About Me

I am Jonathan White (he/him). I just retired in October 2025 from the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.  Under four U.S. Presidents, I served in uniform on disaster and crisis response missions for the federal government, most recently leading disaster recovery and disaster behavioral health missions for the US Department of Health and Human Services. 

In the first Trump Administration, I led the pushback from inside the government against Trump's cruel policy of separating children from their parents at the Southwest Border.  I tried unsuccessfully to prevent family separation, and then led the mission to reunify children separated from their parents at the US border. In testimony before Congress, I was the first federal official to describe the harms of family separation to children and to advocate an end to separation for reasons other than the safety of the child. My efforts in 2017-2018 to prevent family separation, and in 2018-2019 to reunify children with their parents, are featured in Errol Morris’ 2024 documentary film Separated, Caitlin Dickerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 Atlantic article “Family Separation: An American Tragedy,” Jacob Soboroff’s bestselling book Separated, Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear’s Border Wars.

Earlier in my career, I was an oncology social worker, helping stage 4 cancer patients and their families. In prior careers I have been a college English professor, and for seven years I worked on international labor union campaigns. Prior to that I was a community activist and labor union organizer. I'm a licensed clinical social worker in Maryland.  I have deployed or held national-level leadership roles in over eighty responses to domestic disasters, public health emergencies, incidents of mass violence, and humanitarian crisis events.

I have seen firsthand what Trump and his enablers are capable of–in terms of cruelty to immigrant families, gutting the public health system of the United States, weakening American national security and disaster response, and mean-spirited attacks on federal employees and their families. And so I am dedicating myself to the defense of our communities from Trump and his unconstitutional abuses.

I retired from federal service so I could fight for my friends, my coworkers, my Maryland neighbors. Federal employees deserve better.

And the Trump Administration is a crisis for democracy and a disaster for Maryland families.