This week at Unbreaking, December 19
Our final briefing of 2025 covers updates in immigration, data security, medical research funding, and brand-new material in trans healthcare — it’s an unusually long one, but we found some good news to mix in with the bad. We’re also pointing to some of the year’s standout reporting and analysis, without which we would have nothing to compile for you. All our gratitude goes out to the tireless (but actually very tired) reporters, editors, and analysts seeking clarity and sense in this chaotic year.
We’ll be back on January 8, and we hope you are safe and well.
Immigration
The administration has doubled down on two major parts of its immigration agenda: violent crackdowns in “blue” US cities and chaotic attacks on refugees and other people pursuing lawful immigration. We also saw a lot of successful resistance, in both courts and community responses. As always, you can visit our chronological Immigration timeline for much (much) more information.
Immigration enforcement
The administration has moved ICE and CBP squads into New Orleans and Minneapolis–Saint Paul and continues to ramp up arrests and detentions across the US, including in Memphis, New York City, and Northern California. ProPublica reports that federal enforcers have detained more than 600 immigrant children, more than the previous four years combined.
We’ve been concerned for months about the vast surveillance capacity and violent national police force the administration is building under the aegis of immigration enforcement. Those capacities are expanding far beyond their original — alleged — targets. At the end of November, the Brennan Center for Justice reported on the administration’s plans to focus surveillance on US citizens who oppose its agenda and to criminalize political dissenters as “domestic terrorists.”
Criminalizing and deporting lawfully present immigrants
Since the moment he was inaugurated, President Trump has been trying to transform hundreds of thousands of lawfully present adults and children into “illegal immigrants” who can be arrested, denied due process, imprisoned in conditions Amnesty International calls “a human rights disaster,” and deported. The administration has ended Temporary Protected Status designation — a humanitarian immigration status for people fleeing war, persecution, and starvation — for nine countries, including Haiti, El Salvador, Ukraine, Venezuela, and most recently, Myanmar and South Sudan. An estimated 675,000 people who fled some of the deadliest conditions on Earth are now in danger of deportation.
Status clawbacks are also affecting people well into the process of pursuing legal residence or even citizenship. After the arrest of an Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard troops in Washington, DC, the administration paused all pending immigration applications from 19 countries and canceled naturalization ceremonies for aspiring new citizens from countries on the list. The next day, Trump delivered a racist and dehumanizing tirade about Somali refugees from the Oval Office.
Pushback and gratitude
Federal judges have ruled against the administration over and over, blocking warrantless immigration arrests in Washington, DC; mandatory imprisonment of immigrants previously eligible for bond hearings; and the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles (already blocked in Chicago and Portland, OR). A judge ordered the government to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia from detention and prohibited his re-arrest. And though protests and community defense actions — whether big and organized or small and spontaneous — aren’t an easy fit on a timeline, they’ve also been a huge part of the pushback against brutal and often arbitrary enforcement actions.
We are grateful for the work of immigration reporters in newsrooms big and small throughout this year, including those in local independent outlets like Block Club Chicago, THE CITY, LA Taco, and Mission Local. We also appreciate analyses from the Brennan Center and the American Immigration Council and deep, focused investigations from 404 Media, The Intercept, The Marshall Project, and ProPublica.
Data security
The year in data security has been characterized by astonishing data grabs, consolidation across federal agencies, and the expansion of mass surveillance. We’ve also seen steady erosion of cybersecurity and data protections within the government itself — a change that opens up all of our personal information to misuse and theft.
Data grabs
This month, Customs and Border Protection proposed to collect much more data (and in much more invasive ways) from would-be tourists, building on earlier efforts to collect biometric data from immigrants. And as the administration continues to share all the data it can get its hands on with immigration enforcement, the TSA is handing airline passenger data directly to ICE. Trump’s Department of Justice is also suing 18 states for access to their complete voter rolls. Mother Jones recently published an in-depth look at what the administration may be able to do with voter data it does manage to obtain.
Institutional spine
Some institutions are pushing back: The Government Accountability Office is investigating Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte’s alleged misuse of its data in his targeting of prominent Trump opponents for mortgage fraud prosecutions. And local governments from Charlottesville, VA, to Flagstaff, AZ, are ending contracts for Flock’s AI-powered license plate surveillance system, which produces a huge trove of data that local police have been sharing with ICE.
Zine time (and thanks)
Finally, we are excited for the upcoming release of 404 Media’s printed ’zine on surveillance technologies used by ICE and ways that people can fight back. The publication will be distributed at an upcoming January 4 fundraiser in LA for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and is available for pre-order now.
We appreciate all the in-depth reporting that outlets like 404 Media, WIRED, and the Intercept have been doing on the surveillance technology being used to target and track millions of people, particularly immigrants. We have also relied on reporting from Stateline and the Brennan Center for Justice on federal efforts to gather voting data and dozens of other newsrooms tracking important local stories all year. Thank you to all the reporters and editors and other writers who make our work possible.
Medical research funding
After grant reinstatements, the total estimate of canceled and delayed NIH funding this year has dropped from more than $5 billion to $730 million. However, the administration’s manipulation of medical research agendas via funding control looks likely to continue or intensify in the coming year. We’re tracking it all on our Medical Research Funding page.
Political interference in research
In response to successful legal challenges, the administration appears to be systematizing previously slapdash attacks on research it ideologically opposes. This year, despite insistence that there is no list of banned words, applicants and program officers raced to replace specific keywords in proposals in order to secure funding. Now, a new internal memo obtained by STAT prescribes the use of “computational text analysis tools” to flag grants containing certain words and ensure comprehensive ideological alignment of funded projects. The memo directs NIH staff to negotiate with applicants to reshape their research to suit the administration’s political priorities, and it lists poverty, employment, and immigration as areas not to be studied as factors in health.
Pushback and resilience efforts
Meanwhile, Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) has introduced impeachment articles against Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing his actions as a threat to public health, and former NIH official Jeanne Marrazzo is suing the administration over her dismissal. And some state and regional medical research efforts will benefit from expertise purged from the federal government: Fired CDC director Susan Monarez and former CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry have been hired to help develop California’s Public Health Network Innovation Exchange.
Our issue team is grateful for the journalists who have published essential coverage of political interference with medical research funding. STAT has been an essential resource. We particularly appreciated their series titled “American Science, Shattered,” on the threats posed to science funding, early-career scientists, and transgender and nonbinary researchers. NPR has also humanized the issue, as with their story on renowned cancer researcher Joan Brugge.
Trans Healthcare
The federal government has pulled many different levers over the past year to make gender-affirming care more difficult and dangerous to receive and provide. This week, we’ve pushed a huge update to our issue page, including a brand-new timeline and a rewritten explainer page to help us all understand them.
The administration’s early attacks were predictable: They began with channels the government directly controls, like healthcare for people in the military and in federal prisons, health insurance for federal employees, and administrative rules governing Affordable Care Act coverage. But they have also found plenty of alternative approaches, and this week, the federal government introduced several new “side door” attacks.
On Wednesday, December 17, the GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for youth and classify providing it as a felony. This follows months of targeted activity at the DOJ, the FBI, and even the FTC in efforts to portray life-saving, best-practice healthcare as a crime. Earlier this year, the federal government sent over 20 subpoenas to clinics and care providers who offer gender-affirming care. So far, two of those subpoenas (in Boston and Philadelphia) have been quashed.
Yesterday, on December 18, the Department of Health and Human Services released a proposed rule (PDF) that would strip Medicare and Medicaid payments for all patients from any hospital that provides gender-affirming care to patients under 19. This would destroy most healthcare facilities’ ability to operate and follows many months of threats to financially ruin university hospitals that offer this care.
Both of this week’s news items don’t yet change policy. The new bill has to pass in the Senate to go into effect, and the proposed Medicare and Medicaid rules now have a comment period — and will certainly be challenged in court.
This brings us to a tragic reality in the current state of trans healthcare: Most of the administration’s attempts to destroy gender-affirming care have technically failed. Judges have ruled against them and ordered them to be halted. But in practice, they have had their intended effect. Providers across the country have complied even when the attacks have been ruled illegal and cut their gender-affirming services, often specifically citing federal pressure and threats. We don’t know exactly how many clinics have stopped providing gender-affirming care, but we know it’s more than twenty. In some cases, these clinics are the only option for trans folks in a given area.
We send our immense gratitude to all the reporters, editors, and analysts who have worked so hard this year to understand and explain the consequences of the dozens of confusing attacks on gender-affirming care. We’ll be back next year to pick up where we left off.