But ... What Rights Have You Lost?

An answer from a man who gets to choose his battles

Jun 08, 2026

Every time I post something critical of this administration, someone shows up in the comments with a question that sounds reasonable but rarely is:

What rights have YOU lost?

It is a fair question.

I am a middle-aged white man living in South Florida. I have the privilege of getting to choose which policies touch my life and which ones I can ignore. I can scroll past the immigration news and feel nothing close to fear. I can walk into a federal building without wondering if I will walk back out. I can drive through my neighborhood without my skin triggering someone’s calculation about whether I belong here.

My wife does not have that option. My stepsons do not have that option. They are brown-skinned. The world reads them differently than it reads me, and this administration has worked to widen that gap, not bridge it.

So when someone asks what rights have I lost, it implies how does this affect me personally? And the answer is: less than it should.

I believe the privilege I enjoy should be used to help others. I believe it is the work I owe all my kids, my family, and anyone else within earshot of these words.

The Trump Action Tracker, maintained by epidemiologist Christina Pagel using verified news sources, has documented 3,368 actions (as of June 8, 2026) by this administration since January 20, 2025 — spread across ten categories: undermining democracy, suppressing dissent, hollowing out federal institutions, controlling information, politicizing science and health, attacking education and culture, dismantling civil rights, corruption, aggressive foreign policy, and anti-immigration nationalism. I break down a handful of those actions below.

The Legal Challenges

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution contains 43 words that have governed American citizenship since 1868: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born here if neither parent is a citizen or permanent resident. Every federal court that has reviewed it has blocked it.

One judge, John Coughenour of Seattle, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 1, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, with most justices appearing skeptical of the administration’s position. A ruling is expected by summer.

But the fight is real, even if the challenge is a long shot. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to rewrite the foundational promise of American citizenship. If the order stands, a birth certificate in this country will no longer be enough. Parents will have to prove their own status every time a child is born. Some children, born on American soil, would be rendered stateless.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement set a reported daily arrest quota of 3,000 people and began arresting individuals at courthouses, at the very appointments they were legally required to attend. The Department of Justice later admitted in court that the memo used to justify those courthouse arrests “does not and has never applied” to them. In September 2025, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order allowing ICE to make stops based on “apparent race,” Spanish-language use, and what kind of work a person appears to do. Justice Sotomayor dissented directly: the ruling, she wrote, lets agents seize anyone who “looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.”

That is a description of many people I care about.

The administration also reinstated a ban on transgender people serving in the military. On June 1, 2026, a federal appeals court ruled in a 2-1 decision that the ban is unconstitutional, finding it “appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” Those are a federal court’s words, not mine. The ban technically remains in effect for new recruits while the administration seeks further review, but current service members named in the suit are protected for now. The fight continues.

Then there is what happened on April 29, 2026. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling along conservative lines, issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais and effectively finished what it started in 2013. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that prohibits congressional maps drawn to dilute the voting power of Black and brown communities, is now, in the words of Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, “all but a dead letter.” The Brennan Center says the ruling makes challenging racial discrimination in redistricting “all but impossible.” The Campaign Legal Center called it a historic blow that clears the way for states to engage in vote dilution targeting Black and brown voters.

The ruling landed less than six weeks before a midterm election-year redistricting fight that the administration had already set in motion to protect Republican House majorities. In 2013, the Court removed the guardrail that had prevented discriminatory voting rules from taking effect. Now they have removed the mechanism that challenged them after the fact. The Voting Rights Act still exists on paper, but its teeth are gone.

And First Amendment protections have been tested in ways that should trouble anyone who believes in free expression. The administration has targeted law firms that represented its opponents, stripped security clearances, detained and sought to deport student protesters including a lawful permanent resident named Mahmoud Khalil, and what a Reuters investigation documented as a retribution campaign against at least 470 people, organizations, and institutions, running at an average of more than one target per day.

The Economy

On July 4, 2025, the President signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation cuts roughly $1.06 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces over ten years. KFF puts the Medicaid-only reduction at approximately $911 billion. The CBO projects the law will leave 10 million more people without insurance by 2034. When you add in the expiration of enhanced ACA premium subsidies that Congress allowed to lapse, independent researchers estimate the total newly uninsured could reach 14 to 17 million people.

Some of those cuts are already in effect. At the start of 2026, the enhanced federal funding that helped states cover Medicaid expansion costs was eliminated. States are now absorbing a larger share, and some are already reconsidering their expansion programs. Two rural hospitals, John Fitzgibbon Memorial in Missouri and Mizell Memorial in Alabama, filed for bankruptcy citing OBBBA cuts as contributing factors. By December 2026, states must conduct Medicaid eligibility redeterminations every six months rather than annually. Policy analysts describe this not as an administrative change but as a mechanism designed to remove people from coverage, including people who remain technically eligible but cannot navigate the paperwork.

The same bill cut at least $120 billion from SNAP, the food assistance program that serves 42 million Americans. The USDA estimated the law’s expanded work requirements will push 2.4 million people out of the program over the next decade. The CBO projects more than 2 million people will lose SNAP access in a typical month. And during last fall’s 43-day government shutdown, the administration suspended SNAP benefits entirely for the first time in the program’s history. The USDA website stated, plainly: “The well has run dry.” Two federal judges ruled the freeze unlawful. Benefits were eventually restored.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has returned more than $21 billion to more than 200 million consumers who were victimized by financial institutions, was effectively shut down. Staff were placed on leave, headquarters closed, contracts canceled. A court initially blocked the dismantling, but the appeals court allowed layoffs to proceed. The OBBBA then cut the agency’s funding authority in half.

Tariffs have raised the average household’s costs by somewhere between $1,000 and $1,700 per year, depending on which economic model you trust. Those costs fall hardest on working families who spend a higher share of their income on goods.

The Promise

The United States holds a premise: the idea that regardless of where you come from or what you look like, you belong here, you are seen here, and the government is working toward making sure you have a fair shot at what this country can offer.

The administration eliminated all federal DEI offices on day one. It directed the Attorney General to investigate private-sector diversity programs and threatened organizations with the withdrawal of federal contracts and grants. A federal court found one enforcement provision to be “textbook viewpoint-based discrimination.” The corporate retreat was swift, with Target, Walmart, Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Google among those rolling back diversity commitments.

Environmental justice offices and programs were shut down and grants funded under the Inflation Reduction Act were canceled. Communities of color, which according to Earthjustice already face 38 percent higher nitrogen dioxide exposure than white communities, lost the federal infrastructure built over decades to monitor and address that disparity.

The Department of Education is being dismantled. Staff were cut from roughly 4,000 to 2,000. Major programs including Title I funding for low-income schools and English-instruction support are being transferred to other agencies. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which oversees compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, was gutted in October 2025. Congress has held funding levels steady for now, but the oversight capacity has been hollowed out.

On March 1, 2025, an executive order declared English the official language of the United States and rescinded the 2000 requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to people with limited English proficiency. The administration directed agencies to minimize multilingual services, suspended the federal language-access website, and canceled translation contracts. There are roughly 25 to 28 million limited-English-proficient people in this country. The White House Spanish-language website was taken down January 21, 2025, the first day back in office. There was no announcement.

And voting. A repeated call to federalize elections. An executive order, and proposed legislation (the SAVE America Act) that attempted to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. A federal judge blocked that provision of the executive order permanently in October 2025, finding the president lacks authority over election rules. The companion SAVE America Act passed the House and so far has stalled in the Senate. The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million voting-age citizens do not have ready access to proof of citizenship. Those citizens are disproportionately younger, lower-income, people of color, and married women who changed their names.

The Answer

So what rights did I lose?

Honestly, fewer than I should have. Because I am white, because I speak English without an accent, because I hold a passport that no one is trying to re-litigate in federal court.

But my family members now live in a country where a federal agency can now stop them on the street based on how they look. Where the citizenship of children born here is pending a Supreme Court decision. Where the systems designed to ensure equal access to food, healthcare, housing, legal protection, and education are being stripped back, one executive order and one budget cut at a time.

The question is never really just about rights in the legal sense. It is about the promise. The promise that the country you are born into is working toward you, not against you. That the government sees you as a full person, not a problem to be managed.

That promise has always been imperfect. But it has also always been worth defending, and my job is to defend it loudly, with whatever reach I have. And that might cost me something.

But it might cost others everything.

Be kind, feed your mind, and … you know.

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