My daughter has a life.
That sentence should not be remarkable. For most of American history, it would have been. The Trump administration, it seems, would like to go back.
My eldest daughter turned 25 in September. We had a St. Louis Cardinals-themed birthday party — chocolate cake, her favorite — and she stood at the counter and helped me frost it. She took enormous pride in that.
She should. My daughter has Down syndrome. She lives in our community. Several days a week, she volunteers — real work, work that matters, work that people count on her to show up and do.
She has friends she makes plans with, a life with texture, routine and meaning. She is a full person living a satisfying life. That is not an accident. It is the result of decades of advocacy, landmark law and the simple moral premise that people with disabilities belong in the world, not apart from it.
Recently, I learned that Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, was the driving force behind a Justice Department memo that would dismantle the legal foundation of exactly that premise.
The memo, issued June 18, argues that neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor the Rehabilitation Act requires states to provide community-based services to people with disabilities.
It takes direct aim at Olmstead v. L.C., the 1999 Supreme Court decision that generations of families like mine have relied on — the ruling that said unnecessary institutional isolation is discrimination.
Miller’s memo argues that the court’s holding was narrower than anyone understood and that “what counts as adequate justification” for institutionalization “remains an open question.”
In plain language, it means states could stop funding the day programs, supported employment, home care and community supports that allow people like my daughter to live among us — and face no federal accountability for doing so.
It means the alternative — the institution, the facility, the place where people with disabilities were warehoused for most of American history in conditions documented to be cruel and sometimes fatal — becomes legally permissible again.
The memo itself acknowledges it is “out of step with the common understanding” of Olmstead in federal courts. They know. They did it anyway.
The cruel irony is that community-based care costs Medicaid significantly less than institutional care. This is not a fiscal rescue. It is not about saving money.
The memo arrives alongside something else: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut Medicaid funding by an estimated $911 billion over a decade. Medicaid is the primary source of funding for the community-based services that keep people like my daughter in their communities.
So the money is being cut, and the legal requirement to provide alternatives is being stripped away at the same time. What’s left when both are gone?
And what kind of government looks at my daughter’s life and sees a problem to be solved by separation? What kind of adviser sits in the West Wing and decides that the answer to homelessness, to mental illness, to disability, is to put people away somewhere out of sight?
In 1999, the Supreme Court called unnecessary institutionalization what it is: discrimination.
That finding did not require a constitutional amendment. It required decency. Justices appointed by presidents of both parties looked at the evidence of what institutions had done to human beings and said: not again.
Stephen Miller looked at the same history and saw a matter of dispute.
My daughter’s life is not a point of contention. Neither is the obligation of the government to protect it.
As of this writing, the memo has not been challenged in court — because it isn’t law. It is a legal opinion, not a statute, and it cannot overturn a Supreme Court decision. Olmstead remains binding precedent. Courts are still required to honor it.
The immediate danger is not a court ruling. It is silence: the Justice Department simply stepping back from its role as federal enforcer of Olmstead claims, withdrawing from existing consent decrees, and leaving families to fight alone in courtrooms without the government on their side.
There is also a case to watch. Texas and eight other states are actively challenging the integration mandate in Texas v. Kennedy, arguing it is unconstitutional. The federal government, which for 27 years under presidents of both parties defended community integration in court, has now aligned itself with the plaintiffs seeking to dismantle it.
Disability advocacy organizations are mobilizing for litigation. Congressional Democrats have signaled interest in oversight hearings. The coming months will test how far this administration intends to push.
My daughter will keep volunteering. She will keep showing up, doing work that matters, living her life among her neighbors, family and friends. What is being tested is whether 50 years of hard-won freedom from institutions was a promise or just a pause.
©2026 STLtoday.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
