Trump's actions signal a move toward institutionalizing people with disabilities, advocates warn

[searcher]

Trump's actions signal a move toward institutionalizing people with disabilities, advocates warn​

WASHINGTON (AP) — For decades, disabled people have fought for their rights to go to school and live alongside peers without disabilities — rights that some fear could be losing ground under the Trump administration.

Last month, the Education Department announced it would offload oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose comments on the limits of disabilities such as autism have drawn sharp rebukes from advocates and lawmakers.

Meanwhile, following a White House push to police homelessness, the Department of Justice released guidance that lowered the barrier to institutionalizing any person with a disability.

Taken together, the actions signal a worrying return to a reality where people with disabilities are pushed to the margins of society, advocates said.

More:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/t...s-advocates-warn/ar-AA26WcDe?ocid=socialshare

 

[searcher]

A little history with Grok

Q
How did the Nazi regime treat people with mental and physical disabilities?

A
The Nazi regime viewed people with mental and physical disabilities as "unworthy of life," genetically inferior, a financial burden on society, and a threat to the "Aryan master race" under their eugenics and racial hygiene ideology. This led to systematic persecution, starting with forced sterilization and escalating to mass murder—the first major Nazi program of systematic killing, which served as a precursor and testing ground for the Holocaust.

encyclopedia.ushmm.org
Early Policies: Sterilization and Exclusion (1933 onward)

• Shortly after taking power, the Nazis passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (July 14, 1933), which mandated forced sterilization for those deemed to have "hereditary" conditions. These included schizophrenia, "feeblemindedness," epilepsy, Huntington's disease, blindness, deafness, and physical deformities.
  
  encyclopedia.ushmm.org
• Approximately 300,000–400,000 people (estimates vary) were sterilized against their will, often without consent or through coercion. Decisions were made by "hereditary health courts."
• People with disabilities faced exclusion from society: loss of jobs, denial of marriage rights (under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws extensions), institutionalization, and propaganda portraying them as "life unworthy of life" (e.g., films and posters like "Life without hope").
  
  theholocaustexplained.org

Aktion T4: Systematic Murder ("Euthanasia" Program, 1939–1941)

• In 1939, the regime launched a secret program codenamed Aktion T4 (after Tiergartenstraße 4, the Berlin address coordinating it), headed by figures like Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler. It began with children and expanded to adults.
  
  encyclopedia.ushmm.org
• Methods: Victims were killed by gas chambers (using carbon monoxide in disguised shower rooms or vans), lethal injection, starvation, or overdose. Bodies were cremated, and families received falsified death certificates citing "natural causes" or illness.
• Scope: Primarily targeted institutionalized Germans with mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia), intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, and severe physical disabilities. It included some non-institutionalized people reported by doctors or authorities. Jewish disabled people and others were often killed regardless of severity.
  
  encyclopedia.ushmm.org
• By official counts, around 70,000 were murdered in the centralized phase (1939–1941), though broader estimates for the entire program and decentralized killings reach 200,000–250,000 or more disabled people by 1945.
  
  hmd.org.uk

Decentralized Killings and Continuation

• Public protests (e.g., from Bishop Clemens von Galen) led Hitler to officially "suspend" the gassing program in August 1941, but killings continued secretly through starvation, medication overdoses, and neglect in asylums until the war's end.
  
  history.com
• Techniques and personnel from T4 (doctors, nurses, SS staff) were transferred to extermination camps in occupied Poland (e.g., Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), applying similar gassing methods to Jews and others.
  
  encyclopedia.ushmm.org

Broader Context and Impact

• This was framed as "mercy killing" or racial purification but was driven by eugenics, cost-saving (freeing up hospital beds and resources for the war), and ideological purity.
• It affected Germans and "Aryan" citizens first, distinguishing it somewhat from the later racial genocide, but it overlapped and fed into the broader Holocaust machinery.
• Many perpetrators faced limited accountability after the war; some T4 doctors were tried in the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial.

The program demonstrated how Nazi ideology dehumanized vulnerable groups, using pseudoscience and bureaucracy to enable mass murder. Sources like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provide extensive documentation, survivor testimonies (where available), and records from the era.

 

[Casey Jones]

Trump's actions signal a move toward institutionalizing people with disabilities, advocates warn

...instead of putting them on the street, in NGO-provided tents...like would be useful to the Party of Chaos.