For the past few years it has been my honor to serve as a member of the Founding National Advisory Council for ADA Watch, a program of the Coalition for Disability Rights and Justice. One of ADA Watch’s primary goals is to AMPLIFY the Voices of People with Disabilities. AMPLIFYing our Voices has become more important now than I have ever seen in my lifetime…and while we speak of AMPLIFYing the Voices of People with Disabilities, its important to recognize that everyone will be affected by some form of disability, in some manner, at some point in their lives. Disabilities are as natural as aging, the conditions of which present as Disabilities. So, ADA Watch aims to AMPLIFY everyone’s Voices through the lens of Disability Rights, which are Human Rights.
With that in mind, please read the following briefing from my friend, Jim Ward, Founder and Executive Director of the Coalition for Disability Rights and Justice and ADA Watch, about the current threat to Disability Rights…the current threat to Human Rights…that we face now in the United States, and the solution on the table.
Please, AMPLIFY your Voice by demanding that our US Congress pass the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act. Please AMPLIFY our Voices by sharing this post. Please Read, and Lead On…
From ADA Watch:
ADA WATCH NEWS BRIEFING
A project of the Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice (CDRJ) July 1, 2026
A Pattern, Not an Accident: Federal Moves Toward Institutionalization
(ADA Watch/CDRJ) On the first day of Disability Pride Month—a month that commemorates the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and celebrates the right of people with disabilities to live, learn, work, and participate fully in their communities—three separate federal actions are converging into what disability advocates and activists across the country are calling a coordinated retreat from that right.
What’s happening
In June, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum arguing that neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act requires states to serve people with disabilities in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs—a direct challenge to the integration mandate, first established in 1977 federal regulations implementing Section 504, carried forward when Congress enacted the ADA in 1990, and affirmed by the Supreme Court in its landmark 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C.
The memo does not overturn Olmstead. Nor does it amend the ADA or Section 504. But it signals that the Department of Justice may retreat from decades of enforcing the integration mandate, shifting more of the burden onto individuals, states, and disability rights organizations to defend rights that federal law was intended to protect.
That memorandum did not arrive in isolation. The Department of Education has announced plans to transfer oversight of special education programs to the Department of Health and Human Services. Separately, following a White House push to address homelessness through institutionalization rather than community-based care, DOJ issued guidance lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment.
Taken together, disability advocates and activists say these actions point to a coordinated retreat from the federal government’s longstanding commitment to community integration at precisely the moment the movement is marking the anniversary of the law that helped make that integration possible.
What colleagues are saying
The response from the disability rights community has been immediate and remarkably unified across organizations that do not always agree on tactics—a notable development in itself.
Marlene Sallo, Executive Director of the National Disability Rights Network, put it plainly: “We reject any effort to return to systems that separate people with disabilities.” NDRN’s Protection and Advocacy network—the same infrastructure AMPLIFY’s Integrity Matrix is designed to strengthen—has pledged to continue defending Olmstead protections at the state level regardless of any change in federal enforcement.
The Arc’s Shira Wakschlag, Senior Executive Officer of Legal Advocacy, called the memorandum “a direct threat to decades of progress toward community living,” noting that The Arc’s seventy-five-year history has always been rooted in rejecting institutionalization.
AAPD was even more direct, describing the memorandum as effectively giving federal permission to strip people with disabilities of their homes and autonomy—language that reflects the lived experience of generations who knew institutions before Olmstead.
Claudia Center, Legal Director at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, told the Associated Press that the administration’s broader posture toward disabled people is simply “dark, and it’s awful”—a rare moment of a leading legal advocate speaking in plain human terms rather than policy language.
Alison Barkoff, who served in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration and later led the Administration for Community Living under President Biden, told NPR that administrations of both parties—including the first Trump administration—have enforced the integration mandate for decades. That bipartisan history is part of why this memorandum reads as a break with longstanding federal practice, not a continuation.
Harvey Rosenthal of the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, who has spent five decades in mental health advocacy, reminded NPR’s Disabilities Beat what the alternative actually looked like: the large state psychiatric hospitals his generation fought to close, and the peer-led community supports built in their place.
The ACLU, while emphasizing that the memorandum changes no law on its own, was equally clear about the response: “We won’t stop fighting to protect it.”
ADAPT—the grassroots, direct-action organization whose history runs through Reverend Wade Blank and decades of civil disobedience, distinct from the legal and policy organizations quoted above—places the memorandum within a longer legal arc. Dobbsdemonstrated that longstanding precedent could be overturned, while the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision eliminated the judicial deference that had long protected many federal regulations. ADAPT argues that these decisions did not create the current memorandum, but they made this challenge to the integration mandate legally conceivable. As ADAPT put it: “None of us are free unless all of us are free.”
Why this matters beyond the memorandum
None of these developments occurs in a vacuum. Deep Medicaid cuts enacted last year are already forcing states to reduce home- and community-based services—the very services Olmstead was designed to protect. A Department of Justice that retreats from enforcing the integration mandate while states reduce the services necessary to fulfill it creates a two-sided squeeze: fewer community supports and a weaker federal commitment to defending the rights that depend upon them.
Legal experts are equally clear about what the memorandum does not do. It does not overturn Olmstead. It does not amend the ADA or Section 504. People with disabilities retain the right to bring integration claims in court.
But rights enforceable only through lengthy, expensive individual litigation increasingly become rights available primarily to those with the resources to fight for them. That is precisely the gap consumer-controlled organizations such as Centers for Independent Living and the Protection and Advocacy system were created to help bridge.
A Legislative Answer: The Latonya Reeves Freedom Act
Days after the OLC memorandum was issued, the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act (HR 9401/S 4865) was introduced in Congress.
Unlike a federal regulation—or an agency interpretation that can be changed by a future administration—the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act would establish an affirmative, judicially enforceable statutory right to community-based services, one that cannot be undone by an Office of Legal Counsel opinion.
The legislation goes beyond simply restoring the status quo. It applies across disability types rather than focusing only on psychiatric disabilities. It recognizes the denial of wheelchairs, communication devices, and other essential supports as civil rights concerns alongside attendant services. It extends obligations to private managed care organizations and subcontractors as well as public entities, and it addresses accessible housing as an essential component of community integration.
The legislation has attracted bipartisan support—a reminder that the Americans with Disabilities Act itself became law only through bipartisan coalition-building. Five House Republicans have joined a large Democratic caucus as cosponsors, and the bill’s sponsors worked with the Department of Justice on constitutional questions before introduction. The final language also received independent legal review from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
The legislation honors Latonya Reeves, a Black disabled woman who was institutionalized as a child in Tennessee. With the assistance of Reverend Wade Blank and Denver’s Atlantis Community, she secured her own freedom and then devoted decades to helping others leave institutions for community life. She helped shape the legislation that now bears her name without ever telling her own family.
Take Action: Contact your U.S. Representative and Senators and ask them to cosponsor HR 9401 and S 4865. House offices may contact Representative Cohen’s office for additional information. Senate offices may contact Senator Bennet’s office.
What we’re watching
- Whether Congress builds momentum toward passage of the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act.
- Whether states begin citing the OLC memorandum when reducing home- and community-based service commitments.
- How the transfer of special education oversight to HHS intersects with disability civil rights enforcement.
- Ongoing multistate litigation concerning canceled special education grants.
ADA Watch and CDRJ will continue documenting these developments through the Integrity Matrix, tracking not only individual federal actions but the broader pattern they reveal.
ADA Watch is a project of the Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice (CDRJ).
We AMPLIFY the many voices of the disability rights & justice movement.
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