CLASP

In response to the Senate Finance Committee’s Request for Information to improve health coverage in the United States, CLASP provided comments focused on universal health care coverage for all, suggestions on health system design to improve access for communities of color, immigrant access to health care, and better access to mental health services.

>>Read full comment here.

By Kaelin Rapport, Ph.D. and Elyse Shaw

Note: this post originally appeared on Medium.

In mid-June, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a memo calling for states to ignore the integration mandates embedded in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Olmstead case. These policies and cases are bound together by a desire to end the history of discrimination experienced by individuals with disabilities because of their condition and to provide access to in-home and community-based health services and educational accommodations. However, the crux of the DOJ’s memo is an attempt to undermine the needs of individuals with disabilities by reinterpreting the responsibilities of federal and local governments when administering accessible services in an ‘integrated’ setting.

Wide adoption of the memo’s provisions would be especially devastating for students with disabilities. Elyse Shaw’s experiences accessing and maintaining care for her child demonstrates how the system in place already fails to meet the needs of many students and their families.

The millions of children who qualify for and receive accommodations through section 504, from kindergarten to grade 12, are entitled to a “504 plan,” which includes accommodations such as extra time for testing and assignments, and access to sensory breaks and fidgets. Through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students may also qualify for anindividual education program, or IEP, which has additional accommodations like one-on-one support or an aide, and comes with more stringent reporting requirements for schools. Both plans are tailored around an individual’s unique needs and ensure integration in the school and curriculum. But 504 and IEP plans are often aspirational. The shortfalls are generally not the fault of the teachers and staff who work tirelessly to provide these services, but the result of administrative obstacles and public school budget cuts that result in staffing shortages and reduced oversight on plan implementation.

When she tried to get an assessment for her child through the public school system, Elyse was told to expect a six- to eight-month wait. She could get a private assessment sooner, but that would cost more than $3,000 out-of-pocket if her health insurance plan didn’t cover the cost. Even with health insurance and private assessments, it still took a year and half to get an accurate diagnosis, which was just the first step in getting a 504 plan.

Even with a 504 plan in place, Elyse still spends countless hours on emails and meetings every year to make certain her child is getting the services she needs.

The accommodations her child receives, even with the system’s flaws, enable her to continue learning and progressing at grade level alongside her peers. The plan ensures that there is at least one paid professional at the school — even though it is understaffed and under-resourced — who works alongside parents to make sure children’s accommodations change and grow with them.

Without the 504 plan and a job with the flexibility to take time to address these care needs, it’s likely that Elyse’s child would be in a specialized school, segregated and isolated, with no accountability measures to make sure she is protected, safe, and given the same rights as her non-disabled peers.

Creating the Conditions for Re-Institutionalization

Many are not so lucky. Almost half of the students with disabilities that require accommodations go without, and a significant portion of those students feel that they need more support.

Without the assistance needed to thrive, they are punished more consistently than their peers. Children with disabilities comprise roughly a quarter of the children given an out-of-school suspension. The consequences of this access gap are further accelerated by race; non-white students, and Black students in particular, suffer harsh disciplinary actions in schools at disproportionate rates and are more likely to have their 504 or IEP accommodations mishandled.

At best, the DOJ’s move to reduce states’ responsibility to facilitate integration for individuals with disabilities could lay the groundwork for school segregation. At worst, the reinterpretation of the integration mandate will channel students with disabilities into the school-to-prison pipeline. The majority of children already swept into the juvenile detention system have disabilities that make them eligible for special education services, and yet only 37 percent received those services while in school.

To understand the Trump Administration’s likely solution to the integration problem, we can look to the proposed plan of building a forced treatment camp in Utah for individuals dealing with mental health challenges. Rather than provide services for individuals with disabilities in a home or community-based setting, they could be forced to go without their accessibility and health care needs met or isolate themselves within a presumably better resourced institution–if they can afford transportation and tuition.

What Is to Be Done?

Weaponizing the ambiguity surrounding state responsibility to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities is the latest in a series of attacks launched by the administration to shrink the federal government’s social safety net. This time, the consequences facilitate the conditions for segregation and mass institutionalization.

To protect children and students with disabilities, we must intentionally reckon with the past in ways that put students with disabilities first and include them in decision-making processes. That will require the commitment of states and education systems to building the infrastructure necessary for resourced, community-based care systems. We also need these systems to holistically define and expand the integration mandate.

Doing this will require states and school districts to hire more specialized staff for all schools, especially staff with the training and expertise to provide assessments, diagnosis, and tailored social, emotional, and academic support. Additional training for all teachers on how to properly adhere to and implement 504s and IEPs is also needed.

Finally, we recommend that codes of conduct and training be developed and disseminated for the implementation of 504 and IEP plans that acknowledge racial stereotypes and their impact on how individual school administrators, teachers, and support staff interact with and discipline students. Without these provisions, the most vulnerable of our students will be shut out or left behind, just like their predecessors.

By Christian Collins

Last month, the push for college athletes to collectively bargain gained significant momentum with the news that football players at Stanford University, the Oregon State University women’s basketball team, and over 100 women’s college basketball players have publicly expressed their desire to bargain as employees and taken key steps toward unionizing. Unionization would allow players a direct say in key terms of their athletic participation, from health and safety to transfers, eligibility, and compensation.

These developments come at a time when Congress is actively considering legislation to dramatically reshape college sports. Last year, a bill that would prevent college athletes from being recognized as employees and enshrine antitrust protections for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) into law—the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act—was introduced in the House and gained 21 cosponsors. This summer, the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) passed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on a 19-9 vote. The PCSA cleared a major hurdle this week after winning a Senate cloture vote 74-24, despite the bill text not being finalized or released to the public at the time of the vote and with several legal questions on bill provisions that have yet to be addressed.

College Athletes Meet the Legal Standard to be Labeled Employees

Two pathways—collective bargaining and federal legislation—represent the possible avenues by which current tensions in college sports may be resolved. Collective bargaining would guarantee protection under federal law through allowing college athletes to jointly negotiate with colleges and the NCAA over the terms and conditions of their athletic participation. To avoid going to the bargaining table with athletes, colleges and the NCAA have sought intervention from Congress to instead be protected from federal law for past and present exploitation. PCSA, like its predecessor SCORE, seeks to place the blame of financial gaps squarely on the shoulders of athletes and solidify the longstanding advantages that have enabled colleges to profit handsomely off the talent and hard work of those athletes—without having to compensate them fairly or grant them the rights and protections that employees are entitled to.

The system that has persisted for decades in which athletes generate billions of dollars in revenue for colleges, the NCAA, and media companies, yet see a small share returned to them in the form of scholarships is now threatening to collapse. In recent years, courts have increasingly recognized athletics participation as work and athletes as employees. In NCAA v. Alston in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that “amateurism” is a valid defense against the NCAA complying with laws that ensure fair market competition. Following the decision, the NCAA eliminated its rules restricting athletes from receiving compensation from endorsements, ushering in the new era of “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) deals. Relatedly, the House v. NCAA settlement in 2025 awarded current and former Division I athletes $2.8 billion in damages due to denying them NIL compensation and established fairer compensation for future athletes at schools that agreed to the settlement through direct revenue sharing of $20.5 million per year, rising 4 percent annually.

Similarly, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under Biden in 2024 determined that a group of Dartmouth college basketball players met the common-law definition of employee, which “requires that the employer have the right to control the employee’s work, and that that work be performed in exchange for compensation,” pointing to the non-monetary benefits that athletes receive—even in the absence of scholarships, per Ivy League rules. While the players voted to unionize following this decision, they withdrew their petition to be recognized after the 2024 election in anticipation of an incoming NLRB that would be more likely to reject their petition.

Congress Can’t “Protect College Sports” by Ignoring the Participants

While the PCSA is neutral on its face concerning the question of athletes’ employment status, it would enshrine into law a range of terms and conditions of athletic participation, eliminating athletes’ opportunities to bargain over these terms and in many cases setting terms that are favorable to schools, conferences, and the NCAA. As the American Economic Liberties Project wrote in its memo opposing the legislation, the bill “puts Congress in the shoes of the players and makes choices and tradeoffs they wouldn’t necessarily make in a true collective bargaining process, where health, safety, wellness, and economic terms would all be on the table.” These terms impact not just players’ experience in sports, but also in academics and their personal lives. Transfer rules, for example, seek to prevent frequently changing rosters and athletes easily seeking better contracts elsewhere. In doing so, it also limits athletes’ choice about which schools and teams are best for them as students to, for example, pursue a new major or be closer to family. In addition, it allows schools to use the transfer portal as a weapon to wield against students by kicking them into the portal as punishment, like if they’re suspected of organizing other athletes. Rather than allowing athletes a voice in the process, the PCSA locks into law the major terms of their participation, preventing athletes from winning better terms in the future and extending anticompetitive immunity to the NCAA that few industries enjoy.

Most concerningly, college sports legislation has been crafted with little to no input from the college athletes themselves. As one current University of Utah football player observed during a Senate committee hearing on the PCSA, “It’s like there’s no student-athlete in those conversations at all.” In recent weeks, current and former college athletes across the country have come out against the bill. A letter with signatories from a range of schools argues that the PCSA would make it “substantially more difficult for student-athletes to receive legitimate compensation,” while athletes from the United College Athletes Association have said they favor collective bargaining as a way to settle key questions in college sports. One former college athlete argued in an op-ed that “players, coaches, schools and communities that made these sports great in the first place” should be the ones to make decisions about the future of college sports—not Washington. As the joint letter states, the fact that “the issue of conference alignment and media rights pooling have been among the most contentious, and also seems to involve student-athletes the least” is very telling: right now, Congress and the NCAA are negotiating over the distribution of the $19 billion in annual revenues the college athletes generate through hours of practices, competitions, travel, and hard work without allowing them a seat at the table. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the AFL-CIO Sports Council, a collaboration between labor unions that represent professional athletes, similarly reject the PCSA.

Congress should step aside from attempting to govern the minutiae of college athletes’ daily lives and lock in further advantages for powerful entities such as the NCAA. Schools don’t need to wait on Congress to act; if they chose to, they could negotiate with athletes to build a fair and equitable college athletics system tomorrow by voluntarily recognizing athletes as employees. The athletes whose hard work and dedication are the raw material for the enterprise beloved by millions of Americans should be fairly represented in the process as the workers they are.

Other CLASP publications on the exploitation of college athletes and related public policies include:

• Congress Is Weaponizing Federal Law Against College Athletes By Cutting Pell Grant Access and Stripping Labor Protections
• The SCORE Act Would Harm College Athletes by Codifying Inequity into Federal Law
• Equal Play, Unequal Pay: Race-Conscious Admissions and the Systemic Exploitation of Black Male Athletes

By Stacy M. Brown

Excerpt:

The Center for Law and Social Policy describes a workplace landscape where racialized hostility, sexual harassment, and retaliation intersect with unequal power and economic insecurity. Research published by Harvard Business Review found that Black women are uniquely burdened by the “angry Black woman” stereotype, with expressions of frustration more readily interpreted as hostility or aggression, which can damage how colleagues view their competence and leadership potential.

By Shira Small

The Trump Administration continues to harm a child care and early education sector in desperate need of support. Recent efforts to weaken the programs meant to make child care more affordable and accessible are not new; the administration has only built on their destabilizing early education policies from year one in office. Through harmful regulatory action, illegal funding freezes, and unfounded fraud allegations, the Trump Administration has spent its second year continuing to dismantle the early childhood education programs children and families need most.

The child care sector is already on shaky ground: the average annual cost of child care has risen to $13,184, while only 1 in 6 children eligible for child care subsidies are able to access them, per the most recently available data. The rising cost of living is straining both families and the child care workforce, whose woefully low compensation drives turnover and attrition—especially for providers participating in the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the primary federal funding stream for child care assistance.

Working to increase funding, center family and provider needs, and engage state and local systems to expand access to care would all be critical steps in addressing the affordability crisis. Instead, here is how the administration has targeted the child care and early education sector in 2026 so far:

• Cast unfounded doubt on child care program integrity. In response to a YouTuber’s allegations of child care fraud in Minnesota, the Trump Administration illegally froze $10 billion in child care assistance funds and began requiring states to submit a “Defend the Spend” justification to access CCDF funds that Congress had already approved. The administration’s embrace of the unfounded influencer allegations initiated an avalanche of legislative and administrative attacks to CCDF, despite having no evidence of widespread fraud.
• Catalyzed legislative action that focuses on influencer allegations, not the root causes of the child care crisis. Congress has devoted more attention to the child care fraud narrative than the child care affordability crisis that came before it. It has passed legislation, held hearings, launched taskforces, and initiated investigations on child care fraud that ignore the foundational challenge facing the sector—inadequate funding for a broken market. A core facet of the legislative response has been the conflation of improper payments and error rates with intentional fraud, wherein administrative processing errors are being used as evidence for a widespread, calculated abuse of public dollars, without regard for the existing program integrity protections in child care assistance.
• Introduced regulations that weaken child care and early education programs.
  • In January, the Trump Administration released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for CCDF proposing to repeal the Biden Administration’s 2024 requirements to limit family co-payments for child care at 7 percent; pay providers prospectively for their services; pay providers by their classroom enrollment rather than actual attendance; and use grants and contracts to help reach populations that have fewer care options. The rule was finalized in July.
  • The administration has also released two proposed rules regarding Head Start:
    • One in June proposing to roll back Biden Administration requirements to increase Head Start staff pay and benefits in June.
    • One in August repealing nearly all of the Head Start Program Performance Standards, which provide guidance on how to ensure that families have robust access to Head Start’s comprehensive services.
  •  Combined with other sprawling regulatory actions meant to restrict any government agency’s access to funding if they implicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” these regulations all destabilize the early childhood sector and the critical government-funded programs that help families access the care they need.

• Weakened trust in public benefits while limiting their own transparency. The administration’s rhetoric has also played into longstanding narratives meant to weaken trust in public benefits and the people who receive them, in order to justify gutting the programs that help families in need of support. While casting doubt on public benefit program integrity, the administration has reduced its own government transparency and was sued in July for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding their “Defend the Spend” policy and the January funding freeze.

Conclusion
The legislative and regulatory attacks to CCDF from the Trump Administration make one thing clear: they have no real solutions to the child care crisis. Instead of using their power to address skyrocketing costs for families and support a strained child care workforce, this administration has attempted to divert attention from their policy failures by weakening the public’s faith in public services and the public servants who administer them. Deregulation, attacks to program integrity, and attempts to censor the role that racial inequity plays in this country’s economy and history only amount to a destabilized sector, with parents still struggling to afford care and providers still not earning enough to provide it.

These attacks have real consequences for vulnerable families and an already fragile sector. Child care centers have been raided as a result of the administration’s rhetoric, and immigrant communities are being targeted and attacked, on top of the dangerous immigration policy agenda the administration was already leading. The result is communities in crisis, with families afraid to access the supports for which they’re eligible and the provider workforce shrinking further as immigrant early educators are attacked.

The child care and early education sector needs stronger investment and good-faith engagement from leaders who want the best for children, families, and providers, not the best for their political agenda.

The following statement can be attributed to Wendy Cervantes, director of the Immigration and Immigrant Families team at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP).

Washington, D.C, September 2, 2026—Children’s advocates mourn the death of Pierre Damas Bel, a Black 20-year-old first-year college student from Haiti with dreams of becoming a doctor. His preventable death followed weeks of anguish after he was stripped of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and fitted with an ankle monitor, along with many other Haitian Ohioans who have built their lives in Springfield. Pierre is one of more than 350,000 Haitian nationals across the country who have been robbed of their work authorization and legal status due to the Trump Administration’s termination of TPS for Haiti, leaving them vulnerable to detention, deportation, and family separation. Pierre’s tragic story is a reminder that Black immigrants continually face the compounded pressures of a punitive immigration system that is not only xenophobic and outdated, but also anti-Black.  

Experts from the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) issued the following statements:

Wendy Cervantes, Director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at CLASP: “All of our children deserve the opportunity to follow their dreams and prepare for their futures. They deserve to build community, pursue an education, and put down roots in the place they call home. But the federal government has robbed this from countless children and adults, like 20-year-old Pierre Damas Bel, by cruelly taking away their immigration status and forcing them to wear electronic shackles; and others by locking them away in detention camps and sending them to dangerous places they don’t know. 

“No child, teenager, or young adult should have their lives cut short by any policy or political agenda. Nothing can undo what was done to Pierre, but our elected officials can act now to stop the bleeding they’ve caused to our beautifully diverse communities. Remove the shackles, restore dignity. Close the camps, cancel the removal flights. Make pathways to stabilizing immigration status. Invest in solutions that ensure all of our children can grow up to become whole, healthy adults. Our precious children need us to create the conditions that let them live.”

Kaelin Rapport, PhD, ACLS Leading Edge Fellow and Policy Analyst, Public Benefits Justice at CLASP: “Pierre’s future was stolen by the Trump Administration’s crusade of wanton cruelty against immigrants—and built on a history of the United States using carceral violence against Black individuals. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has used electronic monitoring—modern-day shackles—to surveil Black communities, including immigrants. In my research, I’ve repeatedly heard from men like Pierre how humiliating it is to be subjected to this type of surveillance; people reported feeling dehumanized, stigmatized, depressed, and paranoid, presenting long-term consequences for public health. 

“While electronic monitoring is often praised because of its presumed cost and harm reduction, Pierre’s and other Haitian Ohioans’ stories show us otherwise. By stripping Black immigrants of their legal status, surveilling them both in and out of detention, and sending them to harmful conditions, the United States is simply repeating its long history of criminalizing Black people. Our policymakers at all levels of government must do right by our Black and immigrant neighbors, remove their shackles, free them from unnecessary immigrant detention, and create workable pathways to citizenship that allow them to build stable lives in the American communities they call home.”

Christian Collins, Policy Analyst, Education, Labor, and Worker Justice at CLASP: “The tragedy that has befallen Pierre Damas Bel’s family and community is a direct consequence of the Trump Administration’s abject cruelty towards Black immigrants. However, the state of Ohio also bears responsibility for this tragedy. State policymakers have shamelessly watched as the federal government has weaponized racism and xenophobia against Springfield’s Haitian community—a population who happily integrated themselves into a struggling city to help revitalize it.  

“Ohio has not only failed to protect Pierre because of his immigration status, but has made him the latest example in a long list of its failures to protect Ohio’s college students. It is no surprise that a system that has failed to stand up for its students against policymakers’ attacks, has again failed to stand up for Pierre as he faced isolation and bullying after beginning his semester at Wright State. No family or community sends their children to be harassed or to die at an educational institution. Ohio’s policymakers and its schools must protect students and communities against the harms they face from the Trump Administration—not sacrifice them to cling to the altar of power.” 

CLASP submitted a comment opposing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) proposing changes to the Unaccompanied Children Program through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The rule would create additional requirements in sponsor assessment to include restrictive proof of identity requirements, modified income verification standards, and expanded background checks. The NPRM also proposes the conduct of examinations of unaccompanied children for gang-related tattoos or markings related to considerations of “dangerousness.” These proposed changes would delay family reunification by deterring parents and other trusted caregivers from coming forward to sponsor unaccompanied children, prolonging unaccompanied children’s stay in federal custody, and exposing vulnerable children to further trauma, all without any evidence that the changes would improve child safety. We urge the ORR to withdraw or substantially revise this proposed rule to prioritize the well-being of unaccompanied children by safely and quickly facilitating family reunification.

>> Read the full comment here.

The following 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 19, 2026—On September 15, the U.S. Census Bureau will release reports with national data on Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance for 2025. While we anticipate a slight rise in poverty across the board compared to the data from 2024, we know that next month’s numbers will serve as a bellwether for what’s coming.

The changes wrought by H.R.1, signed into law by President Trump in July 2025, are already taking effect in communities across the country. For example, Congress let the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits expire last December when it passed H.R.1, pushing nearly three million people off their health insurance in early 2026. While the 2025 data don’t yet capture this drop in access to affordable health insurance for millions, we know that individuals and families are desperately struggling to pay for health care.

We should anticipate a rise in poverty for women, higher poverty for children of all races, and more poverty among immigrants, all driven by the many provisions in H.R.1 that are destabilizing families, such as the elimination of more than $200 billion in basic food assistance over the next decade. SNAP work requirements have also been tightened for elderly people and people with disabilities. Already, between October 2025 and February 2026, we’ve seen WIC participation decline by 250,000 people.

The administration’s relentless attacks on immigrants and their families will continue to have a chilling effect on access to the public benefit programs they are eligible for. This includes policymakers imposing significant eligibility restrictions on Medicaid, ACA, and SNAP for immigrants authorized to be in the U.S. In addition, immigration enforcement has created conditions in which workers lose wages and can fall into poverty if they stay home due to fear of ICE officers at workplaces.

While the administration and Congressional leaders have targeted immigrants in their slashing of social safety net programs, populations across the country are seeing their Medicaid, food assistance, and child care assistance gutted at the federal level in favor of funding military actions and aggressive immigration enforcement. We also know that last fall’s longest-ever government shutdown—a crisis manufactured by the White House and Congress—pushed countless people to the economic brink. Moreover, millions are living with the consequences of policy choices that have driven up inflation, driven down wages, and reduced funding for programs that meet basic needs. As a result, far too many people are taking on debt just to buy groceries and pay for the gas they need to commute to work.

We expect the September reports will show a wider gender pay gap and a rise in income inequality for Black households relative to white households. This phenomenon is largely driven by the disproportionate job losses experienced by Black women and the fact that it took Black women twice as long to find a job as white women in the second half of 2025. After attaining employment, Black women are paid less than their white peers, regardless of their educational level.

The Census reports will be much more than a look-back at the state of the country in 2025. Sadly, they will be a preview of the harm ahead for our communities because policymakers have chosen to enrich the wealthiest and finance a siege on immigrants over helping people meet their most basic, human needs. Poverty is the result of systemic failures, and our nation and the people who show up every day to make our economy work deserve better.

In recent years, states like New York and New Mexico have demonstrated that universal child care is possible. However, despite widespread awareness of the value of child care and positive progress at the state level, the Trump Administration has continued to dismantle the existing child care and early education system through funding freezes and fraud allegations. As a result, the administration has further destabilized an already fragile sector. But what if the fight to protect child care is also our opportunity to transform it?

CLASP’s next installment of Equity Matters, “What if the Current Fight to Protect Child Care is also an Opportunity to Transform it?” will examine what it means to build a truly equitable universal child care system—and why the building process matters as much as the vision itself.

Our panel of experts will discuss how meaningful engagement with families, providers, and other directly impacted communities—particularly communities of color, people with low incomes, and immigrants—strengthens policy design, informs implementation, and centers equity.

Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of why centering the leadership and expertise of those most impacted is essential to advancing racial equity and building a universal child care system that is just, inclusive, and responsive to all who rely on and sustain it.

Tune in on October 22 to learn more and join the conversation. We will share additional event details soon. In the meantime, please register below:

Register Today