Marginalized groups admit fear, uncertainty as Trump secures second term

Sophia Arshad, a Merrillville attorney who works on immigration cases, said she’s already received a dozen calls or emails from clients worried about the status of their cases following president-elect Donald Trump’s win Tuesday.

“It goes beyond nervous, it’s anticipation of what’s to come,” Arshad said. “I have had a lot of already desperate emails and calls from current clients who are just very scared about what may or may not happen.”

Jane Hartsock, a founding board member with The Good Trouble Coalition, said her nonbinary child woke up Wednesday morning feeling terrified and crying. As a mother, Hartsock has had to find a balance between reassuring her child that they are safe, protected and loved by their family while making sure to not “provide a false picture of things.”

“This administration is targeting them, is seeking to harm them. I feel the need to sort of know that and not deny their sense of reality. I don’t want to tell them that things aren’t what they are,” Hartsock said. “I don’t know that I have any easy answers in terms of what we should tell kids. That we love them. That we’re fighting for them. That they’re valuable. That they matter to their community.”

Project 2025, a 900-policy manual crafted by the Heritage Foundation and many former Trump administration officials, would expand presidential power and impose ultra-conservative views on social issues and it shows how a second Trump administration would approach issues like public health and immigration, which impacts the most marginalized people, officials said.

Healthcare

Gabriel Bosslet, president and founding member of The Good Trouble Coalition, said the organization was created in 2022 and made up of more than 1,300 healthcare and public health stakeholders that aim to educate, empower and facilitate political advocacy in the areas of patient-centered care, public health and health equity.

Under a Trump presidency, the group will continue to do that work focusing on the Indiana statehouse, which is controlled by a Republican supermajority that often takes cues from Trump, Bosslet said.

Project 2025’s second goal for the Department of Human Health and Services states that the traditional nuclear family is the only way Americans should live, Bosslet said. It’s clear the Trump administration believes the nuclear family “is demonized and threatened” and they want to remove that threat, he said.

“I don’t know why they are so interested in the way I decide to live my life within the walls of my home, or who I decide to love. I don’t know how that affects anyone else, so I don’t understand why that’s the government’s role at all,” Bosslet said.

Overall, Hartsock, who is an attorney, bioethicist, and a medical humanities professor at Indiana University, said the group anticipates that the Trump administration’s approach to health care would limit access for the LGTBQ community and women’s reproductive rights.

Medicare funding was the way President Lyndon B. Johnson forced racial integration of hospitals in the South, Hartsock said. Now, Hartsock said she’s worried that the same funding source will be used to ban gender-affirming care, abortion and certain forms of birth control.

“In the long term, this is going to harm the most vulnerable people within Indiana. It’s going to harm people who already have difficulty accessing healthcare because public health infrastructure is the safety net there,” Hartsock said.

Hartsock said one of her concerns is that Americans “don’t adequately appreciate” the kind of power the Trump administration will have over departments like Heath and Human Services and the Department of Education. With that control, Trump will be able to push through an ideologically informed agenda that targets LGTBQ people, youth in particular, and reproductive rights, she said.

Through the Department of Education, Hartsock said the Trump administration will limit funding and resources to schools that don’t adhere to his agenda. Hartsock anticipates that he will use health resources within schools, like nurses, counselors and teachers, to stop pronoun usage, name changes and addressing gender identity.

Further, the Trump administration will seek to ban books that target LGTBQ stories and narratives, Hartsock said. All those elements, she said, will negatively impact LGTBQ students’ mental health, she said.

“It isolates them from the human story, from the human condition, suggests that they are not part of a larger community and will overall worsen health,” Hartsock said.

Trump has alluded to giving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a role in public health administration. If Kennedy were nominated to secretary of Health and Human Services, Bosslet said that would set public health in the United States back centuries.

“Not years, not decades, but centuries,” Bosslet said.

Kennedy promotes himself as not an anti-vaxxer, but he is an anti-vaxxer, Bosslet said. If appointed to the Department of Health and Human Services, Bosslet said Kennedy would have the authority to get rid of directives for vaccines, which would allow states to roll back requirements for vaccines for kids going to public schools, he said.

“We will see a rise in diseases, and deaths from diseases, that I have never seen in my lifetime,” Bosslet said.

Trump will strip public health-related agencies of their expertise, which is the whole point of the agencies, Hartsock said. That will impact public health on many levels, she said, from vaccine availability to vaccine requirements in schools.

“Trump is a petty, small man. He uses revenge, he wields that sword rather generously, and he is mad,” Hartsock said. “He is going to be more than happy to see those regulatory bodies just crumble, irrespective of what it does to people.”

Immigration

Arshad said about 50% of her practice focuses on family immigration and citizenship issues, which requires a lot of legal filings with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and not going before a judge. The only immigration cases she hasn’t handled are deportations, Arshad said.

Having worked as an immigration lawyer under a Trump presidency before, Arshad said she has some sense of what lies ahead.

Under the first Trump administration, there were many intentional delays and unconstitutional executive orders within the immigration process, Arshad said. Under those circumstances, Arshad said she worked with nervous clients and many lawyers left immigration law.

“It was basically a daily battle with the administration,” Arshad said. “During the Trump administration, one of the things that they did is that they basically made a lot of different types of routine immigration fillings very burdensome. That is anticipated.”

Under a second Trump administration, Arshad said she anticipates it will be equally challenging, if not worse. In his second term, Arshad said Trump has promised to eliminate various visa categories without restructuring the process.

“They call it a proposal. From my perspective, it’s more like a threat,” Arshad said.

What people may not understand, Arshad said, is Trump’s proposal for mass deportation would shift funding within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services toward the deportation procedures, which means less funding and resources, like employees, for people seeking legal status within the U.S.

The ripple effect, Arshad said, would mean immigrants who are entitled to benefits and protections not receiving them in a timely manner. For example, if a client files a petition on behalf of their parents, Arshad said that process typically takes about nine to 12 months, but under the Trump administration, that took three to four years.

The ultimate impact, Arshad said, is that immigrants, who qualify for some form of immigration status, ultimately decide not to file and “stay in the shadows” because of fear of deportation whether or not they file for status.

In the past, within the transition period between administrations, the departing administration has given a directive for the immigration agency to speed up the review of immigration cases. It’s not yet clear how the Biden administration will respond, Arshad said.

Future support

People in marginalized groups could seek support from “the helpers,” like organizations and communities who are working to protect them and their rights, Bosslet said.

LGBTQ Outreach of Porter County issues a statement reaffirming its support for the LGBTQ community as the community faces a rise in harmful rhetoric and other risks.

“Nevertheless, we assert that our community embodies resilience. We will continue to grow and cannot be marginalized. United, we are stronger, more resilient, and prepared to effect lasting change in the lives of those within the LGTBQ+ community,” according to the statement.

Chris Daley, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, said the national ACLU network has been preparing for the outcomes of the 2024 election for about the last year. The ACLU is prepared to push back against any unconstitutional action the Trump administration takes.

Any attempt to deport a large number of immigrants from the U.S., particularly at the level Trump promised on the campaign trail — to launch the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history on his first day in office — would violate their due process rights, Daley said. The ACLU would file lawsuits to make sure immigrants had the right to due process, he said, but the fear is that Trump will deport people so quickly that their due process rights won’t be respected.

Family separation is also a fear, Daley said, as children may have U.S. citizenship but their parents aren’t U.S. citizens.

“Almost always immigration is a proxy for racial discrimination. We will see people who have legal status, including people who are U.S. citizens, get caught up in this when they don’t have documentation on them or their name is similar to someone who has an immigration case,” Daley said.

Daley said the ACLU of Indiana and its national network have already been filing lawsuits to protect reproductive rights following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for nearly 50 years provided the constitutional right to an abortion. The ACLU has also been preparing to fight for access to contraceptives and in-vitro fertilization, he said.

On the campaign trail, Trump denigrated the dignity of transgender people, so Daley said the ACLU is anticipating his quick action against the rights of transgender people, from protections against employer discrimination to healthcare access. The ACLU will help protect the rights of transgender people, he said.

To anyone who feels uneasy following the results of the election, Daley said the ACLU understands.

“We get it. We’re afraid too. You’re not alone,” Daley said. “As heartbreaking as this election was, as a nation we have gone through challenging times before and if we continue to believe in the core values and principles of this country, which this election unfortunately did not reflect, we can get our country back on the right path.”

akukulka@chicagotribune.com