Abolition for Our People: Assessing the landscape: Authoritarianism and the fight for public health justice
People living with HIV have long sounded the alarm about state control, criminalization, and the weak privacy protections surrounding our health and bodies. This insight and leadership are more critical than ever as we confront 2025 – a political moment defined by surveillance, policing, and the weaponization of data. The Trump regime is rapidly advancing an agenda that merges arrest, militarized policing, and deportation with efforts to harness and weaponize massive amounts of personal information including private, sensitive health data. This wave of state violence targets already marginalized communities, from migrants and people who use drugs to political dissidents.
Too often, the fight to end the HIV epidemic sidelines the dangers of unchecked data collection, storage, and surveillance, but without strong privacy safeguards, public health can become another tool of control rather than liberation.
This third installment in our Abolition for Our People webinar series will dig into the intersections of public health, data privacy, and state violence. Together, we’ll examine the recent history of attacks on public health, data privacy, and bodily autonomy within broader public health practices and actions led by the Trump administration. We’ll analyze how policing and data collection from vulnerable populations share the same logic, and work together to envision building a liberated public health system that upholds fundamental rights and is rooted in care, accountability, and human dignity.
Participants:
- Maritza Perez Medina, Director of Federal Affairs, Drug Policy Alliance
- Christine Mitchell, Health Instead of Punishment Program Director, Health In Partnership
- Allie Bohm, Senior Policy Counsel, New York Civil Liberties Union
- Sara Geoghegan, Senior Counsel, Electronic Information Privacy Center
- Moderated by Amir Sadeghi, Policy and Advocacy Manager, CHLP
This webinar will be 75 minutes long.