Jonathan P. Baird

I wanted to announce that my ebook Defiance is beautiful is now live and available through the Amazon kindle store. I am planning to do an audio book version and a hardback or paperback version too.

One of the less-publicized aspects of the Trump regime has been its war on science and public health. The Trump mission would appear to be wrecking science. The regime has gutted the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, by ousting all 17 independent scientists and medical experts who comprised the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. Since January 2025, CDC has lost just over a quarter of its federal employee workforce. That is an almost irreplaceable braintrust of knowledge and experience.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, fired the CDC Director Susan Monarez last August after she refused to accept political interference with the agency. RFK Jr., an individual with zero medical credentials, makes decisions based on his subjective feelings – not science.

We witnessed a ridiculous spectacle on August 10 when Trump signed an Executive Order about vaccines. He called for splitting up the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine into three separate single-disease shots. He also instructed the Department of Justice to sue states that fail to provide wide medical and religious exemptions for mandated school vaccinations.

There is no new evidence showing the MMR vaccine doesn’t work. The MMR vaccine has been incredibly effective for decades. One thing that neither Trump nor RFK Jr. mentioned was that there are no separate vaccine shots for each of the three MMR diseases. They don’t exist.

We are currently in the middle of a raging measles outbreak. Back in 2000, the disease had been declared eliminated in the United States. More cases have been recorded this year than in any year since 1991. Nearly 2300 measles cases were reported last year and the total number of measles cases in 2026 has already surpassed that. Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says:

“This essentially is a public health failure, and it’s avoidable.”

Trump’s Executive Order makes no sense. It can only create confusion as there are no separate MMR vaccines. Separate vaccines are not close to happening as drug companies would have to go through a long process creating and testing vaccines and holding clinical trials.

Too many people are not getting vaccinated with the MMR vaccine which explains the measles outbreak. I think anti-science attitudes are causing and could cause a tremendous loss of life. That happened in the past before the MMR vaccine became widely available.

The anti-vaccine movement has been entirely enmeshed with the far right. Attacking science in the name of health freedom is part of MAGA fascism. Just the idea of many more shots for separate vaccines is almost a guarantee of more sickness. Such a policy would require many more doctor visits, something that would result in less vaccine coverage. Adding appointments and needle sticks translates into missed dosages.

For anyone who watched Trump’s performance around the anti-vaccine Executive Order, you had to note his stating vaccinations were the size of soda bottles. He talked about “vats of vaccines” being pumped into children’s bodies. Doses of childhood vaccines are generally about a tenth of a teaspoon.

Trump also baselessly concluded that rising rates of autism were connected to vaccines. That has been extensively studied and debunked. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Also the U.S. is not an outlier in the number of vaccines given, Vaccines protect children.

What is not appreciated by the health freedom advocates is the critically important role vaccines have played in expanding life expectancy in higher income countries. I saw an infectious disease specialist, Dr. MarkAlain Dery, say that the two most important reasons humans live beyond 40 to 50 to 70 to 90 are vaccines and clean water.

Trump’s Executive Order will likely kill people. Measles is no joke. There is a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis that can happen 7 to 10 years after someone contracts measles. The condition is like a time bomb and causes a drastic neurological decline that is fatal. Getting the MMR vaccine is the best prevention.

I think the reason Trump is talking about vaccines is to distract attention away from his many failures including the war in Iran, his failure to address the economy and the affordability crisis and his continuing effort to hide the Epstein files. With the midterm elections approaching Trump is desperate to change the subject away from these failures. He knows that if there is a blue wave and Democrats sweep, investigations will begin into his bottomless corruption and scandals.

Starting with COVID-19, vaccine refusal became a leading cause of loss of human life. More Americans died from COVD-19 vaccine refusal than died from diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease based on CDC data. Vaccine denialism around measles is a continuation of this pro-death trend.

Publicity about ICE has left out one important component of ICE’s activities. They are targeting for detention and removal immigrant children who entered the United States unaccompanied by a parent. These children were often fleeing persecution, trafficking and abuse. They were trying to achieve safe harbor and asylum here in the U.S.

Since early in 2025, the top immigration official in the Trump regime, Stephen Miller, has made it clear that arresting and deporting immigrant children was the regime’s high priority. He has repeatedly been explicit about that. Yet, the vast majority of unaccompanied minors being removed from the U.S. have no criminal history. They are often trying to escape criminals.

What we are seeing is an effort to dismantle all legal protections for those children. Under the federal court consent decree in the Flores case, children received legal assistance. They also had limits placed on the length of their detention.

The Trump regime is shredding their legal obligations under Flores and is actively fighting to terminate that consent decree. That settlement had established nationwide minimum standards governing the treatment, placement and release of children held for prolonged periods in detention facilities. Flores gave counsel access to detention facilities and it allowed lawyers the ability to monitor conditions in which children were held.

ICE and its sister collaborating agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement or ORR, have been trying to scuttle the right to counsel established by Flores. ORR has refused to pay the lawyers representing 25,000 immigrant children for services already rendered. The government owes these lawyers $65 million. ORR let the contract with lawyer non-profit groups representing minors expire. The lawyers have appealed and the case is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Trump regime is trying to make legal providers hand over confidential client data in order to get a contract renewal. They wanted to make legal providers submit information that would allow ICE to track down unaccompanied minor children living in the U.S. It puts the lawyers in a compromised situation. They would have to sell out their clients to continue representation.

Imagine trials where the government has a lawyer and toddlers en masse appear without counsel on the other side. That is a scenario the Trump regime loves. There would be no lawyers to report when kids are deported from the U.S. on secret midnight flights. Many of the children being deported are too young to understand what is being done to them.

This scenario happened on Labor Day last year and only the fact that the flight was leaked to lawyers saved the kids from deportation to Guatemala. The lawyers filed an emergency motion and a federal judge stopped the flight The government wanted to swiftly deport 600 unaccompanied children. The government woke the children in the middle of the night, put them in vans and took them to the airport. The judge saved them. The government wants lawyers out of the way as they blocked and impeded their deportation schemes.

Adam Sendukas, a lawyer at the Galveston-Houston Immigration Representation Project has said:

“We know that without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the U.S. less than 1% of the time.”

The government has done everything to stack the deck in immigration court, including firing over 100 immigration judges. The Trump regime has advertised to hire “deportation judges” in place of immigration judges. The quality of justice immigrant children are receiving is beyond an embarrassment. It is kangaroo court where so-called “judges” give cursory examination to valid asylum claims before ordering deportation for masses of children.

Fast tracking deportation is the plan. Since the start of Trump’s second term, deportations are triple the rate they were during the final years of Trump’s first term. ProPublica says the federal government has been deporting 10,000 immigrant minors a month.

They gave a small Houston-based law firm with ties to Trump $150 million to represent unaccompanied children. The firm has no discernible experience in immigration law or child welfare. The contract covers the 1800 children being held in shelters. It doesn’t cover the 22,000 children who are not in Health and Human Services-connected shelters.

Instead of competent, experienced lawyers, the government is using Trump-friendly lawyers who have never demonstrated any commitment to the interests of immigrant children. Why would anyone give a contract like this to lawyers with no relevant background?

Detention is dangerous for children. Under Flores, children were not supposed to be held for prolonged or indefinite periods in incarceration. Much evidence shows that such detention inflicts toxic stress that damages mental health and long-term well-being. Detention for kids is not supposed to be carceral but ICE and ORR are leaving children alone in jail for months.

The Trump regime is looking to build a new mass deportation facility for kids in Alexandria Louisiana that is located on a toxic waste site which contains high concentrations of PFAS “forever chemicals” in its groundwater.

ICE is paying bounties to local police to track down and find children they can then deport. This is a Faustian bargain. Once kids are found, they are being sent back to the cartels and traffickers they had tried to escape.

The harm toward children that ICE is doing has been under-reported. They are literally destroying the lives of thousands.. Our much vaunted free press has failed to highlight this story. You might think an immigration system would feel some compulsion to protect the most vulnerable and allow viable legal claims an opportunity to be heard. That is not the case in America in 2026. The government agenda is deportation for as many as possible as quickly as possible.