Trump drains Ryan White HIV/AIDS funding to pay for “baby cages”
The week after pride month has been a disaster for the LGBTQ community in terms of our future with the SCOTUS pick and now another potential HIV Crisis. Americans with HIV may be the ones paying the price for the Trump administration’s political desire to separate immigrant babies and children from their parents.
According to a new report, internal documents obtained from the Office of Refugee Resettlement show that the agency, which was caught off guard by the Trump administration’s family separation policy, had to find a way to budget for a surge of potential immigrant minors being detained in the coming months. The budgeting exercise called for at least 25,400 beds and they currently have about 11,800 children in its care.
How will the agency pay to care for all these children? According to Slate, to help cover this budget shortfall of $585 million, the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses ORR, will reallocate money from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which provides essential and comprehensive care for people living with HIV who are uninsured or underinsured. According to the documents, Slate reports, the process of transferring funds away from Ryan White has already started.
Trevor Church the author of “Out of the Woods: The Lynch Mob & Hillary Clinton” went on Facebook to state:
The White House has started taking money from programs that help uninsured patients with HIV and AIDS to fund their child detention facilities.
They’re literally going to let people die so that they have enough money to lock babies in cages.‘¢Trump visited Ryan White’s family the day Ryan White died, with Michael Jackson.
‘¢For year’s he lied about paying Ryan’s medical bills, and admitted to lying about it.
‘¢28 years later, he has taken government money from the Ryan White Foundation (an org that helps the uninsured cover costs of HIV and AIDS) to pay for baby-cages.This is so sick, and to Ryan White’s family… I am so sorry.
In a tweet, California Democrat Barbara Lee called the office’s decision to transfer funds away from Ryan White programs ‘œunacceptable on so many levels.’ ‘œI don’t even know where to start,’ she wrote.
The decision to reallocate Ryan White HIV/AIDS funding comes after Trump’s original proposed FY18 budget cut over $800 million in funding for HIV programs domestically and abroad. Trump’s proposed 2019 budget includes millions in cuts to the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, AIDS housing programs, and the CDC’s HIV programs, according to POZ.
Trump signaled that his administration wouldn’t make HIV/AIDS a priority when he appointed Mike Pence, who was the architect of a major HIV outbreak in his home state of Indiana, as his vice president. Pence has also previously indicated that he would be in favor of rerouting federal HIV/AIDS funds away from ‘œorganizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus’ and into ‘œinstitutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior’ ‘” or using HIV/AIDS money to fund conversion therapy.
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