Jonathan White fought the first Trump administration’s efforts to separate migrant families, doing bureaucratic battle with officials such as Stephen Miller while working to reunite children with their parents.
He managed to keep his federal job, even after testifying to Congress that President Donald Trump’s family-separation policies had harmed thousands of children, a headline-grabbing public rebuke of a president known for prizing retribution. But after Trump returned to office this year, and White watched billionaire Elon Musk take a buzz saw to the government he had spent two decades serving, he couldn’t help but wonder: Where was the resistance?
Now 56 and freshly retired from the Department of Health and Human Services, White says he has a new mission — challenging Democrats that he believes aren’t doing enough to fight the Trump administration. He’s starting with an unlikely bid to unseat his own popular, two-term congressman, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Maryland).
“We need an opposition party. What we have is a club of people who view these as their offices for life,” White said in an interview with The Washington Post, chastising Democratic leaders for their handling of the government shutdown and other priorities. “They have failed, and they must be replaced.”
His primary challenge in Maryland’s 4th District is a reflection of a deeper undercurrents in American politics. Both parties are grappling with their identities heading into next year’s crucial midterm elections, and the energy animating White’s campaign is both fueling Democratic hopes and dividing the party, as a groundswell of frustrated voters push their elected representatives to fight Trump’s agenda harder or more effectively.
“I think it’s going to be the tea party year for the Democrats,” White said, invoking the conservative activists who unseated longtime Republicans in 2010 and upended Washington.
Off-year election results and early redistricting wins have reinvigorated Democrats’ belief that they can reclaim a congressional majority, despite Trump’s efforts to bolster Republicans’ slim margin by urging them to redraw electoral maps. But the party’s focus on next year’s midterms has also angered White, who says that Democrats should be doing more to stop Trump right now as he unwinds federal agencies.
His campaign faces obvious hurdles. He has yet to hire any full-time staff. He has no prior political experience. He’s a White man running in a congressional district that is majority Black. And he’s a bisexual, practicing Wiccan — an identity that he calls “quite boring,” citing his two-decade marriage to his wife, but leaves him outside the mainstream.
“The people that will bother are never going to vote for me anyway,” White said, acknowledging that he was probably “not ready” for the inevitable scrutiny of his personal life. “But I’m readier for that than I am to spend the rest of my life wondering, did you just let those far-right people take power and not do everything you can do?”
Ivey’s office declined to make the congressman available for an interview. People close to him characterized the lawmaker as a fighter. Ivey in March called for Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) to be potentially replaced after compromising with Republicans on a funding bill; traveled to El Salvador to advocate for the release of Kilmar Abrego García, a county resident that the Trump administration has spent months seeking to deport; and has rallied against Trump’s policies, such as his deployment of the National Guard in Washington.
“Whether it’s standing up for federal workers or defending families from harmful Republican overreach, he’s fighting every day on behalf of Maryland,” said Doug Thornell, the chief executive of SKDK, a left-leaning strategic communications firm, and a longtime Ivey adviser.
Ivey also has extensive political experience on Capitol Hill, having held a series of senior staff positions, and was twice elected state’s attorney for Prince George’s County. He comes from a prominent local family; his wife and son also hold elected office.
White traces his decision to run in part to a confrontation with Ivey in March at the height of Trump’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, which has had an outsize impact on the roughly 760,000 residents of the district that wraps around the eastern edge of Washington, D.C.
Ivey had just explained to the crowd gathered in Suitland High School that Democrats’ ability to fight back was limited by their numbers in Congress.
White, whose history of civil disobedience includes three decades-old arrests for protesting — once in an effort to save a grove of trees and twice to boost pay for janitors — was not having it.
He told Ivey and his colleagues to stand up to Trump, or take a seat.
“We are not interested in hearing that you are in the minority. We know that,” White thundered, in an exchange that was shared widely on social media and amplified on cable news. “We want you to show some of the backbone and strategic brilliance that Mitch McConnell would have in the minority. We want you to show fight, and you are not fighting.”
The White House has defended Trump’s efforts to fire federal workers, saying that he is streamlining government.
Kristi Coulter, a writer who has known White since college and is supporting his campaign, said she wants “angry Democrats” like him in office.
“We desperately need that kind of energy … when it’s channeled well, of course,” Coulter wrote in an email. “He has a long track record of funneling his passion for fairness and justice into practical action.”
White, a social worker and crisis manager originally from Lynchburg, Virginia, was unexpectedly jolted into the national spotlight in 2018. He had been managing the HHS office that takes custody of unaccompanied refugee children, when the administration’s policy shifted in a way that alarmed lawmakers and human rights advocates.
He attempted to prevent the Trump administration’s fledgling efforts, warning political officials that separating migrant children from their families at the border would be dangerous. He worked with his team to document the earliest separations, before taking another job at the health department, frustrated at Trump officials’ efforts to prevent refugee children from obtaining abortions.
Later, after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite thousands of separated families, White was tapped by HHS leaders to bring them back together. He drew up a plan and coordinated logistics from across the country — sometimes over the objections of ICE officials who balked at White’s requests and rapid time frame.
He also tangled with immigration officials whom he and others said sought to delay the family reunifications and downplay the administration’s actions.
In one instance, a pair of Department of Homeland Security officials tried to coach White’s testimony to the Senate, asking whether he knew that the family separations were actually traumatic. The exchange was first recounted in “Separated,” a 2020 book by Jacob Soboroff, and confirmed by two people with knowledge.
Katie Waldman, a Homeland Security spokesperson who later married Stephen Miller and took his last name, suggested that White could tell Congress that there was no way to know that separations were harmful to children.
“There is no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,” White subsequently told the Senate panel, effectively condemning the administration that he worked for.
Some Trump political appointees within the health department praised White’s work, and HHS Secretary Alex Azar bestowed him with an award recognizing his service. He rose to the rank of captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, helping oversee disaster-recovery missions.
But when Trump returned this year, White made plans to leave government “by the door, not the window,” he said, worried that vengeful Trump officials — including a resurgent Stephen Miller — would find ways to target him.
He began the process shortly after Inauguration Day, filing paperwork and ultimately retiring Sept. 30. The next day, he filed to compete for the June 23, 2026 Democratic primary.
White now has a network of 170 volunteers helping his fledgling campaign, focusing on issues such as securing a national living wage of $27 per hour, fighting for career civil servants and protecting immigrants. His supporters include filmmaker Errol Morris, who documented White’s efforts to defy the first Trump administration and has pledged to “do anything” to help him win his race.
He has set a modest goal — $150,000 in fundraising by the end of the year. The average congressman usually raises several million dollars per election cycle.
And he has vowed to stay in the race, despite his long odds. “The promise that I made to people — I may get beat, but I won’t quit.”
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