In The Politics of Autism, I discuss court cases involving the civil rights of people with autism and other disabilities.
For decades, people with autism and other developmental disabilities languished in large institutions, many of which were snake pits.
Last month, the Education Department announced it would offload oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose comments on the limits of disabilities such as autism have drawn sharp rebukes from advocates and lawmakers.
Meanwhile, following a White House push to police homelessness, the Department of Justice released guidance that lowered the barrier to institutionalizing any person with a disability.
Taken together, the actions signal a worrying return to a reality where people with disabilities are pushed to the margins of society, advocates said.
Trump has long called for bringing back the mental institutions.
So we're going to be talking seriously about opening mental health institutions again, in some cases, reopening. I can tell you, in New York, the Governors in New York did a very, very bad thing when they closed our mental institutions, so many of them. You have these people living on the streets. And I can say that, in many cases throughout the country, they're very dangerous. They shouldn't be there. So we're going to be talking about mental institutions. And when you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution, and they can see what they can do. But we've got to get them out of our communities.
But, in the old days, you would put him into a mental institution. And we had them in New York, and our government started closing them because of cost. And we're going to have to start talking about mental institutions, because a lot of the folks in this room closed their mental institutions also.
And we're looking at mental institutions, which we used to have. Like, as an example, where I come from in New York, they closed up almost all of their mental institutions—or many of them—and those people just went onto the streets. And they did it for budgetary reasons. Well, New York is not unique; they've done that in many places.January 20, 2026:
Signed an Executive order to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums. We're going to have to bring them back. Hate to build those suckers, but you've got to get the people off the streets.
You know, we used to have—when I was growing up, we had, in my area in Queens—I grew up in Queens. We had a place called Creedmoor. Creedmoor. Did anybody know that? Creedmoor. It was a big—I said, "Mom, why are those bars on the building?"
I used to play Little League Baseball there, at a place called Cunningham Park. I was quite the baseball player. You wouldn't believe it. But I said to my mother, "Mom"—she would be there. Always there for me. She said, "Son, you could be a professional baseball player." I said, "Thanks, Mom."
I said, "Why are those bars on the windows?" Big building. Big, powerful building. It loomed over the park, actually. It was pretty—she said, "Well, people that are very sick are in that building." I said, "Boy." I used to always look at that building, and I'd see this big building—big, tall building. It loomed over the park. It was sort of—now that I think, it was a pretty unfriendly sight.
But I'll never forget. I don't know if it's still there, because they got rid of most of them. You know, they—the Democrats in New York, they took them down, and the people live on the streets now. That's why you have a lot of the people in California and other places, they live on the streets. They took the mental institutions down. They're expensive.
But I'd say: "Why does that building have those bars? Boy." It didn't—it wasn't normal. You know, you're used to looking at, like, a window. But this, when you look at it, all the steel—vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out. It's called a mental institution. That was an insane asylum.
