Donald Trump’s Department of Justice issued a funding-withdrawal threat to The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) if they didn’t remove all LGBTQIA+ issues from its materials. The group complied with the administration’s demands, according to The Verge, NBC News and The Handbasket. From Adi Robertson at The Verge:
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a child safety nonprofit that works closely with the government and major tech platforms, has recently removed publications that reference queer and transgender children from its website. The removals come amid reports that NCMEC was ordered to cull mentions of LGBTQ+ issues under threat of losing government funding, part of President Donald Trump’s push to eradicate recognition of trans people in the US.
Marissa Kabas at The Handbasket did some of her own original reporting, and confirmed the report with multiple sources.
I also learned they were told to deadname trans kids in their reports (the practice of using a person’s birth name against their will and/or to misgender them.) This was an effort to force them into compliance with Trump’s executive order banning any mentions of “gender ideology”, but it was also in violation of the court order halting the federal funding freeze.
NCMEC is a private nonprofit corporation whose mission, as stated on its website, is (emphasis theirs) “to help find missing children, reduce child sexual exploitation, and prevent child victimization. Every child deserves a safe childhood.“
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
“Every child,” you say? Apparently not, if a child is so unlucky to exist outside parameters arbitrarily set by the Evangelical warlords “powering” Donald’s “movement.”
I’m not a lawyer, but this appears to cross several lines into illegality. First, as Kabas noted, a court ordered Donald’s mob to cut the crap with funding freezes—and the removal demand, at least partially, would appear to fall in that category.
Pressuring a private nonprofit (some might say “coercing” or “extorting,” both of which seem more apt to me) can also be illegal if states or entities are left with no real alternative to comply. In my research, I found a piece by Amy Howe in SCOTUSblog from 2012 in which she writes about right wingers challenging constitutionality of an Affordable Care Act provision expanding eligibility for Medicaid. She writes:
when Congress gives the states money with strings attached, can Congress eventually reach the point at which it put so many strings on the money that it violates the Constitution, because Congress is using the strings to accomplish things that it couldn’t require the states to do without the money? In two cases nearly fifty years apart, the Court has suggested that these kinds of conditions can amount to unconstitutional ‘coercion’ on states
Of course, in this case America’s top law-enforcement agency is doing the potential lawbreaking in pressuring a private nonprofit, so there will be no remedy if and until a) certain Republicans grow a conscience or b) Democrats gain control of either or both the House and Senate.
