This Cannot Be Normal, This Cannot Be Okay
The federal government didn’t just orphan a child — it is walking away from the systems all children depend on.
One Death, One Child, One City in a Nation of Children at Risk
There’s a child in Minneapolis who just lost everything. His mother, Renee Nicole Good, was shot and killed last week by a federal immigration officer during a raid in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood.
In a three-minute interaction with federal officials, Good was shot and killed in her car – in broad daylight, in a residential neighborhood, as community members screamed in horror, and requests by a physician to provide medical aid were denied. The video footage should haunt the nation.
The federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the ICE officer involved in the shooting was at risk of harm, but the video shows Ms. Good was trying to leave the scene after having been directed to do so by another ICE agent.
There will hopefully be a thorough investigation (although the FBI is currently blocking state investigation into the matter).
What we already know is that Ms. Good was a mother of three. Her older children are reportedly in the care of extended family. But her youngest, a six-year-old boy whose father died years ago, is now orphaned by the actions of his own government.
We should all let that sit for a moment. It is our government and our tax dollars that orphaned Good’s son.
While the debate has largely focused on fault, more people need to be asking questions about what happens to this child now. Unfortunately, in our political system, children are too often invisible, especially when the policies and actions that harm them are wrapped in the language of law enforcement, border security, or fiscal discipline. It is disheartening to hear an Administration official say, “This incident is tragic but [insert demonization and finger pointing at the victim].”
Our children are not blind. They see what is happening and live in fear.
The communities where they live see it and are demanding justice.
Schools in Minneapolis were placed on lockdown and are now closed out of concern for children's safety. Parents have kept their kids home to stay out of harm’s way. When schools reopen, educators will be forced to try to explain why their classmate has suddenly disappeared. A single encounter with a federal agent has left children and families devastated and traumatized in Minneapolis and around the country.
Nobody should think this is about protecting children. It never seems to be, as our nation repeatedly does nothing in response to school shootings.
And this – this week of fear, lockdowns, and mourning – is only one of a number of calamities for children at the hands of its own government. It’s a symptom of a much larger, more deliberate pattern. In the same week that a child was orphaned by a government gun, the federal government also took a number of ill-fated steps to rip away support systems for other children across Minnesota and the entire country.
Just days ago, more than $10 billion in funding for child care and family support was frozen by the federal government in Minnesota, along with the states of New York, California, Illinois, and Colorado. The Trump Administration – citing vague concerns about fraud stemming from a misleading video by a known provocateur – suspended payments to programs that keep daycares open, staff employed, and parents able to work across Minneapolis and the State of Minnesota. Strangely, the Administration added four other states to the freeze with seemingly no evidence of fraud beyond partisan politics.
But there are no red children and blue children. There are just children. And in this one action, the Trump Administration has threatened funding to 23.7% of the nation’s children.
The New York Times cites Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) arguing the Administration’s funding freeze had “nothing to do with fraud” and characterized the cuts as “political retribution that punishes poor children in need of assistance.”
Gillibrand added, “I demand that President Trump unfreeze this funding and stop this brazen attack on our children.”
Sen. Gillibrand is correct.
The Administration’s imposed funding freeze adds to the harm to children and families, as it could force child care centers to close, leaving families scrambling and children without safe, stable learning environments.
Also, as part of the $10 billion freeze, the Administration blocked funding to TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, in the five states. This action has stopped the money without warning or a backup plan. Rather than support during the dead of winter, the federal government’s response is to turn its back on the very children who are most in need, which is more than half of all the nation’s children who benefit from TANF.
The consequence of the TANF freeze will result in greater child poverty, homelessness, hunger, and child abuse and neglect. Again, this is a policy choice.
As Chad Bolt, Averi Pakulis, and Lily Klam, my colleagues at First Focus on Children explain:
Children are once again collateral damage in a political battle. However, children are neither blue nor red — they are just children with needs no matter where they live.
And in a parallel move – also just this week – the federal government has unilaterally decided to cut back its own recommended childhood vaccination schedule, reducing the number of recommended vaccines from 17 down to 11.
While this change has received expressed concern by the American Academy of Pediatrics and public health officials across the country, the gravity of its implications, particularly for children in underserved communities, will result in more children becoming victims of preventable diseases like measles and meningitis, and suffer from preventable illness and death as a consequence. Pediatricians are already witnessing negative implications.
None of this is progress. Rather, it’s cruelty. It’s the policy architecture of abandonment, designed and executed at the highest levels of government.
And it’s all happening in just one week – on the backs of children and families.
Schools on Lockdown, Support Systems Under Siege
These actions all have ongoing and compounding impacts.
In Minneapolis, for example, the ripple effect of federal immigration enforcement continues. In addition to the death of a mother and a child’s trauma, the ripple effects extend into classrooms, child care centers, cafeterias, and community centers across Minneapolis – all the places where children should feel safe. When federal violence enters a neighborhood, it doesn’t politely avoid the playground. It reaches into the daily lives of every child nearby.
And yet, as Minneapolis reeled from the shooting and the school lockdowns, the very agency charged with supporting the nation’s schools – the U.S. Department of Education – was under coordinated attack from the same federal leadership responsible for the chaos. While children in Minnesota are sheltering in place or closed, the Administration continued its push to dismantle the Department of Education, scattering its functions across agencies and leaving schools and families to navigate a fragmented, underfunded bureaucracy.
As my colleague Lily Klam outlines in her important Substack piece, “The Misguided Push to Abolish the Department of Education, this isn’t a theoretical restructuring. It’s a dismantling of the only federal department with a sole mission to advocate for students. If the Department disappears, so too does the national voice fighting for children’s civil rights, for low-income schools, for kids with disabilities, for English learners, for rural students, and for every child who can’t afford a lobbyist.
This is not oversight. It’s orchestrated abandonment.
And it’s all part of the same story. ICE raids. School lockdowns. Defunding the Department of Education. Freezing child care assistance. The tools vary, but the target is the same: children, especially those who are poor, brown, immigrant, or otherwise outside the political spotlight.
Not Just One City – A Nationwide Campaign of Abandonment
What’s unfolding is horrifying. It’s is part of an broader unprecedented war on children. It’s what happens when federal policymakers begin treating children not as a group that deserves to be protected, but as line items to be eliminated.
This is what “organized abandonment” looks like. It is part of a deliberate hollowing out and defunding of the systems that helps protect the health, education, development, safety, and well-being of children.
It’s visible in the attacks on Medicaid that are simultaneously happening, where an estimated 10 million children, people with disabilities, and low-income senior citizens will be kicked off coverage due to increased “red tape” and bureaucratic barriers to care (i.e., uninsurance by design).
It’s in the SNAP benefit cuts in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which will make it harder for kids to eat.
It’s in the rollback or expiration of the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit, which threw millions of children back into poverty after proving it could lift them out. Again, the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” shortchanged children and left 19 million of the children most in need with either no or only partial credit.
It’s in the elimination of global child health and education programs through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), signaling that children beyond our borders are expendable, too. First Focus on Children’s Children’s Budget 2025 finds President’s Trump most recent budget proposal would cut the share of federal spending on international assistance down to an abysmal 0.03%.
These aren’t disconnected incidents. They’re not budget quirks or political missteps. They are the output of a federal apparatus that has turned away from children at a shocking rate.
Millions of children are at risk – not just in blue states or red states, not just in cities or rural areas, not just immigrants, and not just the poor, although they are all being hit first and hardest.
The war on children is nationwide. And sadly, it’s accelerating.
The Child Tax Credit Is a Mirror, And It Shows Us Who We Abandon
Returning to the child in Minneapolis, a 6-year-old boy, who is now orphaned because of government action. No parent to come home to. The loss of an income in the household. And no explanation that could possibly make sense of what has happened to his world.
And as if that weren’t cruel enough, for children who have lost a parent, they are at much increased risk of losing the one federal support designed to lift children out of poverty and help them through such a tragic event: the Child Tax Credit.
Why? Because the Child Tax Credit is tied to income, and his or her family loses income with the death of a parent.
That’s the bitter irony at the core of this policy: the federal government has chosen a policy that ensures the children who need the most help get the least.
Under current law, the full Child Tax Credit is either reduced or eliminated for low-income children who live in a household that earns too little to qualify for the full credit. If you are a child who is a victim of a natural disaster or has lost a parent, you are also more likely to lose the very support from the Child Tax Credit when you need it the most.
This isn’t a bug in federal policy. Sadly, it’s a feature.
When the National Commission on Children recommended creating the Child Tax Credit 35 years ago, the bipartisan recommendation was that the credit be fully refundable and available to all children. That proposal by the National Commission on Children, which was created under President Ronald Reagan and released a 1991 report to President George Bush, explained:
The United States is the only Western industrialized nation that does not have a child allowance policy or some other universal, public benefit for families raising children…. Other nations that have adopted child allowance policies regard such subsidies as an investment in their children’s health and development and in their nation’s future strength and productivity.
To improve the lives, well-being, and future of children, the National Commission on Children’s report, Beyond Rhetoric: A New American Agenda for Children and Families, recommended that the Child Tax Credit go to all families with children and not be withheld in whole or in part from its poorest children and families.
Unfortunately, Congress did not design it that way in 1997. With the sole exception of 2021, when it was made fully refundable on a temporary basis as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), it shortchanges more than one-quarter of the nation’s children most in need.
Organized abandonment results in policy that wraps our safety net in barriers, red tape, blame, and bureaucracy, and subsequently questions why policy fails the children it was supposedly designed to serve.
Ultimately, child poverty is a policy choice.
While simultaneously shortchanging children and their future, the “One, Big Beautiful Bill” allocated more than $175 billion for immigration enforcement and border security over the next decade.
So let’s be clear: Congress and President Trump had the money. They had the money to dramatically expand and militarize immigration enforcement. They had the money to fund the federal agent whose bullet left a child motherless on a Minneapolis sidewalk. But when it came time to invest in children – to give kids health care, food, shelter, nutrition, income support, or a refundable tax credit – they walked away.
The Child Tax Credit and other programs of importance to children are a mirror. Budget decisions reflect the values we’ve made in our nation. And right now, it shows us a country that abandons our most vulnerable children when they need us most.
This should shame us. It should shock us into action. But the tragic reality is that this kind of policy failure has become so routine and so quietly accepted that we no longer even register the injustice.
A child just lost his mother, and our national response should never be to impose further harm.
All Children Are Now at Risk
Organized abandonment is also a system that punishes vulnerability, defunds protection, and turns its back on kids with ruthless disregard.
The Stephen Miller and Russ Vought playbook recognizes that the public overwhelmingly supports children’s issues. Thus, rather than attack children directly, they seek to “otherize” kids by category, imposing “deservingness” exclusions on their parents, and divide the nation into in-groups and out-groups.
The Heritage Foundation and others provided the playbook:
They start with immigrant children, whose families can be demonized and deported.
They attack LGBTQ children by rolling back federal protections, erasing inclusive policies, and enabling discrimination.
They target low-income children by excluding them from benefits with rules and restrictions that sound neutral but function like walls and barriers.
They target Black and Brown parents by declaring them undeserving, and thereby, target their children with harm.
They threatened religious minority groups.
They close programs for rural children, whose needs are dismissed as unsustainable or unscalable.
They embrace partisan politics and target blue states and the children in those states with cuts and exclusions.
Organized abandonment results in parents being left to themselves with declining support to navigate the world for their children without trusted partners like teachers, child care professionals, pediatricians, counselors, and scientists. Thus, child care and early childhood programs are defunded, public schools are gutted, Medicaid and nutrition supports are slashed, science is questioned, books are banned, immunizations are limited, and environmental protections are abandoned.
The cruel irony is that this is being done in the name of “parental rights.”
The path of organized abandonment begins with targeting those who are easiest to ignore and ends with a system so hollowed out that no family is supported and no child is safe. Parents are abandoned, without support or protection, and that is exhausting, atomizing, and isolating.
That’s why this is not just a story about Minneapolis. It’s a national alarm bell. It’s a warning that we are dismantling the social contract for children everywhere: step by step, week by week, and piece by piece.
We cannot wait for the damage to reach our doorstep before we fight back.
We Cannot Let This Stand
We cannot call ourselves a civilized society if we are willing to let these attacks on children stand.
This very deliberate war on children is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of decades of policy choices that devalue children, especially poor children, Black and Brown children, immigrant children, LGBTQ children, and children who seem to be easiest to cast aside.
In 1975, Chester Pierce and Gail Allen referred to “childism” as “the automatic presumption of superiority of any adult over any child” that results in actions taken toward children via “authoritative, unilateral decisions.”
We see it again and again, from the sex abuse scandals that rocked many major religious organizations to the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team to the Boy Scouts to Kids for Cash to the Troubled Teen Industry to Jerry Sandusky and Jeffrey Epstein. Private and public institutions and the powerful almost always choose to protect themselves rather than the child victims, who are dismissed, ignored, and silenced. After years of government inaction to do something about or even to release the Epstein files, we are seeing the U.S. Department of Justice making redactions to protect the wealthy and powerful rather than the child victims.
It is time to stop treating these harms as disconnected tragedies or partisan gridlock.
This is a governing philosophy: starve public systems, punish vulnerability, retreat from responsibility, and dismiss society’s responsibility to protect and support the health, education, development, safety, and well-being of children.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought was quoted by the New Yorker as saying:
I get excited about cutting the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education.
These are the agencies and programs that disproportionately support children. We must call it out, and demand that our policymakers bring children to the forefront of every conversation about how the government should serve the public. For children, this means a very different policy agenda, including:
Demanding a Child Tax Credit that actually reaches the children who need it most.
Rejecting the dismantling and undermining our nation’s public schools and the federal Department of Education, as children deserve federal champions of their fundamental educational rights rather than federal retreat.
Protecting child care and funding early education programs, including Head Start.
Restoring health programs by reversing the cuts to Medicaid, making the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) permanent, and putting science at the forefront of vaccine and medical research programs rather than ideology and “feels.”
Treating every child, regardless of income or status, as fully human and fully deserving of fulfilling their full potential.
It means refusing to let ICE raids, school privatization, vaccine rollbacks, or book bans become routine.
We need journalists to center children in their stories.
We need policymakers to ask and answer this simple question when making policy decisions: “Is it good for the children?”
We need voters to demand that our political leaders not abandon the next generation, but instead, make them a priority.
Let this be the moment we say: No more. Not on our watch. Not to our children.
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