are excited to carry forward our 20-year legacy at CLASP by bringing together policy, advocacy, and activism under one roof in service of transformational change,” said West-Bey. “We look forward to conducting policy analysis and advocacy in close collaborative partnership with young people and integrating organizing principles and strategies into policy work.”
The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) has a proud history as an incubator for several prominent nonprofits. These include the National Women’s Law Center and Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, both of which are leaders in their fields of advocacy.
The TYP Collaborative will focus its work on the needs and leadership of young people who have been most impacted by oppressive systems of power, historic and on-going policy violence, and systemic marginalization. “By centering the experiences of young people, we will achieve more just systems and better outcomes for all young people,” said West-Bey.
“I’m proud to help Nia launch the TYP Collaborative, a new organization led by a Black woman with deep passion and commitment to organizing the next generation of youth advocates and community leaders to drive policy change,” said CLASP President and Executive Director Indivar Dutta-Gupta. “CLASP looks forward to working side-by-side with the TYP Collaborative. Partnering with groups who organize on the ground is core to our theory of change. And youth and young adults—especially many young people of color—continue to be sidelined in much of our nation’s public policies and will continue to be a focus of CLASP’s work toward economic justice.”
Kisha Bird, a former director of the youth policy team at CLASP and founding board member of the TYP Collaborative said: “I am very proud of over two decades of work by the youth policy team at CLASP. It is an honor to serve as a founding board member for the National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy. I am confident that launching the TYP Collaborative is an essential next step on the journey to realizing youth justice in our communities.”
The CLASP youth team’s projects, A New Deal for Youth (ND4Y) and Communities Collaborating to Reconnect Youth Network (CCRY), will also be moved as initiatives within the TYP Collaborative, which will also continue existing work on youth mental health and youth economic justice.
For more information, please visit www.typcollaborative.org.
###
2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the War on Poverty, an ambitious package of social welfare legislation introduced under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Today, as we continue the fight to end poverty, we face both long-standing and more recent structural, systemic, political, and economic challenges that impede this urgent goal.
Our nation has made meaningful gains in the last few decades to bring economic security and opportunity to millions. However, the reality is clear—we remain far from achieving the equitable, inclusionary, and transformative changes needed to end poverty and advance a multiracial democracy. In 2023, CLASP redoubled our strategic advocacy, implementation and technical assistance, research and analysis, and narrative change work at the national, state, and local levels.
Our 2023 Impact Report highlights just some of the ways CLASP has worked to limit the harm of poverty in America through a multitude of strategies and collaborations. The COVID public health emergency may be behind us, but the profound economic insecurity experienced every day by millions of children, working people, families, and communities of color is an epidemic that requires immediate attention with substantial public investments.
I often say that poverty is a choice—one made by policymakers, not by people who experience it. CLASP offers policymakers the information, ideas, insights, and inspiration to shrink poverty and help move our country toward equity, justice, and inclusive democracy.
Thank you for being a partner in our mission and vision for a world where children, families, youth and young adults, immigrants, and individuals across all lived experiences and identities can live a healthy, economically secure, and civically engaged life now and for generations to come.
Indi Dutta-Gupta
President and Executive Director
By Tatiana Villegas
“I feel like when talking to somebody you don’t know, you sort of have that feeling that they might judge you or not, like not believe something that you’re saying” – Youth focus group participant, Colorado, 2023
Rates of youth depression and anxiety have been on the rise for years and continue to increase. A recent report found that rates of anxiety and depression remained high in July 2023, with three in four young adults reporting some level of these challenges. A 2023 report by Mental Health in America found that 60 percent of youth with major depression are not receiving mental health treatment. Young people aren’t seeking help from mental health professionals for several reasons, one of which is that youth don’t trust them. Young people’s distrust of and fear in the mental health system is well-founded. This system has historically harmed Black and brown communities, LGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, and other individuals living at the margins. Many of these harms are ongoing, including through the continued use of forced treatment.
Over the past six years, our team has spoken with numerous young people. Many discussed a lack of trust in and relatability to mental health professionals and the system at large, and a desire to change the current mental health system. As the crisis escalates, it’s time we listen to what those most affected want and invest in their mental health and future.
“For me, I don’t really like, like for example if I go to a counselor, I don’t know this person. Like, I don’t know them, they don’t know me. So I have this feeling of like, why should I tell them everything about me, everything that I’m going through if I don’t know them deeply and I don’t know what their true intentions are with the information they’re going to get and how I can really trust them. Like, how do I know if they’re not going to go turn my back, maybe tell another student, tell a teacher, or even, like, tell someone that could possibly make me go into a let’s say…I don’t know, I don’t know. But just a place where I don’t want to be in because I’m just, it’s just scary to talk about your feelings with someone that you don’t know or trust.” – Youth focus group participant, Colorado, 2023
Discussing mental health concerns with a stranger is challenging. One issue is the inherent distrust youth, especially youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth, feel toward people they don’t know. This distrust stems from the lack of meaningful, bi-directional relationships between mental health professionals, who are often adults, and youth seeking help. The distrust also stems from the power dynamic between clinicians and patients; many young people we’ve spoken to question what therapists will do with the information they share, doubt the confidentiality of their sessions, and sometimes feel judged by these professionals. In a therapeutic relationship that relies on vulnerability, this lack of trust significantly hinders the effectiveness of mental health support.
Rather than persisting with a failing system, policymakers, mental health professionals, teachers, and school counselors must listen to what works for youth and incorporate their feedback to improve mental health access.
“I feel like it is better to talk to our peers like we doing now. ‘Cause the way our generation set up, we all have somewhat of a similar lifestyle. And I feel like this somethin’ we should do, like, every now and then.” – Youth focus group participant, Southeastern United States, 2017
“To be honest with you, I would rather talk to somebody that went to prison or came through here because they know the lifestyle. They know how it was. And they understand you.” – Youth focus group participant, Southeastern United States, 2017
In our conversations with youth, a consistent theme emerged: they turn to their peers, family members, or community members for support during times of emotional distress. Peers are a common source of comfort because youth can relate to them. They share similar life challenges and experiences, making the support feel genuine and validating. Likewise, many youth confide in family members, believing that their loved ones have their best interests at heart and deeply understand them. Both peer and family support are characterized by pre-existing deep relationships and a sense of relatability, fostering a caring bond that extends beyond professional obligations.
Not all young people have a safe community to rely on, making it crucial for them to have access to affirming mental health support. This underscores the need to reframe the mental health system to ensure all youth have this option. Young people who distrust or have been harmed by the mental health system often prefer non-clinical mental health supports, like youth peer support. Peer support is an equitable and effective mental health intervention rooted in trust and mutuality; however, policy barriers make it inaccessible to too many young people.
Relatability is especially crucial for youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth, as these populations typically experience higher rates of mental health conditions. Young people seek support from individuals who can genuinely empathize with their experiences and understand them. For queer or BIPOC youth, this may mean connecting with professionals or peers who share their identities or backgrounds, which can foster a sense of cultural resonance and understanding. For these communities, having a mental health professional who does not look like them or understand such an important part of their identity can make therapy inefficient and, in some cases, harmful. Therapists who do not share similar identities may struggle to provide effective guidance and could inadvertently perpetrate microaggressions against those they’re counseling. Additionally, 75 percent of mental health professionals are white, while 25 percent are BIPOC, which is not representative of the U.S. population. Racial inequalities and systematic discrimination are at fault for the historic and current underrepresentation of BIPOC mental health professionals in workforce pipelines and the system. This lack of representation has perpetuated inequities in mental health diagnoses and treatments, especially for BIPOC individuals.
We’re falling short in providing youth, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, with mental health care that meets their needs. Addressing the issue of youth distrust toward the mental health system and providers hinges on prioritizing their voices and preferences. To improve mental health care, we must enhance diversity in both identity and credentials among providers. This means increasing representation of people of color, queer individuals, and others with lived experiences relevant to the communities they serve. By offering scholarships and fostering peer support networks, we can encourage more individuals from diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in mental health. Having providers who share identities with the communities they serve is crucial for effectively engaging youth with the health care system. Additionally, young people deserve a choice of mental health supports beyond talk therapy and Western models of care, particularly young people who have been harmed by the mental health system. Above all, those with decision-making power have a responsibility to actively seek and integrate feedback from youth to improve the mental health system. By genuinely listening to the experiences and needs of young people, they can better tailor services and policies to ensure effective support for mental well-being.
“Certain things, you don’t want to talk to people about. Especially, I’m gonna just be honest, I ain’t too kindly with, you know, I ain’t fittin’ to have no white man sit in front of me and ask me questions about my life. What about ‘What your life about?’ Like, it’s stuff like that, because I feel like they really coming at you a certain type of way because people may think you got an issue, but you really don’t, you feel me? I just, I don’t know, it just suddenly everybody make you snap off or make you just blink off. Everybody is just different.” – Youth focus group participant, Southeastern United States, 2017