Disabled people are five times more likely to experience domestic violence than non-disabled people, and make up a third of its victims, according to a new report published today by the federal Government Accountability Office. People with cognitive disabilities, such as those who are autistic, are even more likely to be abused. Disabled women are also more likely to be the target of such violence than disabled men.

The rates of abuse, drawn from Justice Department data from 2017 to 2022 underscore the necessity for domestic violence centers and their services to be accessible to disabled people—which is required by both the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, key items of federal civil rights legislation, but is not always the case. ADA enforcement, for instance, often requires disabled people to make complaints after the fact. Someone actively experiencing domestic violence may not have the capacity to do so, let alone wait for a center to make itself accessible—highlighting the importance of government enforcement of accessibility laws for disabled people’s safety.

“The GAO report highlights a critical gap in our domestic violence services for individuals with disabilities.”

“We must guarantee that our systems are not only adequately funded but also effectively implemented, so survivors, regardless of their abilities, receive the support they need,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Vir.), who released the report with Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), in a statement to Mother Jones.

The GAO report investigated whether domestic violence programs that receive funding from the Department of Health and Human Services are accessible to disabled people; most of the domestic violence centers interviewed for the report across Maryland, Mississippi and Washington said that they served relatively few disabled survivors, and officials at nine of 12 centers weren’t certain how to identify whether a survivor had a disability. Some disability groups, according to the report, say that local centers do not work with them to better reach disabled survivors.

Disabled people may also be scared to report domestic violence if they are abused by people they rely on for caregiving, as the report notes:

One domestic violence group told us that some people with disabilities who require caregiving to live in their homes may not seek domestic violence services because they are reluctant to report the abuse they have suffered. Officials from that group said people with disabilities who require caregiving may be worried that if they seek domestic violence services from a local center, law enforcement or other authorities will be notified of the abuse and move them from their preferred living situations into institutions.

HHS is responsible for ensuring compliance with federal law at the institutions it makes grants to, but here it also falls short, investigators found. The GAO report notes that there were no accessibility-related findings from on-site visits by HHS from 2019 to 2022 across 17 states, which HHS says it’s addressing by updating its monitoring requirements “to include more specific accessibility compliance questions.”

Investigators also reached out to resource centers like the National Network to End Domestic Violence: 11 of the 16 that responded said they shared best practices for how to work with survivors with disabilities, but only two have developed technical assistance on making shelters accessible to disabled people. GAO’s site visits, the report says, “raise questions about whether the assistance provided by national resource centers and state coalitions” addresses local needs, made still more difficult by a lack of data on accessibility needs and efforts.

“The GAO report highlights a critical gap in our domestic violence services for individuals with disabilities,” Scott said. “We must invest in the collection of crucial data to understand the needs of survivors with disabilities, but also must ensure this information leads to meaningful improvements.”

The report, available in full on GAO’s website, recommends that HHS investigate how it can better support local centers in accessibility and support for disabled survivors, and implement those changes.

Earlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign dropped an issues page detailing the Democratic candidate’s priorities if elected. One brief but important point: Harris’ platform commits to ending the federal subminimum wage for disabled workers.

Since the establishment of a federal minimum wage in 1938, an exception has allowed employers, through a certificate system, to pay disabled workers much less than the national minimum of $7.25 an hour—sometimes as little as 25 cents. It’s a practice that 25 states, most recently Ohio, have introduced or enacted legislation to phase out. If Harris succeeds, at least 40,000 workers across the country will see a wage rise. But for most disabled workers earning below minimum wage, it won’t make a difference.

That’s because workers in prison—including disabled ones—are subject to another subminimum wage, which neither candidate aims to roll back. Imprisoned workers in all 50 states, including the 17 where prison work is enforced, can earn pennies an hour, or even nothing at all, as a 2022 American Civil Liberties Union report highlights. In Louisiana, people working in prisons can make as little as 2 cents an hour; if they worked 30 hours each week, they would earn just over $30 annually.

Federally, and in seventeen states, “incarcerated people under law are required to work, and they actually cannot opt out of that work.”

Kate Caldwell, director of research and policy at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice, told me that more than half of incarcerated people in US prisons have a disability, including psychiatric disabilities. Given that Black and Latino people are disproportionately incarcerated, disabled people of color face the brunt of low prison wages.

“Most incarcerated individuals want to work,” Caldwell said, “but they want to earn a wage.”

Caldwell explained that getting rid of subminimum wage for disabled people in prison involves different legal frameworks: Ending the practice for disabled people in sheltered workshops, as workplaces allowed to engage in the practice are known, would mean amending the Fair Labor Standards Act—whereas ending subminimum wages for incarcerated people would mean requiring workers in prison to be recognized as employees under federal law, which they aren’t.

Federally, and in the seventeen states where it is mandatory, “incarcerated people under law are required to work, and they actually cannot opt out of that work,” Caldwell told me, “nor can they opt out of work when there are dangerous conditions in most states.” This includes fighting wildfires, a strikingly common form of prison labor. Work done while in prison also does not count toward work requirements for Social Security Disability Insurance, Caldwell noted.

On the other hand, as the ACLU report describes, some disabled people in prisons are denied the opportunity to work when they want to. The extent of the problem is hard to capture, Caldwell says, given the lack of data on disability and the criminal justice system—but regardless, it’s “in violation of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act,” Caldwell said. “It’s either because of the stigma that disabled people can’t work, or the perceived cost of providing accommodations.”

Being incarcerated can also be incredibly expensive: health care is pricey, poor, and limited, not to mention financing your own incarceration, essentials from the commissary, paying restitution, continuing to pay child support, and affording costly phone calls with loved ones.

“There are typically medical co-pays involved in seeing a doctor,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative, told me. “For instance, in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, there’s a $2 co-pay every time you request a doctor visit.” That could represent 17 hours of work—and given the health issues that many disabled people experience, the cost can quickly add up.

Bertram raised another issue, one that also comes up in connection with sheltered workshops: whether or not some jobs typically given to prisoners, like making license plates, develop skills that will help them when they leave prison. Bertram and Caldwell both note that many jobs for incarcerated workers also involve essential administrative and maintenance work that keeps their prisons running.

“The largest beneficiary of prison labor is the prison system itself,” Caldwell said. “Those workers are providing over $9 billion of services a year to the prisons where they are incarcerated.”

When New York’s Nassau County signed the first county-level mask ban into law in August, its deputy police commissioner, Kevin Smith, told local news that training was “being conducted [in] the department, which means across ranks.”

But that has not happened, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Through an information request reviewed by Mother Jones, NYCLU, a state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, requested policies and training materials used to instruct the county’s police on enforcing the ban. In return, the group received a three-page legal bulletin on the “Mask Transparency Act,” and a six-slide presentation, including a title page, briefly going over the new law. The presentation reiterates the bulletin’s explanation of the law, as well as saying police officers still need to follow Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure—but there is little else.

“There’s none of the sort of type of training and guardrails you would expect to see in a police procedure or in a training module around how you interact with members of the public,” said Beth Haroules, a senior staff attorney at NYCLU.

The very brief materials also do not address people’s rights in protecting their health information from police, which also underscores why police officers cannot independently determine whether someone is wearing a mask for health reasons. “You’re not allowed to interrogate somebody about their private health information, or family member’s or loved one’s health information,” Haroules continued, “including whether or not you’re just Covid cautious,” something county law enforcement seems to have overlooked altogether.

The Nassau County Police Department did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the extent of its training.

The law allows Nassau County police four reasons to question people about their mask-wearing—among them, when they are gathered in a public space with other people who are wearing masks. Haroules notes that this seems to clearly target people at protests, especially recent waves of pro-Palestinian protests, some of whom may be wearing masks for health reasons—but the implications for who the ban could suddenly impact would be much wider.

“You could be waiting at a bus stop at Nassau County with a mask on, and then, suddenly, three or four more people show up,” Haroules said. “You’re all subject to arrest or interrogation as to whether or not you have a right to wear that mask.”

As Mother Jones previously reported, fear of being interrogated by police over masking has led Disability Rights New York to sue Nassau County in federal court on behalf of two disabled residents.

Since the mask ban law was enacted, two people have been charged with misdemeanors for violating it, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. In both cases, Haroules says, “there probably wasn’t probable cause to arrest either gentleman.”

Haroules agrees with concerns that people of color will be disproportionately targeted for wearing masks. The Nassau County Police Department, Haroules says, “has a documented history of inappropriate interactions with people of color.” (It also has a troubled record on other fronts, including around residents’ civil rights.)

Choosing to wear masks, as Haroules told Mother Jones she herself continues to do on public transportation, is an individual decision which mask bans threaten. Having other community members “enforcing the mask ban by threatening to call police,” Haroules says, “really suggests that there’s a societal problem.”

Nevada State Sen. Robin Titus—at the time a member of its state House—received an email from a speech pathologist in rural Nevada. The pathologist and his students had noticed that the state constitution used the phrase “deaf and dumb” to describe people who were deaf or hard of hearing. 

“He said, ‘Hey, this is just wrong. We shouldn’t be using this terminology anymore,’” Titus, the Nevada Senate’s Republican minority leader, told me. Where people with disabilities are concerned, Sen. Titus says official language should not put “some negative connotation on what their needs are,” as such terms do. 

Now that the bill has passed Nevada’s House and Senate unanimously in two consecutive sessions—a prerequisite to place an amendment on the state ballot—Nevada voters will decide whether to remove the words “insane,” “feeble-minded” and “dumb” in describing, for example, programs that help disabled people find employment, replacing them with more modern terms. 

“This ballot measure is also creating public awareness of disability issues and the value of people with disabilities.”

Nevada is one of 16 states, including Colorado and Mississippi, that still officially use the word “insane” to refer to people with mental illness in their constitution. Washington was the first state to remove the word from its constitution via a ballot measure, in 1988. Ableist language in government also remains an issue at the national level, with a Senate bill being introduced this year to try and get a slur for people with intellectual disabilities out of the US Code.

Nevada is not the only state where voters will decide whether to remove ableist language in November. A similar measure in North Dakota—like Nevada’s, introduced by a GOP legislator with unanimous bipartisan support—would update names such as “state hospital for the insane” with language like “for the care of individuals with mental illness.”

“This is an important step for our state as it signifies that how we talk about individuals with disabilities matters and all individuals deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” Veronica Zietz, the executive director of North Dakota’s Protection and Advocacy Project, wrote in an email. “This ballot measure is also creating public awareness of disability issues and the value of people with disabilities.”

State Sen. Titus was not surprised to find bipartisan support for her Nevada bill. “We can identify problems, but we don’t always have a pathway” to solving them, Titus said. “Both parties,” she said, “will get on board” when a solution piques their interest.

There is no formal opposition to either state’s ballot measures, which Titus and Zietz say people with disabilities have expressed support for. Local press and anti-DEI national commentators have not criticized either proposal, signaling that, as once was the norm with the enactment of laws like the Americans with Disabilites Act, the push for disability rights can be bipartisan. Many Republican-leaning states, such as Alabama and Texas, do not have ableist language like “insane” in their state constitutions.

However, even within disability communities, there are breaks in support of language choice: the Nevada measure would switch its language on disability in the constitution to person-first language, as in “people who are autistic”—but there is growing support for identity-first language, as in “autistic people,” among disabled people.

The outcomes of both ballot measures come November could be indicative of how much public views on the harms of ableist language have changed. Back in 1998, Michigan voters were asked whether to change the word “handicapped” to “disabled” in its state constitution. The measure passed, but with less than 60 percent of the vote.

Sen. Titus told me that she hasn’t heard any real pushback, either, and believes that “the time has come for us to update our language for all disabilities.” 

Nevada State Sen. Robin Titus—at the time a member of its state House—received an email from a speech pathologist in rural Nevada. The pathologist and his students had noticed that the state constitution used the phrase “deaf and dumb” to describe people who were deaf or hard of hearing. 

“He said, ‘Hey, this is just wrong. We shouldn’t be using this terminology anymore,’” Titus, the Nevada Senate’s Republican minority leader, told me. Where people with disabilities are concerned, Sen. Titus says official language should not put “some negative connotation on what their needs are,” as such terms do. 

Now that the bill has passed Nevada’s House and Senate unanimously in two consecutive sessions—a prerequisite to place an amendment on the state ballot—Nevada voters will decide whether to remove the words “insane,” “feeble-minded” and “dumb” in describing, for example, programs that help disabled people find employment, replacing them with more modern terms. 

“This ballot measure is also creating public awareness of disability issues and the value of people with disabilities.”

Nevada is one of 16 states, including Colorado and Mississippi, that still officially use the word “insane” to refer to people with mental illness in their constitution. Washington was the first state to remove the word from its constitution via a ballot measure, in 1988. Ableist language in government also remains an issue at the national level, with a Senate bill being introduced this year to try and get a slur for people with intellectual disabilities out of the US Code.

Nevada is not the only state where voters will decide whether to remove ableist language in November. A similar measure in North Dakota—like Nevada’s, introduced by a GOP legislator with unanimous bipartisan support—would update names such as “state hospital for the insane” with language like “for the care of individuals with mental illness.”

“This is an important step for our state as it signifies that how we talk about individuals with disabilities matters and all individuals deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” Veronica Zietz, the executive director of North Dakota’s Protection and Advocacy Project, wrote in an email. “This ballot measure is also creating public awareness of disability issues and the value of people with disabilities.”

State Sen. Titus was not surprised to find bipartisan support for her Nevada bill. “We can identify problems, but we don’t always have a pathway” to solving them, Titus said. “Both parties,” she said, “will get on board” when a solution piques their interest.

There is no formal opposition to either state’s ballot measures, which Titus and Zietz say people with disabilities have expressed support for. Local press and anti-DEI national commentators have not criticized either proposal, signaling that, as once was the norm with the enactment of laws like the Americans with Disabilites Act, the push for disability rights can be bipartisan. Many Republican-leaning states, such as Alabama and Texas, do not have ableist language like “insane” in their state constitutions.

However, even within disability communities, there are breaks in support of language choice: the Nevada measure would switch its language on disability in the constitution to person-first language, as in “people who are autistic”—but there is growing support for identity-first language, as in “autistic people,” among disabled people.

The outcomes of both ballot measures come November could be indicative of how much public views on the harms of ableist language have changed. Back in 1998, Michigan voters were asked whether to change the word “handicapped” to “disabled” in its state constitution. The measure passed, but with less than 60 percent of the vote.

Sen. Titus told me that she hasn’t heard any real pushback, either, and believes that “the time has come for us to update our language for all disabilities.” 

Last week, Nassau County, on New York’s Long Island, became the first county in the US to ban the public wearing of masks—with very vague health exemptions—since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Nassau ban follows a similarly controversial statewide mask ban in North Carolina that took effect in June.

Several concerns have been raised about Nassau’s mask ban, including that police officers—not experts in public health or medicine—are tasked with determining whether an individual is wearing a mask for valid health reasons. But another is that the pandemic is not over, and wearing medical masks while grocery shopping or even at a protest is meant to limit exposure to the disease—and some residents expect a ban to lead to harassment by local anti-maskers.

The county’s move has prompted the first class-action lawsuit against a mask ban, filed Thursday in federal district court by Disability Rights New York against Nassau County and county executive Bruce Blakeman on behalf of two anonymous residents.

“This mask ban poses a direct threat to public health and discriminates against people with disabilities,” said Timothy A. Clune, the group’s executive director, in a press release.

One of the residents, who lives with cerebral palsy and asthma, said they were stopped and questioned by other residents after the ban was passed—even before it was enacted—and, according to the complaint, now “fears that they will be arrested…because there is no standard for the police to follow to decide if they meet the health exception.”

The other resident represented in the complaint, who masks due to various immune conditions, the complaint says, is now “terrified to go into public wearing a mask.”

Both complainants say that masking has enabled them to participate in public life as disabled people during the ongoing pandemic. Disability Rights NY argues in the suit that the ban as written is unconstitutional, and violates both the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, both key items of federal civil rights legislation, by denying disabled people access to their own communities.

“Local laws that abrogate or curtail rights conferred by federal law are…rendered invalid,” the complaint reads.

Given that Covid can itself disable people, Jason Cohen, a neurologist who lives in Nassau, has major concerns about how the mask ban will play out.

“I care for many patients who have brain fog from Covid and many more who are at higher risk of brain damage from Covid,” Cohen said. “Anything that discourages masking among those who want to mask is a travesty and public health disaster.”

Cohen also says that governments “should not force people to disclose their personal medical information to police in order to negotiate their way out of being accused of a crime.”

Some disabled people nevertheless have concerns about the suit itself. Ngozi, a Black disabled person who lives just over the county border in Queens, is concerned that it will end in “some type of negotiation with the state that results in keeping the law intact,” which would maintain the risk of racial profiling.

“I do not have faith in the state,” Ngozi said. “A lawsuit will not resolve the threat of mask bans anytime soon.”

Disability Rights New York is requesting a declaratory judgment that Nassau County’s mask ban violates federal law, as well as a restraining order. The complaint in its entirety can be read below.

Only some 40 percent of disabled people are employed. But even that low figure is buoyed by federal laws against employment discrimination—a target of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a right-wing transformation of government by a second Trump White House.

A key institution for the just treatment of disabled workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal bans on workplace discrimination. Viewed with distaste by many on the right since its founding through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the EEOC obtained nearly $4 million in 2023 for disabled workers subjected to employment discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Discrimination plays a significant role, according to Stetson University College of Law professor Robyn Powell, in unemployment among disabled people, who experience it at a rate about double that of people without disabilities.

In response to substantiated complaints, the EEOC can sue companies for discrimination on the basis of disability—among other categories, including race, gender, and age—and may reach a consent decree, where companies agree to changes in policy and practice, sometimes with financial settlements to the affected workers.

“Consent decrees are really critical in any kind of civil rights monitoring or systemic action.”

“Consent decrees occur when there is a big employer where we’re seeing systematic examples of discrimination,” Powell said. “If we can open up employment opportunities by tackling discrimination, it helps everyone.”

The decrees are quicker, cheaper, and sometimes more effective than lawsuits in combating workplace prejudice. But they have a notable enemy in the Heritage Foundation’s pet project.

Jonathan Berry, who was the chief counsel of Trump’s 2016 transition team and held multiple jobs in his administration, writes in Project 2025 that EEOC “should disclaim power to enter into consent decrees that require employer actions” not already explicitly required by law. Back in 2012, during the Obama administration, a Heritage Foundation employee testified before Congress that federal agencies habitually abuse consent decrees—a viewpoint still clear in Project 2025. 

“When we look at [Project 2025’s] specifics around the EEOC and consent decrees,” Powell told Mother Jones, “we can see that they really are trying to attack and decimate disability rights.” 

The EEOC and DOJ “have really been critical in protecting the rights of people with disabilities,” says Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior director of legal advocacy at The Arc, which serves people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. “Consent decrees are really critical in any kind of civil rights monitoring or systemic action.”

Anti-discrimination consent decrees tend to emphasize reform and accountability, with modest settlements compared to potential legal damages. In one representative case, a government contractor that did not provide accommodations to Deaf and hard-of-hearing employees, and that fired workers on medical leave, agreed to a $1 million settlement with updates to policies on medical leave, reasonable accommodation, and managerial training on the Americans with Disabilities Act, including five years’ monitoring for compliance.

Other types of Justice Department consent decrees also come under attack in Project 2025. Wakschlag says that’s very concerning for disability rights—federal consent decrees are used to fight the continuing institutionalization of disabled people, which violates both the ADA and the Supreme Court’s Olmstead ruling. 

Conservative attacks on consent decrees are not exactly new. “We’ve certainly seen pushes to either limit, restrict or get rid of consent decrees in agencies in prior administrations,” Wakschlag says. The Trump administration, notably, put a near ban in place on consent decrees between the Department of Justice and police departments that aimed to address police brutality.

If the EEOC’s ability to give consent decrees was diminished or ended, federal anti-discrimination legislation would be dramatically weakened. The agency could still provide technical assistance—such as instruction on how the ADA protects employees and applicants with visual disabilities, diabetes, or epilepsy—but losing the power to push companies to commit to treat disabled workers better, and monitor their progress, will harm disabled workers and strip them of remedies.

“We would see a huge shift in power dynamics,” Powell said, “where we would see that it would really tilt the balance of power more towards employers in these disability discrimination cases.”

In late April, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers finalized a $233 billion budget for the next fiscal year. One item in its 144-page official summary has sparked fear among disability advocates: dramatic changes to a vital home health aid program that may push more people into nursing homes.

A quarter of a million New Yorkers currently use CDPAP, a widely popular program launched in 1995, which facilitates Medicaid funding for home carers chosen by patients themselves at hours they arrange. Participants spoke to Mother Jones about how the program allows them to remain in their communities, rather than being institutionalized—a cause central to disability rights activism. Without access to workers who understand their needs, like assisting people with spinal cord injuries with toileting, those participants risk hospitalization, placement in restrictive long-term care, or both.

The program is run through “fiscal intermediaries,” which provide financial and administrative oversight; some specialize in helping certain groups, such as the Bengali immigrant community. Hochul’s plan would make the program an administrative monopoly: by October, one middleman—potentially an out-of-state, for-profit firm—will hold a $40 billion contract covering all 250,000 participants in the state. Currently, those intermediaries are subject to oversight by New York’s chief fiscal officer; under Hochul’s system, the new middleman wouldn’t be. In late July, some current intermediaries sued New York’s Department of Health over the changes.

Hochul has been incredibly critical of CDPAP, calling it a “racket.”

“This was a backroom deal that happened days before the budget was finalized,” said Kendra Scalia, a disabled public policy analyst and board president of the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Association of New York State, which supports both CDPAP providers and recipients. “It was never discussed with disabled communities.”

Hochul has been incredibly critical of CDPAP, calling it a “racket” and “one of the most abused programs in the entire history of the state of New York.” But 2022 audits by the state’s Medicaid Inspector General reviewed $37 million in claims—and found that 99 percent were accurate. Of $46,000 in documented overpayments, $41,000 was recollected. Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for evidence that the program has been abused.

It can already be difficult to get care through CDPAP. For Laura Mauldin, a graduate student when she applied in 2010, it took nine months—and an initial rejection—to get her partner, who had been sick with cancer for four years, approved for support.

“There was not an option to check for CDPAP” in home care applications at the time, said Mauldin. The request for around-the-clock care was eventually approved—allowing Mauldin to leave her apartment, with her partner in a worker’s care—but so late that Mauldin’s partner was only able to use it for three months before passing away.

Critics like Hochul see the potential for corruption in the fact that disabled people can hire family members—something Kendra Scalia first did by hiring her sister when she was in college.

“I felt really vulnerable to hiring strangers or welcoming strangers into my dorm room where there’s no oversight,” Scalia said. Her brother now has worked as her assistant for the past decade.

Some care workers feel they’ve been left in limbo on how Hochul’s changes will impact them. For the past 25 years, Tara Murphy has worked as a home care provider through CDPAP, after working as a certified nursing assistant in a nursing home. As a home carer, Murphy felt she’d be able to serve people better.

“I saw all the horrendous things and lack of care and neglect that were happening,” said Murphy, who is based in Troy, New York. “I knew I couldn’t change it, and I didn’t want to be part of the medical mafia.”

Now, Murphy is panicked over the impending changes to the program that helps employ her. She doesn’t know whether she’d be hired under the new monopoly, or whether her pay will be cut. “I’m sitting here every day,” Murphy said, “like, ‘Am I going to have a place to live? Am I going to be able to eat?’ 

1199SEIU, New York’s main health care workers’ union, has been critical of for-profits’ growing role in the program. Helen Schaub, the union’s interim political director, said that administrative costs have ballooned since a 2012 jump in the number of for-profit intermediaries. One of New York’s largest home care intermediaries, Schaub points out, is being run by embattled insurance giant Anthem.

Some users of the program who spoke with Mother Jones also expressed concerns that pay cuts could force their aides to look elsewhere for work, leaving both patients and workers in a difficult position. 

Lacey Tompkins, who works in advertising in New York City, says that CDPAP makes it possible for her to maintain a partly remote job as a disabled worker, with help getting to work despite hours that can change from week to week. “I can make my decisions and not [have] a standard set of hours,” Tompkins said.

Advocates with differing views agree on one thing: Hochul’s six-month timeline to transform the program is unreasonable and impractical. “Any serious company who is bidding on the work also believes that, because it’s a very daunting task,” said Schaub, of SEIU. “Privately, people in the [Hochul] administration have said, ‘We know that it can’t happen on that scale.’”

Update, August 13: This article has been updated to detail the current and proposed roles of the New York State Comptroller in reviewing the state’s CDPAP program.

In 2020, Sharon Giovinazzo, who is blind as a complication of multiple sclerosis, wanted to vote independently—and in person. She knew that electronic voting machines in Little Rock, Arkansas, then her home, were her only option.

Giovinazzo called an Uber to take her and her guide dog to the polls. The first three canceled on her. Giovinazzo, now CEO of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco, knew that was a possibility.

“You lose that autonomy of just being able to go where you want, when you want,” Giovinazzo said, “and do what you want.” (As an unfortunate bonus, the accessible voting machine at her polling place wasn’t working—someone had to help cast her ballot despite her efforts.)

“You lose that autonomy of just being able to go where you want, when you want,” when you’re discriminated against.

As more and more states clamp down on mail-in voting—in Texas, for instance, where it’s difficult to vote by mail, ballots can be rejected if a poll worker thinks their signature doesn’t match one on file—there a greater urgency to make it physically practical to get to voting booths, even among people comfortable with absentee voting. In addition, a joint survey by the US Election Assistance Commission and Rutgers University following the 2022 midterms found that nearly half of disabled voters prefer voting in person.

Scheduling paratransit to the polls is one option—but in rural areas, that can also be more challenging than it should, says Michelle Bishop, manager of voter access at the National Disability Rights Network.

“Even if you can get a pickup to take you to your polling place, you have no idea when you’re going to need a ride home,” Bishop said. “That’s something that you would have had to have scheduled well in advance.”

RideShare2Vote was founded by Sarah Kovich and her daughter Paola in 2018 in Texas to help Democrats and left-leaning independents vote. In addition to utilizing regular cars, RideShare2Vote rents out accessible vans to take voters to the polls free of charge, including in rural areas. Drivers also receive training to understand voting rights. “Every voter that a [Rideshare2Vote] driver has ever taken has been able to cast a ballot with us,” Kovich said. “No one’s been turned away.”

The organization operates in more than a dozen states—mostly Republican strongholds and swing states. But, again, those plans need to be etched out before voting day—and its budget only lets it take some 12,500 voters to the polls in a given election year. 

In an ideal world, rideshare apps like Lyft and Uber could be a great alternative for people without ready access to paratransit. But the issue remains that drivers cancel on riders (which has been the subject of court settlements), and accessible vehicles are not readily available. One wheelchair user seeking to vote in person also shared a video with Mother Jones of a driver refusing them a ride because of their wheelchair. A 2018 report from New York Lawyers for the Public Interest found that, when requested, barely half of New York City riders received accessible vehicles from Uber—and below five percent for Lyft.

Training drivers not to discriminate against disabled people, and having accessible vehicles available, should be universal to rideshare firms. But it isn’t.

In statements to Mother Jones, both Uber and Lyft said they didn’t tolerate discrimination, and that they encourage disabled riders who have experienced it to submit reports. But it happens too often to report every time, and disabled people often face stigma for filing complaints, especially ones under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Other organizations have also partnered with ride-share companies to get people to the polls: this year, NAACP is partnering with Lyft to do just that for Black voters, who often face disenfranchisement. Asked how NAACP would work with Lyft to make sure Black disabled voters weren’t turned away, its national mobilization director, Tyler Sterling, said in a statement that the organization is “working closely […] to ensure their drivers are equipped with the necessary cultural competency” to help all Black voters looking to participate.

The expense of transportation means there’s no simple, perfect solution to help disabled people vote, said Bishop, of the National Disability Rights Network. Bishop says that makes it crucial to fight for a voting system “where we have just a whole menu of options for voters, and they can figure out what makes it work for them”—a challenge not only due to expenses, but both ableism and rising voter suppression. 

Fred Trump III, Donald Trump’s nephew, very much hopes for a bipartisan national effort to better support the needs of disabled people, a passion driven by being the father of a disabled son. That’s why he tried—when his uncle was president of the United States—to use his family ties to push for disability rights.

Fred did manage to have a White House meeting with disability advocates that his uncle Donald attended. Later on, he was met with comments by Donald that Fred “should just let” his son, Donald Trump’s grandnephew, “die”—an anecdote he recounts in a new book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.

The former president, Fred Trump says, has never met his grandnephew William. In fact, he’s never even tried to. Donald isn’t the only Trump family member to share that attitude, according to Fred—who, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t think “anything positive happened” for disability rights under Trump’s administration.

"Those people should just die." That's how Donald Trump talks about disabled Americans, according to his nephew, Fred Trump.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/EGi1Bn1boT

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) August 2, 2024

Fred Trump’s disability rights goals, including more accessible, better medical options—especially training doctors to treat nonspeaking people like his son—didn’t see progress under the Trump administration. Under a potential Kamala Harris administration, the younger Trump hopes they might.

Fred Trump III talked to Mother Jones about his advocacy work, the way Donald Trump treated his son, and why he supports Kamala Harris’ run for office. He’ll be “campaigning for her if I’m asked,” Trump says, “because I know she will be a champion of the disabled community.”

Before your uncle made his comments about your son, and people like him, how did he treat William?

Donald has never asked, and not once has ever met William, who is 25 years old now. Never. He has asked from time to time, “How’s William? How are the kids?”—I have two other adult kids—but never, “Hey, you know, can I meet him?” Frankly, he’s missed out on the ability to know William, who I consider the most courageous and inspirational person I have ever met.

Is that typical of other people in your family as well, or is that just a decision Donald made?

Neither my two aunts nor my other uncle, Robert, ever asked to meet William. William was in Mount Sinai [Hospital] in the neonatal intensive care unit for three weeks, within a mile radius of where they all lived, and they never visited William. In fact, they never called about William to see how he was doing while we were there.

You met with people in the White House to advocate for better transitions from pediatric to adult care and more. How did that meeting come about?

When Donald was inaugurated, I knew that would be an opportunity for me and my wife, Lisa, to try to use his position as president to the benefit of folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The first person we reached out to is my cousin Ivanka, who had, as you know, a role within the administration. She was great, and set us up with Ben Carson, who was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, because, as you may know, housing issues for disabled [people] is a very tough issue.

“All those expenses—those people should just die.”

It culminated in a meeting with just brilliant people who have dedicated their lives to issues regarding the complex disability community in May 2020, [when Covid] was raging. Just to let Donald know, I had called him and said, “Look, I really need you to listen to this. Okay?” He did, and we spent 45 minutes [in the meeting]. It dispersed, he called me back in, we chatted for a minute, and he goes, “Those people, all those expenses—those people should just die.”

In the greater context, in our country, people may not have that extreme reaction—but the disabled community gets short shrift in this country, and I don’t think people understand that. One of the most important things is squaring away how to take care of caregivers, funding for better caregivers so they can live their lives, [and] also better training. I’m going through this in my town right now, where people are fending off just using money that was given for ADA work to widen door frames and such. A lot of people don’t understand it unless it hits them personally.

Was there anything that you heard after the meeting, besides what your uncle had said, where staffers made any effort to listen to you?

No, I don’t think anything positive happened within the administration, which is partially why—there are many reasons why—I’ll be voting for Kamala Harris, and campaigning for her if I’m asked, because I know she will be a champion of the disabled community.

You mentioned that Ivanka set up this meeting with you. I’m curious what your cousins’ role have been in your son’s life.

Eric and Donnie were the only family members to ever meet William. We invited them up to our house, Lisa and I did, separately. Donnie showed up with Vanessa, and I believe with his first two kids. Eric was with Lara before they were married. They both came, we spent time together, and it was nice.

They understood. They could see William for who William was, who, again, is a wonderful young man. I will give them absolute credit. They have their own charities that they’re involved with, and that’s fantastic. I know Eric was very much involved with St. Jude [Children’s Research Hospital], and I give him kudos for that. Ivanka has her life, [and] she was helpful in other ways.

“I don’t think anything positive happened within the administration [on disability].”

Do you have concerns about how your uncle would represent disabled Americans in a second term based on how he’s treated your son?

Let me answer it this way. [Tonight], there’s a Zoom call from the Harris campaign called Disabled Voters for Harris. Imagine a Disabled Voters for Trump. I don’t think he or his campaign would care about doing that.

The attitudes of some people in this country toward the disabled is very disturbing—[like] when Donald mocked the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. That was bad enough, but the fact that the crowd cheered him on was disgusting.

Given the opportunity, would you meet with Vice President Harris before the election—or if she wins, after—about how the White House could better support people with complex health needs?

It would be my honor to do so. This is not an ego thing, [but] I am going to have a national platform with this book coming out, and I’m going to use that to the best of my ability to advocate on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Is there anything that you would like to say to your uncle about how he views your son, and how he views disabled people in general?

It’s not just disabled [people] that he demeans. It’s people that he thinks are lesser than him. If you have that power that he had, and he thinks he has, why not do stuff for the greater good? I know it’s a trite expression, but isn’t it just easier to try to help people instead of helping yourself?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

If not for her partner driving her, Madeline Ryan Smith isn’t sure how she’d be able to campaign across the four counties she hopes to represent in Georgia’s state House. Smith is blind: “Getting from Point A to Point B physically” is the biggest hurdle she faces on the campaign trail. 

“I think it is problematic and kind of disheartening that disabled candidates have to rely so heavily on able-bodied people around them,” Smith said. “We talk a lot of big game about public transportation, and then we choose not to implement it anywhere except for metropolitan cities.” 

Smith, 27 years old, is the Democratic nominee for her district; the Republican incumbent she’s running against (himself a Democrat until the mid-aughts) has been in office since 1985, before she was born. Her experience living with a disability has influenced her policy views, including support for expanding Medicaid and getting rid of Georgia’s subminimum wage for disabled workers.

Many candidates claim to support disabled people; Smith wants them to “prove it.”

Although disabled people make up the largest minority group in the country, there are disproportionately few openly disabled politicians relative to the approximately 42.5 million American adults with disabilities. There are several reasons: disabled people can lose Social Security benefits while running for office; some politicians—like FDR throughout his 12 years in the White House—hide their disabilities due to ableism; for people with some health conditions, the long hours aren’t feasible.

In January 2023, Smith was elected as Georgia Democratic Party’s Disability Caucus Chair, where she’s already been met with disappointment by the state Democratic Party’s decision to leave disability policy out of its platform this year.

Politicians, Smith says, need to start proving that they actually care about disabled constituents. “When anyone inside the Democratic Party who’s running for office comes to me and says, ‘Oh yeah, I’m so supportive of people with disabilities,’” she notes, “I say, ‘Okay, prove it.’” Many of those candidates, Smith says, don’t provide standard accommodations like alternative text on social media posts for people with low vision—including her—or American Sign Language interpreters at events. 

Smith says they need to take the initiative. “It’s in the ADA, so I don’t need to be teaching anyone how to do that,” Smith says. The Americans with Disabilities Act—which many disabled people still have to fight to get institutions (and the people who run them) to follow—was signed into law in 1990, again before Smith was even born.

At political events not run by disabled people, Smith has “never seen anyone stand up to make a speech and describe themselves visually”—the type of visual description that Republicans attacked Vice President Kamala Harris for using in a meeting with disability activists.

“The reason people are making fun of Kamala Harris as she accommodates the audience she is speaking to is twofold: ignorance and ableism,” Smith adds. “There’s no other explanation.”

Constantly facing inaccessibility has led Smith to make her campaign as accessible as possible both to the people working on it and to her constituents. 

“Events are accessible. They’re safe. They’re masked. We have hand sanitizer,” she says. “ We do the whole nine yards because…a lot of my campaign staff is disabled anyway.” Smith says it’s a priority for her team to “proactively think about accessibility” rather than as an afterthought.

And she hopes that seeing more disabled people run for office—through campaigns like hers—will have a positive impact on other people with disabilities and inspire them to do the same. “It is so important, so vitally important,” Smith said, for disabled youth to “see people with disabilities in positions of power.”

When his uncle Donald became president, Fred Trump III—whose son William, due to a rare genetic mutation, has seizures and an intellectual disability—saw an opportunity to advocate for disability rights.

In a Time excerpt of his forthcoming book All in the Family, Fred Trump revealed a disturbing conversation with the then-president following a White House meeting in which he discussed how expensive caring for people with complex disabilities can be. Donald Trump said of some disabled people, his nephew recounted, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

Time said that it had reached out to Donald Trump for comment about his nephew’s allegations but received no response.

It wasn’t the only concerning conversation Trump’s nephew alleged that they had. When a Trump family medical fund for William’s medical and living expenses was running low, Fred said his uncle told him, “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

“The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

It wouldn’t be the first time Donald Trump has made offensive comments about disabled people. He infamously made fun of a reporter’s disability at a 2015 rally. But it’s still even more shocking to hear from a close relative that he clearly does not value the life of his own disabled family member.

On Monday, a federal court struck down restrictions on an Ohio law that made it a felony for a non-family member to help return a disabled person’s absentee ballot to a mailbox or dropbox. Other parts of the law in question HB 458, like eliminating an early-voting day and more voter ID restrictions, still remain in practice.

Many disabled people vote via absentee ballot. It can be challenging to commute to in-person voting sites, which may not be accessible.

League of Women Voters of Ohio and individual voter Jennifer Kucera, who has spinal muscular atrophy, brought the case forward, and they were represented by the ACLU, ACLU of Ohio, and the law firm Covington & Burling.

Last December, Kucera said that “under the current laws, I am not allowed to complete my civic duty of voting if for any reason my mom is unable to help me vote, even though my caregivers would be available to help me.”

The Northern District Court of Ohio granted a summary judgment late yesterday, citing Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which permits disabled voters to have assistance in voting from a preferred person.

“In any event, the clear violation of a federally guaranteed voting right in this case outweighs any harm State Defendants and Intervenors may suffer,” Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan wrote in her decision.

In a press release, ACLU of Ohio legal director Freda Levenson said that “this is a win for democracy” and “is the correct reading of the Voting Rights Act and a validating decision for Ohio voters.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s guidebook for Republican control of the presidency and Congress, is, unsurprisingly, coming for abortion rights. But in a new twist, they want to use a key disability rights law to do it.

In Project 2025’s plan for the Department of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, a former Trump administration HHS official, writes the following:

The undeniable reality of abortion is that it does not always result in a dead baby, and these born-alive babies are left to die. HHS should use EMTALA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits disability discrimination, to investigate instances of infants born alive and left untreated in covered hospitals.

The premise of Severino’s claims, says Marissa Ditkowsky, the National Partnership for Women & Families‘ disability economic justice counsel, is a fabrication.

“It’s always concerning when people repeat medical myths to score political points,” Ditkowsky says. “It’s even more concerning when disabled people are used as a political football without consulting or truly centering us.”

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is a landmark piece of federal disability rights legislation that protects disabled people from discrimination on the basis of their disability. The activism that led to its passage was something many conservative politicians would scoff at, if not demonize: In 1977, disability activists and their allies in the Black Panther Party participated in sit-ins in federal buildings to push HHS’ then-secretary to sign off on the new regulations.

Using Section 504 “to demonize pregnant people who may seek an abortion goes against the very purpose,” Ditkowsky says, since “disabled pregnant people are more likely to experience complications” that threaten their lives and health.

This use of civil rights law to attack abortion in Project 2025 isn’t surprising to Sabrina Talukder, director of the Center for American Progress’ women’s initiative. Talukder argues that the project’s research scrapes “the bottom of the barrel” of unrelated laws to make an authoritative-sounding case.

“Project 2025 is about trying to use existing government institutions and structures to exert as much control as possible over the reproductive autonomy of Americans,” Talukder said, “really by any means necessary.”

During the 1960s, disability activists fought for the right to live independently, rather than in institutions like nursing homes. That led to the first Center for Independent Living: a hub serving and largely run by people with disabilities, established in Berkeley, California, in 1972—now one of 403 locations across the country. CILs help disabled people live at home who might otherwise have been institutionalized, in part by connecting them with resources like state programs to fund home care.

Now, in the worsening climate crisis, CILs have a new challenge: helping disabled people prepare for and survive extreme weather events, which are becoming both more severe and more frequent. The difficulties they face drive home the disproportionate and often ignored impact of climate change on people with disabilities. Extreme heat, for instance, puts disabled people in particular at increased risk of dying. Losing power can ruin essential medication that needs cold storage. And when it comes to local evacuation plans for wildfires and flooding, mobility issues are often unaccounted for. The list could go on and on.

Disabled people are “two to four times more likely to die or be injured in [climate] disasters or crises than nondisabled people.”

Hundreds of disabled people in the San Francisco Bay Area died as a consequence of power outages between 2005 and 2012, notes Berkeley’s CIL emergency preparedness and outreach coordinator Henry Maeko—a systematic failure that’s put pressure on the region’s natural gas and electricity company, PG&E.

“Because of the harm done to disabled people during power outages and heat waves,” Maeko says, PG&E “has been essentially mandated to provide funds for disability centers and communities in order to provide things like backup batteries.” 

Back-up batteries and generators can be the difference between life and death for people on respirators. Severe temperatures, either hot or cold, can also cause people to experience life-threatening complications. Even in a blue state like California, people with disabilities died in extreme weather before more assistance was provided to CILs in 2020.

But in red states, it’s even more of an uphill battle to secure lifesaving funding and resources for disabled people amid the climate crisis. A Buzzfeed News analysis estimated that more than 700 people died after Texas’ power grid failed during winter storms in 2021. Experts expect these preventable deaths to continue until Texas politicians allow changes to the power grid—which seems very unlikely, given the GOP’s strong hold on the state legislature. 

Before the independent living movement, many disabled people were regularly pushed into locked residential facilities, psychiatric hospitals and other institutions, even from a young age. Through CILs, they can receive one-on-one, in-person assistance, remote classes, and social services while retaining their autonomy (the right for disabled people to live outside institutions didn’t come until a 1999 Supreme Court ruling).

“We got frustrated with traditional agencies, people without disabilities, telling people with disabilities how to live, without that disabled experience,” says Theo Braddy, the executive director of the National Council on Independent Living.

That autonomy can be a matter of life or death. More than once, institutions like nursing homes, prisons, and hospitals have abandoned people in floods and fires, or ignored them in heat waves, with fatal results.

Michael Stein, the executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, said that federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act make it a legal issue, not just a moral one, when disabled people are “discriminated against or excluded from federal, state and other programming” like disaster plans.

That includes local governments and organizations like the Red Cross, which still need to have emergency plans that account for the needs of disabled people, said Shaylin Sluzalis and Germán Parodi, the co-executive directors of the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies.  

Disabled people are “two to four times more likely to die or be injured in [climate] disasters or crises than nondisabled people,” Sluzalis said, “largely due to the inaccessible society that we live in.” 

“Finding out two days later that a hurricane struck does no good to people with disabilities.”

One issue that arises, according to Stein, is inaccessible information —such as news about climate events on sites that don’t work with a screen reader. “Receiving the same information at the same time is one of the requirements of disability law,” Stein said. “Finding out two days later that a hurricane struck does no good to people with disabilities.”

Inaccessible climate plans are also an international problem. Although the 2015 Paris Agreement on limiting emissions required “inclusive responses to climate mitigation,” Stein says, almost nine in ten countries that signed “don’t even mention disability in their policies.”

Experts I spoke to agree that disabled people need to be welcomed and heard in climate-related plans. As Braddy notes, when they’re not, “everything is based on the able-bodied experience,” sometimes fatally.

The United States, like many other countries, is ill-prepared for extreme weather in general. The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies maintains a hotline to address that gap by connecting as many disabled people to resources as quickly as possible—especially to their local CIL. 

“One of our main ways of really supporting disabled disaster survivors is connecting them with their local Center for Independent Living,” Sluzalis said. “We do a soft handoff of those referrals, so folks don’t continue to fall through the gaps of calling one place and then calling the next.” 

The partnership’s directors themselves went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017, to try and help disabled disaster survivors. One in three adults in Puerto Rico is disabled, according to the CDC, highlighting the importance of inclusive disaster response in the territory. One of the groups the partnership collaborated with—in addition to FEMA, the Red Cross and local government—is MAVI, a nonprofit which operates two independent living centers in Puerto Rico. 

Back in the Bay Area, Berkeley’s CIL is also helping people prepare for serious earthquakes, including by offering to earthquake-proof their homes. While California has always been known for its earthquakes, research suggests that they will become more common with climate change. Maeko says the center provides both group training and “one-on-one workshops, where we’ll sit with an individual person or a family, we’ll talk through what they might need in emergency preparedness, and we base it on specific needs. We’ll talk about what it would look like for you to be independent during an emergency.”

Braddy believes that governments and agencies collaborating with CILs, both in planning for and during climate events, can help save disabled people’s lives. That includes training Red Cross staffers on how to safely evacuate someone’s wheelchair or ventilator, which are indispensable extensions of a person.

“When emergency-prepared people come into a local community, they don’t know where these individuals live,” Braddy said. “They don’t know the kind of complex medical equipment that these individuals depend on.”

But a local CIL will know just that, Braddy said—something he’s talked to FEMA about. In climate catastrophes, Braddy said, CILs “should be an integral part of that rescue and that management.”

Last December, UNICEF reported that two and a half months into Israel’s offensive in Gaza, at least a thousand children lost one or both of their legs. As more Palestinians become disabled, their risks expand. A United Nations committee warned in May of “the disproportionate impacts on people with disabilities due to the destruction of hospitals, the cut-off of essential services, restrictions, [and] non-existing access to humanitarian assistance” amid the war waged in response to Hamas’s attack on October 7th.

One organization that is trying to help disabled Palestinians in Gaza is Humanity & Inclusion, an international Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian group, which has operated in Palestine—both in Gaza and the West Bank—for nearly three decades. Since October, H&I has provided mobility devices to newly disabled Palestinians.

Their work has been treacherous—multiple H&I staff members have been killed and their office in Gaza City has been destroyed. In mid-June, H&I says the Israeli Defense Forces bulldozed their warehouse in Rafah, where medical supplies and mattresses had previously been stored. (In response to a request for comment on the destruction of H&I’s warehouse, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces did not deny the warehouse’s destruction, but said the IDF “follows international law.”) The Israeli army has also prohibited many medical devices from entering Gaza, claiming that these are “dual-use items”—that crutches or hearing aid batteries, for example, could have a military use. 

Mother Jones spoke to Noor Bimbashi, an advocacy officer for Humanity & Inclusion based in the West Bank about the challenges that disabled people in Gaza face, the impact of aid restrictions, and how those in the West Bank experience violence, too. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The number of amputees, including children who lost limbs in Israel’s offensive, has risen in Gaza since October. How has this changed the type of work that Humanity & Inclusion does? 

Back in 2022, the number of amputees was already high. At least 21 percent of households in Gaza had [a person with a] disability. We keep trying to compare this number with what’s happening right now.

The impeded access into Gaza is affecting our rehabilitation services. In order to sustain the well-being of amputees and persons with disabilities, we need more resources. And the shortage of electricity and fuel is impacting our operations.

One of the challenges I’ve heard from my colleagues recently is the fact that after the Rafah offensive our employees became scattered in different areas across the Gaza strip. Sometimes communication is difficult. The number of persons with disabilities, and how many families are in need of rehabilitation—or in need of assistive technologies like wheelchairs or crutches—is increasing by the day, and sometimes it’s difficult to keep up. But we’re trying our utmost best. 

In mid-June, H&I said the Israeli army destroyed a warehouse your organization had previously used in Rafah. How has the lack of viable warehouse space affected the services you have been able to provide? 

The offensive has forced us to suspend all activities for persons with disabilities across the whole governorate of Rafah. The loss of this warehouse made it impossible for us to stock items in Rafah, in the short term. And even after the end of the offensive, it’s going to take us a lot of time, which, of course, slows down our future assistance to persons with disabilities, especially in Rafah. 

In Gaza, even mild injuries are turning into permanent disabilities. “We’re hearing about people having their legs or arms amputated without anesthesia,” says an advocacy officer.

Even our warehouses in other areas sometimes it’s too difficult to reach them, or to find a proper warehouse, since more than 60 percent of buildings are destroyed in Gaza. 

Palestine has high rates of disability, including child amputees. Have you all been able to meet that demand of treating kids who are newly disabled? What obstacles stand in the way of getting these kids care? 

The nurses that we work with tell us how challenging it is, since they don’t have access to basic tools to treat patients. One of the nurses told me one of the biggest challenges is inability to follow up with patients because of displacement. One day they’re treating a person with a disability, and the next day they can’t find him or her, because they were ordered to evacuate to another place. 

The overcrowding in shelters hinders the execution of some of the rehab sessions. But I think the biggest challenge right now is displacement and scarcity of resources.

In Gaza, persons with disabilities have lost all chances for education, or for mental support. They’re the last ones to evacuate because some of them don’t even know that they have to evacuate, like those with hearing difficulties.

We keep calling for Israel to allow us to import some of the tools and resources that are considered “dual use,” but they’re not. So sometimes it’s difficult even to bring into Gaza wheelchairs, crutches, and hearing aids, because some of them are put on the dual use list. The problem is that we’re not even getting the list, so we don’t even know. 

There need to be thousands more prosthetics in Gaza. How does delaying getting an amputee a prosthesis negatively impact their quality of life? 

First, it affects their mental health. We’ve heard about confusion, anger management issues, because they’re unable to get the right treatment. And even mild injuries are turning into permanent disabilities. The situation in the hospitals is very bad. We’re hearing about people having their legs or arms amputated without anesthesia. It’s devastating. We try our best to find alternatives, but I don’t know what else can be done. 

Some children think that their legs might grow again. This is one of the saddest things that we hear on a regular basis, when talking to children. They tell us, we’re waiting for our legs to grow again. Sometimes, it’s difficult to explain that that’s not going to happen. 

That’s heartbreaking. How has the team in the West Bank, where you’re based, been supporting H&I members in Gaza?

At the beginning, we lost communication. It was really difficult. But right now, there are more than 40 employees in Gaza, and in the West Bank there are more than 30. We try to have joint projects together. But, you know, in the West Bank we aren’t allowed to enter Gaza. 

Our international staff are the ones who have entered Gaza. We send rehabilitation specialists, we send a lot of support from our headquarters in France, and other places, to enter Gaza to support. Sometimes we suspend movements due to the security situation. After the Rafah offensive, it’s been difficult to predict what’s going to happen—we don’t want our staff to be stuck. 

What challenges have you experienced in helping disabled people in the West Bank since October?

I can tell you, living there, that everything has escalated following the seventh of October. One of the biggest challenges is restriction of movement. We work not only in Ramallah, but also in Jenin, and Nablus, and Bethlehem. Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have been subjected to daily raids and incursions. So, sometimes we plan a field visit, or we plan to conduct a needs assessment in a certain refugee camp, but then the next day, we are unable to, because a new checkpoint has suddenly been erected, which prevents us from going there.

“Some children think that their legs might grow again. This is one of the saddest things that we hear on a regular basis.”

Another challenge is that settler violence has increased drastically. One of our local partners is a rehabilitation center in Jenin refugee camp. All of the infrastructure surrounding them has been completely destroyed. I cannot walk to the center, or go in a car to the center. The Israeli soldiers have been surrounding hospitals and rehabilitation centers, and they destroy the infrastructure around them. It’s becoming really, really difficult for persons with disabilities to continue their treatments or to access services that they need.

The situation is bad. We hope for the cessation of hostilities, and to have a ceasefire as soon as possible, so we will be able to operate as we should.