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By Elyse Shaw and Lorena Roque

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we should reflect on how far women’s rights have come over the years. However, that’s difficult to do when the Trump Administration has spent the past year engineering a wholesale attack on women’s rights. This onslaught has included attacks on the federal workforce, gutting the Department of Education and the proposed loan caps and loan forgiveness changes, clawing back EEOC guidance on harassment and discrimination at work, canceling grants that support women and LGBTQ+ individuals, and attacks on DEIA and trans people. Taken together, this has allowed the conservative movement to use its authoritarian playbook to strip women of their rights, economic security, and health and well-being. These are not one-off issue areas or separate attacks: this is a coordinated campaign to exert power and control over every aspect of women’s lives. 

Instead of promoting policies that support all working women, such as paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and equal pay, a new report from the Heritage Foundation outlines what type of women they actually want to support: cisgender straight white women who stay home to raise kids while their husbands work. Writers of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation have gone into detail about their pronatalist policy agenda for women in their latest report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. The Trump Administration has taken this playbook as its own and already begun to dismantle policies, setting women back half a century. All of these policy decisions are intentional and lead to the Trump Administration’s goal: restricting women’s autonomy and freedom in the United States. 

Controlling Women’s Lives: The Pronatalist Movement

Since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the conservative movement has been working to strip reproductive rights from women across the U.S. The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 through the Dobbs decision signified an opportunity for the conservative movement to further erode access to basic reproductive health care and control women’s lives. Since Dobbs, women have been denied basic reproductive health care, with the delay or denial of care even leading to death. Some Southern states have sought to criminalize and violate women in regards to their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. For example, a brain-dead woman in Georgia was forced to stay on life support against her family’s wishes, in an attempt to maintain her nine week pregnancy to viability and was forced to give “birth” while coma-induced. In another case, a Texas woman who suffered a miscarriage was charged with “abuse of a corpse” and jailed for five months. Just weeks ago, a sexual assault survivor in Tennessee, who was hours into pre-surgery preparation for sterilization, was denied that procedure at the last minute when hospital staff decided they had a “duty to protect her sacred fertility.” 

These types of cases are part of a larger playbook for the right-wing movement on who should be given government support. In the new playbook, “Saving American Families,” the Heritage Foundation authors acknowledge the high cost of child care, but instead of investing in universal child care or funding Head Start, they instead focus on incentivizing women to leave the workforce and stay home to raise children. They recommend limiting child care credits, programs, and tax benefits to families with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. The paper details many other policies aimed at increasing the U.S. birthrate by restricting women’s autonomy – such as limiting public benefits to heterosexual married couples and banning no-fault divorce – while punishing single women and mothers. The report recommends creating stricter work reporting requirements for single mothers who access basic needs programs, rolling back access to higher education, eliminating all government-run registered apprenticeship programs, and eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit. All of this would disproportionately impact single mothers, who are more likely to be women of color and paid low wages, further marginalizing them. 

Limiting Access to Higher Education 

Postsecondary education is a key pathway to economic security for women, given that women with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, only slightly more than men with a high school diploma. At the same time, women rely on professional and post-baccalaureate programs for career advancement and economic mobility. In 2024, the Heritage Foundation made it clear that they believe education, especially higher education, is to blame for the nation’s declining birth rates. Their solution: restrict access to education for women. As a result, the Trump Administration is attempting to dismantle the Department of Education by restructuring departments and reassigning higher education grant programs to other federal agencies. In addition, the administration is threatening funding for colleges that maintain their commitment to DEI and proposing to overhaul student loans and loan forgiveness programs. These combined actions will make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for women to attend undergraduate or graduate degree programs. 

Federal Attacks on DEI/Gender Ideology 

On the first day of his second term, Trump launched an attack on DEIA and transgender and gender-nonbinary people, leading to the shuttering of federal offices and agencies, ending of programs and initiatives, and discontinuing of grant activities or entire grant programs that supported women. Across the federal government, even mentioning the term “women” was enough to get a project, program, or grant cancelled – from workforce development grants to grants for research into women’s health. And critical initiatives to advance women continue to feel these impacts. According to recent research, women scientists were disproportionately impacted by the NIH grant cancellations, as they were leading almost 60 percent of de-funded projects. These attacks will have long-lasting impacts on women’s health, well-being, and economic security. 

Economic Impacts

These policy decisions by the Trump Administration are driving women out of the workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 455,000 women left the labor market from January to August 2025. For the rest of 2025, only 184,000 women re-entered the workforce compared to 572,000 men during the same time period. A national survey revealed that 42 percent of women who left the workforce last year did so due to caregiving responsibilities, 37 percent left due to inadequate workplace flexibility, and 18 percent left because of insufficient wages to meet the high cost of child care. Strikingly, Black women have been the hardest hit by the labor market in the past year. By December 2025, Black women’s unemployment rate hit 7.3 percent, double that of white women and the highest it has been since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Trump Administration’s shrinking of the federal government has had the biggest impact on Black women’s unemployment rate. That’s because Black women represent 6 percent of the labor force and 12 percent of the federal labor force. With almost 330,000 federal jobs cut in 2025, Black women represent 33 percent of those job cuts. The Trump Administration will only amplify these numbers by eliminating minimum wage and overtime protections for millions of home health care and domestic workers. 

At the same time, women can’t achieve economic security without access to comprehensive health care. Abortion bans reduce women’s earnings and labor force participation, especially among Black and Latina women. In fact, when including in-state restrictive abortion policies, such as mandatory waiting times and unnecessary restrictions for providers, the U.S. economy has lost over $133 billion annually since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The economic cost of restrictive reproductive health care transcends abortion access because it also includes maternal mortality, the absence of cancer screenings and treatment, and the lack of access to pre/post-natal and doula care. Just to offer two examples: 81 percent of Black maternal deaths in Michigan are preventable and 40 percent of counties in Colorado are considered maternal health care deserts, meaning they lack a hospital, birth center, or obstetric care providers.

With Project 2025 as the playbook of the current Trump Administration, the newest Heritage Foundation’s report is alarming and should not be taken lightly. Additionally, with the rise of ‘tradwives’ and ‘princess treatment’ getting more traction on popular media platforms, the normalization of women’s subjugation hides what these conservative policies actually promote: the dangerous and violent reality of the government controlling women’s lives and bodies. 

Updated March 23, 2026, by Priya Pandey; Spanish version added September 2025 (see link below)

Originally published in 2019 by Rebecca Ullrich, updated in February 2022 by Alejandra Londono Gomez, and updated further in January 2025 and March 2026 by Priya Pandey.

Early childhood programs play an important role in the lives of young children and their families. But in our current political climate, families across the country are questioning whether it’s safe to attend or enroll.

In January 2025, the Trump Administration rescinded the Biden Administration’s guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection enforcement actions in certain “protected areas.” Immigration enforcement actions had previously been restricted at or near these locations, which include early childhood programs such as licensed child care, preschool, pre-kindergarten, and Head Start programs.

In response to the administration’s actions in January 2025 and since, we have updated “A Guide to Creating ‘Safe Space’ Policies for Early Childhood Programs,” which gives practitioners, advocates, and policymakers information and resources to design and implement “safe space” policies that safeguard early childhood programs against immigration enforcement, as well as protect families’ safety and privacy. The guide also includes sample policy text that early childhood providers can adapt for their programs.

Download in English here

Disponible en español aqui

CLASP submitted this statement for the record in response to the March 18, 2026, House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government for the hearing entitled, “Immigration Policy by Court Order: The Adverse Effects of Plyler v. Doe.” The statement makes the case for the importance of upholding Plyler v. Doe’s constitutional protections that guarantee all children access to K-12 education regardless of immigration status. The statement uplifts the importance of immigrant students to our nation’s future workforce and demonstrates how denying access to a basic education will have long-term harmful consequences for immigrant students, U.S. communities, and the economy.

>>Download Statement Here

 

By Elyse Shaw

Since January 2025, the Trump Administration has embarked on a wholesale attack on transgender individuals. Under the guise of “protecting women,” the administration has been simultaneously marginalizing transgender people and rolling back women’s rights. I saw both of these actions firsthand during my time in the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Women’s Bureau (WB). On the first day of his second term, Trump launched his attacks on DEIA and transgender and gender-nonbinary people, forcing the WB to strip any mention of the word “gender” from its website. Denying services to transgender and gender-nonconforming people was also the rationale used by the administration for cancelling 25 of the WB’s active grants, cutting vital funding for all women. These actions have only intensified and gained momentum.

On February 18, 2026, the Kansas state legislature overrode Governor Kelly’s veto of SB 244, a sweeping anti-transgender measure that restricts access to bathrooms and locker rooms in public buildings based on sex assigned at birth, with criminal and civil penalties for using the “wrong” facility. The bill also allows for bounty-style lawsuits that individuals can file against those they believe are breaking the bathroom laws, and invalidates all Kansas driver’s licenses and birth certificates with updated gender markers. 

Overnight, Kansas sent letters to all trans individuals stating that their licenses are invalid and must be surrendered. This has effectively blocked transgender Kansans from being able to drive to work, pick up kids, get groceries, or even to go to the DMV to surrender their ID in compliance with the new law. In order to get a corrected ID, trans Kansans are also required to pay the fee associated with replacing their license. Invalidating a driver’s license not only leaves transgender individuals unable to drive to and from work and maintain employment, it also means they cannot open a new bank account, apply for a loan, rent an apartment, start a new job, fly on commercial airlines, or vote. Invalidating IDs and stripping access to public restrooms denies trans people the right to exist in public space and have their voices heard in elections.

One week later, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continued this anti-trans agenda by reversing its long-standing position that trans federal employees have the right to access bathrooms and other sex-segregated facilities consistent with their gender identity, denying them the ability to safely access bathrooms while at work. This is especially concerning given the removal of all gender-neutral bathrooms at the DOL under the Trump Administration, a policy I can only assume was implemented across the federal government. 

These inhumane measures will only further push transgender people out of public spaces and limit already constrained job prospects. Research has found that transgender individuals experience either harassment or violence when attempting to access public restrooms, or are outright denied access. These situations are worse when trans people are required to use bathrooms according to their sex assigned at birth. Such policies leave transgender people few options: trying to avoid using the bathroom at school, work, or in public; limiting their food and water intake (at the detriment to their physical health); or meticulously planning their days around access to safe bathrooms. As a result, 58 percent of trans survey respondents reported avoiding going out in public due to a lack of access to safe bathrooms, with 38 percent saying they actively avoid places without such access. If a place of employment is not one of those safe spaces, transgender individuals will have even more limited employment opportunities, negatively impacting their economic security. 

These attacks on transgender rights will have long-standing detrimental economic impacts on transgender individuals. In 2021, transgender people were almost twice as likely to live in poverty compared with straight cisgender people (21 percent versus 11 percent). Every single transgender person interviewed for a 2020 study said they’d had a hard time finding and holding stable employment due to bias and discrimination. Economic insecurity also leads to increased experiences of food and housing insecurity: half of transgender men and two-thirds of transgender women reported not having stable housing or experiencing homelessness. The attacks and threats coming from the administration will only create more hardship. 

All of these policies have been enacted under the guise of “protecting women,” but this administration, which has long been plagued by accusations of sexual assault and misconduct, does not truly care about women’s health or safety. While the impacts of these measures are felt most acutely by transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, they also increase violence against cisgender women. Cisgender female athletes, especially women of color, have dealt with numerous accusations that they are transgender in an effort to invalidate and undermine their progress. Women are increasingly being accosted in bathrooms, with the demand that they “prove” they are women: one teen had to go so far as to unzip her hoodie and show she had breasts before being allowed to leave a restroom. Another cisgender female Walmart employee was fired after a man followed her into the bathroom and shouted anti-trans threats at her. 

The fight for transgender rights is the fight for all of our rights. The administration and Republican state leaders are setting a dangerous precedent and assuming that cisgender individuals will not step in to defend trans rights. This precedent can then be used against other marginalized groups, slowly chipping away at our collective power and rights, including our rights to exist safely and freely in public spaces and to vote. 

In these moments, I return to these wise words from Audre Lorde: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” Our rights are inextricably linked, and cannot be separated. 

By Parker Gilkesson Davis and Teon Hayes

For years, much of CLASP’s food assistance work has centered on protecting and strengthening federal programs like SNAP and WIC. SNAP helps millions of families put food on the table, and WIC supports pregnant people, babies, and young children at some of the most vulnerable points in their lives. These programs save lives, and we will continue to fight for them.

But events in 2025 made something painfully clear: federal programs alone cannot be the only plan.

Since January 2025, we’ve watched a steady stream of political attacks on SNAP—through budget cuts, expanded work requirements, and rhetoric that treats hunger as a personal failure rather than a systemic one. At the same time, our long-standing work with the Community Partnership Group (CPG), and our own lived experiences have been telling us the same thing: people are already struggling to get enough food, even with SNAP.

Then came the government shutdown in late 2025.

Parker: As I sat with the reality of what could happen if SNAP benefits truly weren’t administered, I found myself asking a very simple question: What are people going to do? I began searching for organizations in my hometown of Peoria, IL, that could provide food at scale outside of food banks or small, short-term local efforts. And I kept hitting a wall. The truth is, we do not have many systems in place to feed people outside of federal programs. If SNAP really ended, there was no backup plan.

That moment forced a reckoning for Teon Hayes and me who lead our food assistance work, and honestly, our entire team.

It became clear just how commodified our food systems have become and how dependent we are on institutions and markets that can disappear or fail us overnight. And it made me realize that we have lost touch with something our ancestors understood deeply: food sovereignty. The ability to feed ourselves and one another, no matter what.

I think often about conversations I had as a child with my grandmothers. I asked them what it was like growing up during the Great Depression. Both of them said something similar: they couldn’t really tell the difference. 

Both of my grandmothers were Black, growing up under the Black Codes and Jim Crow, living in poverty long before the Great Depression ever had its name. Hardship was already a reality. But they told me this: no matter what was happening around them, our people knew how to survive. Farming, bartering, cooking, canning, sharing food, and feeding one another. These were not hobbies or trends—they were collective skills passed down, refined, and relied on.

While the rest of the country was learning how to survive the Great Depression, our ancestors already had the code.

That history matters right now.

What this moment is calling us to do is remember. To return to the ways our communities have always cared for one another. To build food systems that are rooted in people, not politics. To recognize that while federal programs like SNAP and WIC must be protected and strengthened, they cannot be the only answer.

Here on CLASP’s Public Benefits Justice Team, we are expanding how we think about food assistance—not because SNAP doesn’t matter, but because people matter more. We are looking beyond federal programs to uplift community-led solutions, local and state initiatives, and the work that community-based organizations have been doing for generations. We see our role as learners and connectors—listening to what’s already working, sharing information, and helping connect community power to policymaking power.

Ensuring that everyone eats feels urgent, but it also feels possible. Our ancestors showed us how. They fed one another through conditions far worse than this. They survived because they had each other.

This is a call to remember. To reconnect. And to build food systems that can carry us through yet another moment—together.

To learn more about why we’re expanding our approach to food assistance, what food resources are available to communities right now, and how this work is playing out on the ground, click here to read our full paper about this new approach, which includes a real-life example from Peoria—because if it plays in Peoria, it can play anywhere.

By Lulit Shewan

At a moment when workplace protections are under political attack, enforcement agencies are under-resourced, and conversations about diversity and equity are being rolled back, the question of who is safe at work feels especially urgent. For Black women, safety has never been guaranteed. It has had to be demanded, defended, and organized for. While workplace violence is often framed as a matter of individual misconduct or internal compliance, the reality is more structural. Sexual harassment, racialized hostility, retaliation, and toxic management practices do not emerge in a vacuum. They flourish in labor systems shaped by unequal power, economic precarity, and long-standing racial and gender hierarchies. To understand workplace safety in the United States, we must understand how Black women experience work.

Who feels safe at work shapes who can keep a job, earn a living wage, and build long-term economic security. When safety is uneven, opportunity is uneven. The history of Black women’s labor makes this clear.

From enslavement to domestic servitude to the modern service economy, Black women have labored in environments where proximity to power rarely came with protection from it. Racialized sexual coercion, economic vulnerability, and systemic disbelief were embedded features of the labor system. Today’s patterns of workplace gender-based violence and harassment reflect that history.

Historical Exclusion Shapes Present-Day Risk
Black women were disproportionately concentrated in domestic and agricultural work, two sectors excluded from foundational labor protections under the New Deal, namely wage and hour standards provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act and pension protections under the Social Security Act. These significant exclusions were political compromises designed to preserve racial hierarchy in the labor market. The result was predictable. About 90 percent of Black working women, reflecting millions, worked without basic safeguards, collective bargaining rights, or meaningful recourse against abuse.

That legacy continues. Black women are overrepresented in home health care, hospitality, retail, food service, and education support roles. These jobs often involve close physical proximity to supervisors, patients, or customers. They rely on at-will employment structures and are frequently understaffed. Many earn tipped wages or work on a contingent basis. All these conditions increase vulnerability to harassment and retaliation.

National research consistently shows high rates of sexual harassment in hospitality, health care, and food service. Customer-perpetrated harassment is common. So is retaliation when workers speak up. For Black women, these risks are shaped by misogynoir, the intersection of racism and sexism that defines how harm is experienced and how complaints are received.

Misogynoir Shapes Harm and Response
Black women face heightened risks in male-dominated industries such as construction, manufacturing, utilities, and transportation. When women are isolated or vastly outnumbered, research shows harassment rates increase, and reporting becomes more difficult. For Black women who may be the only woman of color on a jobsite, isolation can compound vulnerability to both racist and sexist hostility. Advocacy groups like Heartland Women in Trades have uplifted cases such as the heartbreaking and preventable death of Outi Hicks, a tradeswoman killed in 2017 by a coworker after experiencing workplace harassment. Her story is a stark reminder that gendered discrimination, harassment, and violence in these environments can be an issue of life or death without the intervention of employers. Misogynoir can lead to tragedy when worker safety is shaped by power dynamics, racial hierarchy, and the gender composition of entire industries.

In the workplace, Black women who assert boundaries are more likely to be labeled aggressive. Research has found that Black women are less likely to be believed when reporting discrimination and more likely to experience retaliation – in fact, retaliation remains the most frequently filed category of complaint with the EEOC. Black women who challenge unsafe conditions have faced higher rates of retaliation, including reduced hours, negative evaluations, or isolation from colleagues.

Bias distorts reporting systems at every stage. Such systems often treat race and gender as separate categories. But Black women’s experiences rarely fit neatly into one or the other. When harassment is both racialized and gendered, reporting mechanisms can fail to recognize the full scope of harm. Bias can distort investigations, credibility assessments, and outcomes.

The burden of proof becomes heavier. The cost of speaking up becomes higher. And in low-wage sectors where economic precarity is already acute, retaliation can mean immediate income loss. At-will employment allows employers to terminate workers without cause in 49 states, a common occurrence that places disproportionate burden on workers of color. In fact, research shows that one in two U.S. workers has experienced an unfair or arbitrary termination at some point in their lives. Enforcement agencies such as the EEOC and OSHA face resource constraints relative to the scale of violations, and the use of arbitration clauses can further limit transparency and public accountability.

For workers navigating wage gaps and caregiving responsibilities, leaving an unsafe job is rarely simple.

Disempowerment Upholds Inequality
Workplace violence is not only about individual incidents; it’s also about systems of power. Internal reporting systems often prioritize institutional risk management over worker safety. Even in mission-driven sectors, reports have documented organizational cultures where complaints are minimized or workers of color face retaliation.

This, in turn, shapes long-term economic trajectories. When workers are pushed out of jobs due to harassment or retaliation, they lose income, benefits, and advancement opportunities. Over time, these losses compound and reinforce racial and gender wage and wealth gaps.

Safety cannot be separated from power and systemic marginalization. Without enforceable rights and collective leverage, formal policies provide limited protection.

Black Women Have Led the Fight for Safer Workplaces
Black women have long been central to labor organizing, from public-sector union leadership to contemporary worker center movements. Today, Black women workers often lead union drives in education, health care, hospitality, and nonprofit sectors. Collective bargaining agreements increasingly include anti-harassment provisions, just-cause protections, transparent grievance procedures, and language addressing customer-perpetrated harassment. Organizing spaces and worker centers with Black women at the helm, such as the LA Black Worker Center and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, have fought to shape reform, strengthen standards, and expand the definition of workplace violence to include unjust employer practices. The voices of Black women allow ‘safety’ to be inclusive of mental, emotional, and economic stability.

Building Standards to Reflect Reality
Effective gender-based violence and harassment policies must reflect the realities Black women face. Promising approaches include:

Policy design alone is not enough. Decisionmakers must adequately fund enforcement, and workers must have collective power to hold employers accountable. When Black women’s workplace experiences are centered, the conversation shifts from compliance to power. Harassment is understood as a structural labor issue tied to economic inequality. Safety becomes foundational to job quality.

Protecting Black women at work strengthens protections for everyone. The standard should not be survival. It should be dignity, stability, and respect.

CLASP joined an amicus brief filed with the United States Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara challenging Executive Order 14160, which seeks to end birthright citizenship. The brief outlines the immediate and long-term harms to babies and children if birthright citizenship is eliminated. It was co-authored by Persyn Law & Policy on behalf of First Focus on Children, CLASP, Children Now, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and child health and development experts.

>> Download here

By Wendy Chun-Hoon

Last night’s State of the Union address was the latest reminder of how the Trump Administration is devastating the lives of immigrants, workers, LGBTQ+ communities, children, families, and people of color by pushing them further to the margins. Last month, CLASP highlighted just a sampling of the administration’s actions and executive orders that target immigration, child care and early education, nutrition, economic supports, health care and mental health, housing, higher education, and workers’ rights. Trump demonstrated in his address that he plans to expand that 2025 playbook of destruction.

Despite Trump’s rhetoric about a “roaring economy,” this past year has been defined by cruelty, chaos, and a deliberate dismantling of the public benefit programs that families count on. His administration has manufactured crises, cut essential programs, and turned government agencies meant to serve all of us into tools of punishment and fear.

Massive Cuts to Public Benefit Programs

We heard lots of claims last night about the economy, but the ugly truth is that Trump has gutted the very programs that keep families healthy and fed. Last July, he signed H.R. 1, a sweeping law that will slash $793 billion from Medicaid and nearly $200 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over 10 years—the largest cuts to those programs in our nation’s history. Trump bragged that he “lifted” 2.4 million Americans off of food assistance. To be clear, this translates to 2.4 million people being dropped from SNAP in an average month. And as a result of H.R.1, millions of families have already begun losing coverage or benefits. These cuts will result in:

And while he vowed in his address to protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, H.R. 1 included policies that would harm these programs.

Even the so-called “Trump Accounts,” which create $1,000 savings accounts for babies, are a mirage. They’ll widen the racial wealth gap by allowing wealthy families to enjoy the full benefits of the accounts, putting them even farther ahead of children in families who can’t afford to make added contributions to the initial amount.

The Trump Administration Has and Will Continue to Manufacture Crises

We can’t forget the manufactured government shutdown of late 2025, which was the longest in U.S. history. It wasn’t just a political stunt; it was an act of sabotage that threatened millions of families with the prospect of losing the SNAP and WIC benefits that allow them to keep food on the table. In addition, thousands of families who depend on Head Start faced closed doors at their centers, with many more facing the real possibility of closures. Moreover, the shutdown forced health insurance premiums to skyrocket after Congress let Affordable Care Act subsidies expire. When Trump boasts about a “turnaround for the ages,” remember: his austerity didn’t come at the expense of billionaires. It came at the expense of families.

The president continues to follow the playbook of bringing up fraud, even claiming last night that eliminating fraud would “balance the budget overnight.” We should take factual instances of fraud seriously and address them. But he’s using these allegations as a pretext to cut basic needs programs, demonize immigrants and families with low incomes, and as another strategy for taking away the help people need to care for themselves and their families.

Cruel Attacks on Immigrants

The most vivid example of the cruelty of Trump’s second term has been his relentless assault on immigrant families. Within weeks of taking office last year, his administration had unleashed indiscriminate enforcement actions, turning routine traffic stops into family separations and deportation threats. He reinstated family detention, removed restrictions on conducting immigration enforcement at sensitive locations like schools and hospitals, reopened the notorious family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, and is attempting to deny birthright citizenship—a direct attack on the 14th Amendment.

In his State of the Union, Trump claimed these measures were about “restoring safety.” But the only thing they’ve restored is fear. Mixed-status families are living with constant anxiety. Teachers have watched children burst into tears when a classmate’s parent fails to show up at pickup. Immigrant communities are skipping doctor’s appointments and food pantries because they’re terrified that they will be detained.  And to be clear, this indiscriminate and reckless immigration agenda is harming everyone. Administration officials are profiling and assaulting and detaining citizens and immigrants alike in communities across the country.

Disregard for Workers, People Pushed to the Margins

Trump has also undermined the rights of workers and students at every turn. His administration axed diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs across federal agencies and rescinded rules that made workplaces safe. The Department of Education reclassified nursing and social-work degrees as “non-professional,” making students ineligible for essential loan programs.

Although the president loves to describe himself as “pro-worker,” the thousands of laid-off federal workers and the millions of people now at risk of losing child care and housing support would disagree. In fact, throughout the longest State of the Union address ever, Trump said nothing to address the struggles everyday families face, for instance failing to mention the child care affordability crisis even once.

Fortifying the State of OUR Union

The State of the Union is supposed to be a moment for the nation to take stock and see who we are as a society. But Trump’s address was a work of fiction. The real state of our union is fragile, strained, and deeply unequal, not because families failed to work hard enough, but because the government failed to protect them.

Advocates who care about people who have been marginalized, along with everyday Americans have a choice in the months ahead: to accept this cruelty as normal or to demand better. We can start by amplifying the truth. Share reports like CLASP’s timeline of harm. Support local food banks, mutual-aid networks, and immigrant-rights groups doing the work that Washington refuses to do. And call on legislators to support policies that help, not undermine, our communities.

We must all fight because the state of our union—the one rooted in compassion, justice, and community—depends on what we do next.

By Alyssa Fortner

The 2026 theme of Black History Month, A Century of Black History Commemorations, urges us to tell an accurate and inclusive history of Black people’s role in building and shaping the very systems that tried to marginalize them. As the Association for the Study of African American Life and History reminds us, “Black history’s value is not its contribution to mainstream historical narratives, but its resonance in the lives of Black people.” This resonance is particularly evident in the child care sector; a system built on the exploited labor of Black women that continues to reproduce inequities for Black early educators, families, and children today. As the current presidential administration continues to undermine child care and early education, these pre-existing inequities and compounding disparities that have disproportionately harmed Black communities have only gotten worse.

As reiterated in the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center’s new report, The History of Child Care Policies, investments in and the perceived value of child care have long been shaped by beliefs about who should work, whose caregiving labor is valued, and how children of different backgrounds are expected to be cared for. These beliefs, and subsequent implementation of policies borne from them, are deeply racialized, gendered, and classist. Under chattel slavery, enslaved Black women were forced to take care of white children in place of their own. After emancipation, low-paid domestic or agricultural work were some of the only jobs available to Black women. These professions were then systemically excluded from labor protection laws. Today, these historical patterns show up in persistent racial pay disparities and limited advancement opportunities for Black women within the child care workforce.

Outside of the care workforce, Black families have faced inequities in accessing and utilizing public assistance programs. Throughout the 1900s, public benefit programs advanced narratives about the deservingness of mothers that disproportionately stigmatized and harmed Black families. One example is the enduring “welfare queen” stereotype, which portrays Black women as negligent mothers who bear children to exploit public benefits. Though decades old and rooted in Southern segregationist attempts to send welfare recipients north, this harmful trope continues to influence public and policymaker perceptions by reinforcing the false assumption that Black women misuse public programs and shouldn’t receive them. Narratives like this persist despite child care policies moving away from overtly biased language.

Now, eligibility rules, work requirements, inadequate program funding, and administrative burdens reinforce assumptions about who deserves support and how they get it. Due to the intersectional identity of Black women with low incomes, these barriers still make accessing child care subsidies and other assistance especially challenging. While programs like the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) remain an important resource for participating families, inequities persist in who can access CCDF, generally and by race and ethnicity, due both to these barriers and to broader systemic economic inequity. Therefore, even without explicit racial exclusions, programs are still designed in ways that shape those who ultimately benefit from them and who do not. This continues to result in a system that perpetually fails to truly support Black families whose ancestors laid the foundation of the child care sector.

The harms of these inequities extend beyond access to care and care providers. To this day, Black children continue to be harmed by the systemic racism and anti-Blackness that persists through harsh discipline practices in education settings, including in child care and early education. Black children face suspension, expulsion, or being pushed out of programs more often than their peers. These inequitable practices echo the violence and control forced upon Black families under slavery and the Jim Crow era and continue today through the policing of Black children in care and educational settings.

The ingrained inequities in the child care and early education sector are intergenerational. Black early educators are underpaid and undervalued, Black families face barriers to accessing stable and safe care, and Black children face disproportionate discipline and exclusion practices. These present-day realities are born from racist, anti-Black systems that have never been transformed in ways that acknowledge and remedy these harms.

This Black History Month calls us to commemorate the deep roots and ongoing consequences of inequity in the child care sector. Doing so means not only recognizing the essential labor of Black women in the field but also understanding how disparities in compensation, access, and discipline reflect a history of oppression that adapts across generations, ensuring that systemic barriers continue to affect Black early educators, families, and children today.

To respectfully commemorate these inequities, the field must go beyond acknowledgment and take meaningful action to transform the child care system so that it works for everyone who provides, upholds, or relies on it, no matter their background. This action must center the voices of Black communities, confront the harms caused by racial, gender, and class inequities, and embed equity into every facet of the sector. The long-overdue transformation we need also must be supported by meaningful federal investment that is robust and equitable to allow for these necessary changes such as higher wages; good jobs with meaningful benefits; universal access; and quality, consistent, and stable care for children. This is the way to create a system that no longer perpetuates harm against the most vulnerable and truly honors the labor and care that has built and sustained it.

For a detailed analysis of the history of child care policies and that history’s impact on equitable implementation, please see the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center’s new report.