The push to reinstitutionalize disabled people, RFK’s autism registry, and the deportations all run on the same logic this country once handed the Nazis.
On June 18th Lanora Pettit, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, signed an opinion telling states they were free to ignore decades of Supreme Court precedent and start locking disabled people back into institutions instead of paying for the home and community care that allows them to live their lives with their families and friends. This memo is part of an effort to unwind the principle behind Olmstead, the 1999 Supreme Court ruling that found it is discrimination to force disabled people into institutions. This is not about budgets because locking a person in an institution is actually more expensive than just providing the services that they need to live at home.
According to Bloomberg Law, the person behind this policy was Stephen Miller. The details have come from sources who would only talk anonymously because they were afraid of getting fired, and both the White House and the DOJ have denied that Miller had anything to do with it, but the memo aligns very closely with Trump administration policy, including an executive order issued last summer pressuring states to push homeless people into involuntary confinement.
If these policies are advanced, the country could bring back brutal facilities like Willowbrook, a state school on Staten Island that became the face of the industry. The conditions there were horrific, with children lying around on the floor, unclothed and filthy, often covered in their own waste. The place was overcrowded as well, with about one attendant for every fifty children. The residents were also used for cruel experiments, like doctors intentionally infecting them with hepatitis. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s father toured the place in 1965, he called it a snake pit and said the people inside were living in filth, in conditions worse than the animals at a zoo. Willowbrook was not alone. Pennhurst in Pennsylvania ran the same way, and so did institutions across the country, until a federal court ruled in the Pennhurst case that warehousing disabled people like this violated their constitutional rights.
Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 exposé put the Willowbrook wards on national television, causing a wave of lawsuits from parents. In the following years the institutions slowly emptied, and the movement that grew out of it produced the federal law guaranteeing disabled children a public education, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, and eventually the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Olmstead ruling that this memo is trying to gut.
RFK Dismantling Special Education
Just a few days before the disability memo was published, the Department of Education announced it was handing off its responsibilities for special education to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is under the control of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Last year, Kennedy said autistic kids will never “pay taxes” or “hold a job,” and then went down a longer list, saying they would never play baseball, write a poem, or go on a date, as if a human life only counts when it produces tax revenue and children.
There are also concerns about what his agency wants to do with the data. Last spring NIH director Jay Bhattacharya described plans for an autism registry, but then denied that it was actually a registry after the plan faced backlash. He then pivoted to calling it a “real-world data platform,” but the mechanics are still the same. The system pulls together Medicare and Medicaid records, insurance claims, prescription histories, genetic tests, and even smartwatch data on autistic people. The ACLU, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, and around eighty other groups wrote to Kennedy pointing out that disabled people in this country have a long history with government efforts to find and track them for the purpose of eliminating them.
The institutions, the special education rollback, and the registry all run on the same idea, that some lives are worth supporting and others are a burden to be removed. That idea is called eugenics, and the United States did not borrow it from anyone. We are usually taught to think of it as a Nazi invention, but the US is largely responsible for exporting this ideology around the world.
Eugenics: Made in the USA
In 1927 the Supreme Court ruled eight to one in Buck v. Bell that Virginia could forcibly sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck because the state had decided she was “feebleminded.” The ruling was followed by seventy thousand forced sterilizations across the country.
Forced sterilization was just one part of a broader policy of eugenics in the United States. The Immigration Act of 1924, the law that created the national origins quota system, rested on a foundation of eugenic pseudoscience supplied by Harry Laughlin, the same man who drafted the model sterilization law that states across the country had copied. Serving as the expert eugenics agent to the House immigration committee, Laughlin testified that southern and eastern Europeans, and Jewish immigrants in particular, were carriers of insanity and feeblemindedness who would degrade the national gene pool, and Congress took that testimony and pegged the new quotas to the 1890 census because that was the year that best preserved a northern European majority, while entirely banning immigrants from most of Asia.
These policies were later adopted and taken to further extremes in Nazi Germany. Laughlin bragged that his model sterilization law shaped the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, and Hitler had already praised the 1924 immigration quotas in Mein Kampf, holding America up as a country that agreed with him about basing citizenship on blood. The Rockefeller Foundation poured money into German eugenics through the 1920s, funding the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and a variety of other programs connected to the German eugenics establishment. A Virginia hospital superintendent named Joseph DeJarnette watched the Nazis ramp up their sterilizations and complained that the Germans were beating us at our own game. When the Nazis put up propaganda celebrating their racial program, the poster read “We do not stand alone” and listed the United States first among the nations that had shown them the way. At Nuremberg, when the Nazi doctors needed a legal defense for what they had done, they reached for Buck v. Bell.
Even today, Buck v. Bell is still a legal precedent in the United States. It was never overturned. The American eugenics movement did not get struck down by a court. Americans just stopped talking about it and pretended they had always been against eugenics. Meanwhile, the legal machinery was left standing in case anyone ever wanted it again. When an OLC lawyer writes a memo telling states they can disregard the precedents that protect disabled people, she is not inventing a new cruelty so much as dusting off an old one that was always within reach.
Article posted with permission from John Vibes
