Ivanka Trump chose Miami-Dade for her back-to-school charity drive this week, the same district that just ended universal free lunch.
Her company, Planet Harvest, teamed up with the nonprofit Style Saves to help more than 25,000 Miami families get ready for the year ahead, handing out backpacks, uniforms, sneakers, haircuts and boxes of produce.
She described the effort on Instagram. “Planet Harvest was thrilled to collaborate with Style Saves in support of more than 25,000 Miami families as they prepare for the new school year. Thanks to our incredible partners, students are heading back equipped with backpacks, uniforms, and nutritious food to nourish their bodies as they learn and grow.”
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The school supplies were only part of what viewers wanted to talk about.
Some commenters focused on the school lunch cuts, pointing out that Republicans “won’t give kids free lunches at school.” Others shifted to immigration policy, arguing that her father “has deported thousands of families in the exact state you’re doing this” and calling the mismatch “astounding.”
A few raised what’s happening inside detention facilities right now, asking that children there be fed too, since “they are getting sick every day” and “they are humans.”
One reply tied the whole thing together with a single question, wondering aloud whether the deported kids from Florida could have attended themselves.
Shorter reactions landed just as hard, with commenters calling it “THE HYPOCRISY!!!” and “The cognitive dissonance is WILD.”
The policy context behind the criticism is well documented.
The Marshall Project reported in April that more than 6,200 children have been detained during Trump’s second term. Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel at Children’s Rights, told the outlet: “Every American should be shocked that we’re incarcerating thousands of children. It just adds up to an incredible amount of trauma.” A UCLA Luskin School analysis found 558 Latino arrests occurred per day during the administration’s first 100 days.
Food policy adds its own layer to the story.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to cut federal food stamp spending by about a fifth over the next decade, and enrollment has already dropped 11%, roughly 4.5 million people, since it passed. Gas hit $4.06 a gallon nationally the same week as Ivanka’s post, a dollar higher than a year earlier, according to AAA.
Planet Harvest operates as a for-profit business, something Ivanka has defended on the record before.
“Initially, I said, you know what, why don’t we just buy this excess and get it to food banks?” she told CNBC. “And I thought that to really do the volume, to make it a functional private sector business… you can actually impact a lot more change.”
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
