The Trump-Vance administration and congressional Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” could strip more than 10,000 Floridians of life-saving HIV medication.

The Florida Department of Health announced there would be large cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program in the Sunshine State. The program switched from covering those making up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level, which was anyone making $62,600 or less, in 2025, to only covering those making up to 130 percent of the FPL, or $20,345 a year in 2026. 

Cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which provides medication to low-income people living with HIV/AIDS, will prevent a dramatic $120 million funding shortfall as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill according to the Florida Department of Health. 

The International Association of Providers of AIDS Care and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo warned that the situation could easily become a “crisis” without changing the current funding setup.

“It is a serious issue,” Ladapo told the Tampa Bay Times. “It’s a really, really serious issue.”

The Florida Department of Health currently has a “UPDATES TO ADAP” warning on the state’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program webpage, recommending Floridians who once relied on tax credits and subsidies to pay for their costly HIV/AIDS medication to find other avenues to get the crucial medications — including through linking addresses of Florida Association of Community Health Centers and listing Florida Non-Profit HIV/AIDS Organizations rather than have the government pay for it. 

HIV disproportionately impacts low income people, people of color, and LGBTQ people

The Tampa Bay Times first published this story on Thursday, which began gaining attention in the Sunshine State, eventually leading the Democratic Party to, once again, condemn the Big Beautiful Bill pushed by congressional republicans.

“Cruelty is a feature and not a bug of the Trump administration. In the latest attack on the LGBTQ+ community, Donald Trump and Florida Republicans are ripping away life-saving HIV medication from over 10,000 Floridians because they refuse to extend enhanced ACA tax credits,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Albert Fujii told the Washington Blade. “While Donald Trump and his allies continue to make clear that they don’t give a damn about millions of Americans and our community, Democrats will keep fighting to protect health care for LGBTQ+ Americans across the country.”

More than 4.7 million people in Florida receive health insurance through the federal marketplace, according to KKF, an independent source for health policy research and polling. That is the largest amount of people in any state to be receiving federal health care — despite it only being the third most populous state.

Florida also has one of the largest shares of people who use the AIDS Drug Assistance Program who are on the federal marketplace: about 31 percent as of 2023, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

“I can’t understand why there’s been no transparency,” David Poole also told the Times, who oversaw Florida’s AIDS program from 1993 to 2005. “There is something seriously wrong.”

The National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors estimates that more than 16,000 people will lose coverage

Please do not forget that Renee Nicole Good was a queer woman. 

Last week, Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was shot and killed by a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. Her wife Rebecca Good was present when the ICE agent shot her, standing outside their car. In the immediate aftermath, Minneapolis erupted with protests aimed at ICE in the city and Republican officials, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who argued the shooting was justified as an act of self-defense. 

In a press conference held this past Thursday, Vance told reporters that Good was “a victim of left-wing ideology.” “I can believe that her death is a tragedy,” Vance said,” while also recognizing that it is a tragedy of her own making.” Many criticized Vance’s statement, especially given how he blamed “left-wing extremism” for Charlie Kirk’s death in September on a Utah campus and Vance himself doubled down on condemning those who were celebrating the far-right podcaster’s fatal shooting.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem implied that Good was a domestic terrorist while Fox News host Jesse Watters said that “the woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio.” 

Laura Loomer, another far-right Trump supporter, tweeted, “‘She/her.’ Literally every time,” in response to what is believed to be Good’s Instagram account. Loomer and Watters both pointed out her pronouns are somehow part of the reason she was tied to ICE-related violence. 

As these comments from far right pundits show, far-right media coverage was quick to connect Good’s queerness to her work to inhibit ICE activity in Minneapolis. 

But while far-right news outlets highlighting Good’s queerness, centrist and even leftist news outlets also erased her wife’s experience, featuring interviews with Good’s mom and ex-husband but not her wife who was present for the shooting, feeding into the narrative that she was an “innocent” white mother while denying Good’s own agency in mobilizing for immigrants in her community. 

Nobody should be shot by government agencies ever, and these news outlets do not need to play into the construction of an “innocent” white woman for people to be outraged by her death. In fact, in doing so and denying Good’s queerness, they deny the way in which Good’s identity likely affected the way she interacted with the police. For queer and trans people, police are not safe people–in fact, Good’s last words deescalating the situation reflect the ways that homophobia and misogyny prime queer women, and all women to placate men’s emotions.

And it still didn’t work. After shooting her, the ICE agent called her a “fucking bitch,” in front of her wife who was kept away from Good while she bled out in her car.

When the media reinforces the narrative that she was an “innocent” mother, it reinforces the same sexism and racism that allows police brutality to continue. 

In an interview, author of the book After Purity released this past December, Sara Moslener said that “White womanhood has been constructed to require that white women sort of maintain purity within themselves as a way to maintain the purity within themselves as a way to maintain the purity of, the innocence of, the nation state. When the purity movement resurfaced in the 1990s, it was this recapitulation of the 19th century nation of sexual purity that was highly racialized.”

“It wasn’t something that was accessible to enslaved women, to other women of color, to immigrant women. It was this ideal of true womanhood that became connected to this idea of a strong nationstate. That rhetoric was then used to justify racial terror lynchings. If white women were threatened, you know, physically, bodily, culturally, they have the right to claim things. This was often used as a guise to justify violence and murder, especially against Black men. It even ties to the concept of Karen and the entitlement of white women, where they can weaponize their vulnerability,” Moslener said. 

Good’s shooting for many people was a breaking point for this very reason — because it represented the first time that they had witnessed a white person killed by an ICE agent or a member of the police. 

For some, their whiteness had been a source of safety because of the privilege of their skin color, or so they thought until Good’s murder this past week. In the aftermath, they are rethinking if this privilege will continue to protect them and what it can mean in a world where violence against white women’s bodies has long caused social backlash.

This is not a reason to stop fighting — Good was not the first person killed by ICE, not even the first person killed by ICE in 2026, but her whiteness is one of the central reasons that it incited outrage — because of a society that privileges and protects white women’s bodies. To describe Good as solely an “innocent” white woman, to deny her queerness, is to play into this performance of outrage about the brutalization of white women’s bodies.

If discussions of Good’s queerness — and persistent queerphobia against queer women — is not considered in our outrage, in our protests, we feed right into the same narratives that mean some police brutality, especially that against queer and trans people and people of color, goes completely unreported and unchallenged. 

This is state-sanctioned violence, and in the immediate aftermath of Good’s death, the Trump administration has demanded that people deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, has pushed the narrative that Good weaponized her vehicle against an ICE agent and that agent fatally shooting her was an act of self defense. This is categorically false but denying what we know to be true, what we can witness ourselves and understand, is the final step in fascism armed and funded by the government. 

But let’s be frank: This is not the first time that the American police or a government agent has murdered an unarmed person. Just under six years ago, George Floyd was murdered by police officers in the same city — his death was a breaking point for many who had witnessed police brutality against people of color. 

While people are eager to say Good’s name, we cannot say or remember her without remembering and saying the names of Black and Brown men and women, especially disabled people of color, who have been murdered in the hundreds by the police. Their names are often said, their murders often go unquestioned. 

People have been and will continue to say Good’s name largely because she was a white woman but the names of Black and Brown people go unsaid and unrecognized because of a system that performs outrage about violence against white bodies. What Good’s murder realized was how a system built on the protection of white women — a Christian nationalism committed to Social Purity — will still sacrifice white women who refuse to fall in line. 

Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned this week over the Justice Department’s push to investigate Good’s widow. Among them was Joseph Thompson, a career federal prosecutor, who objected to investigating Good’s wife as well as the department’s refusal to investigate whether the shooting was lawful. 

In the signs, in the protests, in the prayers and pleas that you say and make in the aftermath of Good’s murder, do not deny her queerness, do not deny who she was and do not deny the work she did because in performing outrage against the murder of an “innocent” white mother we replicate the same systems of harm that hurt us all. 

Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian.

A gay Venezuelan opposition leader who currently lives in Colombia says his country’s future is uncertain in the wake of now former President Nicolás Maduro’s ouster.

The Washington Blade spoke with Yendri Rodríguez on Thursday, 12 days after American forces seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at their home in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, during an overnight operation.

Maduro and Flores on Jan. 5 pleaded not guilty to federal drug charges in New York. The Venezuelan National Assembly the day before swore in Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, as the country’s acting president.

Rodríguez, who lives in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, described the events surrounding Maduro’s ouster as “very confusing.”

“It was a very surprising thing that left me in shock,” Rodríguez told the Blade. “We also thought, at least from the perspective of human rights, that the United States was going to respect international law and not go to the extreme of bombing and extracting Maduro.”

“Other questions also arise,” he added. “What could have been done? What else could have been done to avoid reaching this point? That is the biggest question posed to the international community, to other countries, to the human rights mechanisms we established before Trump violated international law, precisely to preserve these mechanisms and protect the human rights of Venezuelan people and those of us who have been forced to flee.”

Rodríguez three years ago founded the Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence. He also worked with Tamara Adrián, a lawyer who in 2015 became the first openly transgender woman elected to the Venezuelan National Assembly, for more than a decade.

Members of Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency, known by the Spanish acronym DGCIM, on Aug. 3, 2024, “arbitrarily detained” Rodríguez as he was trying to leave the country to attend a U.N. human rights event in Geneva.

Rodríguez told the Blade he was “forcibly disappeared” for nearly nine hours and suffered “psychological torture.” He fled to Colombia upon his release.

Two men on Oct. 14, 2025, shot Rodríguez and Luis Peche Arteaga, a Venezuelan political consultant, as they left a Bogotá building.

The assailants shot Rodríguez eight times, leaving him with a fractured arm and hip. Rodríguez told the Blade he has undergone multiple surgeries and has had to learn how to walk again.

“This recovery has been quite fast, better than we expected, but I still need to finish the healing process for a fractured arm and complete the physical therapy for the hip replacement I had to undergo as a result of these gunshots,” he said.

María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, and other Venezuelan opposition leaders said Maduro’s government targeted Rodríguez and Peche. Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his government also condemned the attack.

Colombian authorities have yet to arrest anyone in connection with the attack.

Rodríguez noted to the Blade he couldn’t sleep on Jan. 3 because “of the aches and pains” from the shooting. He said a friend who is “helping me out and looking after my things” was the one who told him about the operation the U.S. carried out to seize Maduro and Flores.

“He said, ‘Look at this! They’re bombing Caracas! And I was like, ‘What is this?'” recalled Rodríguez.

White House ‘not necessarily’ promoting human rights agenda

Rodríguez noted Delcy Rodríguez “is and forms part of the mechanisms of repression” that includes DGCIM and other “repressive state forces that have not only repressed, but also tortured, imprisoned, and disappeared people simply for defending the right to vote in (the) 2024 (election), simply for protesting, simply for accompanying family members.” Yendri Rodríguez told the Blade that “there isn’t much hope that things will change” in Venezuela with Delcy Rodríguez as president.

“Let’s hope that countries and the international community can establish the necessary dialogues, with the necessary intervention and pressure, diplomatically, with this interim government,” said Yendri Rodríguez, who noted hundreds of political prisoners remain in custody.

He told the Blade the Trump-Vance administration does not “not necessarily” have “an agenda committed to human rights. And we’ve seen this in their actions domestically, but also in their dealings with other countries.”

“Our hope is that the rest of the international community, more than the U.S. government, will take action,” said Yendri Rodríguez. “This is a crucial moment to preserve democratic institutions worldwide, to preserve human rights.”

Yendri Rodríguez specifically urged the European Union, Colombia, Brazil, and other Latin American countries “to stop turning a blind eye to what is happening and to establish bridges and channels of communication that guarantee a human rights agenda” and to try “to curb the military advances that the United States may still be considering.”

Yendri Rodríguez told the Blade he also plans to return to Venezuela when it is safe for him to do so.

“My plan will always be to return to Venezuela, at least when it’s no longer a risk,” he said. “The conditions aren’t right for me to return because this interim government is a continuation of Maduro’s government.”

Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers was on assignment in Bogotá, Colombia, from Jan. 5-10.