A Cruel Tradeoff
The Trump administration plans to create a $45-billion “Amazon of deportation” while cutting $40 billion from Health and Human Services
The Trump administration wants to spend $45 billion to build an inhumane deportation industry and, at the same time, cut at least $40 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services’(HHS) life-saving programs. That juxtaposition is a near-perfect gauge of how heartless the government of the richest nation on Earth has become.
To accelerate deportation, the administration is virtually frothing for an Amazon-like fulfillment center to robotically sort handcuffed human beings, shuffle them onto trucks and planes, and whisk them out of the country.
Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), recently told private security companies seeking contracts that ICE needs to function “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours.”
“Trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe,” he added, “is really something for us.”
That is really something on many levels. One is the sheer immorality of reducing humans to shrink-wrapped products to shove onto conveyor belts and stack on forklifts. Another is that, so far, ICE is as indiscriminate and incompetent as Amazon is efficient.
President Trump promised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Border czar Tom Homan said the U.S. government was “targeting the worst of the worst” for deportation. Instead, there have been notorious incidents of students rounded up for exercising their free speech rights and untold numbers of people without criminal records deported without cause.
Running roughshod over due process
The legality of many of the deportations is highly questionable, but the White House has defied court orders to turn back planes and return wrongly deported people back to the United States. In one recent notorious case, 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants were deported to a prison in El Salvador. Bloomberg News found that only about 10 percent of them had a U.S. criminal record.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, ICE issued 18,000 “detainer” requests for local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to hold people for possible deportation in the new Trump administration’s first month. That amounted to more than triple the detainers issued in the first full month of the Biden administration, which faced its own fierce criticism from immigration rights advocates.
ICE says detainers are mostly for people who have been convicted of burglaries and robberies, kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, weapons offenses, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But only 28 percent of people targeted by a detainer in the administration’s first month had a prior conviction in the United States, with the most frequent offenses involving drunk driving and other traffic violations.
As for the “worst of the worst,” just one half of 1 percent of detainers involved a convicted rapist or murderer. So far, all that the Trump administration is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process, separating children from their parents, and deporting children who are U.S. citizens, including one with late-stage cancer.
Cuts that would betray HHS’s mission
That the Trump administration would spend $45 billion to maliciously ruin lives and destroy families looks even more unconscionable when Trump and his HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., want to cut $40 billion from a department whose mission is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
A review of the proposed cuts—detailed in a 64-page memorandum leaked to the news media—shows how profoundly the Trump administration is about to betray that mission.
The administration would end the HIV Epidemic Initiative, even though nearly 5,000 people a year in the United States still die with HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause. Despite many advances in HIV treatment that enable patients to live longer, there were 38,000 HIV diagnoses in 2022, half of them in Southern states, and one in five people with HIV in the United States are not able to access treatment.
The administration also would kill the Minority AIDS Initiative, even though the disease is rife with gross racial disparities. African Americans comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for 37 percent of new HIV diagnoses in 2022.
Likewise, the cuts would eliminate the division of Firearm Injury and Mortality Research. In doing so, the administration would likely further paralyze any debate on gun control, since the division’s mission is to provide data “to inform action” on a major cause of death in the United States. Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence an “urgent public health crisis” as annual gun deaths soared to a record 48,830 in 2021.
New research funded by HHS’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency rooms receive a gunshot victim every 30 minutes in nine Southern and Western states and the District of Columbia. Although murders have subsided somewhat from a record 21,000 in 2021 during the COVID crisis, gun suicides kept rising to a record 27,300 in 2023. And yet, HHS recently scrubbed Murthy’s advisory from its website.
The Youth Violence Division also would be eliminated, even though gun deaths are the leading cause of death for youth under 18, killing 2,500 kids a year. Due to the Trump administration’s demands to end equity across all federal agencies, HHS has proposed to eliminate the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. More than half of Black youth who die before the age of 18 are victims of gun violence, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Black youngsters are six times more likely to die from a gun than their White counterparts.
Besides the 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, another 22,000 suicides occurred that year from other methods, primarily suffocation and intentional poisoning. About another 100,000 people died in 2022 from unintentional overdoses of fentanyl, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, cocaine, heroin, and other substances. Yet, despite the approximately 150,000 combined deaths a year from suicides and overdoses, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are proposing to eliminate dozens of mental health and substance abuse training and treatment programs for children, families, people of color, convicts, first responders, community recovery workers, and crisis response staff.
As if the Flint water crisis never happened, HHS also plans to shut down the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program and the Lead Exposure Registry despite a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that showed half of the U.S. population was exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood and a 2016 Reuters analysis that found 3,000 communities across the country had higher lead levels than Flint. Another 2022 study concluded that without congressional action to better protect children from brain damage from lead exposure, the United States will “needlessly absorb” about $80 billion in annual costs, double the amount of the proposed cuts to HHS.
Finally, HHS would put an end to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) direct involvement in routine food facility inspections, trusting an uneven patchwork of state agencies to keep bacteria, parasites and viruses out of our food. Never mind that the CDC says there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, costing 3,000 lives and requiring 128,000 hospitalizations. A study last year by researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Colorado School of Public Health found that food illnesses cost the nation $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, premature deaths, and ongoing chronic illnesses.
Targeting programs that save lives—and money
The Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have disingenuously claimed that they are targeting waste and fraud. One need not be a math major to see that what they propose is the opposite. The programs they want to shut down not only save lives, they save money.
For instance, their proposed cuts would eliminate the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, even though cancer, heart disease and stroke kill more than 1.5 million people a year in the United States and cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care costs and lost productivity. Many of those diseases, along with diabetes and obesity, are often preventable, and the center is a resource for programs to reduce smoking, promote physical activity, lower alcohol intake, and improve nutrition.
The administration also wants to eliminate the National Institutes for Nursing Research and several other nursing programs despite studies that show that lower nurse-to-patient ratios and shorter patient waiting times (because of more nurses) can save a hospital millions of dollars a year. A 2021 study found that in New York state alone, lower nurse-to-patient ratios could save more than 4,000 lives and more than $700 million over a two-year period.
Finally, the administration wants to eliminate a HHS program to prevent drowning, even though 4,500 people a year perish underwater. Drowning is the top cause of death for preschoolers, and 55 percent of U.S. adults have never taken a swim lesson.
Make America healthy again? How many people would needlessly suffer from chronic disease and how many would die prematurely if the administration carries through on its threat to slash the HHS budget? And for these $40 billion-worth of cuts to come at the same time the administration wants to spend $45 billion to become “Amazon-efficient” at shipping human beings “all over the globe” to foreign prisons without due process would establish the United States—once a beacon of freedom and democracy—as nothing more than a beacon of cruelty.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) fellow, a former columnist at the Boston Globe, and author and photographer of “Project Puffin” (Yale University Press, 2015) and “The Puffin Plan” (Tumblehome Books, 2020) on the restoration of puffins in Maine. A version of this article originally ran on The Equation, UCS’s blog.
Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
 | A guest post by
|