Post

Mike Hixenbaugh
@mikehixenbaugh.com

Scoop: At a secret meeting this summer, an aide to Stephen Miller laid out Trump administration's plan to make it easier for states to round up and institutionalize mentally ill homeless people — by pushing a drastic policy change that would weaken the rights of millions of disabled Americans.

nbcnews.comHow Trump’s homelessness crackdown became a sweeping retreat from disability rightsAfter issuing a memo making it easier to institutionalize homeless people, the Justice Department began abandoning cases protecting disabled people’s right to live in the community.

694 reposts1.2K likes

Svetozar
@svetozar.bsky.social

Figures. Imagine Miller would just reconfigure those ICE detention facilities using distribution warehouses, with chain-link "cells" on the inside. These guys would not be above a T4 Aktion.

Ryan Paige
@ryanpaige.bsky.social

Definitely. If you've ever tried to get psychiatric help, you will quickly bump up against a shocking lack of providers. In Dallas, even some of the in-patient facilities that would have been closed due to the treatment of the patients were kept open b/c the beds were desperately needed.

Ryan Paige
@ryanpaige.bsky.social

There are certainly many things we need to be doing to address homelessness and mental illness. Trump's idiots have come up with almost the worst possible idea to deal with either.

Decoy Flight Attendant
@jw1958.bsky.social

The Nazis didn’t start with Jews. First they crippled possible opposition groups - socialist & communist party organisations, trades unions, social groups & cooperatives. Then practiced their techniques of mass slaughter (and to gauge the public’s increasing tolerance of murder) on disabled people

Mike Hutchinson
@hutchymon.bsky.social

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who closed all the federal mental institutions and sent the inhabitants home to their communities for better care whether better care existed there or not?

warrenrb.bsky.social
@warrenrb.bsky.social

In for-profit institutions that will be built by companies that probably don't even exist today but will be awarded multibillion dollar federal contracts next week. I'm waiting until homelessness becomes a criminal, not civil, offense. Then they can be enslaved - as permitted by the 13th Amendment.

Mike Hixenbaugh
@mikehixenbaugh.com

Hugo Dwyer, one of those seated around the wooden conference table, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The strategy described by Miller’s aide threatened to roll back decades of progress in the disability rights movement — all to serve Trump's demands to clear homeless encampments in U.S. cities

Mike Hixenbaugh
@mikehixenbaugh.com

“I really cannot support this,” Dwyer, an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities, recalled telling Wasserman. “You’re talking about forcing people into institutional settings.” He later told me: "I'm not sure how I got invited."

Mike Hixenbaugh
@mikehixenbaugh.com

The meeting with advocates and conservative think tank leaders came two days before the Trump administration did exactly what Miller's aide previewed: The DOJ issued a sweeping legal opinion repudiating decades of federal disability policy rooted in the landmark Supreme Court ruling Olmstead v. L.C.

Mike Hixenbaugh
@mikehixenbaugh.com

Hailed by lawyers and activists as the “Brown v. Board of Education of the disability rights movement,” the 1999 Olmstead ruling said that disabled people had a right to be integrated into their communities — not forced apart from society in institutions marred by a history of abuse and neglect.

Kevin
@kevinllong.bsky.social

The number of crimes against humanity committed and/or orchestrated by Stephen Miller leaves zero doubts that he must swing. It must be public and brutal. There is no rehabilitation for this kind of evil.

gonzojeff.bsky.social
@gonzojeff.bsky.social

Is there any information on any large scale plans to actually move people into facilities yet? Or are they just lauing down the legal groundwork? I teach a college course on the history of institutionalization in the USA. It is prohibitively expensive, provides poorer quality of care,

gonzojeff.bsky.social
@gonzojeff.bsky.social

More likelihood of abuse, and poorer treatment outcomes for the people sent there. Plus they eventually sent promiscuous women there, juvenile delinquents, and those with mood disorders. Overcrowding and lagging budgets led to terrible conditions in which visitors could not tell

gonzojeff.bsky.social
@gonzojeff.bsky.social

Staff apart from residents. In fact, they had to use residents who were higher functioning to care for those with profound disabilities. And there were better private facilities for the family of rich citizens (think Rosemary Kennedy) and worse facilities for the middle class and poor.

Jerry
@geraldlombardi.bsky.social

Do we need to be reminded that the first populations Hitler subjected to round-up and extermination were mental and physical "defectives"? Please re-read Chapter 6 of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" or Gerald Reitlinger's "The Final Solution".

Dan Bongard
@danbongard.bsky.social

Under normal circumstances I would say that involuntary commitment of homeless people with severe mental illness or addiction was the most humane option. But I wouldn't trust these dirtbags to implement a program like that. No sir.

roaringgirl.bsky.social
@roaringgirl.bsky.social

Well, next comes murder, the question is how. Will it be industrial euthanasia? Killing these people through deliberate neglect? And when does the forced sterilization start--you can't have a master race if just anyone can reproduce!