RFK Jr. likes to lambaste the medical establishment for its “war on protein” or “war on saturated fats.” But if we’re to use Merriam-Webster’s definition of war — “a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism,” it’s not hyperbole to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his boss are waging the real war — one against children.

Donald Trump’s most cruel and significant blow to the health of children in this country is to the over 200,000 children or their family members who have been detained by ICE. Two thirds of them are U.S. citizens. New Yorker investigative reporter Sarah Stillman, in a comprehensive article last April summarized it well, writing “the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy.”

This administration ended the policy of “protected areas” where children gathered, sending ICE agents into schools, daycare centers, school bus stops, churches, and hospitals — traumatizing many thousands of children. The terror campaign in Minneapolis is most well-known but in cities and states across the U.S. kids have been swept up in raids, zip-tied, sprayed with chemicals, and separated from parents.

Since Trump took office in 2025, 6,000 children, including 500 babies, have been detained at facilities like the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. Children in these concentration camps (they meet the dictionary definition) have been denied essential medicines, given bug-infested food and non-potable water, separated from parents, and sent unaccompanied to other camps. Infectious diseases like TB are surprisingly common in these centers.

This treatment of children is a crime against humanity and a form of torture, according to no less than four international conventions, including the 1949 Geneva Convention, which was signed by all members of the United Nations including the U.S.;  it was written to prevent the kind of torture and killing practiced by the Nazis from ever happening again.

The recent Supreme Court ruling ending Temporary Protective Status affects 230,000 children who are U.S. citizens, but whose parents may have to leave jobs where they have worked for years and be shipped back to countries like Haiti, which carries a Level 4 (Do Not Travel) advisory from the U.S. State Department due to the risk of kidnapping and murder from gangs who control much of the country.

Let’s go back to the first blows dealt to our health care system: 15 short months ago, the previously renown CDC, NIH, and National Science Foundation were decimated with funding and staffing cuts. RFK, Jr., who has no medical training, fired thousands of experienced physicians and scientists — cutting funding for childhood related research for prevention and treatment of everything from childhood cancer to respiratory illness to complications of pregnancy — funding previously approved by Congress. At the same time, Elon Musk and his “Department of Governmental Efficiency” (DOGE) cut billions of dollars in grants to state departments of health, who were and are struggling to take up the slack.

This administration replaced physicians with expertise in the care of children and adolescents with fringe conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. It has given new life to the long-debunked myth that the measles vaccine causes autism, resulting in loss of herd immunity in many states and the most cases of measles seen in the U.S. since. Its new childhood immunization schedule, which cuts six vaccines from the roster of current vaccines, has been criticized from every single national medical society, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which took the administration to court over this travesty.

Children, who are small, with still developing bodies and larger surface to volume ratios, are especially vulnerable to heat-related illness, smoke, toxic ingestions, ingredients in plastic products, herbicides, and other chemicals. By demolishing the EPA, putting almost all environmental regulations on the chopping block, slashing funding for green initiatives, and terminating funding for climate change related research, the administration is putting millions of young people at risk of asthma, cancer, and developmental disabilities, to name a few.

This regime has replaced experts with bigots. It has cut funding and treatment for some of our most vulnerable children, especially those who are people of color or LGBTQ, causing untold psychological damage to these kids and their families.

And if the millions of stressed young people want to see a therapist? Or a doctor?

The billion-dollar cuts to Medicaid, in the “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) was summarized this way by the president of the AAP, Andrew Racine, MD, PhD, in the current issue of the AAP News: “Medicaid is a program designed around the needs of children. Efforts to undercut or undermine Medicaid for the children who rely on it is a bet against the future of the country.”

RFK Jr. and his gang have stated that we don’t need vaccines nor research to protect us against germs, including future pandemics; all we need is good nutrition and exercise.  Yet the BBB has resulted in hundreds of thousands of low-income American children forfeiting free school lunches because they have lost their Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The administration lowered WIC’s supplemental fruit and vegetable benefits by 60% (to $10 per month) and it has eliminated a half billion dollars dedicated to nutrition education and school gardens, affecting one million school children.

Then there are RFK’s “one-offs”: The eradication of: 1. the ban on fruit flavored vapes — often marketed to children. 2. the prohibition on the use of tanning beds by people under 18 (so they call all share his leathery skin? get melanoma?).

The administration’s most deadly act affecting children globally has been the exit from the World Health Organization and the virtual closure of the USAID (by joyfully callous Elo Musk and DOGE). USAID provided 50% of the funding for international programs fighting malnutrition worldwide (which is worsening in large part because of climate change driven droughts, to which the U.S. is a major culprit). Programs to fight HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria were slashed. Thousands of pediatric critical care centers closed down. Experts say that this has already led to the deaths of a half million children worldwide and could lead to four million deaths of children under five by 2030, if present trends continue.

But it seems that the only way to reverse these trends is for Trump and RFK Jr. to have a miraculous conversion to a belief in science and compassion, or for them to lose their dictatorial control over the federal government.

Dr. David Gottsegen is a local pediatrician and author of the book “Mending the Body with the Mind: Harnessing Kids’ Superpowers to Heal and Stay Healthy.“