During the same summer in which Americans marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, disabled Americans have faced a renewed threat to their freedom: an effort by the administration of President Donald Trump to reopen the door to forced institutionalization.
On June 18, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memorandum opinion concluding that neither Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act nor Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires states to integrate individuals with disabilities into community settings. Even more alarming, it asserts that states can offer any “nonarbitrary rationale” for keeping someone institutionalized, including budget constraints.
This makes me shudder. I was part of a team of community-based providers brought in to help disabled people transition out of the notorious Brook Run Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, when it was finally closed in 1997. Witnessing the grim reality within those execrable halls, I learned how being forced to live in an institution scars both the body and soul. We cannot let this happen again. And yet, that is exactly the direction in which the Trump Administration is trying to take us.
A month after issuing its opinion, the DOJ published a Federal Register notice declaring that it will no longer rely on its decade-old enforcement guidance set by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1998 Olmstead decision. It argued that the guidance might not survive review under a narrower reading of the ADA.
Then, on August 31, the DOJ, on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services and in conjunction with the states of Texas, Florida, and Alaska, asked the court to eliminate all aspects of Section 504 regulations that mention community integration for disabled people.
These efforts reopen a door we thought was closed long ago to forcibly segregating disabled people into institutions. And it is happening even though this is a more costly way to go. In 2022, according to the University of Minnesota’s Residential Information Systems Project, the cost of institutional care in the U.S. averaged $159,520 per person per year, versus $55,812 for community-based care.
The deeper danger here is not economic, but ideological. The push for institutionalization is based on the ableist argument that disabled bodies are burdensome to society. When societies accept this argument, those in power can justify segregating disabled people from everyone else.
Ableism does not stop there. Once those in power succeed in using ableist logic to marginalize disabled people, they expand it to scale back the rights of nondisabled people, too. As historian Douglas Baynton documented, arguments for denying women the right to vote rested on the false claim that they were emotionally disabled; arguments for denying Black Americans civil rights rested on the false claim that they were cognitively disabled. The same logic was used to curtail the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans through the false claim that they were psychiatrically disabled.
In each case, the rollback of rights for a nondisabled group relied on ableist arguments, and these rollbacks coincided with periods of high institutionalization rates for disabled people. Societies that forcibly institutionalize disabled people normalize logic that can then be used to roll back the rights of nondisabled groups by expanding the definition of who counts as “disabled.”
In response, a group of disability lawyers has been carefully tracking the DOJ’s actions, with the newly formed Defend Community Integration Coalition (DCIC) spearheading the grassroots effort to fight for the right of disabled people to live in the community. As of early September, 100 members of Congress and eighteen state governors have affirmed their commitment to community integration and urged the DOJ to halt its efforts.
Ableism is never satiated. If states are permitted to follow the guidance of the DOJ and begin forcibly institutionalizing disabled people once again, this loss of rights will expand to where it harms us all. We must work together to fight ableist policies by protecting the civil rights of both disabled and nondisabled Americans. We start by ensuring that disabled people are not forcibly institutionalized.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.