The New Yorker:

Federal offices and programs that insure equal treatment are being shuttered and scaled back.

By E. Tammy Kim

Eight years ago, Sara Fernandez flew into Newark, New Jersey, on her way back from the Dominican Republic, where her boyfriend lived. As she was going through airport security, she heard a T.S.A. agent say to one of his colleagues, “Do I need to pick her up and put her through the scanner?” Fernandez has dwarfism; she identifies as a little person. She also happened to be a new hire in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which oversees anti-discrimination enforcement for the Department of Homeland Security, including T.S.A. “The guy obviously didn’t know I worked for D.H.S.,” Fernandez recalled. He had made her feel “really awkward and uncomfortable,” but she didn’t want to get him in trouble, so she contacted T.S.A. and scheduled a phone call with him. “I wanted to be, like, ‘You upset me. Look at me. I’m a professional,’ ” she said. After their call, “he got some training. Moments like that can actually stick with a person more, because he got to hear it from me.”

Fernandez was raised in Pittsburgh by adoptive parents, also little people, who’d met at an annual meeting of Little People of America. Her mom’s family was “historically Republican,” in a moderate, John McCain kind of way, Fernandez told me. Her dad had emigrated from Argentina and worked as an accountant. “I have a picture of us at his naturalization ceremony, with American flags,” she said. Her parents weren’t political, but they believed in equal rights and taught their daughter not to feel limited by her stature. Still, she recalled, “as a kid, I was very reserved, observant, anxious. I didn’t want anyone to notice me.” Fernandez earned degrees in law and social work, and entered federal service through the Schedule A program, which expedites the hiring of qualified candidates with disabilities. She started at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then went to D.H.S. in 2017, during the first Trump Administration. She married the man she’d been dating, who’s of average height, and gave birth to their son, a little person who’s now five years old.

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