United States- Queer Kids to be Placed in Anti-Queer Foster Homes Under New Executive Order

By Artemis T. Douglas, Jane Migliara Brigham

Yesterday, Nov. 13, President Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families.” The EO has two concerning sections; the first focusing on “faith” and “beliefs”, and the second focusing on “AI” and data.

For the first section of the EO, the President’s rhetoric is blowhardy. The first line reads, “ My Administration is dedicated to empowering mothers and fathers to raise their children in safe and loving homes.”

The EO continues to pay lip-service to the burdens on caseworkers and the real issues with the under-resourced foster care system in the United States. 

Towards the end of the first section, it reads, “Some jurisdictions and organizations maintain policies that discourage or prohibit qualified families from serving children in need as foster and adoptive parents because of their sincerely-held religious beliefs or adherence to basic biological truths.”

Extrapolating from this, the President is sanctioning foster service providers to place children in homes that are anti-trans and/or deeply religious, without concern for whether those family ideologies would harm the children involved. 

The EO continues, “Our Nation’s children and youth — and the families who care for them — deserve better.”

Another way to read this is that the President believes that children “deserve better” than safe, affirming households- and should instead be placed in fundamentalist anti-queer households that will harm them.

The EO is an attempt to fully de-secularize the child welfare system.

In a phrase, this is state-enforced corrective violence- that is, the administration is ordering the foster system to use violence against queer kids to “correct” for the existence of queer kids.

The risks which this policy would inflict on queer kids is substantial.  They could be forced to choose between a roof over their head and conversion therapy, or being homeless, with all the danger that comes with this.

According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, queer children make up 40% of all children who are sleeping on the street.

According to a report by the Trevor Project, transgender youth are 50% more likely to be homeless or to have unstable housing than cisgender youth.

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Supportive home environments can reduce the risks for trans youth of suicide significantly. Data from a Trevor Project report shows that highly supportive families lower the risks of suicide from 62% to 17% for trans kids under 13 and from 51% to 9% for trans teenagers.

The other concerning section covers a call to use Artificial Intelligence to streamline the bureaucratic process of matching foster kids to foster parents.  

In the context of the broader emphasis on matching kids with faith organizations, the most reasonable explanation for this is that it could serve as a means of obfuscating discriminatory practices and/or the process of placing queer kids under the guardianship of faith-based bigots.

In plain terms, the President is using executive force to erase queer kids. Whether that means they are closeted or they are killed doesn’t seem to matter to the administration.