Domestic Violence Support Is Unraveling

Opinion|‘It Sounds Really Dire Because It Is Really Dire’

Recently, the roof started leaking in a shingled white house in Androscoggin County, Maine. The boiler also went out. There is nothing remarkable about this house, except that it shelters victims of human trafficking. At capacity, it has room for six. It is always at capacity. In years past, the organization that runs the house, Safe Voices, would have ponied up the $30,000 required to fix these issues. But the uncertainty unleashed by the Trump administration’s policies made it difficult to make financial commitments like this.

So all six residents and one dog piled into a minivan owned by Safe Voices and lugged their belongings in multiple trips to a 17-bed domestic violence shelter nearby, where they had to double up in rooms; the house now sits empty.

The reason Rebecca Austin, the executive director at Safe Voices, could not immediately fix the roof or the boiler is that she had no idea what her organization’s financial situation would be after Oct. 1 when the new fiscal year starts. Since President Trump took office, the group’s federal grants have been briefly frozen, then unfrozen. Then the release of new grant applications was delayed for three months without explanation. “No one seems to know the answers to what’s going to happen and if money is actually going to come through,” she told me.

Much of the federal infrastructure that supports domestic violence programs is damaged or gone. The director of the Office of Family Violence and Prevention Services was placed on administrative leave this spring. One domestic violence advocate told me her organization has gone through four points of contact at the Department of Justice since February.

This chaos is happening throughout the country and is largely out of public view. While the enormous losses to science, education, development, arts, health and other areas dominate headlines, the local consequences — busted boilers, leaking roofs — are less visible. But they can be catastrophic for organizations that operate on shoestring budgets. It’s what makes the Trump administration’s approach to rooting out waste, fraud and diversity, equity and inclusion so maddening and brutish.

Neil McLean, the district attorney in Lewiston, Maine, told me he employs one of his office’s two full-time domestic violence prosecutors through a Safe Voices grant. This prosecutor is assigned to over 700 cases across one county. For context, this is more than 10 times the typical caseload of a local public defender. “It’s as bad as it sounds,” Mr. McLean said. “This is not one of the areas where we need cuts.”