Donald Trump’s Assault on Disability Rights

Eight years ago, Sara Fernandez flew into Newark, New Jersey, on her way back from the Dominican Republic, where her boyfriend lived. As she was going through airport security, she heard a T.S.A. agent say to one of his colleagues, “Do I need to pick her up and put her through the scanner?” Fernandez has dwarfism; she identifies as a little person. She also happened to be a new hire in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which oversees anti-discrimination enforcement for the Department of Homeland Security, including T.S.A. “The guy obviously didn’t know I worked for D.H.S.,” Fernandez recalled. He had made her feel “really awkward and uncomfortable,” but she didn’t want to get him in trouble, so she contacted T.S.A. and scheduled a phone call with him. “I wanted to be, like, ‘You upset me. Look at me. I’m a professional,’ ” she said. After their call, “he got some training. Moments like that can actually stick with a person more, because he got to hear it from me.”

Fernandez was raised in Pittsburgh by adoptive parents, also little people, who’d met at an annual meeting of Little People of America. Her mom’s family was “historically Republican,” in a moderate, John McCain kind of way, Fernandez told me. Her dad had emigrated from Argentina and worked as an accountant. “I have a picture of us at his naturalization ceremony, with American flags,” she said. Her parents weren’t political, but they believed in equal rights and taught their daughter not to feel limited by her stature. Still, she recalled, “as a kid, I was very reserved, observant, anxious. I didn’t want anyone to notice me.” Fernandez earned degrees in law and social work, and entered federal service through the Schedule A program, which expedites the hiring of qualified candidates with disabilities. She started at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then went to D.H.S. in 2src17, during the first Trump Administration. She married the man she’d been dating, who’s of average height, and gave birth to their son, a little person who’s now five years old.

Being in a civil-rights office, Fernandez often thought about the laws that made her career possible. In the federal government, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “a physical or mental disability,” and requires that “reasonable accommodations,” or tweaks to working conditions, be provided to disabled employees. (In 199src, the Americans with Disabilities Act extended this protection to workers in state and local governments and the private sector.) D.H.S. gave Fernandez an accessible parking spot, placed step stools in common areas of the office, and brought over the customized chair she’d used at the E.E.O.C. During the pandemic, when she was dealing with an autoimmune sickness, her supervisor allowed her to work from home. “It was the best environment I’ve ever worked in,” she said.

Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had issued executive orders to improve access and opportunities for civil servants with disabilities. The first Trump Administration also “prided itself on continuing efforts around disability hiring and retention,” Daniel Davis, a disability expert who recently left the Department of Health and Human Services, told me. More than a tenth of the federal workforce identified as disabled in fiscal year 2src21 (the most recent data available), including a great number of disabled veterans. In the past decade, the over-all employment rate for adults with disabilities has risen from seventeen per cent to nearly twenty-three per cent, with a big jump since 2src2src. The pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and caused many others to become disabled also led employers to offer flexible schedules and remote-work arrangements that made it easier for disabled people to do their jobs.

Fernandez’s office was at D.H.S. headquarters, at St. Elizabeths, a huge campus in Washington, D.C. that was once the grounds of the Government Hospital for the Insane. Not long ago, people with disabilities had been relegated to such institutions, often against their will. At the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or C.R.C.L., Fernandez was part of a team that enforced anti-discrimination and language-access laws, led equal-opportunity trainings, and reviewed requests for accommodation for D.H.S. employees. In 2src23, she appeared alongside Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, at a conference that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Rehabilitation Act. They posed for a photo—Fernandez wore a blue pleated dress, her hair down to her shoulders—that was later published in an agency newsletter.

C.R.C.L. also set policies for, and handled complaints from, the public. Its jurisdiction was vast, ranging from the encounter Fernandez had at Newark Airport to much graver incidents: sexual harassment in immigration detention, neglect of wheelchair users in FEMA disaster recovery, racial bullying in the Coast Guard, assault by federal security guards.

Last year a group funded by the Heritage Foundation set up a website, “DHS Watch List,” to publicize the names and photographs of immigration judges and bureaucrats it deemed “subversive.” It described C.R.C.L. as “a bastion for leftist [sic] who want to use the tools in the department to frustrate efforts to deport illegal aliens.” Fernandez was surprised by this characterization. C.R.C.L. was a law-enforcement agency within a law-enforcement department—so unprogressive, in fact, that friends in the disability community had asked how she could even work there.

Early this year, when the Department of Government Efficiency started to push large-scale layoffs, Fernandez reassured herself that, because C.R.C.L. was mandated by the founding statute of D.H.S., its hundred and fifty or so employees would be protected. In late March, she learned otherwise. Her position, according to an e-mail from Human Resources, was being eliminated as “a result of the dissolution of Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.” The entire office was found to be “non-essential or not legally mandated,” as were two smaller offices that conducted oversight of the immigration-detention system and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A spokesperson for D.H.S. referred to the three as “internal adversaries.” Civil-rights mechanisms at Homeland Security were essentially wiped out. Fernandez would be put on paid administrative leave for sixty days, then terminated at the end of May. She packed up her office and left.

One way to parse Donald Trump’s approach to disability is on the basis of his public comments. At a campaign rally in 2src15, he mocked the hand movements of a disabled reporter. In his first term, he told aides that he didn’t want to appear with military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” In 2src2src, according to a memoir by Trump’s nephew, who has a disabled son, the President said, of people with serious disabilities: “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” And this year, after his second Inauguration, he said that Biden’s recruitment of “individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities” were partly to blame for an aircraft collision over the Potomac River that killed sixty-seven people.

Fernandez had been so rattled by the general chaos in the Administration that her layoff initially came as a relief. Her husband, their five-year-old son, eight-year-old stepdaughter, and four dogs kept her more than occupied, especially when school let out for summer break. “Do you want some kids to live with you?” she joked to me one day, by text. “Mine are available.” After bedtime, she would go online to browse and exchange messages about crystals and rocks, which she’s collected her whole life. She posted closeups of blue lace agate and pink sugar amethyst on Instagram.

But the relief soon curdled into worry. Her family relied on her salary and health insurance; her husband, who is Dominican and has a green card, took irregular freelance gigs as a construction worker, a personal trainer, a dance instructor, and an Uber driver. She would have to find a new job soon, but where? She had only ever been in the public sector, and by choice. “I want to do good work, but also, I want to move the world forward,” she said.