Alabama disability advocate loses federal job amid Trump firings

by Anna Barrett, Alabama Reflector
February 25, 2025

Advocating for children with disabilities was Victoria DeLano’s dream. And after 15 years of advocacy work, she got her dream job at the U.S. Department of Education in December. 

Three months later, she was fired.

The first sign that she had been fired came on Feb. 12, when she could no longer log into her computer at the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). She had no idea why, and neither did her boss. She later got a phone call from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management notifying her of her termination.

“I did get a phone call from someone at the Department of Ed saying ‘We don’t have a letter of termination for you, because we didn’t terminate you,’” DeLano said in a phone interview Thursday. “‘OPM did this.’”

DeLano said she had no proof of her termination in a LinkedIn post written on Feb. 18. In the Thursday interview, she said she only received a termination notice six days after being locked out of her computer because she asked for it. The letter did not cite a reason for her termination, even though she was a probationary employee. 

Under federal employment law, a probationary employee is someone who has been employed for less than two years. Those employees can only be fired if they have low performance or any conduct issues. DeLano said she did not fall under either category.

“I have protections as a probationary employee … you can only be fired if there is documented low performance – and they actually have to document it and come to you and do a performance plan,” she said. “That was not the case with me, like I was a high performer. I tracked everything.”

DeLano is one of thousands of workers fired by the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) since Trump entered the White House on Jan. 20. According to USA Today, the total number of layoffs may have exceeded 100,000.

At the OCR, DeLano’s served as an equal opportunity specialist and investigated cases of discrimination at public schools, museums, libraries and any other entity using federal funds in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. She specialized in cases involving discrimination of people with disabilities. 

DeLano said she looked at who, what, when, where, how and if a complaint was discrimination. In her three months of employment, DeLano said she investigated seven cases across her four states.

“Sometimes it’s just a matter of bringing both sides to the table and communicating,” she said. “Sometimes there are kids (with) super rare disease situations. Maybe it’s something a school has never seen, so they don’t know how to handle it.”

The most common cases DeLano saw included students with Individualized Education Programs or Section 504 plans and making sure those students got the education they are entitled to. But she said the word disabled included “a pretty large gamut” of cases.  

“The definition of disability could be a child with asthma who needs an inhaler at school, and where’s that inhaler going to be stored? Who’s going to administer it?” DeLano said. “It can also be a student who’s on a ventilator and a feeding tube and in a wheelchair, like maybe the other extreme, who needs a one-on-one nurse to provide their medical care.”

DeLano said she was the only OCR employee in Alabama that she knew of, but others still advocate for disabled Alabamians.

The Alabama Disability Advocacy Program works with people with disabilities and aids parents in the OCR complaint filing process, said ADAP senior attorney and children’s team leader Jenny Ryan. 

“So if the parent has contacted us, it is typically to work with the parent to make sure that the IEP we’re basically there to support the parent in trying to get an IEP that works for the child and parent, and protects the rights to education for the child,” Ryan said.

There were 285 open discrimination cases in Alabama at elementary-secondary and post-secondary schools as of Jan. 14, according to the OCR website. DeLano said the Department of Education stopped outside communication of the inner workings of the department after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

According to ProPublica, OCR opened about 20 cases in the first three weeks of Trump’s administration, only relating to disability discrimination and not racial or sex-based discrimination. In the first three weeks of former President Joe Biden’s administration, ProPublica reported OCR opened 110 cases relating to all discrimination. 

DeLano said OCR was still opening cases when she was there and students and families should still file complaints. However, she said there was not a way to know what cases were being investigated due to the external communication pause. 

“I don’t know what’s happening right now,” she said.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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