“Block Trump’s Push to Lock up Disabled People,” written by Professor of Sociology Scott Landes, was published in The Progressive magazine. Following is an excerpt:

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.