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Dr. Eve Krief

By William Stieglitz

On Thursday, May 29, close to 100 people lined the streets outside Congressman Nick LaLota’s (R, NY1) Hauppauge office to protest planned cuts to Medicaid and other health programs under the One Big Beautiful reconciliation bill, passed by the House of Representatives the week before.

The rally’s speakers included grassroots organizers and health care workers, who argued that the bill LaLota voted for would cut health care funding for Long Islanders while giving tax breaks to billionaires. “The budget is a gift to the rich and a slap in the face to workers,” said Diane Cantave from Long Island Jobs with Justice. “We reject the idea that working families must carry the burden while the wealthy hoard more.”

The bill would place restrictions on Medicaid, including new work requirements to qualify, as well as on the SNAP and CHIP programs for food stamps and children’s health insurance. It would also reduce Medicaid funding by 10% to states like New York that provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants.

Dr. Eve Krief, speaking on behalf of Engage Long Island and the American Academy of Pediatrics, warned the bill would result in “tens of thousands of people right here on Long Island” losing their health care. “It’s going to raise our premiums regardless of what insurance you have, because hospitals are gonna be forced to provide uncompensated care to the uninsured… It’s gonna strain our hospital systems to the breaking point. They’re gonna be forced to cut staffing, and eventually, they’re gonna have to close their doors.”

Responding later, LaLota said, “You’re not gonna find anywhere that there’s a Medicaid cut” in the bill, describing the legislation as a commitment to Bill Clinton-era work requirements. “The main part of what this bill did was requiring able-bodied adults, so not pregnant women, not disabled people, not seniors… able-bodied adults to work or seek work for eighty hours a month. That burden is not too large to ask your neighbors to pay for your health care.” The other major aspect of the bill, he said, is that it will “check everybody’s qualifications” for Medicaid, and in doing so, “root out the waste, fraud and abuse in the system.”

However, Planned Parenthood Coordinator Kaitlyn Pawlukojc argued that the bill would also bar Medicaid funding toward Planned Parenthood so long as it provides its current abortions services. “Last year, Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic completed over 19,500 visits for Suffolk County residents,” she said, “providing vital health care like birth control, STI testing and treatment, and cancer screenings.” She added defunding Planned Parenthood would cost taxpayers “nearly 300 million dollars,” referencing the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

A further concern, touched on by Gender Equality New York Executive Director Juli Grey-Owens, is how the bill could threaten gender-affirming care for transgender youth. “For many, transitioning is crucial to continuing to live,” she said, adding that the surgery is a medical need for trans people suffering from gender dysphoria, and reduces suicide and depression. “We do not ask for special treatment. We ask to live safely, truthfully, and equally.” LaLota, when asked about the bill’s blocking of funds for gender-affirming care, stated, “I do not support using federal taxpayer dollars for transgender surgery.” Jennifer Capotorto, a local mother of two, said she worried about her children losing access to health care, as well as the impact for the rest of her family. “My sister will no longer be able to afford her rheumatoid arthritis medication and will live in chronic pain. In February, we lost our Navy vet father, and he suffered for months before his passing in a for-profit rehab that was neglecting him simply because they were understaffed.”

The bill also brings back SALT deductions, quadrupling the current $10,000 cap to $40,000, something many Long Islanders have argued for. 

 However, Suffolk Progressives founder Shoshana Hershkowitz said she does not support “gutting Medicaid” in exchange. “We can actually get our SALT deductions back, all they have to do is let the first Trump tax cuts expire.” Following the speeches, she and others marched to drop off letters to the congressman, also leaving salt packets while saying “Keep your SALT.” While the last group of people were dropping off letters, LaLota was walking to his office and spoke briefly with the group in defense of the bill before going inside.

These are arguments Krief touched on when she spoke, but claimed they were misleading. “The overwhelming majority of people on Medicaid do work,” she said. “So we’ll have these funding cuts without the actual [removal of] waste, fraud and abuse to make up for those cuts, which will then impact us all.”

The reconciliation bill now goes to the Senate, where it awaits its next vote.

Lights for Liberty Vigil

By Leah Chiappino

“I’m hungry here at Clint all the time … I’m too scared to ask the officials for any more food,” a 12-year-old boy stated in testimony read at the Lights for Liberty candlelight vigil, held July 12 in Huntington Village. It was one of more than a thousand vigils held both nationally and internationally in protest of family separations and the conditions at the United States-Mexico border, where children are being held in cages.  

Lights for LIberty Vigil

Local pediatrician Dr. Eve Krief helped coordinate the event as founder of Long Island Communities Against Hate in a joint effort with multiple other organizations and churches that include the Unitarian Universalist Church of Huntington and St. John’s Episcopal Church. 

“My mother taught me silence is complicity and if we don’t speak out, we are all responsible,” she said. “If we let the inhumanity go on, we lose our own humanity.”

Krief’s own mother was a Holocaust survivor who lost both parents and two sisters during Hitler’s reign.

During Friday’s rally, the names of children who died in detention facilities were recited, as folk musicians performed. 

Local teenagers read the written testimonies of immigrant children. A 17-year-old pregnant mother described guards taking blankets and mattresses from detainees at 3 a.m., leaving babies as young as two months old sleeping on a concrete floor. 

“I think guards act this way to punish us,” she stated.

The testimonies read also included the experience of a 16-year-old mother, who described sleeping on floor mats with aluminum blankets, and not being offered a shower for days. “They took our baby’s diapers, formula and all of our belongings,” she stated. “There is no soap and our clothes are dirty.” 

A 17-year-old boy’s testimony described conditions at the Ursula detention center were a toilet sits out in the open inside the “cage” where he was being held.  He lacked not only privacy but also access to soap, paper towels, a toothbrush and toothpaste.

Families seeking asylum at Border detention center on July 13 in McAllen, Texas

Another mother stated that when her baby became sick, the guard told her to “just deal with it.” She asked for help two more times, then broke down in tears before officers took the child to a doctor. Other testimonies that were read also contained reports of sick children being denied care, with another guard saying, “She doesn’t have the face of a sick baby. She doesn’t need to see a doctor,” after a mother reported her baby was vomiting and had diarrhea. 

Some children described children being separated from their parents. Children as young as two years old were left alone and crying, only to be mocked and ignored by the guards.

At least seven children have died in custody of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in the past year, according to government officials, compared to zero in the last decade. 

“We want our country to once again represent the words inscripted on the Statue of Liberty that welcomes the tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We want our country to welcome those legally seeking asylum in our country as they escape danger and violence,” Krief said. “Instead, however, we are seeing children and families held in inhumane and overcrowded conditions and we are seeing ongoing family separation.”

The groups participating in Lights for Liberty demand that changes be made at the border, which include improving children’s living conditions at both border and detention centers, and releasing the 13,000 children living in detention facilities who don’t know when they will be released.

Krief said many have family members who willing to take them in but are not permitted to. 

Protesters are also demanding that the administration return to the policies of the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 provision that detailed the procedure for unaccompanied minors entering the United States. The policy was reversed by the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, a crackdown on illegal immigration that ultimately led to family separation. 

Flores, according to Krief, limited the time children spend in U.S. Customs and Border Patrol custody to 72 hours, compared to the current status of children who stay in custody for weeks. The Flores agreement also states that children should not be kept in detention facilities for more than 20 days, according to the law, but minors have reported staying for upwards of nine months. Lights for Liberty also demands Customs and Border Patrol allow congressional visits to detention facilities in order to increase oversight. Final demands include access to pediatric care and other necessities, not separating children from their parents unless a welfare agency deems them unfit, and the accountability of people who carried out secret separations, even before the zero-tolerance program, which has led to separated children who may never be reunited with their parents.

“My hope in all of these events is to increase public awareness and to get people to understand this should not be about politics, but humanity,” she said. “The conditions these children are kept in borders on child abuse. Looking back, this will be a dark stain on our country’s history because we are traumatizing children and families who are only legally seeking asylum in our country after escaping dangerous conditions in their own countries.”

However, in response to backlash against people like U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx), who referred to the detention centers as concentration camps, she feels the situation is too dire to play politics and worry about labels. 

“There’s been a lot of questions from people about us referring to these detention centers as concentration camps, which they do meet the definition for, but I feel if we wait for perfect analogies then it will be too late.”

Krief, who sits on the executive committee of the Long Island Queens and Brooklyn chapter of American Academy of Pediatrics, added that the health effects of the conditions in detention facilities are detrimental and potentially irreversible. 

“As a pediatrician I am appalled and horrified at the conditions that we’re keeping children in,” she said. “We’re emotionally traumatizing them, and we’re physically traumatizing them.” 

Children are experiencing Toxic Stress Syndrome, she said, as a result of extreme stress, which changes the architecture of the brain and affects children the rest of their lives.

Congress has attempted to remedy conditions at the border, according to a New York Times report, having passed a bill granting $4.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid to the border, which included improvements to hygiene, medical care and training for workers along with limiting a detention center stay of a child to 90 days unless no other facilities are available. 

Krief feels this is not enough. 

“There’s no oversight to where the funds are going,” she said. “It doesn’t increase the transparency in these facilities.”

Krief encourages the public to call their representatives in order to protest the conditions, a notion that was advocated at the vigil.

“This is an emergent human rights violation,” she said. “Unless they hear from all of their constituents on both sides of the aisle, every single day, demanding they address the inhumanity, they won’t do anything, which is unacceptable and shameful.”

Photos from Steven Zaitz and Rep. Tom Suozzi’s Office (detention center)

 

Correction:  The printed version of this story erroneously referred to toxic stress syndrome as toxic shock syndrome.