Trump’s first 100 days have brought chaos and change to New England
In some ways, it’s hard to believe that on April 30 only 100 days will have passed since President Trump took the oath of office for a second time. The economy and financial markets have been rocked by constantly shifting tariffs. Entire departments of the federal government have been shut down, staff in others have been suddenly dismissed. Critical funding for science and education has been frozen or dramatically slashed.
The scale and the swiftness of the changes implemented by the Trump administration have touched not only every corner of the federal government but everyday life on a national and even global scale. Below are four areas where New England has been particularly touched: education, health, immigration, and the economy.
— Jackie Kucinich
Immigration
For decades, the International Institute of New England has helped refugees and migrants escaping dictatorships, violence, and chaos in their home countries adjust to life in the United States. Its staff has worked to convince the new arrivals they can trust the legal system and build stable lives here, unlike where they came from.
But now, for the first time any of them can recall, migrants and refugees are telling them they feel as if they’ve landed in a country too similar to the one they fled.
“We have a saying in Creole, ‘You are running from the rain and you end up in the river,’ ” said Andrins Renaudin, the group’s shelter services director and a Haitian American who works with the institute’s sizable Haitian population. “A lot of them are not happy that they came. . . . It’s impossible to go back to Haiti, and they’re at a crossroads.”
The first 100 days of Trump’s second term have brought about dramatic and sweeping changes in immigration policy, befitting an area that has been his signature policy focus since he kicked off his political career.
The effects have not just reached migrants, but have pushed the limits of constitutional rights and placed Trump on a collision course with the courts, where judges are accusing the administration of stonewalling and ignoring their orders.
His supporters have cheered the changes, touting the historically low numbers of people arriving at the southern border and swift deportations of migrants the administration claims are gang members or risks to public safety, often with little or no evidence. Trump officials have told migrants not to come to the United States and encouraged immigrants to self-deport.
His detractors say Trump has not just transformed immigration policy, but is punishing legal immigrants as quickly as the undocumented, with blatant disregard for the laws. Public approval of Trump’s immigration policies, once a point of strength, has taken a dive in several recent polls.
Trump’s numerous actions have had immediate effects on the nation’s immigration system. A nonpartisan tracking project run by Yale and Stanford law professors already lists 11 pages’ worth of actions since he was inaugurated. He abruptly halted the longstanding refugee program, blocking the arrival of even pre-vetted refugees slated to come to the United States this year. He has sought to revoke programs that gave temporary status and the right to work to hundreds of thousands of people from places including Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Afghanistan. He has threatened so-called sanctuary cities such as Boston with retribution for not sufficiently cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. Many of those actions have been temporarily halted by courts while being contested, leaving immigrants unsure of their status.
Immigration officials have been authorized to arrest any undocumented immigrant they find during their raids, including a dramatic incident in New Bedford captured on video in which agents broke a car window to reach the occupants. The administration has revoked longstanding policies to allow agents to make arrests at sensitive locations including schools and churches, and use the Social Security and IRS databases to locate undocumented immigrants.
Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping law designed for wartime, to summarily deport Venezuelans whom federal officials allege are members of the Tren de Aragua gang to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. That effort has ensnared immigrants who say they have no criminal history and has led to multiple reprimands by judges who have ordered the return or release of some.
And Trump has also invoked a rarely used provision of law that gives the secretary of state singular authority to revoke immigrants’ status and visas if they’re determined to run counter to American foreign policy interests, which they’ve used to detain several immigrants from colleges who protested or expressed pro-Palestinian views during the Israel-Hamas war.
— Tal Kopan
Health
It took just 24 hours for Dr. Julia Marcus’s research project, years in the making, to totally unravel.
Marcus, of Newton, is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, where she has focused on how to improve access to PrEP, a lifesaving HIV medication, for people who need it. She and her team were halfway through a five-year federal grant, a coveted resource that had taken years to win.
Then, one morning in March, a superior walked into Marcus’s office and told her the Department of Health and Human Services had sent a letter terminating their funding. The project, seen as a DEI initiative, “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the letter said. Marcus believes it was because her grant mentioned “equity,” given that HIV disproportionately affects LGBTQ+ and Black populations.
Later that day, she got another letter from the Trump administration, canceling another grant for a similar project. A third one came the next morning.
Shocked, Marcus huddled with colleagues to figure out how to keep the research alive without federal funding — and more immediately, how to ensure that her postdoctoral research fellows could get their next paycheck. Marcus said she lost half her own salary “overnight.”
“It’s been a scramble, a really chaotic scramble, but all of this is nothing compared to what’s happening on a larger level,” Marcus said. “These grant terminations are like the tip of the iceberg.”
Indeed, Marcus is far from alone. Nearly 800 federal grants for medical research have been eliminated since Trump took office, according to KFF Health News — a stunning renunciation of the federal government’s role as the primary funding engine of American scientific innovation.
It’s just one of many seismic disruptions to the fields of medicine and health science in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration.
The president entered office intent on drastically shrinking the scope of much of the federal government’s work, with a stated goal of saving trillions of taxpayer dollars.
But he and his allies have brought a particular intensity to reshaping the public health system.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has epitomized the administration’s attitude that the country’s medical and health establishment is corrupt, lost after the COVID-19 pandemic, and is too focused on minority groups and special interests.
The confluence of those views, Kennedy’s own deep skepticism of vaccines, and the government-slashing work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have resulted in dizzying changes.
Since January, roughly 25 percent of HHS staff — some 20,000 workers — have reportedly left. The departures have included top public health officials such as Peter Marks, the well-regarded vaccine expert at the Food and Drug Administration, who resigned after making clear there was no place for him under Kennedy.
Across key health agencies, cuts are having immediate effects on programs that have long kept Americans safe. The FDA is reportedly planning to end routine food safety inspections and has suspended its quality control program for milk and dairy products. The National Institutes of Health axed the Women’s Health Initiative, a continuous study since 1991 that has provided a number of insights on health and disease treatment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gutted teams that study car crash injuries, child abuse, traumatic brain injuries, and drowning, among other things. And the administration terminated an entire team that researched in vitro fertilization and provided information to those considering it.
Meanwhile, Kennedy has hired as an adviser a doctor who has suggested vaccines cause autism as Kennedy launches a very public federal investigation into the causes of autism. At the same time, his department has stopped research aimed at addressing vaccine skepticism and is moving to put resources into the federal system for reporting side effects from vaccine.
Kennedy has said he wants to return the federal health system to a “gold standard” of science. But as federal grants get canceled, freezing not only many threads of research but potentially displacing a generation of rising scientists, Marcus has deep concerns about the future. She is also worried the termination of her grant and others like it could lead to a resurgence of HIV.
“We were making a lot of progress toward talking about eliminating HIV,” she said. “Now, it seems far off.”
— Sam Brodey
Higher education
In the first 100 days of his second term, the Trump administration has framed college campuses as ground zero for the spread of leftist ideology it says has harmed the country.
There is perhaps no better case study for the administration’s intentions and what hangs in the balance than Harvard University, arguably the most iconic and powerful higher education institution in the country.
The administration alleges Harvard is one of at least 60 colleges and universities that allowed antisemitism to proliferate on campus, pointing to the treatment of Jewish students amid Gaza war protests. As a result, Trump officials have demanded Harvard make a spate of changes — such as closing DEI programs, implementing “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies, allowing government oversight of certain university programs, and overhauling student discipline procedures — or face the loss of billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts.
Following a brief negotiation period, the administration expanded its demands to include a university-wide audit to ensure sufficient “viewpoint diversity” and an overhaul of the international student admission process, among other things.
Then Harvard drew the line, saying it would not “allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”
The White House fired back, freezing more than $2 billion in federal funding assigned to the university. In turn, Harvard sued the administration, arguing the government’s demands infringe on the university’s First Amendment rights to academic freedom, and the funding freeze is unlawful.
Since then, the Trump administration has levied further retribution against Harvard — moving to remove its tax-exempt status, demanding the university’s foreign funding records, and threatening the school’s ability to host foreign students — sending a clear message that its crusade against higher education will not be short.
In February, the Department of Education said it would would use Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in schools — to ban any effort to increase racial diversity among students, faculty, and staff on college campuses.
Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools, has similarly been utilized by DOE to push the administration’s agenda. Trump signed an executive order in February to prevent transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
Both moves occurred before Trump’s most wide-ranging change to the higher education landscape in March: dismantling the Department of Education to the fullest extent of his powers. It will take an act of Congress to completely eliminate the department, which administers student loans and Pell Grants, and investigates civil rights violations in schools, among other things. And there are more changes to come. The administration announced that starting in May, the government will enforce collection of student loans that are in default.
Meanwhile, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have revoked student visas and imprisoned several foreign students studying in the United States who have been vocal supporters of Palestine. That policy hit close to home in New England when Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish citizen, was detained by masked federal immigration agents on a street in Somerville and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana. Two prominent leaders of Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests, Mahmoud Khalil of New York and Mohsen Mahdawi of Vermont, are also in federal custody.
(On Friday, the administration said it was reversing for now a separate policy of removing international students from the federal system that manages their immigration status, which had faced multiple court challenges.)
Large swaths of research grants distributed by federal agencies such as the NIH, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy have also been canceled, leaving a sizable gap in funding at universities across the country.
All said, Harvard may have started a trend of defiance. While some universities have taken preemptive action to avoid the administration’s wrath, others have chosen to fight. In late April, after Harvard sued the Trump administration, more than 500 higher education leaders signed a letter condemning the administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in academia.
— Julian E.J. Sorapuru
Economy
Mark Shiring, chief executive of Air Technology Americas in Farmington, Conn., thought he was doing everything right in prioritizing production of its fans and motors in the United States.
The company opened a large factory in Tennessee in 2022 and has been planning on expanding it.
Then Trump started levying tariffs, only to abruptly pause some and threaten others, while triggering retaliatory ones from China and other nations.
The tariffs have hit the company, the US subsidiary of Germany’s ebm-pabst, because certain components needed to make its large rooftop air conditioners and other products are only available from abroad, or from US suppliers who use foreign parts.
The Farmington company has had to pass on the costs of those new tariffs to its customers, Shiring said. But he can’t make any decisions about altering supply chains (a complicated process that takes a year) without knowing how long the tariffs will be in place or at what level they’ll be. All those specifics are up in the air because of Trump’s chaotic governing approach and the administration’s ongoing trade negotiations.
So Shiring’s plans to expand — and the 50 to 100 new jobs that would be created by it — are on hold.
“You knew something was coming, but you didn’t know what it was, the timing and the scale,” he said of the tariffs Trump promised during last year’s campaign. “And I think all those things combined with almost no notice, you have no ability to react to that and you have no ability to plan your business.”
Trump’s impact on the economy in his first 100 days can be summed up in one word: uncertainty.
His sweeping tariffs have rattled business owners, investors, and average Americans, causing financial markets to tank, consumer confidence to plummet, and economists to warn of a possible recession this year.
“Beyond the abrupt increase in tariffs, the surge in policy uncertainty is a major driver of the economic outlook,” Pierre‑Olivier Gourinchas, chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, told reporters on Tuesday as the organization significantly downgraded its forecasts for US and global economic growth in 2025.
Trump has said the tariffs are needed for several reasons: to pressure Mexico and Canada to better secure their borders with the United States as well as reverse years of trade deficits with those and other nations while encouraging more domestic manufacturing.
He’s also asserted that the tariffs will bring in billions of dollars from foreign countries to help offset the cost of extending and expanding the 2017 tax cuts and possibly, one day, replace income taxes.
Critics have said the Trump administration’s revenue estimates are overstated and note tariffs are simply another form of domestic tax because they’re paid by the US importer and usually passed along to the consumer.
After a spike in inflation, the economy was the major campaign issue last year and Trump vowed he would “immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.”
The promise was unrealistic from the start.
Except for gasoline, prices rarely go down. And Trump has only added to the upward pressure by enacting tariffs; the Budget Lab at Yale University has estimated the tariffs will cost the average US household $4,700 over the next year.
The consumer price index actually declined slightly in March, but that was before most of Trump’s tariffs kicked in this month. A big factor was a drop in the price of gas, but that came for the wrong reason: lower global demand out of fear of an economic slowdown.
Meanwhile, many grocery prices were up in March, including a 5.9 percent increase in the cost of eggs. Trump has falsely claimed egg prices are way down since he took office. Trump’s approval rating on the economy stands at 45 percent according to a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday — a 14-percentage point decline from just after the election.
Trump inherited a healthy economy, with inflation headed back toward normal after hitting a four-decade high in 2022. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates aggressively to tame inflation, but price increases from Trump’s tariffs will pose a much tougher challenge because the trade war is also expected to slow down economic growth.
Trump hasn’t made the Fed’s job easier by publicly criticizing its chairman, Jerome Powell, and threatening to fire him for not lowering interest rates — a move the central bank is not likely to embrace because easier access to borrowing would only add to the expected tariff-induced inflation.
Trump backed off recently from his legally questionable threat of firing Powell after large stock market declines driven by investors fearful of political influence over the independent Fed. But his attempt to bully Powell only added to the uncertainty about the economy that Shiring and other Americans are grappling with.
“I don’t know what the landscape looks like from a policy standpoint out of Washington,” Shiring said, “for businesses and for tariffs and for me.”
— Jim Puzzanghera