On October 6, 2025, Teon Hayes presented the workshop “Cultivating Resilience: Creative Expression for Advocate” at the Prosperity Summit. The session focused on using painting and gardening as tools for wellness and creative expression.
This statement can be attributed to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Washington, D.C., October 1, 2025 – After Congress failed to pass a budget for Fiscal Year 2026 by the September 30 deadline, the federal government has shut down. Budgets are moral documents, and Congress should be focused on funding the government in a way that supports children, workers, families, and communities across the country. This includes extending programs that continue to make health care affordable for millions and ensuring that children and families receive the assistance they’re eligible for and need to thrive.
Voters across the country elect their Members of Congress and entrust them to do their jobs. The most basic function of Congress is to pass a budget each year. In a functioning government, this budget would be free from interference by a presidential administration. Instead, the administration is manufacturing chaos and dysfunction to continue to weaken the institutions families rely on to survive.
As conversation and work continue around passing an agreement to fund the government, CLASP’s focus remains on communities being pushed to the margin, workers paid low wages, children, immigrants, communities of color, and people and families living on low incomes.Their safety, security, and well-being should not be held hostage by a dysfunctional government.
Updated April 2, 2025, by Priya Pandey; Spanish version added September 2025 (see link below)
Originally published in 2019 by Rebecca Ullrich and updated in February 2022 by Alejandra Londono Gomez
Early childhood programs play an important role in the lives of young children and their families. But in our current political climate, families across the country are questioning whether it’s safe to attend or enroll.
In January 2025, the Trump Administration rescinded the Biden Administration’s guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection enforcement actions in certain “protected areas.” Immigration enforcement actions had previously been restricted at or near these locations, which include early childhood programs such as licensed child care, preschool, pre-kindergarten, and Head Start programs.
In response, we have updated “A Guide to Creating ‘Safe Space’ Policies for Early Childhood Programs,” which gives practitioners, advocates, and policymakers information and resources to design and implement “safe space” policies that safeguard early childhood programs against immigration enforcement, as well as protect families’ safety and privacy. The guide also includes sample policy text that early childhood providers can adapt for their programs.
The thread between parent and child should be one of love and stability. But too often, substance use tears at that thread until it frays. Sometimes the fraying goes beyond repair, leaving behind wounds and loss that no one can fix.
This crisis hits home for me. The generational cycle of addiction shaped my life. While I managed to find a path forward, it wasn’t because there was a system of resources and support in place. I survived — but I can’t say the same for people I love, or for countless others across this country.
Recovery Is About Families, Not Just Individuals
When we talk about substance use, we often focus on the individual — their journey, their choices, and their healing. But for mothers, recovery goes far beyond just them. Substance use impacts the entire family. A mother’s journey to recovery is deeply tied to her children, her family, and her community. Without recovery support, trauma seeps between generations like water through cracked foundations, weakening structures that might have otherwise held strong.
Consider two families.
In one, a mother seeks help. She is ready to recover, but does not have access to programming that allows her to stay with her children. There are waitlists. She’s told that programs in her community have been cut back due to lack of funding. Defeated, she tries to hold her family together while struggling alone. Her son grows up carrying the weight of his mother’s pain, internalizing the instability, the stigma, and the silence that follows substance use. Years later, the son turns to substances to cope — and he doesn’t survive his battle. His death represents the loss of a brilliant young man who never got the chance to graduate, walk down the aisle, or become a father — he never had the opportunity to truly thrive. He was one of more than 80,000 people who lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2024.
In another family, a mother enters a treatment program that allows her to keep custody of her children. For the first time, she feels supported rather than punished. She receives counseling, housing support, and guidance from other mothers who’ve walked a similar path. Her children are also welcomed into the process, given therapy and space to process their emotions instead of silently carrying them. Together, the family begins to heal and learns how to overcome the trauma that fueled generations of substance use and pain. By the time the mother completes her program, the family has grown stronger, closer, and more resilient — living proof of what’s possible when recovery embraces the whole family.
The Ripple Effect of Losing Support
In 2023, approximately 19 million children in the United States lived with a parent or primary caregiver struggling with substance use; that’s roughly one in four children. Even more heartbreaking, a child growing up in a home with substance use is eight times more likely to develop an addiction than a child who is growing up in a home free of addiction. This highlights a clear intergenerational cycle of addiction, showing how the cycle repeats when families don’t get the support they need.
When a mother or other caregiver in recovery can’t get the help they need — whether that’s counseling, child care during treatment, peer mentorship, or safe housing — the impact doesn’t stop with them. The consequences ripple outward, shaping the lives of their children and even future generations. For children, this often looks like persistent anxiety or depression, behavioral disruptions or trouble in school, and deep feelings of neglect or abandonment. The effects can linger for years, shaping mental health, relationships, and opportunities well into adulthood.
Children whose mothers lack access to recovery support are more likely to experience housing instability, food insecurity, and trauma. These early hardships not only cause immediate harm but also set the stage for poor health, educational setbacks, and cycles of poverty that are incredibly difficult to break. This is why recovery support must extend beyond the parent — it must embrace the entire family.
The Disproportionate Harm to Black Families
For Black mothers, the stakes are even higher. The child welfare system disproportionately targets Black families, often under the guise of “protection,” but too often mirroring tactics rooted in slavery: separating children from their mothers, weakening family bonds, and undermining the stability of Black households.
Enslaved Black women were denied the right to raise their own children, a deliberate act to dismantle family structures and maintain control. When a Black mother faces substance use challenges, the system is more likely to remove her children rather than provide the support she needs to recover while keeping her family intact. Black children are two to three times more likely to be separated from their families than white children.
This was my own reality. And to make matters worse, after separating families, the system does very little to follow up with the child or parent to ensure their needs are met, their mental health is cared for, and they are not left carrying invisible wounds for years to come.
Policy decisions must be made with care, recognizing their impact not only on individuals but on children, extended families, and entire communities. The conditions we see today in many Black and brown neighborhoods — violence, police surveillance, poor health outcomes, inadequate housing, and limited opportunities — are not the result of individual failings. They are the predictable outcomes of intentional policies and decades of disinvestment. Ending dedicated funding for substance use programs would only intensify these harms, stripping away one of the few pathways to healing and family stability.
What Recovery for Mothers Should Look Like
To create real change, we must invest in a system of care that truly supports recovery and breaks intergenerational cycles of addiction. This means funding and expanding:
Comprehensive, family-centered treatment that allows women to heal without losing custody of their children.
Safe, stable housing that is affordable and located near treatment and support services.
Access to child care during treatment and recovery programs, so mothers don’t have to choose between healing and caregiving.
Peer recovery support led by women with lived experience, who can provide guidance and empathy and reduce stigma.
Culturally responsive care and professionals who address racial inequities and center the needs of Black women and families.
Targeted support for children and youth, ensuring they learn healthy coping mechanisms, build resilience, and receive opportunities to heal as they navigate the impacts of substance use in their families.
Family therapy for parents, children, and extended relatives, designed to strengthen relationships, repair trust, and end intergenerational cycles of addiction.
Research and policy solutions that explicitly connect substance use to mental health and trauma, with a focus on historical and generational trauma as a driver of substance misuse. This includes building a workforce of professionals trained to explore, address, and heal trauma at its core.
The Path Forward
We cannot afford to go backward. Too many lives are on the line. That’s why it’s essential to protect and strengthen funding dedicated to substance use prevention, treatment, and long-term recovery support and services. These resources ensure that people — especially those without insurance — can access treatment, prevention programs, and recovery support. Disrupting these funding streams would be devastating not only to mothers but also to the generations connected to them.
Dedicated and stable funding for treatment, prevention, and recovery services doesn’t just support individuals in recovery, it also creates a lifeline for their children. It ensures families can stay together, heal together, and rebuild together. Without that funding, too many families are left trapped in cycles of trauma, loss, and grief. Ending funding support for substance use deepens racial inequities, perpetuates historical harms, and robs future generations of stability and opportunity.
Instead, we should be expanding investments in family-based recovery models and holding systems accountable for keeping families together. The two families introduced in the beginning stories run parallel, but the outcomes couldn’t be more different. The difference wasn’t the mother’s choices or love — it was access. One family met closed doors while the other found open arms.
Recovery is not just about surviving substance use. For mothers and those they love, it’s about building a future where healing is possible, families are whole, and every generation has the chance to thrive.
For me, this truth carries the weight of my brother, David. He was the son who never got the chance to thrive. His absence is a constant reminder of what’s at stake — the fragile threads that hold families together, and how every policy decision and funding choice determines whether those threads hold or unravel. My heart goes out to every frayed thread that has ended in loss due to substance use. This grief and absence ripple through families, felt for generations to come — a smile no longer there, a presence no longer felt.
The fight for healing and wholeness for families navigating substance use must continue.
Dedicated to “Lil David.” May you rest in eternal peace.
Washington, D.C., September 12, 2025—This week, rulings on two different court challenges ensured that immigrant families will continue to have access to Head Start and other important programs. Earlier this year, several federal agencies issued notices that would reinterpret the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) to restrict eligibility for some federal programs to “qualified immigrants,” in some cases expanding the list of what are considered “federal public benefits.” Last month, CLASP submitted comments in opposition to this harmful new interpretation. At the same time, several court cases challenged the legality of these actions.
The first case, filed by attorneys general in 20 states and Washington, D.C., challenged the federal government’s reinterpretation of PRWORA and resulted in a preliminary injunction blocking the implementation of the reinterpretation in those states and D.C. This challenge was across three government agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor. In states not covered by the lawsuit, any changes to program eligibility and an implementation timeline are still contingent on additional guidance.
The second case, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged this interpretation, specifically as it relates to Head Start. Yesterday,a federal judge granted a nationwide preliminary injunctionblocking the directive to exclude immigrant children in Head Start nationwide.
“These court rulings are important victories for immigrant families and our country. Unfortunately, so much damage has already been done because these directives have instilled fear, along with the fact that other actions of this administration—including unprecedented immigration enforcement measures—have caused significant harm,” said Wendy Chun-Hoon, CLASP’s president and executive director. “We believe that every family should have access to the programs and services they need to thrive, and we will keep fighting until that happens.”
Administration officials have already taken steps to challenge these rulings, as their goal is to reduce access to and ultimately dismantle these important programs. The well-being of our next generation depends on protecting these programs and the children and families they have served for decades.
Washington, D.C., September 9, 2025—Today’s release of the U.S. Census Bureau’s national Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance data for 2024 shows that while the overall economy is strong, the nation has much more to do to reduce poverty, especially among women and Black Americans.
For the most part, the poverty rate remained largely unchanged from 2023 to 2024. But the poverty rate among Black Americans increased from 17.9 percent in 2023 to 18.4 percent in 2024. And while overall child poverty rates dropped very slightly from 2023, the number of Black children living in poverty increased from 20.3 percent in 2023 to 22.7 percent in 2024, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure. This measure looks at not simply earnings, but the resources people have after factoring in work and medical expenses, taxes, as well as tax credits and non-cash benefits.
For the second year in a row, women faced a large earnings gap. The median earnings for women in 2024 were $45,380, while the median earnings for men were $60,020. This gap is greater than in 2023, when median earnings for women were $43,200 and $57,740 for men.
“These numbers are not surprising,” said Wendy Chun-Hoon, president and executive director of CLASP. “The wage gap between men and women has existed for decades, as has the disparity in Black poverty rates compared to the rest of the country. While the nation has made incremental improvements, the reasons for these disparities are systemic, and we must do more to disrupt them. There’s no silver bullet to remedy these inequalities; rather, we need sustained investments to close the gender-racial wage gap—higher wages, more equal access to quality jobs, affordable family care, equitable tax policy, and paid leave. We should solve for people’s basic needs, not eviscerate our social safety net.”
Signs already point to a weakening economy in 2025. For instance, the August 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report showed an addition of only 22,000 jobs last month, well below economists’ expectations, and unemployment at a four-year high of 4.3 percent.
Black families are the last to do well, even when the economy is growing. The most recent BLS report made that clear, showing the unemployment rate for white men was 3.7 percent, but was 7.1 percent for Black men. The report also showed the unemployment rate for Black women was 6.7 percent, compared to 3.2 percent for white women.
The gender wage gap persists for a variety of reasons, notably that women are still concentrated in some of the lowest-paid jobs, the price of child care remains out of reach for families, and employers are implementing return-to-office policies. The real-world effects of inflexible work policies and unaffordable care are already being felt: the share of working mothers ages 25-44 in the labor market has fallen every month in 2025 and dropped three percentage points between January and June. This is the lowest level of labor force participation from women with children in more than three years.
Increased poverty in 2025 is all but assured due to the severe restructuring of programs that support basic needs in July’s reconciliation bill and the Trump Administration’s executive actions aimed at people with low incomes, immigrant families, women, people of color, and other historically marginalized communities. Congress, with the administration’s approval, has consistently chosen to exclude many families with low incomes and immigrants from the Child Tax Credit, cut Medicaid and SNAP, increase immigration enforcement, and boost tax breaks for the ultra-rich.
“The president promised to lower costs. He and this Congress have clearly broken that promise for so many, making it more expensive for families to afford not just gas and milk but other family basics like housing, health care, and child care. This is not just a broken promise. It’s a breach of contract to the American people,” said Chun-Hoon.
Poverty is not inevitable. It’s the direct result of policy decisions. We know how to reduce it, and now it’s time for policymakers to choose dignity for all and invest in our communities.
This statement can be attributed to Wendy Chun-Hoon, president and executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025—On September 9, the U.S. Census Bureau will release national Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance data for 2024. We expect the numbers to show more poverty in 2024, particularly among children, and more people without health insurance. When we see the data, however, we must consider that the outlook for 2025 and beyond is ominous, given how precipitously the conditions for people facing economic insecurity have declined this year.
Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the administration and Congress have unleashed a cascade of attacks on people with low incomes, including communities of color, immigrants and their families, and others who have been historically marginalized. These attacks have included slashing public benefit programs; issuing executive orders dismantling diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives; ripping families apart through a horrific mass deportation effort and gutting protections and services to immigrants, including U.S. citizen children; eliminating labor protections for millions of workers; and decimating the nation’s data collection efforts that are critical to accurate and equitable decision-making. Through these and other actions, the Trump Administration’s reckless disregard for people’s health, safety, and well-being will have dire consequences for the future of the country.
These attacks are particularly evident in the reconciliation bill passed by Congress, which is causing unprecedented harm to workers, people of color, immigrants, women, and children. In addition to excluding many families with low incomes from the Child Tax Credit, the bill cuts essential benefit programs, including Medicaid and SNAP. Although these changes will not be fully implemented until 2026 and beyond, they are already having a chilling effect among people who rely on these programs to meet their basic needs. Congress made these cuts to fund historic increases in immigration enforcement that undermine family unity and well-being and to provide tax cuts to the wealthy, which will only exacerbate poverty and wealth inequality.
The September 9 data will likely show another annual increase in people without health insurance coverage. The end of Covid-era protections for Medicaid coverage caused many people to lose coverage in 2024, although the availability of enhanced premium tax credits in the Marketplace likely offset some Medicaid losses. Congress’s action in 2025 to cut Medicaid and enhanced Marketplace tax credits by more than $1 trillion is estimated to cause nearly 15 million people to lose coverage in the coming years.
The full effect of millions of people losing health insurance, food assistance, and other supports—and how that loss will harm not just individuals but their families, communities, and the larger economy—will drive even more people deeper into poverty and instability for years to come.
We will have more to say after the Census Bureau releases the data next week. For now, CLASP reiterates our commitment to fighting for policies that center the dignity and autonomy of all people, especially those whom the Trump Administration and the current majority in Congress are most focused on harming with their punitive and dangerous actions.
This statement can be attributed to Wendy Chun-Hoon, president and executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Washington, D.C., August 12, 2025–During a White House press conference on Monday morning, President Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington, D.C., despite evidence to the contrary. The president federalized the D.C. police department and mobilized 800 members of the National Guard to remove encampments of homeless residents to, in the president’s words, “fight crime” in the city.
The rhetoric used by all speakers at the press conference was racist, xenophobic, transphobic, and discriminatory against homeless members of the D.C. community, who are disproportionately Black. Using othering language like “they/them” referring to youth of color, “bedlam,” or “slums” pathologizes structural inequality. Coupling this language with deliberate misinterpretations of crime data and sensationalized stories places people experiencing homelessness at even higher risk of dehumanization and violence. Under a recent executive order, this population is already facing renewed attacks on strained support systems and privacy protections.
Furthermore, this move by the president is blatant abuse of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 and the latest refusal to grant the District statehood. Trump is flooding the streets with FBI agents and the National Guard and federalizing local law enforcement in spite of violent crime rates that are at a 30-year low in D.C., and in spite of the wishes of D.C. residents, the majority of whom are Black and brown.
Demanding that people experiencing homelessness leave the city will not make D.C. safer. In fact, the resources diverted toward mass displacement of homeless people will result in a greater police presence. The root causes of homelessness include unaffordable rents, lack of access to mental health and substance use treatment, and unlivable wages. To truly end homelessness, we should invest public dollars in expanding the supply of affordable housing and ensuring accessible, high-quality mental health and substance use treatment services.
Additionally, researchers have repeatedly disproven a direct link between more law enforcement agents and a higher level of public safety, invalidating measures aimed at “restoring law and order,” which ultimately hurt Black and brown people disproportionately. This increased presence can have deadly consequences, as it did inMilwaukee when a local Black man was killed by out-of-town law enforcement brought in to securitize the downtown area for the Republican National Convention.
In addition to the inappropriate takeover of the D.C. police department, Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to strike fear into the local population mirrors how the administration used the deployment of 4,000 guard troops and 700 active Marines in Los Angeles to facilitate the arrest and deportation of immigrants and quell people’s constitutionally protected right to non-violently protest their neighbors’ kidnapping.
Like L.A., D.C. is being used as a testing site to normalize the use of military personnel against people in our community without the existence of an actual crisis. Rather than advance public safety, the administration’s actions further a political agenda rooted in demonizing race and poverty.
At a time when people with the lowest incomes are already struggling with inflation, a softening job market, and the slashing of programs that support basic needs, the last thing our nation should do is to use force against people who don’t have the resources to fight back.
By Ashley Burnside
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) provides critical monthly support—up to $967 in 2025—for over 7 million low-income people with disabilities and older adults. Without these payments, many would struggle to afford rent, food, and basic necessities.
Social Security, SSI, and SSDI are lifelines for millions of Americans, including people with disabilities and older adults. Cuts or delays to these programs would worsen poverty and instability. Protecting these benefits—and the agency that delivers them—is critical to ensuring economic security and equity for all.
