Trump and his Republican cronies are already inflicting pain on San Diego County, damaging veterans, education, public health, business, the homeless, migrants and more.

I recently started bookmarking articles chronicling the damage that Trump and his Republican lackeys are doing to us and our neighbors here in the county. Not hypothetical damage, or harm done elsewhere in the U.S. — I was looking for concrete financial, physical and emotional damage that Trump and his Republican supporters are doing here and now.

I had no trouble finding examples. Very soon, I found myself with 50 open tabs, and my browser crashed.

This article compiles all the information I’ve been able to find. It is a looooooooong article. I’ve broken everything up into sections for easier reading. Even as long as this article is, I’m sure I missed a lot.

I originally planned to headline this article “The Trump wrecking ball…. " But this isn’t just about Trump. The entire Republican party is complicit in the damage being done to the U.S. Sadly, that includes your nice Republican city council candidate who comes to all the PTA meetings. The Republican Party has demonstrated universal obedience to Trump. Local Republicans may have been able to resist quietly, for now, in some matters, but if Trump is allowed to continue, local Republicans will soon be brought to heel.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego veterans

Local veterans, healthcare providers, and Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Mike Levin (Democrats) are speaking out against proposed cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nurses from the VA Medical Center in La Jolla, along with veterans, patients and other union members, rallied in April to protest cuts.

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“Every position is mission critical,” Andrea Johnson, a nurse there, told the crowd. “Eliminating housekeeping, dietary, transportation, respiratory therapists and lab technicians will lead to delays in admissions and delays in care, which can and will result in negative patient outcomes.”

Republicans plan to cut about 80,000 jobs, or about 15% of the VA workforce. The VA serves 15.8 million veterans, nearly 200,000 of whom are in San Diego.

San Diego veterans are afraid the cuts will hurt their care. “I didn’t think Trump would brutalize the government like he is. His efforts have surpassed my darkest images,” said David Cochran, who suffers from emphysema and traumatic brain injury resulting from his U.S. Army service. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is the former Army major’s sole health provider.

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“It really seems like all of the things I was promised as a citizen of this fine country are very quickly either evaporating or intentionally being dismantled and taken apart,” said Ian Mooney, the president of the San Diego chapter of Veterans for Peace.

Republicans are singling out transgender veterans for punishment, which will lead to higher rates of depression and suicide. Levin said the move fits with the party’s attacks on transgender people.

“Anybody who puts on the uniform, who serves our nation voluntarily, who puts their lives at stake in order to defend our freedom and our institutions and our country — we should take care of them,” Levin told the U-T.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego education

Students, parents and educators are raising the alarm over funding cuts to schools and research. As of mid-April, about 40 grant awards have been impacted by disruption notices, including stop work orders, terminations and funding freezes, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) told the San Diego Union-Tribune. The total value of these grants is $59 million.

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The cuts are already leading students to consider leaving research, and even leaving the U.S. “In the past couple of months, I have absolutely considered moving out of academia and looking for other options, even in other countries,” said Sutanay Bhattacharya, who is pursuing a PhD in mathematics. “This has been a devastating time for me.”

UCSD can’t guarantee the first-year grad students will get full stipends and tuition, leading to job insecurity.

Cuts will especially hurt special education and disadvantaged students, starving public schools that provide a leadership role supporting many students with disabilities. San Diego Unified schools have seen Title I funding, which supports high-poverty schools, delayed by over a month. Republicans are holding those funds hostage as part of their fight against diversity, equity and inclusion.

“[San Diego Unified School Board President Cody Petterson] said that because California residents and businesses pay far more in federal taxes than they get in federal spending, Title I funding is California taxpayers’ money returning home,” the U-T reported.

UCSD is bracing for possible $500 million in annual cuts and shelving some building plans.

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Republican cuts are hitting research into HIV, domestic violence, and homicide against pregnant women and more. Research into an HIV vaccine has stopped, along with support for transgender people and autism research. The National Institutes of Health justifies the cuts with handwaving about equity.

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As of mid-April, the Republican-led federal government had revoked visas for 35 international students at UC San Diego and one student at the University of San Diego. Faculty members at UCSD are concerned that international students could be discouraged from attending. The school has nearly 7,200 international students, many crucial to UCSD research, particularly in health, medicine and engineering. International students pay more than $40,000 annually in tuition and fees, about double the rate for California residents.

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Republican budget cuts threaten funding for San Diego museums, libraries and zoos.

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San Diego college faculty and students fear the Republican plan to investigate UC San Diego and other universities, deporting student activists and asserting control over academic programs.

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“This is what fascist regimes do, and it’s kind of a code red for our universities,” said Adam Aron, a psychology professor at UC San Diego who is Jewish. “This is maybe the beginning if we don’t stand up and oppose this.”

Jewish faculty and students around the country, including in San Diego, argue Republicans are using antisemitism as a pretext to deport people for exercising their rights and crack down on academic freedom.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego’s public health

A nationwide clawback of federal public health funds is leading to the shutdown of the county’s wastewater testing system at the San Diego Epidemiology and Research for COVID Health program (SEARCH), jointly run by UCSD, Scripps Research Institute and the genomics program at Rady Children’s Hospital. The program started testing COVID-19 and expanded to include MPOX. Research is underway to detect influenza, hepatitis, measles and other pathogens.

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The cuts will make it harder to detect infectious diseases and jeopardize all of our health.

How Republicans are hurting San Diego businesses

San Diego and Baja California business leaders and elected officials went on a lobbying mission to Washington, D.C., this month to attempt to mitigate damage to the cross-border economy caused by tariffs. San Diego’s economy is closely linked to Mexico’s, and tariffs will hit us particularly hard.

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In one example, a San Diego small business owner is suing the Republican White House administration over a new financial reporting requirement that the administration claims is cracking down on money laundering by Mexican cartels. Esperanza Gomez Escobar, the owner and manager of Novedades y Servicios Plus, a money services business in San Diego’s Southcrest neighborhood, says the law will financially ruin businesses like hers, violate the Fourth Amendment, and do nothing to combat money laundering.

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These businesses provide check cashing, money transmitting, and foreign currency exchanges, and are already required to report transactions of $10,000 or more. The new rule requires those businesses in 30 targeted California and Texas ZIP codes, including seven in San Diego County, to report all transactions of $200 and over.

Business owners say that would essentially mean submitting costly reports for every transaction and requiring customers to turn over sensitive information such as their names and Social Security numbers, raising concerns that Republicans could use that information in their immigration crackdown.

And criminals will just go to another ZIP code.

“This is a family business … and we’ll have to close if this (order is enacted),” Gomez said.

Additionally, federal agents raided a family-owned business in unincorporated El Cajon, the San Diego Powder & Protective Coatings company, on allegations that the company knowingly employs undocumented immigrants. The company regularly contracts with the U.S. military.

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How Republicans are hurting San Diego’s homeless

Father Joe’s Villages planned to break ground this year on affordable housing complexes downtown that would each hold more than 100 apartments, paid for in part by a multimillion-dollar federal grant. But now Father Joe’s is waiting until at least next year.

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As of late March, some $44 million in funding that local homeless service organizations had been promised had been frozen.

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How Republicans are hurting migrants

As the border tightens, desperate migrants are turning to dangerous human smuggling by sea.

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Migrant shelters around the county and in Tijuana are shutting their doors, following the cutoff in federal funds and immigration crackdowns.

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And it’s not just migrants — Lucas Sielaff, a German national visiting Mexico from Las Vegas, was handcuffed and shackled and spent 16 days in a crowded detention center before being allowed to fly home to Germany. His fiancée, Lennon Tyler, an American citizen, was chained to a bench. Another German tourist, Jessica Brösche, spent over six weeks locked up, including over a week in solitary confinement. The incidents are part of an unprecedented crackdown that includes visitors from Western Europe and Canada, longtime U.S. allies.

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Anecdotally, I’m hearing from friends and business associates in Europe who are canceling trips to the U.S. One friend who lives in the U.K., has visited the U.S. several times but now says he does not expect to visit again in his lifetime (my friend is 60), even though much of his income comes from U.S. business.

San Diego’s tourism economy is at risk if the U.S. comes to be perceived as a dangerous place for non-Americans to visit.

Local Japanese-Americans warn that the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which Republicans are using to persecute migrants today, is the same law used to justify the U.S.’s shameful internment of Japanese-Americans — about two-thirds of whom were American citizens — during World War II.

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Kay Ochi, president of the Japanese-American Historical Society of San Diego, notes that her parents, then 21 and 22, were born in San Diego. They were forced to leave the county and taken to an incarceration camp in the desert of Poston, Arizona.

“That was three years of pure hell,” she said.

About 2,000 people of Japanese descent lived in San Diego County at the time, and San Diego authorities applauded the incarceration, with measures approved by the City Council, County Board of Supervisors, and Chamber of Commerce. The city council, led by then-Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, a Democrat, formally apologized in 2022 and revoked the resolution. Elo-Rivera is still a council member.

What can we do?

A lot. We can demonstrate, we can support Democrats locally and around the country, we can donate and volunteer to our favorite causes and build community ties.

Supervisor Terra-Lawson Remer, a Democrat, laid out an ambitious plan in her recent State of the County Address to bolster services for vulnerable residents and shield the county from looming federal cuts.

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The county is scrambling to address a $40 million hit to public health programs. Funding for Medicaid — which helps the county expand its behavioral health and substance-use treatment services — is also at risk after Congressional Republicans proposed cutting $880 billion over the next 10 years.

Lawson-Remer proposes a local tax ballot measure to offset federal cuts and boost services.

“We can raise the money ourselves, right here at home,” she said, “not by waiting, or begging for D.C. to do its job, but by taking the wheel of our own destiny and steering our own San Diego County ship through this storm.”

But we won’t be able to cushion Republican blows against San Diego if Republicans win a majority of the county Board of Supervisors — and that’s a distinct possibility. The board is now split evenly, 2-2, between Republicans and Democrats, with one vacant seat, in District 1. A special election to fill that seat is scheduled for July 1, pitting a popular Republican against Democrat and Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre. If you live in District 1, please vote for Paloma to help build a firewall against Republican damage, and regardless of where you live, please support her candidacy and get the word out to your friends and family in District 1 to vote.

www.paloma-aguirre.com

Ongoing Republican-led policies are causing tangible harm to San Diego across multiple critical sectors — from veterans’ healthcare and education to public health, local businesses, homelessness, and migrant communities. These cuts and crackdowns are not abstract or distant issues; they actively undermine the well-being and stability of San Diego’s residents and institutions. By supporting local leadership committed to protecting vulnerable populations and advocating for equitable funding and humane policies, San Diegans can work to mitigate these damages and steer the community toward a more just and sustainable future. The stakes are high, but so is the potential for meaningful change if the community unites and acts decisively.

Mitch Wagner is a member at large of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club Board. He lives in La Mesa, a short walk from Lake Murray, with his wife, dog and cats. Contact Mitch at mitch@mitchwagner.com and find his social media links at mitchwagner.com.