After ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired three gunshots at point-blank range at Renee Good as she was trying to drive away from him, he called her a “f—ing b-tch!” Ross’s contempt for Good was a dramatic expression of his misogyny toward her, revealing that her murder was a femicide — a man intentionally killing a woman and who is motivated by her gender. The Trump administration’s response is chillingly familiar to survivors of intimate partner violence: DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse the victim and offender.
While Good’s execution is among the most brutal manifestations of misogyny enabled by the Trump administration, ICE’s very presence in Minneapolis is rooted in misogyny —specifically the Project 2025 goal of re-establishing the patriarchal nuclear family, with men as dominant male breadwinners and women confined to homemaking and childrearing. To achieve this goal, the Trump administration is going after public funding of child care, which was what spurred the deployment of ICE to Minneapolis.
On Dec. 16, 2025, right-wing influencer Nick Shirley showed up at multiple Somali-run child care centers in Minneapolis with a video crew, trying to force his way in by posing as a parent checking in a child. Although the centers refused to admit the stranger with no child in sight, Shirley later posted a video making false accusations that the centers were committing fraud. The video went viral, and national right-wing media pounced. In response, Trump froze all federal child care funds to Minnesota and demanded audits of the funding. Trump then expanded the child care funding freeze to four other Democratic states — California, New York, Illinois, and Colorado. Then he proposed new federal requirements that would make obtaining child care funding more burdensome for providers nationwide. Finally, Trump deployed Homeland Security investigators to Minnesota, purportedly to probe Shirley’s fraud claims. This then led to the surge of ICE officers in Minneapolis.
These recent attacks on child care funding are just the latest in a year-long campaign to gut federal child care programs. Within weeks of taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration imposed a federal funding freeze for Head Start, the incredibly successful federal child care program for low-income children. Then, the Trump administration restructured the Department of Health and Human Services, resulting in mass layoffs and the closure of five regional Head Start offices. By April 2025, the administration had withheld nearly $1 billion in Head Start federal grants compared to the previous year, forcing closures and pushing centers to the brink. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal did not specify any funding at all for Head Start.
Why is the Trump administration attacking child care programs in the first place? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy agenda, which Trump has closely followed, gives us the answer. Project 2025 condemns single parenthood and child care outside the home, while glorifying “Biblical marriage” and the patriarchal family. The Project 2025 policy agenda urges “prioritizing funding for home-based child care, not universal child care” and calls for the elimination of Head Start. Project 2025 inaccurately claims that “children who spend significant time in day care experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect as well as poor educational and developmental outcomes.” Their alternative? “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” In other words, they want to defund public child care and pay women, likely very little, to leave the workforce and care for children.
Trump administration policies are already producing the intended effect: a record number of women left the workforce last year. The elimination of child care funding has been a significant reason why. By cutting child care support and banning abortion and contraception, MAGA public policy is pressuring women back into traditional roles in the home. This shift is reinforcing a gendered hierarchy of power where men are dominant and women are subservient, which in some quarters is fueling contempt for women who refuse to submit to men, such as Renee Good.
Several states are pushing in the opposite direction, investing in child care access and protecting women’s autonomy. Last year, under the leadership of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and a majority-female legislature, New Mexico became the first state to offer free universal child care. Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced $1.7 billion in new child care investments and the launch of community-based care pilots. This will provide free child care for 2-year-olds in New York City and strengthen universal early childhood programs statewide, opening access to high-quality care for nearly 100,000 more children.
The patriarchal future promoted by the Heritage Foundation and embraced by Donald Trump is both politically unpopular with the majority of Americans and economically unrealistic in a world where few jobs pay enough to support an entire family. MAGA is running headlong into reality, and the pushback is growing. My only hope is that we stop the madness before the body count climbs higher.
Carrie N. Baker is a professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.