A newsletter about role of higher education in society — plus Open Campus developments.
Declining numbers of international students coming to study in the U.S. hurts local economies, according to new data released this week.
International students’ economic contributions declined by $1.1 billion this fall, costing the U.S. nearly 23,000 jobs, NAFSA and JB International found. Those figures are based on a 17% decline in international student enrollment.
Much of that decline was among graduate and non-degree students, according to the data. A slight increase in undergraduate enrollment this fall bolstered the overall numbers. There are still more than 1 million international students in the U.S.
It’s been a tense time for international students at colleges in the U.S. In the spring, President Donald Trump’s visa revocation and sudden reversal left many reeling, as our Jessica Priest reported in Texas. Trump has also limited visa interviews, told some universities to cap their international student enrollment, imposed travel restrictions on visitors from 19 countries, and made H1-B visas — which allow educated foreign citizens to work in “specialty occupations” — more expensive.
The U.S. must adopt policies to attract and retain international students and realize that job opportunities for them after graduation “are essential to our standing as the top destination for global talent,” said Fanta Aw, NAFSA executive director and CEO.
“Otherwise, international students will increasingly choose to go elsewhere—to the detriment of our economy, excellence in research and innovation, and global competitiveness and engagement,” Aw said in a release earlier this week.
Our reporters have been detailing the declines in international students on the campuses they cover — including DePaul University in Illinois and IU Indianapolis.
[Read more: Case Western Reserve, University of Cincinnati downplay international college student data online]
A separate report on international students released this week by the Institute of International Education found that their numbers were decreasing even before Trump took office: International student enrollment dropped by 7% in the 2024 school year, according to the report.
These declines matter — not just for college’s bottom lines, but for the broader economy. International students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 355,000 jobs last year, according to NAFSA.
The pre-Trump slump “suggests colleges face other headwinds, such as a slowing global economy, growing competition from nontraditional education hubs, and lingering unease because of the China Initiative,” in addition to current political turmoil, Karin Fischer, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s international education reporter, wrote in her newsletter this week.
India remains the country that sends the most students to the U.S. Marcello Fantoni, Kent State’s vice president of global education, travelled there last spring to talk with prospective students, our Amy Morona reported at Signal Ohio. He told them Kent State is still welcoming — one of the few things he can control amid the broader federal policy changes.
Still, he said Trump’s actions influenced how the students he spoke with viewed America.
“There is damage done there, and it will take a long time to be fixed,” he told Amy. “A long time.”
From Fort Worth: McKinnon Rice at our partner Fort Worth Report visited students who received paid, two-year auto technician internships through a partnership between Autobahn Fort Worth and Tarrant County College.
It’s a growing field in the area and offers opportunities to make good money without much college: “A technician hired after an internship starts out earning $24 to $30 per hour, based on their performance, and the wage grows as skills do — highly skilled technicians can make as much as $250,000 to $300,000 per year,” McKinnon wrote.
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The post A slump in international student enrollment appeared first on Open Campus.
In the last decade, the U.S. electric power sector turned away from coal to embrace wind turbines and solar panels, two energy generating sources that require little water for operations and cooling.
Together with the installation of more water-efficient natural gas-fired power plants, the energy shift has been a net benefit for the country’s water resources – a “reduction in the relative risk that our power sector is facing due to water temperatures and water scarcity,” as Jordan Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory put it.
New considerations are now in the mix. Due to political changes and rising electricity demand to power the AI frenzy, the durability and continuation of that risk-reduction path is less certain for the electric power sector than it was a few years ago.
Energy-hungry data centers are being proposed and constructed at breakneck speed, kickstarting growth in U.S. electricity demand for the first time in nearly two decades.
Today, data centers account for 4 percent of the nation’s electricity use. By 2028, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, data center demand could soar, to between 6.7 and 12 percent of all the electrons consumed nationally.
At the same time, the difficulty in building new transmission lines and the Trump administration’s open hostility to wind and solar – going so far as to cancel the Revolution Wind project off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coast that was 80 percent complete – is casting a pall over electricity-generating sources that consume little water yet are still seeing vigorous growth in the face of gathering political headwinds.
Data center energy demand, said Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration, is at a junction, one that points not only at the computing industry’s carbon intensity but also its energy-related water use.
Will water-intensive thermal generation like coal and nuclear be revived? The Trump administration ordered the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, slated for closure, to remain open. Will hydropower and geothermal – two renewable energy sources the Trump administration favors – see their fortunes rise? Will the data center buildout proceed as rapidly as some forecasts suggest?
These changes have the potential to rewrite the twinned narratives of energy and water.
“I think we’re at a very important inflection point right now with the composition of our electricity grid,” Macknick said. “If we do see a resurrection of coal plants or a push for more thermal technologies that utilize recirculating or once-through cooling technologies, we could see a reversal in that trend of water usage and see increases in the water intensity of our electricity sector, which could in turn potentially lead to more risks for our reliable electricity supply.”
Electric Growth
From Arizona and Georgia to New Jersey and Minnesota, data centers have been the target of public pushback due to the water used directly in their operations to cool racks of data-crunching, heat-producing servers. Supplying cooling water to these facilities has taxed water supply infrastructure and strained local water sources. Berkeley Lab estimated direct water consumption for data centers to be 66 billion liters nationally in 2023.
A second form of data center water use has received less attention – the water consumed to generate the electricity that powers these facilities. In aggregate, this indirect use is a much higher number – some 800 billion liters, according to Berkeley Lab.
For data centers, water and energy are two sides of a coin. As servers undertake more intensive computing processes to power generative AI, they produce more heat. In a circular system, that waste heat could be repurposed. But most data centers operating in the U.S. today do not reuse their heat. They instead dissipate it through cooling systems. This is where operators encounter trade-offs between water and energy.
The most energy-efficient means of evacuating waste heat from the server racks is through water. Where water is constrained, data centers can use recirculating systems or huge fans to cool their equipment. Conditioning the air, however, gobbles electricity. Along with the energy that powers the servers, how that energy for cooling is produced determines a data center’s indirect water footprint.
The U.S. electricity mix is not what it was a decade ago. During that transitional period, power generated by burning coal has dropped by more than half, now accounting for only 15 percent of the nation’s electricity. Coal, which needs water for cooling, has been supplanted by natural gas and renewables, particularly solar and wind.
Forecasts for data center energy growth vary, but the direction is the same: up and up. Western Resources Advocates, a research and advocacy group, says that the largest electric utilities in five Colorado River basin states are collectively forecasting annual demand growth of 4.5 percent through 2035.
Efficiency improvements have helped to lighten the load. The Big Tech hyperscalers – Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon – that operate the largest data centers tout their efforts to wring more performance out of less power. Google claims better processors allow the company to generate six times more computing power per unit of electricity compared to five years ago.
“Data centers are more efficient and getting more efficient by the day,” said Reicher, who was the director of climate and energy at Google from 2007 to 2011.
Despite the efficiency gains, the data center expansion, in aggregate, is so massive that total energy demands continue to climb. Berkeley Lab noted that data center electricity demand more than doubled between 2017 and 2023.
How to accommodate this buildout without stressing water supplies is a matter of serious inquiry. Macknick and his colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are working to identify the best locations for data centers taking into account land, proximity to end users, and energy and water availability.
Reicher said the energy mix in the U.S. is changing because of new priorities in the Trump White House and the Republican-led Congress. How the political turn affects the energy market is an open question, Reicher said. But the administration’s actions – canceling offshore wind, limiting access to equipment, cutting federal funding, and imposing tariffs – are substantial barriers.
“There’s a whole circle of issues that are cutting into the deployment of solar and wind, not just the generating facilities themselves, but adjunct storage capacity, adjunct transmission capacity,” Reicher said. “So we’re really messing things up in a pretty serious way when it comes to this and therefore with all those implications upstream or downstream for water use.”
Macknick mentioned three strategies that data center operators are considering. One is rebooting shuttered fossil fuel and nuclear power stations. Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation Energy in 2024 to reopen Unit 1 at Three Mile Island nuclear plant, in Pennsylvania. Another is to build new natural gas plants. A third is to sign power purchase agreements for renewables. Last year Google signed contracts for 8,000 megawatts of clean energy.
“It’s hard to really parse out what are the trends that will in time be successful,” Macknick said. “I think right now all those options are simultaneously being considered and people are wanting to see what will work, what will be possible, given the large amount of uncertainty that all energy companies are currently facing right now.”
The post Data Center Energy Demand Is Putting Pressure on U.S. Water Supplies appeared first on Circle of Blue.
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Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores.
Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.
A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them.
This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state.
Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics.
Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish.
As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies.
Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears.
Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock.
Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy.
Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return.
And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West.
Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system.
Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production.
A handful of powerful corporations dominate the U.S. grocery market. Over the last few decades, these firms have consolidated their control, leaving a shrinking share of the market for local, independent grocers. Grocery giants and their supporters claim that economies of scale enable them to offer lower prices to consumers. But critics say that these conglomerates’ size gives them too much power, not only over their consumers, but also over suppliers and workers.
Confronted by Walmart’s growing power, traditional grocers like Albertsons and Kroger responded with a spate of mergers and acquisitions starting in the early 1990s. Albertsons now owns over 1,300 stores in the West, though few of the shoppers patronizing Safeway and Haggen may realize that those stores are owned by the same firm. In December of 2024, the Federal Trade Commission blocked a proposed merger between Albertsons and Kroger after a number of Western states sued, arguing that it would further limit competition and raise prices for consumers.
The rise in the popularity of farmers markets since the mid-1990s has been a positive counterpoint to the relentless march of corporate consolidation. Nationally, the number of farmers markets more than quadrupled from 1994 to 2019.
The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.
The trend towards consolidation in the food system has made it increasingly difficult for smaller farmers to compete and stay in business.
The meatpacking industry is concentrated to an extraordinary degree, with an estimated 81% of U.S. cattle and 65% of hogs processed by “The Big Four” meatpacking corporations as of 2021. Critics say this market stranglehold gives The Big Four too much control over both ranchers and consumers.
The above hourglass power dynamic is not unique to meatpacking; it’s also conspicuous in the seeds, agricultural chemicals and food retail markets. The concentration of power in these industries allows a handful of companies to dictate prices and production methods, trapping Western consumers in a food system that prioritizes corporate profits over sustainability, diversity and equity.
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Like many government agencies, the Department of Agriculture has a fraught history with discrimination and disenfranchisement. Farmers of color and young and beginning producers have long struggled to access capital, in the form of loans and grants, from the agency.
So in 2022, former President Joe Biden’s USDA created the Regional Food Business Centers program using funding from the American Rescue Plan. The program established 12 virtual centers to function as business development resource hubs within rural communities nationwide. The centers were intended as a way to provide technical assistance, navigate federal and state resources, and administer grants to small- and mid-sized farmers and ranchers who wanted to develop food businesses or access new markets. The overall goal was to build a more resilient food system.
A total of roughly $400 million was earmarked to support the 12 centers, each run by a coalition of organizations and partners based in each region, which the USDA agreed to fund for five years. In 2024, many began distributing sub-awards from that pool of funds in the form of “business builder” grants.
In early January, Ed Harvey, a Navajo farmer in rural northern Arizona, was awarded a technical assistance contract dedicated to assisting Indigenous producers from the Southwest Regional Food Business Center, which was created to strengthen local supply chains throughout Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. Not only does he grow apples, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, cherries, and sumac berries, but Harvey runs a consulting business geared toward helping other Navajo tribal members through all of the paperwork needed in order to begin or continue farming on their land.
Much of the farmland throughout Navajo Nation is left idle, buried in layers of dirt, wind deposits, and towering weeds, with slivers of corn, squash, and melons here and there. Harvey attributes the situation to the federal mandate that tribal members need a permit with a conservation plan in order to use their land for agricultural production. It’s an exceedingly onerous application process, and the reimbursable RFBC funding was intended to cover the costs associated with the development of conservation plans for other tribal members. When he heard he was selected for the program, Harvey was elated, and immediately began advertising the opportunity to work with him free of charge: He reached out to community farm boards, promoted it across all of the reservation’s chapter houses, and even posted flyers in local businesses.
That sense of joy morphed into one of sinking despair when, the following month, President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly froze the program’s funding, and a tsunami of layoffs at USDA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs saw thousands of federal workers leave their positions. The month of February, Harvey said, was the “worst of my life.”
“It hurt me. It hurt the business,” he said. “I did a lot of conservation plans for free, not getting paid for it, because I expressed to people that it’s paid for, so I didn’t want to let it ruin my reputation.” While the fate of the centers remained in purgatory, Harvey scrambled to remedy the damage done, completing 36 conservation projects at no charge, the equivalent of hundreds of unpaid hours and thousands of dollars worth of labor — a huge net loss.
Finally, on July 15, the USDA announced it was shuttering the program, a decision that was met with considerable opposition across food and farming sectors. And just like that, Harvey’s big plans for his community went up in smoke.
“This was a program fully dedicated to support rural people. So I was thinking, ‘Heck, yeah, I can support my relatives who live in the middle of nowhere. I can find a way to help my uncle, to help with what he needs by planting corn,’” said Harvey. “Out here in Navajo Nation, you have to take in the fact that there’s very limited opportunities for people to make money. The tribe here, we live on government assistance…people don’t have that dedicated time to give back to the land, to give back to who they are. It takes funding mechanisms or opportunities to find [it].”
In the press release announcing the end of the RFBCs, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins criticized the Biden administration for creating the RFBCs “without any long-term way to finance them,” which the release described as a “COVID-era program.” The release also specified that “over 450” grants so far awarded would be honored — which meant that roughly four of the centers that hadn’t yet officially awarded their grant selections had 60 days to cease operations, and the other eight overseeing those awards would end next May. But even those centers still operating through next spring won’t be running at full capacity, as the cancellation limits the scope of what each center can do to no more than merely monitoring awards and technical assistance for existing grants. Rollins also stated that “any remaining funds will be repurposed to better support American agriculture.” As of this story’s publication, the details of that repurposing are not yet known.
Roughly a week after the USDA announced the end of the RFBCs, Rollins released a memo that again took the agricultural world by storm. The five-page document revealing Rollins’ plan to significantly reorganize the agency was accompanied by an unlisted YouTube video intended for employees, which also broadly detailed the four pillars powering the decision: ensuring the size of the agency’s workforce aligns with available resources and priorities, bringing USDA closer to those it serves by relocating resources, getting rid of bureaucracy, and paring down redundant support functions.
According to current and former USDA staffers, the closure of the country’s regional food business centers and the agency’s reorganization rollout should not be considered as separate developments, but rather as successive decisions with intertwining impacts. Both moves are expected to have lasting effects on historically underserved rural communities in particular, where farmers and families are already facing the day-to-day impacts of a shrinking federal workforce in local offices. That’s to say nothing of the growing role of climate change in throttling agricultural production and amplifying economic stressors such as increased price volatility, trade war disruptions, and surging labor and production costs.
“To me, there is a real friction here between those in the administration that simply want to diminish, destroy, and decimate the federal workforce and any sort of policy goal that is aimed at improving the lives of Americans and reducing costs for those who live in rural communities,” said Michael Amato, former USDA communications director. So far in his second term, Trump’s USDA has gotten rid of more than 15,000 federal employees, nearly a fifth of its workforce, straining bureau capacity, even as the agency has culled billions of dollars in funding streams that, in the process, has buckled local and regional food systems. At least ten percent of the federal employees who have left the USDA this year worked for Rural Development, the nation’s lead agency that fights rural poverty.
“If there was some policy objective, then it’s lost on me, because I don’t see how simply just cutting funds to try to run up your DOGE score as high as possible, and calling for deferred resignations across the entire department with no strategic plan about where you see waste or where you see bureaucratic bloat,” Amato continued. “It just seems like a meat axe approach with the goal of shrinking the department.”
Rollins did not specify a timeline for the plan, nor did she share many details of how it will be carried out, but noted that the agency will move more than half of the roughly 4,600 D.C. area employees out of the capital area. According to Rollins, the five hubs, located in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, Indiana, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, would bring the USDA closer to its “core constituents.” The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Multiple current USDA employees told Grist that not even they have been briefed on the details of the reorganization. “We haven’t been given any more information than is publicly available,” said one USDA employee who is based in D.C. and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “It’s been unsettling. Morale is low. It has not been a great work environment, just because everyone feels insecure right now.”
“The relocation is actually going to be moving many of our regional office partners farther from the states that they cover,” the staffer continued. “The logic is just not there. It doesn’t make sense. And the claim that they’re moving up closer to the people we serve, is just patently false.” The USDA staffer added that the mass layoffs experienced have already resulted in overworked employees and significant delays in processing financial assistance applications. “There are things falling through the cracks,” they said.
On Thursday, August 21, a letter addressed to Rollins and signed by 32 USDA unions, and shared with Grist, also expressed widespread concerns about the reorganization. It noted that over 90 percent of USDA employees already live and work outside of the D.C. area and urged the department to “slow down, engage with Congress and the labor unions in good faith, and fully assess the true impacts of this reorganization before proceeding further.”
“We are just trying to call attention to how poorly planned the USDA reorganization is, that they seem to be hiding whatever details that they have,” said Ethan Roberts, a physical science technician at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service based in Peoria, Illinois, who represents the bargaining unit employees at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president. “There’s something going on. When I talk to the management in this building, they don’t know anything. They’ve not been told anything.
“Why this is incredibly harmful is because the USDA is already struggling administratively,” Roberts continued. “Here in my laboratory, the management and the admin are taking on two to three jobs just to keep up to try and make everything continue to function. If we lose even more people in D.C., at the highest levels of the human resources department, and our budgeting and our billing, it’s going to be catastrophic. There’s going to be a critical administrative failure.”
The lack of clarity has prompted plenty of congressional backlash, too. When news of the reorganization broke, a Senate hearing was swiftly assembled where a bipartisan contingency of Democrats and Republicans grilled Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen Vaden about the unusually secretive nature of the rollout of the reorganization. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry ranking member Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, said at the hearing that the committee first heard of the plan just minutes before it was announced.
“It is clear from the hearing that this is a half-baked reorganization plan developed without input from Congress or stakeholders that will almost certainly result in worse services for farmers, families, and rural communities,” Senator Klobuchar later told Grist. She noted that the reorganization “follows the cancellations or delays of funds for voluntary conservation programs that protect our environment and improve farmers’ bottom lines.”
Klobuchar and some of her colleagues on the Senate Agriculture Committee sent a letter to Vaden on Monday requesting more time to comment on the plan and increased transparency with the results of the agency’s ongoing public comment period. The letter followed at least two others that have been issued in the last month by groups of lawmakers demanding more information. Nearly all have referred to the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which resulted in the resignation of three quarters of employees, and declining workforce productivity.
Kevin Shea, a 45-year veteran of USDA who led the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for 11 of those years, and briefly served as Secretary of Agriculture during the Biden administration, points to the USDA’s claim that the reorganization plan will bring staffers closer to constituents as one example of the contradictions at play. “This whole ruse about being closer to farmers — what nonsense. They’re still going to be in cities hundreds of miles from farmers,” said Shea.
What’s more, the RFBC program wasn’t solely addressing an immediate food system crisis that became clear because of the pandemic, he said, but “it was addressing a problem that had been revealed. The problem was always there.” A USDA report released last October found that the RFBCs led to more than 2,800 individuals receiving technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships formed by recipients, and 287 businesses reporting increased revenue as a result of the program. Other critics of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel it have argued the program was established to meet a $4 billion congressional mandate in the American Rescue Plan to build more resilient food systems.
Another current USDA employee based in D.C., who also asked to remain anonymous, told Grist that the double blow of the closure of the regional food business centers and the proposed relocations “is going to result in massive harm to rural America which, again, is a population that they purport to care about.” “There’s no particular rhyme or reason that we can tell,” the staffer said, while pointing out where the new hubs aren’t. “California is the biggest agriculture state in the country, and there’s not a hub there. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“For farmers and people that rely on the USDA for information, for money, it’s going to be poorer quality service and less of it because there’s just going to be less people working,” said Roberts, the USDA union president. “If we experience an even greater loss of the administrative staff that keeps the USDA running, by telling them that they need to pick up their entire lives and move to somewhere across the country, the USDA is going to grind to a halt.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the Trump administration shrinks the USDA, rural farming communities are left to pay the price on Aug 27, 2025.
(RNS) — San Diego Auxiliary Bishop Felipe Pulido noticed the way a father held his young daughter and stood close to his wife and teenage daughter in the courtroom. The love and care they had for each other was palpable on Tuesday (Aug. 12), when Pulido accompanied the asylum-seeking family for an immigration court hearing.
“As an immigrant, I got emotional because of that connection I have with my own family — I put myself in his shoes,” said the Catholic bishop, who was born in the Mexican state of Michoacán before immigrating to Yakima Valley in Washington as a teenager. He finished high school there, worked picking produce and eventually was ordained a priest.
Immigrants are facing court appointments with newly heightened levels of fear as the Trump administration has begun sending agents to detain migrants as they leave the courtroom. If immigration judges dismiss their cases, they can immediately face expedited removal proceedings without a chance to make their case for asylum. Previously, a 10-day response time to the dismissal was allowed.
Guided by their faith, clergy like Pulido and other representatives from religious groups are accompanying immigrants to court appointments to provide comfort and information and, in cases where their worst fears are realized, to pick up the pieces of a shattered American dream.
The Rev. Noel Andersen, national field director at Church World Service who is ordained in the United Church of Christ, holds a weekly call on faith-based court accompaniment. He told RNS that through accompaniment, “Faith leaders bear witness and speak out against the ways masked ICE agents are abducting our community members.” Accompaniment is taking place “in every major city and in some rural areas, just about everywhere there is an immigration court,” he said.
When it was time to leave their San Diego hearing, Pulido said, the family saw half a dozen United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and the mother told him she was scared. The bishop stuck close to the family, talking and reassuring them as they walked by the agents, he said. The judge had given them another hearing in December.
Pulido was present because the San Diego Catholic Church has partnered with Episcopal, Lutheran, Jewish and Muslim clergy, as well as lay people, to provide accompaniment for immigrants at the courthouse every day in August. They have more than 50 volunteers, and as more sign up, they’re planning to continue the ministry.
It was only when they’d gotten through the ordeal safely that the family asked Pulido which church he was with. The Catholic family were stunned to learn a bishop had accompanied them that day, he said.
Pulido said he was inspired by Pope Francis’ words last year when he attended “baby bishop camp,” an orientation for new bishops in Rome, to get involved in the court accompaniment ministry. “Be a sign of hope for the homeless, for the migrants, for those who are in prison,” he recalled Francis saying.
He said he believes sometimes ICE agents choose not to detain migrants even after their cases are dismissed because his priests are walking with them, though they have also witnessed detentions.
Pulido isn’t the only Catholic bishop who has gone to immigration court. In Orange County, where priests and deacons are also accompanying the faithful in immigration court, Bishop Kevin Vann attended the July bond hearing of Narciso Barranco, an immigrant without legal status and father of three U.S. Marines who was filmed being beaten in the head by immigration agents during his June arrest.
El Paso, Texas, Bishop Mark Seitz was also in immigration court on Tuesday, said Scalabrinian Sister Leticia Gutiérrez, the director of the diocese’s migrant hospitality ministry.
Seitz witnessed the detention of three people — “the sobbing, the anguish of the wife of one of them,” said Gutiérrez in Spanish. Seitz told her, “I saw Jesus walking through the hallway, sister, defenseless.”
Gutiérrez, who has organized a precise system for the diocese’s immigration court accompaniment in the last two months, arrives at immigration court at exactly 7:50 a.m., four days a week, and stays until the final cases have concluded.
Before ICE agents arrive (about 20 minutes after she does), Gutiérrez and a priest who is a retired immigration lawyer introduce themselves to migrants arriving for court and provide them basic legal advice and information — and try to sit with them in their anxiety.
While some of the diocesan team members observe the court sessions, ICE agents have also allowed them a protected zone in the waiting room, so when immigrants leave their court appointments, Gutiérrez helps them arrange their affairs, sometimes taking up to 30 to 40 minutes before they walk toward the agents. She encourages them to call their families one last time and share their Alien Registration Number, and then to write phone numbers on their bodies so they can call family if they’re detained.
If they’re willing to share personal information and their keys, she offers to let their family know if they’re detained, send another team to visit them in detention, connect them with a lawyer when available and move their vehicle so it doesn’t incur fines before their family can pick it up.
Many people are in shock when judges dismiss their cases, Gutiérrez said. “It’s incomprehensible for many of them, who say, ‘I paid taxes. I already have an apartment. I have a car … why are they going to detain me?’”
At that point, Gutiérrez said, “There really is no escape. You have to pass, no matter what, by the immigration agents. So it’s like Jesus, who goes directly to the cross.”
The Rev. Chloe Breyer, an Episcopal priest and director of the Interfaith Center of New York, told RNS witnessing detentions was “harrowing.”
“ All I could do is get their name in this tiny millisecond between when they left the courtroom door and when they were picked up by these officers,” she said.
“ We’re witnessing a kind of public display of lawlessness,” Breyer added. She, like Gutiérrez, said there seemed to be no “rhyme or reason” behind which immigrants were detained and which were able to leave.
The Episcopal Diocese of New York has publicized that three of their parishioners have been detained in courthouse arrests and has held a training on court accompaniment for over 80 clergy, said Mary Rothwell Davis, the diocese’s vice-chancellor for immigration and refugees. On July 8, Bishop Matthew E. Heyd witnessed immigration court detentions.
Breyer said she has gone to immigration court about half a dozen times in the last six months, along with rabbis and other Christian leaders. She has worked with the New Sanctuary Coalition, through which she shows up to accompany immigrants who happen to be there that day, and also with specific clients at the request of their lawyers.
In Los Angeles, Isaac Cuevas, director of immigration and public affairs for the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has trained about 180 priests, deacons and religious sisters in court accompaniment. While they make an effort to match parishioners who request accompaniment for immigration court with someone who has gone through the program, the vowed religious largely create their own schedules for going to courts in the area.
“If people are in need, then we try to come forward and answer that call however possible,” said Cuevas, emphasizing that they do so not by civil disobedience, but through prayer, solidarity and recommendations to seek legal advice.
Another LA group, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, observes courts daily.
In Arizona, Alicia Contreras, executive director of Corazón AZ, part of the grassroots multi-faith Faith in Action federation, said faith leaders in the state attend immigration court when community members request accompaniment. It is part of the group’s broader work, including know-your-rights and family defense planning, when a family makes plans for children, pets and bills in the event of a crisis. Corazón AZ has partnered with Puente, another Phoenix organizing group that maintains a more regular presence at the courthouse.
Corazón AZ has sent Disciples of Christ, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Catholics, Unitarian Universalists and volunteers without a specific tradition to the courthouse. The majority have been lay people.
“If I can offer a word of prayer, if I have brought folks a rosary or just sat with them, give them a gentle touch on their back, a hug when they need it, this goes a long way to calm the nerves,” Contreras said. She reminds immigrants to breathe. “We are not in control of a lot, but we are in control of our breathing.”
Fear can also cause immigrants to “black out” during their hearings, leaving them unable to remember what happened, Contreras said, explaining that faith leaders can help explain what happened afterward. In the worst cases, fear can lead community members to skip their court dates, a guaranteed way to enter deportation proceedings, she said.
Court accompaniment is an expression of faith, Contreras said.
“I know that their higher power, or in my faith tradition, God, does not want this for them,” said Contreras, a Catholic. “God is not putting the barriers, and God also is not wanting us to look away.”
