DERBY LINE — Local Canadian officials hosted a press conference Friday to condemn the U.S. government’s decision to limit Canadians’ access to an iconic library and theater that straddles the northern border in Vermont.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Friday afternoon that beginning Monday, the agency would be restricting Canadian access to the entrance of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which is on U.S. soil, attributing the decision to safety concerns. Staff and library card holders are allowed to access the entrance until October, when limitations are expected to become even more stringent, the agency said.

“The goal of this phased rollout is to provide members the opportunity to obtain the necessary travel documentation without negatively impacting library operations,” Ryan Brissette, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a written statement. 

“On October 1, 2025, all visitors from Canada wishing to use the front entrance will be required to present themselves at a port of entry to enter the library from the United States,” with some exceptions provided for handicapped access and emergencies, he wrote. 

First opened in 1904, the library and opera house is situated between Derby Line and Stanstead, Quebec. For more than 120 years, the library has enjoyed a unique status as a neutral space, where those in Canada can enter U.S. territory to use the space without first going through customs. The building is a heritage site and has long been considered a symbol of the close relationship between the two nations.

On Tuesday, however, U.S. Customs and Border Protection informed library staff that the longstanding arrangement was over, according to Sylvie Budreau, president of Haskell’s board of trustees. 

“No matter what this administration does, it will not change the fact that Stanstead and Derby Line are friends and partners forever,” said Stanstead Mayor Jody Stone said at the press event. “Without borders you wouldn’t even know that we are two separate communities. 

According to Budreau, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had similarly moved to restrict access from the Canadian side of the border in 2022 but ultimately agreed to let the operation run as usual.

“They have more support now,” she said.

The library plans to open a service entrance on the northern side of the building for Canadian patrons to use, which they hope to renovate in the coming months, Budreau said.

Within the library, it would be “business as usual,” she said, and there are no plans to restrict patrons’ movement within the library, which is bisected by a line of tape representing the international border. 

Dozens of people from both sides of the border gathered outside the building Friday to watch the press conference and protest the decision. 

Among them was Clement Jacques, a lifelong Stanstead resident who said he was “not comfortable at all” with the change. 

Wearing a bright red hat that read “Canada is Not for Sale,” Jacques said he was a library card holder and had been coming to Haskell for decades.

“This building is used by both countries,” he said angrily. 

The announcement came just weeks after U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the library, as first reported by VTDigger, during a whirlwind trip to Vermont following the death of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent David Maland.

During that visit, Budreau said, Noam crossed back and forth over the line of tape on the floor that represents the international border while saying, “U.S.A number one” and calling Canada “the 51st state,” echoing a common taunt from President Donald Trump.

Since then, tensions between the two nations have continued to soar as Trump continues to wage an on-again off-again trade war against Canada while suggesting that the U.S. should annex the country. 

Still, Canadian officials at Friday’s press conference were eager to reaffirm the close ties between the two nations. 

“The Haskell Free Library & Opera House is a testament to the amazing relationship between our two communities,” said Marie-Claude Bibeau, who represents the Compton-Stanstead district in Canada’s House of Commons. 

Earlier this week, Bibeau joined Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. at a roundtable discussion in Newport, where she denounced Trump’s controversial tariffs on Canadian goods. 

“Our border community is strong and this will only further our strength and our ties,” Bibeau said Friday. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: U.S. to restrict Canadian access to historic Vermont library straddling northern border.

Hurricane Helene wrought historic devastation when it hit western North Carolina last September. Nearly 100 people were killed in the region and thousands were left injured, traumatized or homeless.

Hundreds of volunteers arrived within hours and began assisting with everything from food delivery to housing to medical care. Their presence was a godsend. But for many of the area’s medical professionals, the crisis underscored their own advantage: They knew the place, the people, the culture.

“A lot of questions I don’t have to ask my patients, because I know already,” said family medicine physician Tim Bleckley, who returned to his hometown of Franklin after residency to take over the practice of a retiring doctor.

Rural Americans are more likely to suffer from, and die prematurely of, a number of chronic conditions, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Effective management of such diseases is bolstered by long-term doctor-patient relationships, and studies show that cultural awareness provides a firm foundation for these relationships.

Cultural awareness is, essentially, having an understanding of and being sensitive to a community’s customs and rhythms. For health care providers, it’s having a sense of what your patients arrive with when they enter your office.

Bryan Hodge is chief academic officer for the Mountain Area Health Education Center. He’s tasked with convincing young health care professionals of the virtues of practicing medicine in a rural community. Hodge said in the storm’s aftermath, he felt “so much pride and inspiration for the way in which people showed up.”

He also witnessed “the value of knowledge of the fabric of a community.” Those attuned to its rhythms were uniquely well-placed. It reinforced Hodge’s conviction that “the more local the care can be, the better.”

A ‘Comfort Zone’

Health care administrators in Appalachia are striving to meet two objectives at once: addressing a critical shortage of providers by nurturing homegrown talent.

Case in point: Tim Bleckley.

Bleckley was born with a heart defect and underwent surgery at a month old. While initially pediatric cardiology was his ambition, he changed his mind while in residency. He wanted to go home to Franklin, but knew the town was too small to sustain such a practice. So he chose family medicine instead.

His patients, he believes, are in a “comfort zone” when they visit him. They like that he’s aware of what they experience, how they operate, “the things that matter to them.”

“Primary care is very personal in terms of understanding where people come from, and understanding what their lives are like,” he said. “People are very comfortable with the fact that I’m a hometown boy who’s come home, and they feel very at ease coming to see me.”

He’s been able to translate that cultural awareness into change, one step at a time. He knew that his patients — like so many mountain folks — have a tendency to take the advice of their doctor without question. He wanted them to take more ownership of their care, to know why they’re taking a particular medication, when it should be taken and potential side effects. He uses the teach-back method to have them describe what they’ve been told about medications their cardiologist or nephrologist prescribed.

“I want them to feel confident they know what they’re doing.”

Rivers Woodward had a similar career trajectory.

When Woodward was a junior in high school, his sister was stricken with an illness for which traditional means of medicine proved inadequate. The family turned to Patch Adams — a physician with an alternative approach to medicine (and the subject of an eponymous motion picture starring Robin Williams) — and she made a remarkable recovery.

This experience inspired Woodward to pursue a career in health care, to help reinvent the way it’s delivered. Further, he wanted to realize that ambition in a rural community.

Like Bleckley, Woodward was raised in Franklin, in rural Macon County. Today, he’s a family medicine physician at Blue Ridge Health, a federally qualified health center in the town of Lake Lure, in the same mountain region in which he was raised.

Studies show that those who were raised in a rural community or trained in one are more likely to practice in a rural region. Both are true of Woodward. While in medical school at the University of North Carolina, he was selected for the Rural and Underserved Scholars Program, a collaboration of the University of North Carolina and the Mountain Area Health Education Center.

“Things move at a different pace” in a rural community, Woodward says. His sense of that serves him well. His cultural awareness provides a foundation from which he offers empathetic care, which, he says, entails “listening with curiosity because I actually want to know someone’s experiences.” It requires listening without judgment.

Regardless of where you come from, rural cultural awareness can be learned with time and patience, assuming you’re receptive to it. But for many, it requires a reset.

“The more insular your upbringing,” Woodward says, “whether that’s in New York City or in Macon County, the more difficult it is to tap into cultural humility with people who may not look like or speak like or think like you.”

Woodward’s upbringing was an unconventional one; learning was experiential. His family took extended trips through Latin America, traveling by bus, staying with local families.

At times, he felt tensions in his relationship with his hometown: that he was somewhat “other.” He says his practice of rural medicine, listening with curiosity, has allowed him “to heal that tension.”

Designing a New Model

In reflecting on his community in the weeks since the storm, Woodward references a paper written for the Episcopal Relief and Development agency on the emotional stages of a community that’s experienced a natural disaster.

“There’s a peak immediately afterwards that’s fueled by adrenaline and cortisol,” he explains, “survival mode, basically.” Next is “this feeling of the community coming together and supporting each other, which we saw.

“But then after that, there’s this long downhill slide into disillusionment, before the upward slope of rebuilding.”

There’s much work to be done in Western North Carolina. Its health care needs, like those of most of rural America, are urgent; solutions require systemic change.

Bryan Hodge recalls so many people being overwhelmed by the attention they were extended in the aftermath of the storm. They were accustomed to going without. This underscored for him the critical need for an overhaul of rural health care. And it underscored the heightened importance of cultural awareness to inform that overhaul.

Woodward was recently named Blue Ridge Health’s associate chief medical officer. One of his primary responsibilities is to help design new systems of care for its rural clinics.

“My hope is to leverage all of the resources we have within a really large organization to make sure that we’re meeting people where they’re at, regardless of their location and their condition,” he says.

This could mean, for example, recognizing what a huge issue transportation is in rural communities and taking better advantage of telehealth, or providing more home visits.

Tim Bleckley’s immediate community was spared from major damage in the storm. But a number of his patients live in communities that weren’t. The morning after, he was on the road, checking in on those he couldn’t contact.

“These are people I know,” Bleckley says. “They’re not numbers.”

He plans to continue to practice medicine in his hometown, using his cultural knowledge of the place to improve care, one patient at a time.

“I never regret or feel like I should have done this differently. Not at all.”

The post In North Carolina, Helene’s Destruction Underscores the Value of Homegrown Rural Health Care appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

In early December 2023, through a scrim of swirling flurries, Mackenson Remy steered his minivan past an open gate in the security fence surrounding a gray concrete factory along Highway 85, on the northeastern edge of Greeley, Colorado. Remy was still relatively new to the state, and he’d never been to Greeley before. He didn’t really know anything about the plant either, only the three letters he’d been told to look for—JBS—and what he’d heard: that they had jobs. Lots of jobs.

Remy is originally from Haiti. He’s in his 30s with braided hair and a thin beard. He has a wary way about him but also a restless hustle. About 10 years ago, he moved from Port-au-Prince to Boston, and for a while that was all he knew of the States. But when his wife, who is in the military, was stationed in Colorado Springs in early 2023, he started working at a Marriott there, driving shuttles of pilots to Denver International Airport. Despite constantly retreading the same ground, the view along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains, with Pikes Peak soaring in the distance, never failed to impress him.

Remy had a TikTok channel, so he started shooting videos with narration in Haitian Creole and sharing them with his few dozen followers back home and those recently arrived in the United States. As Haiti has unraveled over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of migrants have fled the widespread violence and landed in the US in search of a better life. “I just started to show them how Colorado looks,” Remy said later. “ Couple people, they told me, ‘You’re always talking about Colorado is nice, it’s beautiful. How about the jobs over there?’” For those Haitians with temporary visas, having full-time work could help their case to stay.

So Remy, who has a green card, figured he’d ask around. He was always driving by big businesses—warehouses, factories, construction companies—so why not drop in and see if they had any openings? One woman told him her company wasn’t hiring, but she knew a place where they were always looking for new workers: JBS. The company is the world’s largest producer of meat, especially beef. If you’ve recently eaten a burger at McDonald’s—or anywhere, really—there’s a good chance the meat came from JBS.

Remy looked up the address of the company’s plant in Greeley, about two hours from Colorado Springs. It was starting to snow, but he set out anyway. After navigating the icy highway and a long line of cattle trailers idling on the shoulder waiting to be admitted to unload their livestock, Remy inadvertently entered through the facility’s exit. Meatpacking plants usually have security tighter than Fort Knox—it’s illegal in several states, but not Colorado, to photograph or shoot videos near their property—but there Remy was, phone out and already recording, as he circled the parking lot. He looked for anyone he could ask about available jobs. Finally, a security guard stopped him and provided the name and phone number for an HR employee named Edmond Ebah.

Ebah, who had started at the plant after migrating to the United States from Benin in 2017, told Remy that JBS had about 60 positions available slaughtering, butchering, and packaging the meat. Yes, it was hard work, he emphasized. (According to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, jobs at meatpacking and poultry companies are consistently among the country’s most dangerous.) But Remy’s Haitian followers could make good money. Best of all: It was a sure thing. If they came to Colorado, he would find them a job.

So Remy went home and cut together a montage of his footage from inside JBS and around Greeley and recorded a voiceover with the information from Ebah. This isn’t a job for lazy people, he says in Creole. But you don’t need to know English. And, if they came, Remy told his followers, he knew places they could stay. “Those apartment is pretty close from the job,” he told me later, translating the voiceover. So if you’re interested? “You can text me, tell me when you want to come.” He posted the video that night and went to bed.

The next morning, he checked TikTok. Most of his videos only got a few dozen views, but this one had been shared by a Creole-speaking influencer who often went by the handle JeanJean Biden—and it had gone viral. It was already at 35,000. Remy’s phone started blowing up, flooded with direct messages from people who wanted to know more. But Ebah had told him that they only had several dozen positions, so Remy texted him right away. Ebah seemed unconcerned. “100 200 people,” he texted back. “Have them just book theirs flights tickets to Colorado, you and I will take care of the rest…”

Remy told me he was still worried. Where would people live?

“Tell everyone just to come,” Ebah replied. “Don’t worry anymore about where there are going to live, trusted me.”

[I]n February, the Trump administration announced that it would rescind the temporary protected status of more than 200,000 Haitians who had entered the United States legally during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Ebah and his supervisors at JBS came up with a plan. The company struck a deal with the Rainbow Motel, a tiny motor lodge less than a mile down the highway from the plant, to house new Haitian workers recruited by Remy’s TikTok.

But as these workers started to show up, it became clear that the job proposed in the videos was even harder than advertised. A local union representing workers at JBS, in complaints filed with multiple government agencies, would describe conditions at the motel as “squalor.” And inside JBS, the complaint says, this new crop of Haitian workers was asked to work at “dangerously unsafe” speeds. This past September, the union publicly accused JBS of abusing immigrant workers and human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied Ebah or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.)

Since Donald Trump was elected to a second presidential term, things have only gotten worse. In January, Trump fired enough members of the boards of federal worker protection agencies to temporarily leave those bodies without a working quorum, effectively killing any investigations. Then, in February, the Trump administration announced that it would rescind the temporary protected status of more than 200,000 Haitians who had entered the United States legally during Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump reportedly intends to establish detention camps on military bases, including one in Colorado, to hold migrants while they are processed for deportation. Against this backdrop, the story of the workers in Greeley takes on new urgency and raises pressing questions. What does this country owe to the people it has admitted on humanitarian grounds? And what will we do without the workers who produce the lion’s share of our food?

Twenty years ago, at least one-quarter of all meatpacking workers were undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico. That changed on a single day. On December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement simultaneously raided six Swift & Company beef plants spread out across the country—in places like Grand Island, Nebraska; Cactus, Texas; and Greeley, Colorado. Federal agents and local law enforcement, many dressed in riot gear, entered and arrested 1,300 undocumented workers on charges of immigration violations and identity theft. It was the largest workplace immigration raid in American history. At the Greeley plant alone, 252 workers were arrested.

Swift needed to replenish its workforce fast. A Senate bill proposed expanding guest worker visas, but as a company spokesperson at the time said, “Our needs are year-round.” But few American workers were interested. Within about a month, the company reported its loss at $30 million. News reports at the time detailed the company’s attempts to start recruiting refugees who had migrated to the United States from places like Somalia and Myanmar. “Our survival was at stake,” a company executive said. But it wasn’t enough. In July 2007, Brazilian-owned JBS acquired Swift in a $1.5 billion all-cash deal.

With the purchase, JBS became the largest beef processor in the world. Months later, the company announced it would hire enough new workers to staff a second shift in Greeley, including some 400 Somali refugees. And soon, the rest of the industry followed JBS’s lead. Today, in many packinghouses, refugees account for as much as a third of the workforce. But most don’t last long on the line. The turnover rate is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent each year—one of the highest of any US industry. The reason is simple: The work is not only relentless, but often grueling.

These jobs are essentially like working on a dis-assembly line, a standard factory run in reverse. The live cow walks off the back of a cattle trailer and is slaughtered, then gets broken down into steaks and roasts and ribs and hamburger meat. When parts of a carcass slide by on the chain conveyor system, workers sink large meat hooks into those cuts—heavy loins or shanks or slabs of ribs—and then carve with a knife held in their other hand.

The pace of the chain is so fast—around 300 cattle per hour—that many can barely keep up. Workers at JBS and their union say the speed of the line makes serious injuries more commonplace. Complaints filed with OSHA detail ghastly injuries: a worker who was killed when he was hit in the head by falling machinery and knocked into a vat of chemicals; a worker whose arm had to be amputated after it was pulled into the sprockets of a conveyor belt. But more often, the injuries are from repetitive stress. Workers clutch the meat hooks for so many hours in such cold temperatures inside the refrigerated plant that they end up with carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger fingers or ulnar nerve palsy, known as claw hand.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, those jobs became increasingly deadly. Early in the outbreak, after packing plants were forced to close, Trump ordered them to reopen. Before JBS even had Covid safety protocols in place, it brought workers back to the line. In the Greeley plant alone, six workers died and hundreds were sickened when the company refused to heed union demands for a temporary shutdown. A Senate investigation—prompted in part by reporting I did with Esther Honig for Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network—led OSHA to fine JBS $15,000 for failing to protect employees from exposure to Covid, a drop in the bucket compared to the meatpacking giant’s record revenue of $51 billion that year.

In September 2021, after months of negotiations, Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 in Denver, finally reached a new collective bargaining agreement for workers at the Greeley plant. Cordova told me she pressed Tim Schellpeper, CEO of JBS USA, for improved safety standards, higher wages, more paid sick leave, and better health care benefits. Schellpeper finally gave in to the union’s demands—but in some ways the victory was short-lived. After JBS was found to have been using a third-party cleaning company that had been employing children, the Brazilian owners ousted Schellpeper and installed Wesley Batista Jr.—the son of one of the owners—as the new American CEO in May 2023. (JBS characterized these moves as a “reorganization”; the company settled a federal investigation into child labor charges for $4 million in January.)

Batista would prove less amenable to the union’s demands. Cattle prices had begun to climb as JBS reported a shortage in supply. Batista instituted a new work plan at the Greeley plant that Cordova told me is aimed at getting some of those profits back: the white bone program. “What the company is trying to do,” Cordova explained, “is get as much of the meat off a bone, as much yield off the animal, as possible. It’s literally a white bone.” She said this change meant more cutting. More repetition. More exertion. And all at a dizzying pace—“line speeds we had never seen before.”

Workers started quitting. And Cordova said the culture had shifted; union members weren’t willing to work under hazardous conditions anymore—they mobilized, staged walk-offs, or left for good. The union said JBS responded by looking for a more vulnerable and compliant workforce. “JBS needed a new group of workers to come in,” Cordova said, “so that they had more control over them, especially to work at this high speed.”

This was all in the air when Edmond Ebah met Mackenson Remy in December 2023. After Ebah began working on the slaughter side of the operation in 2017, he quickly rose to become an HR supervisor—in part because he speaks seven languages. But he was especially focused on recruiting new workers from his native Benin. In 2020, with JBS struggling to keep its lines running amid the pandemic, Ebah helped hire at least 30 new recruits from his home country, collecting newly created referral bonuses worth up to $1,500 per employee. He bought a van and started an LLC to carry them to and from the plant.

JBS presented Ebah’s story as a manifestation of the American Dream. He was building a private business on the side by providing jobs to his countrymen and a stable workforce for his employer. A banner with his picture above the word “humility” hung in the plant’s main hallway. The company posted to its LinkedIn page congratulating Ebah when he became a US citizen, and it touted his good work in recruiting new employees by producing a two-minute promo video shared on its website and social media channels. The camera work is all soft focus and slow motion. Ebah narrates his experience at JBS over a bed of lush strings. “I’m happy to do what I’m doing,” he says. “I can help people come to work for JBS.”

But after Remy’s TikTok video unexpectedly went viral, people started pouring in—more than Ebah could house at the Rainbow Motel. A hundred. Two hundred. And still, people kept coming.

Auguste calls his journey from Haiti to the United States “an epic experience.” Violent gangs now control about 90 percent of Port-au-Prince. Fearing for his safety, Auguste (not his real name) flew to Brazil in March 2023. From there, he set off north, traveling across 10 countries, walking and hitching rides for thousands of miles. The journey included hiking across the Darién Gap—a 60-mile expanse of thick rainforest at the Colombia–Panama border that separates South America from North America. He slept on the jungle floor, woken in the night by the sounds of wild animals. He was always on guard because people warned him of armed thieves who would rob people—or worse. And then, of course, there were the dead. He saw bodies of people along the way who would never finish the journey. In lakes. On the shores of rivers. By the roadside.

Yet Auguste was never afraid. He believed in himself. He had faith that if others had made this journey, then he could make it, too. And he did. It took a month, but he finally reached Mexico, where he immediately used the online app CBP One to apply to enter the US legally via temporary protected status—TPS for short.

The Biden administration made extensive use of TPS. When Biden first took office, he used this executive authority to protect Afghans after the Taliban retook Kabul. Then he extended the policy to Ukrainians after Russia invaded. Between 2021 and 2023, Biden took a more controversial stance—expanding TPS to include people fleeing dictatorships and gang violence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Today, Haitians make up one of the largest groups with temporary protected status.

Biden’s decision allowed Auguste to legally live and work in the United States—without a path to citizenship, but also without the threat of deportation. Auguste entered the country in May 2023 and made his way to Baltimore, where he stayed with family. Until his work visa was approved, he was unable to make money and would often go hungry. But, he told me, “It’s easier to live without food than it is without hope.”

He’d been in the US for six months when a friend showed him Remy’s TikTok. Auguste was skeptical at first, so he let his friend go ahead to Greeley. When the friend reported back that the job was legit, Auguste booked his flight to Colorado. He says he paid Remy $120 for a ride from the Denver airport to the Rainbow Motel. That’s when he realized the hardships he’d endured to make it to the US weren’t exactly behind him.

All the workers packed into the motel’s tiny rooms were in a strange place, with little to no money. There was also nowhere to make food. Auguste says that at one point, they got a hot plate so they could cook. But when the motel managers found out, they stopped them. Those managers later reported to JBS that it appeared workers had been using the bathtub as a cutting board. Auguste explained that the motel was off a busy highway with little around for miles. It wasn’t easy to walk anywhere to eat. Plus, it was the dead of winter and freezing outside. They had no money to order a ride, and if they did, what would they tell the driver? Many didn’t speak English. They felt stranded.

And then, there was the work. Auguste didn’t want to say where, exactly, he is on the line, for fear he could be identified. But he is on the “cold side,” the refrigerated side of the plant where beef is trimmed, cut, and packaged. He works with a meat hook and knife. He told me he was shocked by the speed and strain of the job. He’s not alone. I spoke to four current and former line workers from Haiti who said the pace was fast and kept getting faster as more Haitians were hired. The Denver Post reported that one worker filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that JBS intentionally discriminates against Haitian workers by subjecting them to unsafe and unequal working conditions.

According to the complaint, the speed of the chain on the A shift is usually between 250 and 300 head of cattle per hour. But as Haitians arrived and were put on the B shift, which runs from about 2 to 11 p.m., the chain speed at night allegedly pushed past 400 head per hour, to as much as 430. “We have people that have been working at the plant for 10, 15 years,” one union representative told me. “They have never seen any chain speed going over 390.”

Cordova, the Local 7 president, said complaints started pouring into the union offices. “New hires are now largely comprised of Haitian refugees,” an official complaint filed by the local with the Department of Labor alleges. The complaint claims that JBS “increased chain speed to dangerously unsafe levels when these workers occupied the line.”

The alleged exploitation didn’t stop there, according to the union complaint. The union suspected that applications for this new group of workers were being submitted with one mailing address for everyone—Ebah’s home address. “The hiring manager and connected individuals likely have control over incoming mail to these workers,” the union alleges. Letters were withheld. And Haitian workers were forced to sign documents in English that waived their rights after on-the-job injuries, “with workers not understanding what they were being asked to sign.” Many, Cordova said, felt trapped.

Meanwhile, Auguste and his fellow Haitians would go back to the Rainbow Motel with little to no food, a line for the bathroom, and only the floor to sleep on. One woman told me that the conditions were so bad there that she agreed to be “the girlfriend” of a more established line worker, just to have someplace safe to stay and something to eat. At one point, there were almost 50 Haitian workers staying in only nine rooms.

“I feel like I was being treated as a slave.”

Auguste

Auguste told me he can’t shake the humiliation. Every day at work, he walked through the slaughter side of the plant, where each cow has its own little holding pen, but he was expected to share a tiny space with five of his co-workers. He found himself thinking the cows had it better. “I feel like,” he said, “I was being treated as a slave.”

“I would not say I’m a victim of the process,” Tchelly Moise told me, “but I was a direct witness.” It’s hard to know whether the union would have even been aware of the dismal conditions at the Rainbow Motel if it weren’t for Moise, a Haitian line worker at JBS who had taught himself to speak nearly flawless English by watching YouTube videos and then working in a call center. Moise came to the US via a long journey from Nicaragua in 2023 after he was shot in the chest in a robbery and nearly died. Once he was allowed into the United States, he discovered his cousin had found a job working at JBS through a TikTok video.

Moise flew to Colorado and his cousin drove him to the Greeley plant for an interview, where his language skills quickly came into use. None of the other applicants spoke English, and the HR manager was struggling. Moise translated for 30 job interviews and was offered a job in the packing plant on the spot.

In the meantime, his cousin had started to pick up extra money—as a driver for Mackenson Remy, who was shuttling in recruits whom he’d connected with Ebah at JBS, taking them to work and driving them around town. Moise was along for one of the pickups at the Rainbow Motel. “You have eight people inside of that one little motel room with one bed, one bathroom, women and men at the same time?” he told me. “It was a very bad situation.” Moise said the motel finally got so packed that Ebah was forced to rent a house nearby. But it wasn’t much better.

There were around 40 people living inside a five-bedroom house, he said. “I’m saying people sleeping on the floor, on the blanket, people everywhere. And at some point, they didn’t have electricity in the house and it was winter, so you can imagine how bad the situation was.” Other workers, including Auguste (who lived at Ebah’s rental house for five months), confirmed that the electricity and water often went out.

Because Moise is fluent in English, some of the Haitian workers asked him to carry forward complaints to the union. Cordova soon told JBS that Ebah was charging workers for rides to work and putting his name on referral bonuses. JBS opened an investigation in December 2023 into Ebah’s activities, suspending him for several months during the process. Lawyers conducted more than a dozen interviews with employees.

But when the investigation was complete, Ebah was merely reprimanded, and he returned to JBS’s plant. Remy and Ebah continued their recruitment work. Cordova continued to press the company before finally reaching out to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In August 2024, JBS opened a second investigation.

The next month, the Journal published its story. Remy was featured throughout, alongside allegations of exploitation from the very Haitians he thought he was helping. Some workers alleged that Remy was working with JBS and getting paid $3,000 for every worker he brought to Greeley. He denies this. He says the company never paid him anything. (A JBS spokesperson said Remy never worked for the company and it notified local authorities and banned him from the premises.)

With these allegations made public, JBS was forced to respond. In an email to the Journal, JBS said it fired the two HR managers above Ebah and that Ebah was moved to a different facility in Greeley. The company said it also put in new training programs to teach employees about proper recruitment.

Still, the union kept demanding answers. “We have been dealing with what we believe is human trafficking and exploitation,” Cordova said, arguing that the workers were brought to Greeley under false pretenses. They were promised a good job and a place to stay but instead found unsafe work conditions and substandard housing.

JBS maintains that its leadership didn’t know what was happening at the Rainbow Motel, but I’ve seen the texts between Ebah and Remy. Ebah asked Remy who was being checked into the Rainbow Motel. Remy replied with five and six names to a room. After the Journal article came out, Ebah abruptly cut ties with Remy and hasn’t been in contact with him since.

The union hoped for a federal investigation into JBS. But that’s looking less and less likely in the current political climate. “While we were exposing this,” Cordova told me, “Trump, during his campaign, made up these crazy statements that Haitian workers were eating people’s pets—you know, their cats and dogs.” Now the Trump administration plans to evict them.

In the days after his inauguration, Trump issued a series of executive orders directing federal agencies to go after undocumented immigrants. Then in February, his administration started to go after legal immigrants, rescinding the temporary protected status of Venezuelans and then Haitians. If that policy remains in place, more than a million people will be forced to leave the country before August 3, including nearly all the Haitian workers who arrived at the JBS plant in Greeley because of Remy’s TikTok video.

When I spoke with Moise the day after TPS was revoked for Haitians, he was still in shock. “I can tell you honestly,” he said, “this is the first time I feel like this is really happening.” He told me that he kept thinking that Trump officials would look at the violence in Haiti—where more than 5,600 people were killed in 2024 alone—and conclude that they simply couldn’t send people back home. “Going back to Haiti is a death sentence, really,” Moise told me. “ We left the country, obviously, because it was very bad. You’re talking to some members at the plant, and they are telling you, ‘Man, my cousin just got killed today,’ or ‘My family members, they just burned down their house.’ So it’s getting worse every day.”

None of that seems to matter to this administration. The man in charge of Trump’s deportation plans—and his new deputy chief of staff for policy—is immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, who has said his goal is to arrest and deport as many immigrants as possible. He has vowed to use federal law enforcement, National Guard troops, and local police to carry out major sweeps of public spaces and raid workplaces. Those plans make little sense to Cordova. “This workforce is an immigrant workforce,” she told me. “The industry would collapse without these type of workers.”

Not to mention what this would mean for us, the consumers. In his campaign, Trump promised he would lower grocery prices. Instead, tariffs on Mexico and Canada threaten to send food prices soaring. Deporting the immigrant workforce that meatpackers depend on would halt processing at every stage of the supply chain, from feedlots to the packinghouse floor. This would drive up prices for Big Macs and Outback steaks, but also for chicken breasts and pork chops at grocery stores, for Hormel bacon and Campbell’s soup and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

“I feel like us, the immigrants, we are a good part of the economy,” Moise told me. “Most of the jobs that we are doing, people who are born in this country are not actively looking to do those jobs.” This is why Moise said he’s confused. If mass deportations hurt not only JBS, but the economy as a whole, why do it? He’s left with only one answer. “ I think it’s just hatred against people with different skin color, because that’s the only logical thing that I can actually see.”

Given the animosity and the threat of deportation, you might expect that Moise would be making plans to flee to Canada or elsewhere, but for now anyway, he says he’s planning to stay put. After witnessing how badly new hires were being treated at JBS, he left his job there and now works for the union. He has retained an immigration lawyer and has a pending asylum application. But if Trump sets up deportation camps and fast-tracks hearings, as he has threatened to do, Moise doesn’t know what he’ll do.

Neither does Auguste. He still works at JBS. After about six months, he was able to save enough money to move into his own place, with his own bed and bathroom. But it all comes at a cost. The white bone program is still going on at JBS in Greeley. And Auguste told me that he can no longer fully close his left hand—an injury he says is a result of gripping a meat hook for hours without breaks, of his work being too fast and too repetitive.

Despite everything, Auguste told me he’s still glad to be in the United States, because his life is stable now. He knows all the things Trump has threatened to do, but he’s trying to stay optimistic. Because he doesn’t believe Americans will really let mass deportations happen. After all, he said, “the USA is the mother of democracy.”

It’s hard to share Auguste’s hopeful outlook. Yes, it’s possible that federal courts might intervene, hearing lawsuits from Haitians as they already are in cases brought by Venezuelans. Or some governors might step in. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has vowed to help companies “retain their employees who are doing work critical to our economy—whether in agriculture, construction, service, or industry.”

But this broad-sweeping government crackdown? It will be difficult to oppose. It’s what Americans voted for.

Moise said he fears most Haitians don’t understand this. “I don’t think they really see the threats that is coming,” he told me. “A lot of them, they feel secure, maybe because of TPS, because they know they already filed for asylum. So I don’t think they know the power that Trump is actually going to have.”

Moise said he feels like his life is in Trump’s hands now. His life and the lives of thousands of other JBS workers in Greeley—and at dozens of similar plants in similar towns across the middle of America. The nearly million people who were granted entrance to our country because they were in danger and they sought protection within our borders. They followed all the rules—filled out the paperwork, allowed their cheeks to be swabbed, their fingerprints to be taken. They risked everything to come here and were allowed to cross the border legally. They trusted the United States to grant them asylum and protect them.

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend confronted a challenge all too common in small rural communities these days: a declining number of kids.

“I started looking into the causes of our declining enrollment and just trying to get better informed,” says Resar-Jaynes, 57, who grew up in this scenic corner of Wisconsin. “And this talk about vouchers kept coming up.”

Wisconsin is home to the oldest private school voucher program in the country—an experiment in which the state, starting in 1990, paid the private school tuition for 1,000 low-income children in Milwaukee. Today, the state spends more than $700 million toward the cost of private school education across the state, and communities like Resar-Jaynes’s are beginning to feel the effect.

During the 2023-24 school year, 11 students in the Kickapoo school district received a voucher to attend a religious school at a cost of $113,811 to local taxpayers, an increase of more than 400% from the previous year. Those numbers might not seem eye-popping, but in a pint-sized district with limited resources, the loss of a handful of students translates into program cuts for the remaining student body. And with vouchers in the state set to expand again next year, Resar-Jaynes says she fears for the viability of small rural districts like hers.

“In a little community like ours, the school is one of the few places we have left where we come together as a community,” says Resar-Jaynes. “We set aside our differences and we cheer on all our children in sports and in the arts. How can we allow that to be put in danger of being lost?”

Growing pains

That’s a question a growing number of rural communities face as private school voucher programs expand across the country. Sixteen states, beginning with Arizona in 2022, have now adopted so-called universal vouchers that allow virtually all families, no matter how wealthy, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public schools. In February, Tennessee and Idaho became the latest to join the voucher club. Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has made enacting vouchers his signature political cause, is the likely next member.

The programs go by different names and embody different approaches. Tax credit scholarships reward wealthy donors and corporations for contributing to private school “scholarship” groups. Traditional voucher programs allow parents to spend public funds on private schooling. Education savings accounts, meanwhile, function more like an education debit card loaded with tax dollars, which parents can use on a variety of education-related expenses. Whatever the specifics of the program, the goal is the same: to move students away from public schools and into private religious schools and to subsidize parents whose kids already attend them.

The project comes with the backing of some of the richest people in the country, including former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and hedge fund billionaire Jeff Yass, who together have devoted tens of millions to the cause of voucher expansion. It’s also a top priority of Trump officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has urged parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of religious homeschooling or explicitly Christian education.

The swift expansion of vouchers through red states reflects a major shift in direction by the school choice movement, which for decades has sought to build bipartisan support for the cause using the language of civil rights. Sensing an opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic, voucher proponents embraced a sharply partisan strategy. In the name of “parents rights,” and with the aid of well-funded conservative groups including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, they leaned into explosive school culture war issues. Support for vouchers was now redefined as a “litmus test” for Republicans. Their first targets: deep red states where rural Republicans have long cast deciding “no” votes against voucher expansion.

That strategic shift has proven wildly successful. In one state after another, anti-voucher Republicans, almost all rural, have been defeated in GOP primary elections, swept out of office by a tidal wave of money from deep-pocketed pro-voucher groups. But knocking out rural legislators in states like Iowa, Texas and Wyoming, is not the same as eliminating long-standing rural opposition to vouchers.

In 2024, rural voters in three states—Nebraska, Kentucky and Colorado—sent a loud reminder that when it comes to spending tax dollars on private religious schools, they remain deeply opposed, despite Donald Trump’s embrace of the issue. In Kentucky, for example, opponents of a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to fund “non-public” school options, warned rural Kentuckians that vouchers could force public schools in rural communities to close. One hard-hitting ad reminded voters of the lifesaving role played by their schools in the aftermath of the floods that ravaged the state in 2022. “Public schools saved us. It’s where everyone could find food and shelter.”

Rural voters responded, as voters in the state rejected the amendment by more than 60%.

Such lopsided results reveal a major weakness in the voucher movement’s strategy of targeting rural legislators. Knocking out GOP holdouts is one thing; convincing rural voters to walk away from their local public schools, even in our era of hyper-partisanship, is something altogether different.

Fighting rural decline

Lance Groves, 34, is a fifth-generation Texan on his father’s side. He grew up in the west Central part of the state near Possum Kingdom Lake, and today runs the family’s mechanical contracting business with his brother. Groves is also a passionate advocate for economic redevelopment in a part of the state that has long suffered from population decline and “brain drain,” as young people leave these small rural communities for more opportunities elsewhere. Now, those efforts are imperiled.

“The consequences of a voucher system in Texas would just completely wreck everything we’re trying to accomplish out here,” says Groves, who, with his brother Corey, started a documentary series called Rural Route Revival that chronicles the duo’s work to bring struggling Texas towns back to life.

Groves’s concerns extend beyond the state’s proposal to provide families—no matter their income—with $10,000 in order to pay for private religious education. His former state representative, Glenn Rogers, a large animal veterinarian who initially ran for office in 2019 out of concern that rural Texas was underrepresented in the state legislature, was one of nine Republicans to get primaried last year for opposing school vouchers.

Rogers ended up losing his seat in a rematch with Mike Olcott in a wildly expensive campaign that often had nothing to do with vouchers but instead focused on Rogers’s alleged failure to support Gov. Abbott’s border policy. “The other thing he said about me was that I consistently voted with Democrats,” recalls Rogers. “That was a 100 percent lie.”

Two years previously Rogers narrowly defeated Olcott, thanks in part to support from Gov. Abbott. This time Rogers opposition to Abbott’s education savings account plan made him a target. Olcott—who firmly supports Abbott’s so-called parental bill of rights amendment to the Texas Constitution—racked up endorsements not only from the governor but from Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

As a result, this part of rural Texas no longer has an advocate for the public schools that serve as its anchor, says Groves.

“We lost a solid guy, a great rancher from a great family,” says Groves. “And for what?”

On the far western edge of the state, in the Panhandle community of Spearman, newspaper editor Suzanne Bellsnyder has been making the case to anyone who will listen that vouchers represent the latest round of disinvestment from rural Texas that has now been playing out for decades. In the competition for scarce resources, communities like Spearman (population 3,000) will inevitably come up short against their more powerful metro counterparts.

“The state of Texas already cannot fund public schools appropriately. Now we’re going to try to find a completely second system of public schools that only certain students are going to have access to,” says Bellsnyder. “You can see what happens next. There are not going to be enough resources to go around and our communities are going to be defunded.”

The Spearman schools are currently considering moving to a four-day school week, in part to save money, a shift that many other school districts in the Panhandle have already made. Bellsnyder fears that the loss of further state funds to vouchers will mean program cuts, staff layoffs and, ultimately, the closure of schools.

Recent evidence from other states that have enacted universal school vouchers shows that she is right to worry. In Iowa and West Virginia expansive new voucher programs are exacerbating the fragile math of funding rural education.

In West Virginia, the education savings account program known as the Hope Scholarship provides $4,900 per student to be used for private schooling, homeschooling, microschools and a broad range of education-related expenses. But West Virginia’s shrinking population also means declining student enrollment. Now a policy that essentially incentivizes students to leave public schools is exacerbating the numbers problem, resulting in multiple rounds of school closures.

“Most towns die after a closure of a high school,” said Charles Goff, mayor of Hundred, a town of 242 in Wetzel County, West Virginia, in an emotional speech to state school board members last year. “[Towns] lose incorporated status, lose elected officials in town, and it leads to fire departments closing and town charters being revoked. That includes losing EMS. We are an hour away from the hospital, and fire and EMS are crucial in our community.”

It’s not hyperbole. In their massive, first-of-its-kind survey of rural political attitudes, scholars Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea found that rural schools play an outsized role in helping define the sense of place that is at the heart of contemporary rural identity. And decaying rural schools, trapped in the cycle of rising costs and diminishing revenues, can create a community death spiral. “A town’s demise can come in fits and starts over a long period,” they write, “but when the local school is boarded up, the death bells chime with a deafening resonance.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is A 50-year-old advocacy organization that rose to prominence during the farm crisis that rocked the state in the 1990s. These days, the group is sounding the alarm that threats to rural public schools are a threat to rural communities.

“Family farms and strong public schools were once the life blood of our rural communities in Iowa,” says Tim Glaza, special projects director for the group. But the state’s political leaders no longer seem to share that view.

Nearly 30,000 students in Iowa now receive state funding to attend private schools, thanks to a two-year old state voucher program. According to state data, 16 public schools, many of them rural, have closed since the voucher program began, while 36 new private schools have opened. While the overwhelming majority of students in the program never attended public school, even the loss of a few students can quickly translate into agonizing budget choices for shrinking rural districts, especially those for whom raising property taxes is a political non-starter.

The full impact of Iowa’s program, meanwhile, has yet to be felt. In its first two years, participation was limited by income. This year, those limits come off, meaning that the state will soon pick up the private school tuition bill for even the wealthiest families.

“The refusal to adequately fund schools combined with a voucher program that funnels public money to private schools is going to mean more school consolidation and closures, and more flight from our small towns,” says Glaza.

Backlash brewing?

The first two months of the second Trump administration has considerably darkened the prognosis for the nation’s rural schools. In addition to the state-run universal voucher programs reshaping education in red states, Trump and his allies are pushing for a federal voucher plan. The Educational Choice for Children Act (H.R. 833), introduced into Congress in January, would incentivize wealthy donors and corporations to donate to so-called scholarship-granting organizations in exchange for unprecedented tax breaks. Education secretary Linda McMahon has indicated that expanding private school choice is among her top priorities.

The federal approach would move vouchers into blue states as well as circumventing opposition among Trump’s own base. The lead sponsor of the legislation that would create a federal voucher program, for example, represents rural Nebraska, where his own constituents voted overwhelmingly last November to repeal a similar program. As one voucher proponent put it, “Rural voters have ‘emotional’ connections to their local public schools that are difficult to dislodge.”

Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the Department of Education will also fall heavily on rural schools and the students who attend them.

Rural schools are highly dependent on Title 1, the 50-year-old program created to ease the nation’s vast school funding disparities. As education writer and retired rural education Peter Greene observed, rural schools are likely to take a double hit if the administration repackages Title 1 funds as block grants, which states then convert into voucher funds.

“Those districts will see a loss of funding and will have limited ability to replace those funds by raising local taxes. At the same time, they are not attractive markets for any high-quality education-flavored businesses,” writes Greene. “Those communities are more likely to end up with a ‘school’ aisle in their local Dollar General.”

The slash-and-burn-style budget cutting that is a hallmark of our DOGE era is also hitting rural schools hard. The Agriculture Department recently axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending. Even Trump’s effort to unwind his predecessor’s commitment to green energy could take a toll on schools.

In Missouri, where one out of three school districts have adapted a four-day week, largely in response to economic pressures, the only rural districts that still provide five days of school rely on taxes paid by wind farms. “When Trump and his Republican allies take aim at green energy, this is what they’re talking about,” says Jessica Piper, executive director of Blue Missouri and the author of the newsletter, View from Rural Missouri.

But if the emerging policy landscape looks bleak for rural education, funding cuts and school closures are also deeply unpopular among rural voters, including Trump’s most ardent supporters. Liv Cook spent years as a special education teacher in rural southeastern Tennessee. These days she works as public education campaign organizer for SOCM (pronounced “sock-em”), the Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, statewide membership group founded in 1972 to organize grassroots resistance to mining companies and in the coalfield communities of the Cumberland Mountains. The group’s organizing work has since expanded statewide, including their #PublicSchoolStrongTN campaign to counter attacks on public education.

When the Tennessee Republican-controlled legislature adopted a $447 million universal voucher program in January, it was over the opposition of many rural communities, including southeastern Tennessee, says Cook. “Vouchers are now seen as a conservative value but there’s a big disconnect with these rural folks. They love their home schools and their teachers.”

Last year, when Tennessee Republicans floated the idea of refusing more than $1 billion in federal education funding over objections to expanded student civil rights protections, Cook spent months going door to door talking to voters about what such cuts would mean for local schools.

“When people learned that their elected officials were talking about less money for local schools they were shocked,” recalls Cook. “Everyone could list off the things that their local schools and teachers desperately needed, and finding out that the plan is actually to privatize and make a few people even more money, was just infuriating to them.”

SOCM was part of a sprawling coalition that fended off vouchers in 2024; they weren’t so lucky this time around. Still, Cook remains convinced that the unique tie between rural voters and their public schools offers a vehicle for not just resisting bad policies, but demanding approaches that strengthen rural communities.

“We ask our neighbors what they want their schools and their kids and the answer is ‘everything,’ ” says Cook. “That’s a powerful place to start.”

The post In Red States, Rural Voters Are Leading the Resistance to School Vouchers appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Medicaid — which provides health coverage for almost 15 million Californians and about half of the state’s children — could face billions of dollars in federal cuts under a budget proposal from House Republicans.That’s alarmed families like the Pequeños, who rely on Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in California, to pay for medical care and other support for their children with chronic conditions.

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Medicaid Cuts Could Upend Lives of Children With Disabilities. Can California Do More to Prepare? was first posted on March 19, 2025 at 9:37 am.
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In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.” 

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?  

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.” 

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. 

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. 

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says. 

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. 

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.” 

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded. 

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.” 

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. 

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. 

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. 

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.” 

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.

Reversing trend of NC rural women’s health care services drying up will require tracking, enforcement and incentives in policies and laws.

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Every January in Elko, Nev., an influx of cowboys and cowboy wannabes take over the town with events like rawhide braiding workshops, bluegrass concerts and poetry readings. It’s all part of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, which celebrated its 40th year in January.

Hosted by the Western Folklife Center, this year’s gathering was the second most attended Cowboy Poetry Gathering in its 40-year history. Kristin Windbigler, chief executive officer of the Western Folklife Center, attributes this to a resurging interest in cowboy culture among younger people.

“This year was the year that it felt like everything tipped,” Windbigler said in a phone interview with the Sierra Nevada Ally. “It felt like the median age of the attendees dropped by about 20 years.”

She said this could be because the Center has put more effort into growing their social media presence and inviting younger artists to perform.

“We have a tremendous amount of reverence for the past and for traditions, but you can’t really pass on traditions if you don’t have the up and coming generations there too,” Windbigler said.

People from all over the country and beyond visit this small eastern Nevada town to celebrate the rural West and meet with old friends. The first gathering was held in 1985 for a little under 1,000 guests, and it has grown exponentially since then.  About 14,000 tickets were sold at this year’s various events, and the Center estimates 8,000 people attended at least one portion of the gathering.

Windbigler said this bodes well for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s future – as long as the Center can remain afloat.

An article published by the Elko Daily Free Press in January claimed the Center has lost more than $2 million over 12 years. In response, Windbigler said that most of that loss is due to depreciation on their office building. It can also be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced them to cancel the in-person portion of the gathering for two years in a row.

To build long-term financial stability, the Western Folklife Center is planning to turn the building they own – the historic Pioneer Hotel – back into a hotel. They already have a restaurant and bar in the Pioneer Saloon on the building’s first floor, and according to a feasibility study the Center paid for, renting the hotel rooms would likely fill their current profit gap.

They need $6.5 million to fund this project, and right now, they’re about one-third of the way there. Over the next several months, they will move into the permitting portion of the hotel project. Once that’s done – and if they can raise enough money – the project should be “shovel-ready,” Windbigler said.

Until then, their main focus is making the gathering the best it can be for as long as possible. That means honoring the many different versions of cowboy culture, including the one that existed 40 years ago at the gathering’s inception and the culture that still exists today–despite the challenges modern farming faces.

The number of U.S. farmers and ranchers has declined precipitously since the mid-1900s, while their average age has steadily increased. Small businesses have been bought up by large corporations across the farming industry, consolidating the number of operating ranches.

This means that the number of tried and true “cowboys,” – those who make a living off livestock and the land – has also declined.

But based on the thousands of people that visit Elko every January, it doesn’t seem like the interest in cowboy culture is going away anytime soon.

“I don’t really buy into all of the ‘cowboy is a dying breed’ and the ‘West is dead’ stuff,” Windbigler said. “You know, things change, but people are still out there living lives connected to agriculture.”

Her ultimate goal is to honor those lives and hopes her work can encourage younger generations to follow suit.

The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is meant to do just that, and despite the hiccups of depreciating assets or a pandemic, Windbigler said the Western Follklife Center has no plans to stop hosting an event that many attendees return to year after year.

“The pandemic killed off a lot of arts and culture organizations like us, and we consider it a small miracle that we survived,” Windbigler said.

Yet, despite the challenges, arts and culture focused on rural life will always have a home in Elko, if Windbigler has anything to do with it.

“We live to fight another day.”

Women’s services often lose money for NC rural hospitals. State doesn’t track lost services or require hospitals to sustain care.

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