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disability rights
It Cannot Be Denied: Israel Is Starving Children to Death on Purpose
Starvation of civilians is not an accident of war, it is a deliberate policy.
Aug 22, 2025
In July, major news organizations published the image of 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a Palestinian child so emaciated that his bones protruded through his back, while his mom cradled him in her arms. Instead of a diaper, he wore a black plastic bag.
Some online commentators have sought to downplay the image’s power by pointing to a preexisting medical condition. But Muhammad is starving as the result of Israel’s use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. This is a war crime that is affecting the entire population and, based on my research, is inflicting particularly profound suffering on children with disabilities like Muhammad.
Humanitarian workers told me that restrictions on aid prevent them from bringing in special food that some children with disabilities or medical conditions need, while medical workers warned that children with disabilities are less likely to get care due to the Israeli government’s systematic assault on Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure.
In mid-August, in Geneva, I joined the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for its session focused on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, governments are required to protect people with disabilities in situations of risks, including armed conflicts. The message from disability groups was clear: Governments need to press Israeli authorities to allow unimpeded, disability-inclusive humanitarian access and not leave children like Muhammad to suffer the consequences of intentional starvation.
Muhammad’s image should move world leaders to use all their leverage with Israel, including an arms embargo and targeted sanctions, to stop Israeli authorities’ mass starvation policy.
There are countless examples of Palestinian children with disabilities thriving with adequate nutrition and healthcare. In just one example, 6-year-old Fadi al-Zant, who has cystic fibrosis and was severely malnourished, was evacuated to the United States from Gaza last year and survived. Osman Shahin, a 16-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who had lost 7 kilograms, regained weight after his family left Gaza for Bosnia.
But Muhammed and other children in Gaza do not have that chance. Between April and mid-July alone, more than 20,000 children in Gaza were hospitalized for acute malnourishment, 3,000 of them severely. Starvation of civilians is not an accident of war, it is a deliberate policy.
Muhammad’s image should move world leaders to use all their leverage with Israel, including an arms embargo and targeted sanctions, to stop Israeli authorities’ mass starvation policy. Muhammad’s disability does not make his starvation less cruel or unlawful; it makes it all the more urgent for countries to act now.
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People With Disabilities Face Unmatched Cruelty From GOP Medicaid Cuts
Trump’s administration is here to serve the wealthy-elite, not the regular working-class Americans and people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid.
Aug 10, 2025
Two months ago, Sloan Meek – a disability rights advocate with cerebral palsy – took the stage at a rally protesting the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” Meek warned how $1 trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts would have life-threatening consequences for people with disabilities.
“My whole life – not just my healthcare – is supported by Medicaid. The way I move around in the world. The way I communicate. The people who help me do all the things I want to do in my life,” Meek said. “Without Medicaid support, I will be forced into a nursing home to spend the rest of my life in a hospital bed.”
The Republican budget is a “death threat” to people with disabilities, Meek said.
It draws a clear line between those in this country who are deserving of protection and public investment, and those who are not. While corporations and the ultra wealthy are afforded millions in tax breaks disabled people and caregivers are neglected, defunded, and treated as disposable.
The North Street Neighborhood
In a joint interview, Meek, his at-home caregiver Wendy Lincicome, and his bandmate, friend, and fellow disability-rights activist Suvya Carroll spoke with both anger and fear about how Medicaid cuts will uproot them from their community in Durham, North Carolina.
The three live in the North Street Neighborhood, a community that describes itself as “an organic network of relationships.” North Street is actively reimagining what it means to build a neighborhood rooted in disability justice and collective care. Home to over 100 residents — including roughly 30 people with disabilities — it brings renters, homeowners, university students, and families into a space designed to foster inclusion, accessibility, and interdependence between disabled and non-disabled residents.
For Meek and Carroll, who also has cerebral palsy, North Street is a home where they can show up as active community members. They serve on the neighborhood residents’ council, deliver newspapers, and perform concerts with their band, Meek Squad. Meek also proudly proclaims himself host of North Street’s infamous party house.
For Carroll, North Street is a place she can show up as her authentic self and trust her neighbors to support her with her disabilities. Both she and Lincicome talk about how the community creates long-lasting relationships between residents, allowing able-bodied residents to knowledgeably and empathetically show up and serve their neighbors with disabilities.
“They’re our friends, they’re our neighbors,” Lincicome says. Thanks to Medicaid funding, those same neighbors can also be trained and paid caregivers, supporting Meek and Lincicome with tasks like lifting him into his wheelchair-accessible van, assisting with medications, and helping him communicate. These responsibilities require specialized skills, and receiving expert care from people who truly know and care for them, just next door, is a rare experience.
Lincicome describes North Street’s ecosystem of care as a rare oasis in a world that often isolates and erases people with disabilities and their caregivers. Instead, their community members understand what life is like for an at-home caregiver and a person with a significant disability. That understanding, explains Linciome, ensures that, “our world doesn’t close into the size of the four walls of our home. Our world is much bigger.”
However, for residents like Meek, Carroll, and Lincicome, living in North Street would not be possible without Medicaid funding.
Medicaid as a lifeline
Medicaid pays for Meek’s home and community supports, including Lincicome, who’s been a caretaker in his life for 31 years. They first met when Meek was just six years old and Lincicome was in college. Lincicome assisted Meek and his family until, as an adult, Meek moved in with her as his full-time at-home caregiver.
The rest of Meek’s medical services are sustained by a patchwork of health insurance. Contributions from Social Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, and Medicare are still not enough to cover all of Meek’s medical costs. Meek’s wheelchair, equipped with a computer communication device, his prescriptions, multiple specialists, and full-time caregiving needs are expensive. While Medicaid has been vital, it’s never been enough by itself and is difficult to access.
Lincicome says they’re lucky. Meek’s family has the financial resources to help fill in the gaps, something many people with disabilities don’t have.
Carroll, who was arrested for protesting Trump’s budget bill in June, also relies on Medicaid. She shares that without the same financial resources, she’s often been left to navigate inaccessible and complex healthcare systems alone. For example, three years after receiving a power assist for her manual wheelchair, she was suddenly billed $6,000 because her Medicaid “wasn’t properly authorized.” After days of phone calls with uncooperative insurance reps, the charge was finally dropped and the device covered. Jumping through constant hoops to receive adequate health insurance for her disability is exhausting for Carroll, and requires additional advocates in her life to help navigate not only daily tasks, but hostile healthcare structures.
Medicaid needed improvements, not cuts, says Lincicome. “We’re not rolling around in benefits. It doesn’t cover everything. It’s really hard to navigate and to access. There are so many rules that seem to contradict each other and have kinds of discrimination built into it.”
Carroll recently found a caregiver covered by Medicaid. Her caregiver assists with tasks like cooking, cleaning, managing medications, and most importantly, advocating alongside her at medical appointments. Previously, Carroll leaned on friends at North Street for support, but ultimately needed the consistent, specialized care that long-term at-home caretakers provide to people with disabilities.
Although Medicaid – like any health insurance in this country – is confusing and hard to access, it’s the only healthcare Carroll has to support vital medical services.
Medicaid cuts threaten HCBS programs
Carroll and Meek are not alone. More than 1 in 5 Medicaid enrollees have a disability. And nearly half of Medicaid enrollees with a disability have difficulties living independently and require long-term at-home care. Today there’s roughly 6 million people who use Medicaid for long-term direct care support and more than 700,000 people currently on a Medicaid waiver waiting list to receive home and community based services (HCBS).
At-home caregivers are paid through Medicaid’s HCBS waiver program. Medicaid is the primary payer for caregivers like Lincicome because other forms of health insurance typically do not cover long-term at-home care costs. But chronic underinvestment in federal Medicaid funding has contributed to low wages for caregivers and a disproportionate number of care workers also relying on Medicaid for their own healthcare. Wages for home caregivers puts them in the bottom 10 percent of lowest paid workers in the US economy.
Lincicome explains that she’s severely underpaid for the work she does. Through the HCBS waiver program, she’s paid an hourly rate based on an eight-hour workday, an assumption that doesn’t reflect the reality of her role. As an at-home caregiver, she often works up to 20 hours a day, effectively earning less than $10 an hour for around-the-clock labor.
Low wages and strenuous labor leads to high turnover rates in the industry, which in turn causes dangerous working conditions and a shortage of direct care workers available to provide life-giving support to people with disabilities.
This crisis is especially acute as the demand for caregivers in the US is increasing. By 2040, more than one in five people in the United States will likely need the aging and disability support direct care workers provide.
Beyond standard medical care, Lincicome’s role as a caregiver gives Meek agency and voice. Meek is an active organizer in his community. With Carroll, he speaks with medical students and doctors about the importance of friendship, social connection, and truly listening to patients with disabilities. He’s worked with the city government. He teaches his friends how to be advocates for themselves and others. And he always makes sure he gets his friends out to the voting polls during elections. “To do all this important work,” Meek says, “I need assistance.”
Without Lincicome, Carroll says, the life she and Meek have built at North Street would not be possible. Lincicome isn’t just a caregiver. In her emails, she signs off as their “logistics manager” and “social secretary,” titles that reflect the many roles she plays. She’s crucial in making it possible for Meek and Carroll to safely travel to Washington, D.C. to protest Medicaid cuts, speak at universities about disability rights, and perform live with their band, Meek Squad.
But fair compensation for caregivers, as well as dignified and quality care for people with disabilities, is hard to find, says Lincicome. And it is only going to become more challenging and complicated to access with Medicaid cuts.
HCBS programs are considered “optional” Medicaid services and will likely be some of the first programs on the chopping block under Republican-led budget cuts. This will lead to the elimination of many at-home caregiver positions and decrease already under-funded wages for caregivers.
But these Medicaid services aren’t “optional”. Lincicome and Meek are a clear example of how Lincicome’s work is absolutely vital is Meek’s ability to live a full and meaningful life. Cutting Medicaid funding takes away the ability of millions of people with disabilities to live in their home and community.
Gutting ACA expansion and strict job requirements targets people with disabilities
In addition to stripping away HCBS programs, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” also attacks Medicaid expansion and imposes strict job requirements that endanger millions of disabled folks.
In North Carolina, where Meek, Carroll, and Lincicome live, 660,000 people became eligible for Medicaid through the recent 2023 expansion. The expansion has been monumental for low-income people and individuals with disabilities.
In the U.S., qualifying for disability-based Medicaid and other governmental support is extremely difficult. Nearly two-thirds of non-elderly adults with disabilities on Medicaid don’t receive SSI, meaning they qualify instead through low income. Thanks to Medicaid expansion, millions more disabled people have access to healthcare because ACA expansion lowers the income threshold eligible for Medicaid. As experts note, expansion has been critical in giving people with disabilities access to care without having to meet strict federal disability criteria.
Trump’s budget bill takes away $526 billion from states who have adopted ACA expansion. North Carolina has trigger laws in place that stipulate if enough federal funds are stripped away from the expansion program, it will shut down all together. This would leave hundreds of thousands of people without healthcare coverage in North Carolina.
In addition to gutting Medicaid ACA expansion, the budget bill requires Medicaid expansion enrollees to meet harsh work requirements or prove they meet eligibility criteria. This is particularly dangerous for people with disabilities.
In the Republican budget bill, Medicaid enrollees will be required to redetermine eligibility twice a year instead of annually starting in December 2026. Studies show that people with disabilities, who already require caregiving support to cook and clean, are particularly vulnerable to these work requirements.
We’ve already seen how job requirements will strip people of essential healthcare. For example, in 2018, Arkansas implemented similar Medicaid work requirements, which caused 18,000 people to lose their health coverage. Yet 95 percent of those who were required to redetermine their eligibility through work requirements appeared to have met and qualified for Medicaid. Put simply, even though people qualified for Medicaid, work requirements created walls of red tape “churning” people off their health insurance.
Rather than protect against “waste, fraud, and abuse,” this budget bill merely exacerbates obstacles, seas of red tape, and unintelligible Frankenstein healthcare policies.
“We want our lawmakers to make the right and moral choices with their vote,” Meek says, and “not take away the support people depend on, our voices, or our lives.”
Lawmakers are “taking away from low income families and people with disabilities for what?” asks Carroll.
The answer: Trump’s administration is here to serve the wealthy-elite, not the regular working-class Americans and people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid.
These Medicaid cuts should not be ignored because it’s going to hurt people like Meek, Carroll, and Lincicome. It’s time to get loud and get to work, says Carroll.
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This Disability Pride Month Is About Survival, Not Celebration
This month, skip the slogans. Ask: Who do I know that needs care? Who will I support when the next cut comes? What am I building that lasts beyond this news cycle? Or this election cycle?
Jul 26, 2025
Every July, we’re told to smile for the cameras. Show our pride. Celebrate how far we’ve come.
But what if all we feel is rage?
This year, Disability Pride Month arrives under a government that is actively tearing down the few protections we have left. Programs that kept us out of institutions—gone. Jobs focused on accessibility—eliminated. Community care infrastructure—defunded, dismantled, or disappeared entirely. And somehow, no one’s sounding the alarm. Or perhaps there are too many alarms going off at once, and nobody can distinguish them anymore.
There’s no parade for the disabled workers quietly laid off when Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) offices were shuttered. No ribbon cutting for the collapse of the Administration for Community Living. No national reckoning when misinformation about disability spreads on federal letterhead and leads to real-world harm. Harm like the little people I know who were harassed in airports after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) became a political target following the D.C plane crash when our president attributed the disaster to our community.
What we’re seeing now is the result of years of bipartisan disinvestment. It’s just happening louder, faster, and crueler than before.
This isn’t bureaucratic drift. It’s intentional. And it’s happening while the rest of the country posts inspirational quotes about inclusion.
I run New Disabled South with the mission of improving the lives of disabled people and building strong disability justice and rights movements in the South, and I can tell you: This moment is not about pride. It’s about survival.
The Trump administration recently directly attacked a federal employment program that helped place disabled people in jobs across agencies like the FAA. Instead of telling the truth, they called it a “diversity hiring” loophole and singled out specific disabilities, including dwarfism. The backlash from right-wing radical folks was immediate and violent. And still, no one covered it.
And yet, the rollback didn’t start this year. It didn’t even start with this administration. President Ronald Reagan, with a Republican Senate from 1981-1987, launched a major campaign to reduce the size of the federal government. Significant cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) led to hundreds of thousands of people losing disability benefits after aggressive reevaluations.
And now, anti-DEI rhetoric has escalated into anti-access policy. Entire programs and research centers have been shuttered under the guise of neutrality. Leaders who run centers for racial and disability justice are currently fighting lawsuits claiming that simply existing in these spaces is discriminatory. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so destructive.
The people affected by these attacks are the ones making our country more livable, accessible, and just. These aren’t abstract programs. These are lifelines. I know, because I grew up on them.
My parents relied on Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) to care for my siblings and me at home. We were triplets, all with cerebral palsy. Doctors encouraged my parents to put us into institutions. But because of HCBS and other programs, we weren’t institutionalized—we were raised in our own home, in our own community, with the people we love. I’m here because of that care. And I’m terrified that families like mine won’t get the same chance.
This is the part where I’m supposed to offer hope. But here’s the truth: We are being failed. And it’s time to name that, without softening it.
Disability justice is not a one-month-a-year conversation. It is not a post. It is not a panel. And it cannot be siloed off from broader fights for racial, gender, and economic equity. Being a part of this community, we are not a niche. We are a movement. This affects us all; more than 1 in 4 adults in the United States have some type of disability, and that’s not counting the number of people who have been and continue to be disabled from Covid-19. And we are all deeply, inextricably linked to every community being attacked right now.
When Black students lose access to equity programs, disabled students lose.
When LGBTQ+ protections are stripped away, disabled people lose.
When DEI offices are dissolved, accessibility gets erased too.
And when we talk about disability, we must also talk about race, poverty, gender, sexuality, and geography. Especially in the South, where I live and organize, policy decisions made in D.C. don’t just ripple—they rupture. The South has the nation’s highest rates of disability, and it’s been made clear with recent cuts to Medicaid and other essential programs that the federal government isn’t coming to save us. No matter who’s in charge, disability is too often treated as an afterthought at best or a political liability at worst. What we’re seeing now is the result of years of bipartisan disinvestment. It’s just happening louder, faster, and crueler than before.
We need care webs—mutual aid rooted in relationships, not rescue. These are informal, hyper-local networks where people look out for one another. Not just with money or donations, but with time, attention, and consistency. Someone to check in. Someone to help navigate a job search or bureaucratic nightmare. Someone to drive you to the doctor when paratransit doesn’t show up. Someone who knows your access needs and shows up anyway.
This isn’t about creating a perfect system. It’s about refusing to let each other fall through the cracks.
Building a care web can be as simple as texting a neighbor, posting in a local group, or organizing around one person’s immediate needs. You don’t have to be disabled to start one. You just have to decide that no one should be left behind because a government decided they didn’t matter.
These may seem like small acts, but they are how we survive. They are how we resist.
So this month, skip the slogans. Ask: Who do I know that needs care? Who will I support when the next cut comes? What am I building that lasts beyond this news cycle? Or this election cycle?
That’s the work. That’s the rage. And that’s how we move forward together.
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