Jonathan White

Jonathan White (Democratic Party) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent Maryland's 4th Congressional District. He lost in the Democratic primary on June 23, 2026.

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I fought back against Trump's cruel family separation policy from inside government - now I'm retired from the service and ready to fight in Congress. 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 Trump's first term, 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 defied political appointees to describe the harms of family separation to children, and I advocated an end to separation for reasons other than the safety of the child.

Earlier in my career, I was an oncology social worker, a college professor, an international labor union campaigner, a union organizer, and community activist.

I am an out bisexual man, a suburban husband and father of two in a multi-racial, multi-religious family.

I have seen firsthand what Trump and his enablers are capable of, and I have also proven that I am dedicated to defense of federal workers, immigrants, and American families.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

RESTORE FEDERAL WORKERS AND CRITICAL FEDERAL PROGRAMS

Nothing is more urgent for Democrats than stopping the brutal assault on federal career public servants, and rebuilding the critical federal programs that Trump has gutted. If Democrats win the majority, I have a plan to rapidly restore the federal workforce to their jobs. We must also de-politicize government by eliminating most non-Senate-confirmed politically appointed positions; modernize the Hatch Act; build new systems for independent oversight; and create negative consequences for all members of Congress every time there is a government shutdown, such as mandatory replacement of sitting members by others of their own party any time there is a lapse in appropriations.PROTECT IMMIGRANT FAMILIES AND AMERICAN CITIZENS FROM ICE OUT OF CONTROL

The most dangerous assaults on democracy today are being conducted by Trump, Miller, and Homan using a masked, militarized secret police under the banner of immigration enforcement.

We must:

-Defund the secret police.

-Require federal law enforcement to take off their masks and wear their badges and agency indicia.

-Outlaw family separation.

-Close ICE concentration camps.

-End ICE human trafficking to third-country warzones and torture prisons.

-Move immigration courts from DOJ to the Judicial Branch.

-Restore ombudsmen and DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office

-Seek comprehensive immigration reform to end the failed experiment of criminalizing immigrationSAVE OUR LIFESAVING NATIONAL SYSTEMS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH AND EMERGENCY RESPONSE

As a career leader in the public health and disaster response systems of our government, I have seen firsthand how Trump, Noem, and Kennedy are demolishing these systems we need for lifesaving.

-Protect American kids' access to vaccines.

-Save CDC

-Require the HHS Secretary to have a background in health and/or human services

-Roll back the gutting of FEMA

-Reform the Stafford Act

-Restore National Weather Service, FEMA, and USAID

-Expand the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps

-Build a modern disaster response system for the real, current Global Climate Emergency

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

-Restoring women's right to choose

-Healthcare access for all

-Defend LGBTQ+ rights

-Take the Global Climate Emergency seriously

-Curb racist police brutality

-Create educational opportunity

-Build an economy for working families, not just the billionaires

-End censorship in our schools, universities, libraries, and museums

-Stop shielding rich pedophiles; release the Epstein Files

-Level the playing field when it comes to Trump's extortion; we have to make whole universities, networks, and companies that he illegally punishes for disagreeing with him--and penalize those who capitulate to his autocratic demands

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What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

Integrity, willingness to fight over issues of principle, compassion for people who are suffering, and decisiveness.

Do you believe that it's beneficial for representatives to have previous experience in government or politics?

What Congress desperately needs now is people with experience in career positions in the Federal Executive Branch. We have to rebuild the government after Trump's crushing it. This will take people who really understand how government works, not amateurs in government like politicians and political appointees. We need much less politics in government, and more government in politics. I think recently fired or departed career federal workers should challenge incumbents--Democrat and Republican alike--in districts all over the country in this cycle. That way, the expertise and public service ethic that is the hallmark of career federal officials can be a counterbalance to the cynicism and self-serving opportunism, the games playing, that is what Americans have come to mistrust and dislike about their elected officials.

What do you perceive to be the United States' greatest challenges as a nation over the next decade?

The two greatest challenges the US will face over the next decade are the Global Climate Emergency, and the recovery from the disaster that is Trump's and Musk's destruction of the federal Executive Branch. Both will require commitment to America's future, reliance on science and evidence in decision making, and an increased role for the experts and professionals rather than the ideologues.

Do you believe that two years is the right term length for representatives?

Yes. And for many who serve, it is long enough for their entire career, and someone else should step in after them.

What are your thoughts on term limits?

We should limit Senators to two terms and members of the House to four terms. The Democratic Party should also have an age limit for leadership positions or seeking re-election. The Party has become preoccupied first with the "right to remain in office," and this keeps hurting us. The DNC needs to stop putting its thumb on the scale to privilege incumbents.

Do you believe that compromise is necessary or desirable for policymaking?

Democrats have overemphasized compromise for too long with extremists. Of course compromise is necessary, but only when it is mutual compromise. Current Democratic leadership specializes in total capitulation, and then calling it compromise

How should the U.S. House use its investigative powers?

The role of House investigations is to be a check on the potential abuses of Executive power. If Democrats do not win the majority in 2026, and Republicans do not allow bipartisan hearings to investigate government abuses or Trump Administration wrongdoing, Democrats should hold their own investigations anyway, and partner with the media and with nongovernmental organizations to arrive at the truth and bring it to the American people.

What is an accomplishment that you are proud of?

Other than being a dad to my son and daughter, the accomplishment I am proudest of is that in the first Trump Administration, I led the fight inside government against Trump's and Stephen Miller's breathtakingly cruel policy of separating children from their parents at the Southwest Border, and led the operation to reunify 2,200 children with their parents.

In 2017, when Trump was first inaugurated, I was stationed in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, working as the career federal official in charge of the child welfare system that takes care of children who enter the US unaccompanied by a parent. Over the next year, I and my team fought a series of battles with my supervisor, the politically appointed Director of ORR, and his superiors. We fought them when they tried to deny girls in care access to abortion services, even though many of those girls were pregnant as a result of sexual assault while they were migrating north. We fought them to protect the transgender girls in care. We fought them over DHS' process of incarcerating teenage boys in secure juvenile justice settings over ICE's claims of "gang affiliation," with no evidence and no due process. But most of all, we fought them over the policy of separating families at the Southwest Border, abducting babies, children, and teens from their moms and dads and then sending them to us at ORR as if they were "unaccompanied," when in fact they were accompanied children and should never have left their parents' side.

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,” and books such as Jacob Soboroff’s bestselling Separated, Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear’s Border Wars. Or just Google "Jonathan White separated," and check it out for yourself.

When we launched the mission to reunify children (which almost immediately became governed by the Ms. L v. ICE lawsuit in federal district court), we didn't even know which children had been separated, because DHS had systematically concealed that information from us in HHS, and in fact at that time had no records to tie any given child to a parent. We had to figure out which children in our care were separated (as opposed to being legitimately unaccompanied children who had come without parents), had to find their parents in ICE custody, and had to reunify the children with their parents before ICE deported the parents. This wasn't a bug, it was a feature. The goal of the policy was to make separation permanent, and the barriers to the reunification were enormous. Additionally, ICE agents tried to sabotage the reunification effort, especially at Port Isabel Detention Center, one of the designated reunification sites. We had to figure out how to accomplish the near-impossible, while ICE worked against us.

During this time, I was sent to testify nine times before Congress. Preparing for my first appearance in front of the Senate, I was ordered by Katie Waldman, soon to marry Stephen Miller and become Katie Miller, to lie under oath and say that there was no way to know whether separation would harm children. I refused, and that day in front of the Senate I became the first federal official to say specifically "There is no question. Separation from children poses significant risk of traumatic psychological injury to the child." I began using my testimony to urge Congress to outlaw family separation except when necessary for the safety of the child. Congress never passed that law, which is a shame--it would be incredibly helpful now in America if there were a law to stop ICE from family separations today. But I never stopped arguing for it, and in fact I intend to sponsor that law again as soon as I get sworn in. Stephen Miller wrote the White House Chief of Staff about me, enraged by my testimony.

It was Miller's and Tom Homan's original plan to separate 10,000 children the first year. Because of our efforts, they were exposed and stopped. It was ICE's plan to sabotage the reunification effort. We had to play chicken with them, besieging them with busloads of children and forcing them to open the Port Isabel site and conduct reunifications as the court order required.

Those were painful days, but people could see what I was trying to do, and why. Rep. Diana DeGette called me "an American hero." Judge Dana Sabraw, who had the Ms. L. case, said I was "exactly the right person" and "a shining light" in the dark, harrowing tale of family separation. My example became an encouraging sign to career federal workers in DC that they could sometimes push back against Trump's cruelties and abuses and win.

Today, many of us are angry and morally outraged by the cruel things ICE is doing right now to children and families. I have real-life experience pushing back against those kinds of abuses, and while I lost many of those fights, I also won sometimes. I failed to prevent family separation, despite my best efforts, but I succeeded in exposing its cruelty before the world. I and the 350+-person team I led succeeded in reunifying thousands of families, despite the Trump Administration's best efforts to make them permanently separated. Placing those children back in the arms of their moms and dads is the most important thing I have ever done.

What legislation would you enact related to election administration in the United States?

We must challenge the corrupting influence of money. Until we can address the fact that Harlan Crow has bought at least one Supreme Court Justice outright, so a different Supreme Court can throw out the deeply un-American Citizens United precedent, we will live in a world where money corrupts our system of government. In the meantime, we should voluntarily refuse to accept corrosive