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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
How Trump Treats Black History Differently Than Other Parts of America’s Past
How Trump Treats Black History Differently Than Other Parts of America’s Past
“Since taking office, President Trump has attempted to reframe the country’s history involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing or denying it. This includes scrubbing government websites of words like “injustice” and “oppression,” eliminating or obscuring the contributions of Black heroes, and purging school libraries of writings by Black authors. Critics argue this is part of a larger cultural and political battle against diversity, while the White House defends its actions as focusing on merit and unity.
Since taking office in January, President Trump has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history or at times denying that it happened.

Cora Masters Barry, a former first lady of the District of Columbia, and Melanie L. Campbell, chairwoman of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund, join hands in prayer outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture last month.Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent. She reported from Washington.
On the occasion of Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the end of slavery, President Trump took a moment to complain that the national holiday even exists.
“Too many non-working holidays in America,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, just hours after his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made a point of noting that White House staff had shown up to work.
The president’s decision to snub Juneteenth — a day that has been cherished by generations of Black Americans before it was named a federal holiday in 2021 — is part of a pattern of words and actions by Mr. Trump that minimize, ignore or even erase some of the experiences and history of Black people in the United States. Since taking office in January, he has tried to reframe the country’s past involving racism and discrimination by de-emphasizing that history or at times denying that it happened.
Government websites have been scrubbed of hundreds of words, including “injustice” and “oppression.” Federal agencies eliminated or obscured the contributions of Black heroes, from the Tuskegee Airmen who fought in the military, to Harriet Tubman, who guided enslaved people along the Underground Railroad. School libraries were purged of writings by pre-eminent Black authors like Maya Angelou. Mr. Trump has assailed the Smithsonian Institution for what he characterized as “divisive, race-centered ideology” in its exhibits on race. He ordered the renaming of monuments to honor Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve slavery.

And on Thursday, instead of marking the day when the last enslaved people were informed of their freedom from forced labor, Mr. Trump lamented that Americans had a day off from work and suggested that the holiday was little more than a drain on the economy.
Taken together, Mr. Trump’s actions are part of a larger cultural and political battle, in which diversity has become an all-purpose target for society’s ills.
“Trump’s behavior around Juneteenth isn’t isolated at all — it speaks to how he views our community, and everyone who doesn’t look like him or isn’t as wealthy as he is,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’s why he’s stripping away our rights, erasing our history and silencing our voices.”
The White House has defended its actions as part of an effort to put merit ahead of diversity, and to focus less on divisions among Americans. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump promised to usher in a “colorblind” society.
“The Black community is more interested in results than in performative messages that do more to check a box than anything else,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. Black Americans, he said, “lined up to support President Trump in historic fashion because of policies that transcend race and align with common sense.”
But to critics, Mr. Trump’s decision to brush off Juneteenth smacks of hypocrisy.
He signed Juneteenth proclamations in his first presidential term. And in 2020, while he was campaigning for re-election, Mr. Trump agreed to reschedule a campaign rally that he was supposed to hold on Juneteenth because it was perceived as insensitive.
The rally was in Tulsa, Okla., the city where in 1921 white people carried out a racist massacre in an area known as Black Wall Street. Later, he tried to claim credit for drawing attention to the holiday, saying he “made Juneteenth very famous.”
But on Thursday, in a year with no votes on the line, he did not even say the name of the holiday.
The decision not to issue a proclamation honoring Juneteenth was made by a senior Trump administration official, according to a person familiar with the internal deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The person said the president and his senior staff were too preoccupied with the escalating conflict in Iran to mark the holiday.
Mr. Trump also spent Thursday posting on his social media account, including an executive order that extended the use of TikTok, another attack on Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, and his approval of emergency for storm-ravaged states. He also reposted other accounts that boasted about his economy numbers and blamed former President Barack Obama for the Iran conflict.
By the end of the night, he had posted two videos of his entrance to an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout, and praise for a court decision in his favor.
In the past week alone, he’d issued proclamations commemorating Father’s Day, Flag Day and National Flag Week, and the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill — none of which are among the 11 annual federal holidays.
Since Mr. Trump came back to office, historians and civil rights leaders have noticed an attempt to sanitize the country’s history of racism.
Chad Williams, a historian and professor of African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University, said Mr. Trump’s actions, taken as a whole, showed that the administration was seeking to craft a “propaganda version of history.”
“They’re trying to erase the history of Black struggle and Black resistance by denying the realities of racism and white supremacy,” Mr. Williams said. “They’re crafting a history that romanticizes the past at the expense of a true telling of the complexities and nuances of the American experience.”
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed the commemoration of Juneteenth into law in 2021, after the nationwide protests that followed the police killings of Black Americans including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The holiday recognizes the day when a Union general arrived in Galveston, Texas, nearly two and a half years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, to inform enslaved African Americans there that the Civil War had ended.
Mr. Trump has been vocal about what parts of the nation’s history he believes deserves recognition.
Since taking office, he has declared new, unpaid (and unrecognized because they have not been certified by Congress) federal holidays. Mr. Trump also announced that he would be “reinstating” Columbus Day, even though it was never canceled as a federal holiday.
He also established “Gulf of America Day,” to recognize his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, on Feb. 9; “Victory Day for World War II,” on May 8; and renaming Veterans Day, on Nov. 11, as “Victory Day for World War I.” Mr. Trump said in his announcement that he would not be closing down the country to observe the days.
Mr. Fields, the White House spokesman, said the president was focused on improving the lives of Black Americans rather than virtue signaling.
“We did Juneteenth, we did the D.E.I. thing, we had the diverse cabinet, and what did that do for us? Absolutely, nothing,” Mr. Fields said. “Inflation tore through households. More Black people were on food stamps. Education never prospered.”
Bruce LeVell, a former adviser to Mr. Trump who led his diversity coalition for his 2016 campaign, said Mr. Trump’s support among Black voters demonstrated that they were not looking to him for validation of their history, but rather to improve their futures.
“We vote for the wallet,” he said. “The emotions come when we’re trying to pick our next pastor for our church.”
Mr. LeVell, a business owner from Ft. Hood, Texas, whose family has been celebrating Juneteenth for decades, said that he and other Black Americans were more concerned with things that Mr. Trump could change, like the economy and immigration.
“That particular historic day when they liberated the slaves in Texas, nothing will ever erase that, it’s there for eternity,” he said. “Whether you like it or dislike it, or celebrate or don’t, it’s still part of what happened and nothing takes that away.”
But Melanie L. Campbell, chairwoman of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund, an advocacy group focused on policies for Black Americans, said that larger issues were at play.
“He’s clear that he wants a white America,” Ms. Campbell said of Mr. Trump, “and what white America looks like for him does not include anybody of color.”
Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.“
Friday, June 20, 2025
Thousands remember George Floyd on fifth anniversary of death
Thousands remember George Floyd on fifth anniversary of death

“Americans across the country remembered George Floyd five years after he was killed by police, with special gatherings in the city where he grew up and the one where he died.
The murder of Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin led to nationwide protests against racism and police brutality.
On Sunday, Floyd's family gathered in their hometown of Houston near Floyd's gravesite for a service led by the Rev Al Sharpton, while Minneapolis held several commemorations.
What many hailed as a national "reckoning" with racism after Floyd's death, though, seems to be fading as President Donald Trump starts to roll back police reforms in Minneapolis and other cities.

The Associated Press reported that thousands of people, including police reform and civil-rights activists, gathered on Sunday for the anniversary.
In Minneapolis, a morning church service and evening gospel concert were part of events to mark the events of 25 May 2020, at the annual Rise and Remember Festival in George Floyd Square, the intersection where Floyd was murdered and which has since been named to honour him.
"Now is the time for the people to rise up and continue the good work we started," Angela Harrelson, Floyd's aunt and co-chair of the Rise and Remember nonprofit, said in a statement about the festival.


In Houston, where Floyd grew up and where he is buried, local organisations held poetry sessions, musical performances and speeches by local pastors.
Rev Sharpton, a civil rights leader, held a press conference and memorial service with Floyd's family, as well as elected officials and friends. They called for changes begun in the wake of Floyd's to continue, especially pushing President Donald Trump to keep up federal police reform agreements.
Floyd was murdered in 2020 during a police arrest in Minneapolis when Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
The killing - captured on a bystander's phone camera - sparked global outrage and a wave of demonstrations against racial injustice and police use of force.
Chauvin has been serving a 22-year prison sentence after he was convicted of murdering the 46-year-old. Other officers were convicted for failing to intervene in the killing.
In a post on X, Rev Sharpton said Floyd's death had "forced a long overdue reckoning with systemic racism and galvanized millions to take to the streets in protest".
"The conviction of the officer responsible was a rare step toward justice, but our work is far from over," he said.
In the wake of Floyd's death, under former President Joe Biden, the justice department opened civil investigations into several local law enforcement agencies, including Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix and Lexington, Mississippi, where investigators found evidence of systemic police misconduct.


The department reached agreements with both the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments that included oversight measures like enhanced training, accountability, and improved data collection of police activity.
But last Wednesday, the Trump administration said those findings relied on "flawed methodologies and incomplete data".
Administration officials said the agreement were "handcuffing" local police departments.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, though, said this week that his city would still "comply with every sentence, of every paragraph, of the 169-page consent decree that we signed this year".
Since returning to office, Trump has also taken aim at Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) measures intended to reduce racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Early in his tenure, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate DEI policies in the federal government, some of which were the result of protests during what is often called "Black Lives Matter Summer", held after the deaths of Floyd and others,
Critics including Trump say such programmes can themselves be discriminatory. Addressing West Point on Saturday, he said that in ending DEI in the military the administration was "getting rid of the distractions" and "focusing our military on its core mission".
Meanwhile, the mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, removed Black Lives Matter Plaza, a strip of road that was emblazoned with the phrase near the White House. This week, a famous mural of Floyd in Houston was destroyed as part of a building demolition, as well, according to Houston Public Media.
Recent surveys suggest Americans believe there have been few improvements for the lives of black people in the US five years after Floyd's passing, including a May survey from Pew Research Center in which 72% of participants said there had been no meaningful changes.
The number of Americans expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement has also fallen by 15% since June 2020, the same survey suggests.
Correction 5 June 2025: This report originally said that Derek Chauvin had stood on George Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes and has been amended to make clear he knelt on it.“
Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.
Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.
“A federal appeals court ruled that President Trump can continue using the California National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles. The court rejected a lower court’s finding that Trump’s use of state troops was likely illegal. The ruling allows Trump to keep control of the Guard while litigation continues over California’s challenge to his move.
A panel rejected a lower court’s finding that it was likely illegal for President Trump to use state troops to protect immigration agents from protests.

A federal appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for President Trump to keep using the National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles, declaring that a judge in San Francisco erred last week when he ordered Mr. Trump to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In a unanimous, 38-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to decide that he needed to take federal control of California’s National Guard and deploy it to ensure that federal immigration laws would be enforced.
A lower-court judge had concluded that the protests were not severe enough for Mr. Trump to use a rarely-triggered law to federalize the National Guard over Mr. Newsom’s objections. But the panel, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., disagreed with the lower court.
“Affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination, we conclude that he likely acted within his authority in federalizing the National Guard,” the court wrote, in an unsigned opinion on behalf of the entire panel.
The ruling was not a surprise. During a 65-minute hearing on Tuesday, the panel’s questions and statements had telegraphed that all three judges — Mark J. Bennett, Eric D. Miller and Jennifer Sung — were inclined to let Mr. Trump keep controlling the Guard for now, while litigation continues to play out over California’s challenge to his move.
Mr. Trump praised the decision, saying in a Truth Social post late Thursday that it supported his argument for using the National Guard “all over the United States” if local law enforcement can’t “get the job done.”
Mr. Newsom, in a response on Thursday, focused on how the appeals court had rejected the Trump administration’s argument that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard could not be reviewed by a judge.
“The president is not a king and is not above the law,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “We will press forward with our challenge to President Trump’s authoritarian use of U.S. military soldiers against citizens.”
The Trump administration had urged the appeals court to find that the judiciary could not review Mr. Trump’s decision to take control of a state’s National Guard under the statute he invoked, which sets conditions like if there is a rebellion against governmental authority that impedes the enforcement of federal law.
The appeals court declined to go that far.
Supreme Court precedent “does not compel us to accept the federal government’s position that the president could federalize the National Guard based on no evidence whatsoever, and that courts would be unable to review a decision that was obviously absurd or made in bad faith,” the appeals court wrote.
But, the judges said, the violent actions of some protesters in Los Angeles had hindered immigration enforcement, and that was sufficient for the judiciary to defer to Mr. Trump’s decision to invoke the call-up statute.
The appeals court also rejected the state’s contention that the call-up order was illegal because Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent the directive to a general in charge of the National Guard, even though the statute says any such edict must go “through” the governor. The court said the general was Governor Newsom’s agent, and that was good enough.
“Even if there were a procedural violation, that would not justify the scope of relief provided by the district court’s” order stripping Mr. Trump of control of the guard, the ruling added.
The state could choose to ask the full appeals court to rehear the matter, or it could directly ask the Supreme Court to intervene. But the state might also just move on from the current part of the dispute, since the ruling on Thursday pertains to a short-lived temporary restraining order that will soon be obsolete anyway.
Either way, litigation in the case is set to return on Friday to the San Francisco courtroom of a Federal District Court judge, Charles Breyer, for a hearing. He is weighing whether to issue a more durable preliminary injunction restricting what Mr. Trump can do with some 4,000 National Guard troops or 700 active-duty Marines his administration has also deployed into the city.
Judge Breyer’s temporary restraining order concerned only the National Guard and whether it was lawful for Mr. Trump to mobilize them under federal control. At the hearing on Friday, he is also set to address a state request to limit troops under federal control to guarding federal buildings, and to bar them from accompanying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the workplace raids that sparked the protests.
That request centers on a 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, that generally makes it illegal to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Trump administration has argued that the troops are not themselves performing law enforcement tasks, but rather are protecting civilian agents who are trying to arrest undocumented migrants.
Mr. Hegseth suggested that he might not obey a ruling from the lower court, telling senators on the Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that he doesn’t “believe district courts should be setting national security policy.”
Conditions in Los Angeles have calmed significantly over the past week, and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles announced on Tuesday that she was ending the downtown curfew, a week after it had first been imposed. She said local law enforcement efforts have been “largely successful” at reimposing order.
California officials have said from the beginning that local and state police could handle the protesters, and that Mr. Trump’s decision to send in federal troops only inflamed matters. But speaking with reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he felt empowered to send troops anywhere violent protests erupt.
“We did a great job. We quelled that thing,” the president said of the demonstrations in Los Angeles. “And the fact that we are even there thinking about going in, they won’t bother with it anymore. They’ll go someplace else. But we’ll be there, too. We’ll be wherever they go.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.“
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Ice’s ‘inhumane’ arrest of well-known vineyard manager shakes Oregon wine industry | US immigration | The Guardian
Ice’s ‘inhumane’ arrest of well-known vineyard manager shakes Oregon wine industry
"Friends and family of Moises Sotelo ‘disappointed and disgusted’ after respected industry fixture detained outside church

In the early morning hours of 12 June, Moises Sotelo woke up to go to work in the rolling hills of Oregon’s Willamette Valley wine country, a place he has called home for decades.
But this morning was not business as usual. A car tailed Sotelo as soon as he left his driveway, according to an account from his coworker. Trucks surrounded him just outside of St Michael’s Episcopal church, where he was detained by federal immigration agents. By the end of the day, Sotelo was in an Ice detention facility.
“He was in chains at his feet,” Alondra Sotelo-Garcia told a local news outlet about seeing her father arrested. “Shoelaces were taken off, his belt was off, he didn’t have his ring, he didn’t have his watch. Everything was taken from him.”
His detention has sent shockwaves through the tight-knit Oregon wine community. Sotelo is a fixture of local industry – in 2020 he was awarded with the Vineyard Excellence Award from the Oregon Wine Board and in 2024 he established his own small business maintaining vineyards.
Left in the lurch is Sotelo’s family, the church he attends, the employees of his small business, the vineyards he works with and friends made along the way. Requests to Ice from family or attorneys regarding next steps in Sotelo’s detention are hitting dead ends.
Anthony Van Nice, the owner of a local vineyard, first worked with Sotelo in the mid 1990s when Van Nice was a “cellar rat” getting his start in the wine industry. He considers Sotelo a friend and said he was “disappointed and disgusted” by the arrest, and the government’s treatment of immigrants.
“My concern is about my friends and neighbors who are getting rounded up by Ice,” Van Nice told the Guardian. “We built this country on the backs of immigrant labor … To just round them up like criminals and throw them into these overcrowded detention centers, send them packing without telling their family or attorneys where they are or where they’re going, it’s inhumane. It’s a human rights issue.”
Sotelo’s detention comes as Ice raids on farmworkers are heating up in Oregon’s wine country and across the US. The Trump administration briefly directed US immigration agents to shift their focus away from farms, only to abruptly reverse course this week. Meanwhile, reports of masked, unidentified agents conducting workplace raids have become commonplace. America’s agricultural industry, where at least 42% of workersare estimated by the US Department of Labor to be undocumented, is exemplifying the practical limits of Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
Victoria Reader, who works for Sotelo as a vineyard manager, would know. She was in the car on 6 June, a week before Sotelo’s arrest, when another employee was also taken. Reader says that agents were masked and refused to identify themselves.
“They didn’t identify themselves. They just came out. They didn’t even say anything. They just started trying to open the doors,” Reader said. “I kept asking, who are you? What are you doing? And they wouldn’t answer.”
Reader said that agents would not tell her what immigration laws her employee violated, threatened her with assault of an officer for asking questions and told her she was not allowed to follow their cars or know where her employee was being taken.
“I’m doing the best I can to keep my crew safe and protected, but there’s only so much I can do,” Reader said. “But long term, this isn’t sustainable for human life, it’s not sustainable for business, it’s not sustainable for this industry, it’s not sustainable for agriculture and this country.”
Bubba King, the Yamhill county commissioner, said that he’s seen fear spread through his community in response to the raids.
“When a large part of the workforce is afraid to come to work or of being detained, everything is affected,” King said.
In a statement sent to local outlet KGW, Ice alleged that Sotelo “first entered the United States illegally in 2006” and has a “criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, Oregon”. Sotelo’s family says that he came to the United States in the early 1990s. The Yamhill county district attorney’s office told local outlets that they had found no evidence of DUI charges.
Sotelo was first taken to a detention facility in Portland. By the weekend, he was in anIce processing center in Tacoma, Washington. On Tuesday, Van Nice drove up to Tacoma to visit his friend. But Sotelo wasn’t there.
“The Ice official told me they are under no obligation to tell the family or the attorneys of the detainees that they have been apprehended, or that they’ve been moved to another state, to another facility, or that they’ve been deported,” Van Nice said. “I told him I thought that sounded wrong, and he said, ‘Well, that’s the way it is.’”

On Wednesday morning, Ice’s detainee locator showed that Sotelo had been moved more than 1,500 miles south-west to the Akima-run Florence service processing center in the Arizona desert. Ice did not notify the family or their lawyers about the relocation.
In response to a Guardian inquiry about whether Ice had no obligation to inform families and attorneys of a detainees status, a spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) replied, “that is correct”. Ice did not respond to other questions about the case, including whether officers had a warrant or any documentation of a criminal record for Sotelo.
The Sotelos have seen a flood of support from Oregon’s wine-growing community, including a GoFundMe that has raised over $100,000 so far.
Tributes to his character have also poured in. Reader said she came to Oregon two years ago with ambitions of working in the wine industry. Sotelo, with decades of experience and roots in the area, gave her a chance to make it her home as well.
“He took me under his wing and guided me and made Oregon feel like home,” Reader said. “If he did that for me then there’s so many other countless people that he’s done that for.”
Van Nice is grateful for the attention and support Sotelo has received and said he, and others, will keep fighting for his friend to come home. He also wonders, in the Willamette Valley and beyond, about the people that aren’t as well known.
“Moises is well known in our community,” Van Nice said. “There’s countless other people that we don’t know. We don’t know their names, we don’t know how many have been detained, and they’re just lost in this system, which seems designed to make them disappear.”
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Federal Judge Deems Trump Administration’s Termination of NIH Grants Illegal
Federal Judge Deems Trump Administration’s Termination of NIH Grants Illegal
“The article describes a federal judge's ruling that the Trump administration's termination of NIH grants was illegal. The judge found that the directives that led to the grant terminations were "arbitrary and capricious" and ordered funding for some of the grants to be restored.
In a ruling issued Monday, the judge called the government’s directives “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered funding for some of the NIH grants, including many profiled by ProPublica in recent months, to be restored.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
What Happened: A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s termination of hundreds of grants by the National Institutes of Health was “void and illegal,” ordering some of them to be reinstated, including many profiled by ProPublica in recent months.
District Judge William G. Young made the ruling in two lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s directives and cancellations: One case was brought by more than a dozen states’ attorneys general, and the other was led by the American Public Health Association alongside several other organizations and researchers.
In Monday’s ruling, the judge determined that the directives that led to the grant terminations were “arbitrary and capricious” and said they had “no force and effect.” The judge’s ruling ordered the funding of the grants to be restored. It only covers grants that have been identified by the plaintiffs in the cases.
What the Judge Said: After Young ruled that the agency directives and terminations were illegal, he noted that the government’s practices were discriminatory.
“This represents racial discrimination, and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out, and I do so.”
This year, the Trump administration banned the NIH from funding grants that had a connection to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” alleging that such research may be discriminatory. ProPublica previously found that caught up in mass terminations was research focused on why some populations — including women and sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — may be more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.
“I have never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during Monday’s hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years, and I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this, and I confine my remarks to this record, to health care.”
He also noted the administration’s targeting of LGBTQ+ research. “It is palpably clear these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop research that may bear on the health — we are talking about health here — the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s appalling.”
Background: In recent months, ProPublica has been covering the toll of the grant cancellations by the NIH. More than 150 researchers, scientists and investigators have reached out to ProPublica and shared their experiences, revealing how the terminations are dramatically reshaping the biomedical and scientific enterprise of the nation at large.
They described how years of federally funded research may never be published, how critical treatments may never be developed and how millions of patients could be harmed.
“Two and a half years into a three-year grant, and to all of a sudden stop and not fully be able to answer the original questions, it’s just a waste,” said Brown University associate professor Ethan Moitra, whose grant studying mental health treatment for LGBTQ+ people was terminated.
Response: White House spokesperson Kush Desai said it was “appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,” adding that “justice ceases to be administered when a judge clearly rules on the basis of his political ideologies.”
Desai also defended the administration’s policies targeting “diversity, equity and inclusion,” calling it a “flawed and racist logic.” He also said that the administration was committed to “restoring the Gold Standard of Science,” which he claimed involves a recognition of the “biological reality of the male and female sexes.” The NIH, he said, is shifting “research spending to address our chronic disease crisis instead, not to validate ideological activism.”
Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, told ProPublica that the agency “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people,” and that it was “exploring all legal options, including filing an appeal and moving to stay the order.”
Why It Matters: The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no historical precedent, experts told ProPublica, and marks an extraordinary departure from the agency’s established practices. ProPublica previously revealed that the Department of Government Efficiency — the administration’s cost-cutting initiative —— gave the agency direction on what to cut and why, raising questions about the provenance of the terminations.
The judge's ruling adds to a growing number of legal decisions halting or scaling back the administration’s actions. As of Monday, according to The New York Times, there have been more than 180 rulings that have “at least temporarily paused” the administration’s practices.
Whether the administration follows Monday’s ruling, however, remains an open question. As ProPublica reported, the NIH has previously terminated research grants even after a federal judge blocked such cuts, and the administration has disregarded several other rulings.
“If the vacation of these particular grant terminations, the vacation of these directives, taken as a whole, does not result in forthwith disbursement of funds,” Young said in Monday’s hearing, “the court has ample jurisdiction.”
Were you involved in a clinical trial, participating in research or receiving services that have ended, been paused or been delayed because of canceled federal funding? Our reporters want to hear from you. To share your experience, contact our reporting team at healthfunding@propublica.org.
Asia Fields contributed reporting.“