Evanston Hands Off Rally April 5, 2025 Speeches

Evanston April 5th Rally Drawing by Sherry Smith

April 5th Evanston Hands Off Rally - Speeches

The following texts were provided by our speakers to share with you. We will add additional texts as we receive them. The following speakers are included:

Arden Handler, Professor Emerita U of I School of Public Health

Representative Robyn Gabel

Reverend Michael Woolf, Lake Street Church

Jerri Garl, co-chair of Environmental Justice Evanston

Arden Handler:

Good afternoon. (I am Arden Handler, Professor Emerita of Community Health Sciences and Maternal and Child Health at the University of Illinois School of Public Health where I was a faculty member for 37 years.) I am here today to briefly talk about the overwhelming and direct assaults on public health and science that have been unleashed by President Trump, Elon Musk, and Doge almost from Day 1.

First came the assault on DEI, when grants focused on equity were explicitly terminated, nearly all scientific communication coming from federal health agencies stopped, and meetings of NIH study sections and key gatherings of federal advisory committees were canceled. Many federally funded research grants and university programs were scrapped in an attempt to eliminate all “woke” terminology from our shared lexicon including words as basic as gender, women, transgender, and pregnant person.

If this wasn’t enough, then came the NIH indirect cost hits to universities. On February 7, 2025 NIH announced a policy to cap indirect cost payments for new and existing research grants at 15% (major research universities have ICR rates much higher than this), but thankfully a federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction halting the implementation of this new NIH policy on March 5, 2025. If enacted, this policy will strike a blow to the entire US research enterprise as indirect cost dollars pay for research infrastructure.

In late March, came the direct slashing of funds to public health departments. State and local public health departments typically depend on federal grants to make up about half of their budgets. [ On March 28, in Illinois, CDC notified IDPH that it had rescinded $125 Million in promised public health investments and blocked $324 Million in pledged future federal support and slashed $28 Million for Mental Health and Substance Use. If Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy is really interested in focusing on chronic diseases to “Make America Healthy Again” how does it make sense to terminate for example, grants to state and local health departments that address mental health needs and substance abuse and overdose prevention? It clearly doesn’t!!

But that’s not the point is it?]

And then this past week came the layoffs of 10,000 employees at HHS. Many CDC divisions, the world’s premier public health agency, are now gone, and major public health programs are gutted (List from Katelyn Jetelina, Why We Keep Going, April 2. Your Local Epidemiologist):

HIV prevention? Gone.
Asthma and air quality team? Gone.
Environmental hazard response? Gone.
Gun violence prevention? Gutted.
Communications? Gutted.
Worker safety? Gone.
Reproductive health? Gone.
Birth defects? Gone.
Disability health? Gone.
TB prevention? Gone.
Blood disorder programs? Gone.
National survey on drug use and mental health? Gone.
Lead poisoning prevention? Gone.
Water safety? Gone.
Tobacco control division? Gone.

And that’s just CDC. FDA has a list. Same with NIH.

And what is coming next: Major cuts to Medicaid by the US Congress are looming on the horizon to fund tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Any major changes in Medicaid federal funding or eligibility rules will harm the 80 million people, children, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, and low-income working adults covered by the program.

I want to end on a more personal note with a focus on the direct hits that have occurred to maternal and infant health surveillance. As an MCH Epidemiologist focused on reducing inequities in maternal and infant health, I am particularly dismayed about the termination of the staff of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) this past week, which effectively guts the PRAMS program, the gold standard of national maternal and infant health surveillance.

I am also distraught over the cuts to the MCH Epidemiology staff working in the Reproductive Health and Birth Defects divisions at CDC. The UIC School of Public Health (my institution) has been one of the premier programs for training PhD level applied MCH epidemiologists to work in state, local, and federal public health agencies, providing skills to enable these individuals to turn data into information for action on behalf of women, children, and families. So, I was unbelievably sad on Monday and Tuesday as I got text after text, email after email from my former students, now colleagues, about their firings/administrative leaves. One of these individuals is here today, Dr. Amanda Bennett, who for many years, was an MCHEPI assignee to IDPH (on assignment from the CDC) and more recently, leader of the MCHEPI program at CDC. Amanda, we would like to than you and applaud your incredible work at both IDPH and the CDC and we want to wish you and your family all the best moving forward.

So I want to end by talking about what we can do to fight back. There are so many ways to lend your voice, your energy, and your time to fight these illegal and egregious assaults on public health and science. Here are just a few ideas:

If you are an academic or a scientist sign an open petition calling on universities to work collectively to protect, science, academic freedom and civil rights. Only when we all stand together and do not allow ourselves to be picked off one by one, will we win. Go to actionnetwork.org to sign the petition.
Don’t wait!! Educate members of Congress and IL state officials about the importance of Medicaid. (Many decisions are being made now and votes are likely before April 11 with negotiation of details in May and beyond.) Join the Illinois Friday Medicaid Phone bank organized by Citizen Action Illinois, Protect Our Care Illinois, and EverThrive IL. If you cannot join these calls, use social media, and your own calls and emails to demand Congress keep its #HandsOffMedicaid.
Urge Governor Pritzker and state agencies to sweep aside the bureaucratic red tape and hire laid off federal workers in our state agencies. Many governors are stepping up to do just this. Governor Pritzker should do the same.
Help in the saving and archiving of public health data. Data drives public health intervention and policy. Some groups to reach out to include the Data Rescue Project (which is a coordinated effort to preserve public US governmental data), and the Preserving Public Health Data Collective at Harvard School of Public Health (which has been holding Public Health Data Preservation Hackathons).
Learn how to use the Wayback Machine and teach others how to do the same (see attached slides).
Finally, please share your stories with your neighbors, your family members, and your legislators about how science and public health have made a difference in your lives!!! (When all of us share our stories about the positive effects of science and public health we will make clear the value of public health and science to the well-being of all of us, our children, our families, our neighborhoods, and our future.)

Link to Arden Handler Slides - Accessing and Storing Federal Datasets handler 4-6-25.pptx

Representative Robyn Gabel’s Speech

Good afternoon!

I want to welcome you all, and thank you all for taking time to stand up for what we know is right.

It takes courage to be here today.

Because we all see the things that are going wrong. We all see the planned chaos and the deliberate cruelty that no one voted for. And the easiest thing to do is to ignore it. But you’re here today to call it out and to speak up for something better.

And it fills my heart to see you all here, because now more than ever we need to speak up for our shared values.

And we also need to share our courage.

Because make no mistake, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance want us to feel afraid, to feel alone, to feel powerless.

So we need moments like this to show us that we’re far from alone. And to show everyone that we will stand together, and we will stand strong.

They want us to feel like the job is too big, so we will give up.

So we need to seek out the things we can control and organize where we can make a difference.

That’s the work we’re doing right here in our community. That’s the work I’m doing in Springfield.

This is our community, our city, our state; and we can fight to make sure it reflects our values.

We can fight for Medicaid and affordable healthcare.

We can fight for women’s rights.

We can fight for inclusion.

We can fight to keep Illinois moving toward a greener future.

We can fight to make sure the savings working people have entrusted in the markets is not erased by Trump’s trade taxes.

That fight starts right here, by showing what our neighborhoods, our cities, and our state will stand for—and what we will stand against.

And we’ve got to stand together and share our courage.

Thank you for sharing that courage today.

REV Michael Woolf:

It has become astoundingly clear that when it comes to this administration’s immigration policy, the cruelty is the point. They are willing to break the law to administer revenge on our neighbors, our friends, and the people who work to build America’s future. Whether it’s illegal deportation flights to Gitmo or El Salvador or the callous removal of temporary protected status from Haitian and Venezuelan migrants, this administration’s cruelty knows no bounds. That’s why we have to say hands off our neighbors, hands off immigrants, hands off refugees and asylum seekers, hands off sanctuary congregations, and hands off abusing someone’s immigration status to deport them for having an opinion and voicing it.

We must be willing to protect our community members, because what this administration has time and time again done is to pretend that immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are somehow separate from our communities, but we know this is not true. We see and perceive it for the lie that it is.

Because the lies will continue, attempting to shape our national consciousness and attempting to turn us into idle bystanders who will be complicit with these crimes. We must always resist that compulsion, because what this administration really wants to seek to do is to criminalize compassion.

It can feel like we are facing some dark times now, and I certainly don’t deny that reality, but I am a person of faith. I believe in things that I cannot prove or see at the time. I don’t think that it’s that different really, believing in an America that can be the best version of itself, that can find a way to being compassionate and egalitarian. It certainly takes faith to imagine such a future for us, and yet it us who will craft that future. We will craft it through loving kindness, through practicing compassion, through the small acts that we can do and control in the here and now. We do it through telling this administration, that when it comes to our neighbors, our friends, and those who are looking to find safety and rest, “hands off!” We do it by bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice, one small act, one protest, one refusal to be complicit with the crimes of this administration, at a time.

Jerri Garl

Hands Off Rally – Evanston April 5, 2025

Jerri Garl, co-chair of Environmental Justice Evanston and a 34-year veteran of EPA Region 5.

In the midst of the global disruptions caused by the Trump Administration, it may be easy to miss the systematic dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency. While air quality violations in the Chicago region have been reclassified from moderate to serious, regulations that protect air quality are being rolled back and critically important jobs are being eliminated. EPA’s leadership role in addressing environmental justice is ending. In Chicago, that program is on the chopping block.

From my own experience at EPA, I know the loss of scientists, analysts and program staff will be profound – it means fewer people to inspect and enforce clean air, clean water and safe drinking water standards and fewer scientists to address emerging threats like forever chemicals and microplastics in our drinking water.

EPA staff -- and the programs they carry out -- are critical to protecting public and environmental health. At risk is the air we breathe, the water we drink, clean water in our lakes and rivers, and a healthy ecosystem of plants, animals and soils. The loss of EPA expertise and the loss of protections for the environment in our Region could be devastating.

The Administration’s efforts to ignore climate change and turning the focus away from vulnerable populations like children, the elderly and from those already disadvantaged -- by poverty, institutional racism and neglect -- is indefensible. As climate change worsens, with Evanston and our region enduring more frequent and severe storm events, excessive heat, the spread of disease-carrying organisms, invasive species, and habitat loss - this is no time to be weakening the role of EPA. It is the backbone of enforcement, research, and support to states and communities.

And there is so much more left to do. If we lose this capacity now, we may never recover. We can’t let that happen. If Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is unwilling to protect our health and the environment -- he has to go!

Please write to every elected official in Illinois, especially Republicans in other districts because they seem to have forgotten how science works and that POLLUTION AND CLIMATE CHANGE DON’T RESPECT POLITICAL BOUNDARIES!

We need an EPA Administrator who will restore its authorities, staffing and funding and protect our future and the lives of our children.

SO, REPEAT AFTER ME --

HANDS OFF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE!

HANDS OFF EPA!