A single mother who relied on federal food assistance lost her benefits in 2020 after Kentucky state investigators concluded she’d committed fraud.

The state alleged she’d made multiple same-day purchases, tried to overdraw her account a few times, entered a few invalid PINs and sometimes made “whole-dollar” purchases that are unlikely during typical grocery runs.

The woman from Salyersville in Appalachian Kentucky had an explanation: She worked at the store. She would sometimes buy lunch there and then get groceries after work. Her child would also occasionally use her card.

An administrative hearing officer kicked her off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) regardless, based solely on the allegedly suspicious shopping pattern. She sued — and won.

“It is draconian to take away SNAP benefits from a single mother without clear and convincing evidence that intentional trafficking was occurring during a time when food scarcity is so prevalent,” Franklin County Judge Thomas Wingate said in his 2023 decision.

Over the last five years, the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services has brought hundreds of fraud cases that are heavily reliant on transactional data with the goal of revoking people’s food benefits.

Judges, lawyers and legal experts said in interviews and in court documents that such evidence proves little. Kentucky Public Radio reviewed dozens of administrative hearing decisions and court documents from the last five years in which the cabinet relied on shopping patterns to prove a person had “trafficked,” or sold, their benefits.

Kentucky is so aggressive in disqualifying people from SNAP benefits that the state has the second highest number of per-capita administrative disqualifications in the nation, behind Florida, according to the most recent federal data from 2023. In the last decade, disqualifications in Kentucky rose from fewer than 100 in 2015 to over 1,800 in 2023. And more than 300 others have been accused of selling or misusing their benefits since January 2024, according to records obtained by Kentucky Public Radio.

Another Franklin County judge in 2023 ordered the cabinet to stop disqualifying individuals based solely on transactional data, but since the decision, at least three lawsuits allege the health agency continues to bring such cases.

Transactional data alone cannot prove intent to commit fraud nor show the actual result of any individual transaction, University of Kentucky law professor Cory Dodds said, adding, “I’m not saying that folks didn’t do it, didn’t commit the fraud, but I don’t think the cabinet in a lot of these cases has met their burden of proof, either.”

Kentuckians receive notice of their alleged suspicious activity through mailed letters, in which they’re asked to voluntarily waive their right to a hearing and automatically accept the punishment. On first offense, that’s generally a one-year SNAP ban. They’re also required to pay back the full amount the state says they misused.

Often, these cases involve a relatively small amount of money. Records show that more than 900 people have been kicked off for “trafficking” or misuse for less than $1,000 since 2022. The lowest amount alleged was 14 cents.

The state has leaned heavily on administrative hearing waivers since 2015, and by 2023, almost a quarter of all disqualifications were via waiver. Some lawsuits allege individuals did not fully understand the consequences of the waivers and were encouraged to sign by officials.

Kentucky Public Radio reviewed more than two dozen cases since 2020 in which the cabinet accused an individual of trafficking using only spending patterns, despite the participants’ denial or lack of response — and with no other evidence or interviews presented, according to administrative hearing decisions.

Kendra Steele, a spokesperson for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, declined to schedule an interview with cabinet officials after multiple requests. Steele said in an email that “we have never” brought trafficking cases based solely on transactional data and acknowledged it would not be sufficient to prove intent.

In response to a different question, Steele wrote the investigation into fraud allegations consists of looking into income, living situations “and patterns of spending that are indicative of trafficking.” She did not indicate how any of those factors could be used to prove intentional misuse or selling of SNAP benefits, or how it differs from relying on transactional data — which is inherently a pattern of spending. Steele said in another email that they also interview vendors and SNAP recipients.

‘It’s our fellow Kentuckians who are going hungry’

Roughly 4 in 25 Kentuckians suffer from food insecurity, similar to the national rate of about 14%, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data.

The USDA will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October, saying Sept. 20 that the numbers had become “overly politicized.” The decision comes in the wake of federal funding cuts for food and nutrition safety net programs nationwide.

In the last fiscal year, 1 in 8 Kentuckians benefitted from SNAP, formerly called food stamps. Food insecurity in Kentucky’s rural areas is even more stark, and legal representation harder to come by.

“The people who benefit from these programs are some of the folks that we need to be helping the most in this country,” Dodds said. “It’s our fellow Kentuckians who are going hungry as a result of baseless allegations of waste, fraud and abuse.”

The cabinet denied KPR’s request for case notes on individual fraud accusations starting in early 2024 that would include the evidence used in the accusations. But administrative hearing decisions reviewed by KPR from 2020 through 2023 included the evidence the cabinet relied on; hearing officers would frequently say a person had trafficked their benefits based on shopping patterns the state deemed suspicious.

National legal experts who specialize in SNAP access say an overreliance on transactional data isn’t unique to Kentucky. Transactional data was initially meant as a tool to identify potential fraud cases — not as a means to prove it, Georgetown law professor David Super said.

He’s studied SNAP disqualifications for decades, and has seen many cases where he believes transactional data is misconstrued as direct evidence of wrongdoing, instead of requiring a state to build cases with witnesses, affidavits, video evidence and plea deals.

In one redacted 2023 state administrative hearing decision, a hearing officer decided a woman in the eastern Kentucky city of McKee had trafficked her benefits because she had made eight back-to-back transactions in a year. The decision also said she’d checked her balance several times, made a few insufficient fund attempts and had incorrectly entered her PIN number a few times.

She lost her SNAP benefits for a year. In an appeal, the woman told the state she has two kids and had recently discovered she was pregnant.

“Everyone forgets to get something and has to go back in the store and get it,” she wrote, defending her back-to-back purchases.

She received another hearing, but the outcome didn’t change.

Cabinet officials acknowledged in cross examinations during a 2023 case that back-to-back transactions and whole-dollar purchases aren’t forbidden under SNAP rules, nor are recipients told that the cabinet considers them suspicious.

But all of these things are used as evidence — sometimes the sole evidence — that a person misused their benefits.

Kristie Goff, an AppalRed legal aid lawyer in Prestonsburg in southeast Kentucky, used to see many of these cases, though they’ve declined in the last year.

“There have been very few instances in cases I have handled, where a client was not able to give me a perfectly reasonable explanation for those transactions, and none of it was trafficking,” Goff said. “There are no receipts, there’s no video footage to show that someone’s doing anything wrong. It’s just a number written on a paper.”

While saying purchasing history is insufficient to prove trafficking, Kentucky judges have stopped short of demanding that the state change how it trains employees or conducts its SNAP investigations.

In response to an open records request, the cabinet provided KPR with documents used to train investigators on intentional program violations. They appear to almost exclusively discuss transactional data, including investigating back-to-back payments, large transactions and whole-dollar purchases.

In 2020, Michigan state court of appeals judges decided transactional data alone is never sufficient to prove that a business — or a person — fraudulently used SNAP benefits.

Dodds believes that should be the standard for all states, including Kentucky.

He is in the early stages of systematically reviewing thousands of SNAP benefit trafficking hearing decisions between 2020 and 2023. Data from about 700 decisions in 2020 alone already shows that many Kentuckians have been denied benefits before the state presents what he considers real evidence of guilt.

“There are maybe a handful of cases that I would say there was real evidence that they had done something wrong,” Dodds said. “There was one where a woman was on the phone with the hearing officer while she was actively trying to sell her benefits… But cases with non-transational data are exceedingly rare.”

Waiving a hearing

When Kentuckians receive the formal notice of accusations, they also receive a waiver asking that person to voluntarily forgo their right to a hearing and automatically accept the punishment.

During the George W. Bush administration, a 2004 federal policy memo encouraged states to rethink their waiver forms, reminding them they weren’t designed for cases where there is a mere “suspicion of guilt.”

Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services declined a records request for a copy of all the waiver forms sent to accused individuals, which include a summary of the evidence, saying they are private correspondence.

Several legal experts and lawyers told KPR there’s no benefit to signing the waiver — the punishment isn’t lessened nor does refusing to sign lead to criminal prosecution.

But lawsuits over the waivers allege cabinet officials encouraged or pressured SNAP recipients into signing away their right to a hearing. In one active lawsuit, a Louisville mom alleges she signed the waiver because a cabinet employee told her she had to. The cabinet refused a hearing request after she consulted a lawyer. (The lawsuit alleges the case against her is also based on transactional data.)

Goff said rural SNAP recipients may trigger a few elements of the cabinet’s trafficking criteria — buying in bulk, traveling long distances for groceries or frequenting small stores that are more likely to sell in whole-dollar amounts.

Rural areas have fewer lawyers and less expertise in this type of law, Goff said, which makes it even more difficult for indigent rural Kentuckians to seek legal advice.

“I imagine for every one person who walks through my door to get a hearing,” Goff said, “there’s probably five more that have never known that they could call us or known that they could get an attorney.”

Associated Press data reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report. This reporting is part of a series called Sowing Resilience, a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and The Associated Press. Nine nonprofit newsrooms were involved: The Beacon, Capital B, Enlace Latino NC, Investigate Midwest, The Jefferson County Beacon, KOSU, Louisville Public Media, The Maine Monitor and MinnPost. The Rural News Network is funded by Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation, among others.

In her 20 years running a food bank in Auxier, a tiny town of several hundred nestled in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, Gail Goble has never seen demand as high as it is now.

The Hand in Hand Ministries food bank serves roughly 150 people in the town and surrounding area of Floyd County who come in once a month for a grocery cart full of canned goods, bread, meat and toiletries.

“They’re here every month, so they depend on it,” Goble said. “And a lot of them come and they’ll say ‘well, I’m completely out of food.’”

The Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky is especially dependent on food assistance. At least a quarter of the population in more than a dozen counties in the region are on the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, according to a Kentucky Public Radio analysis of federal data.

The demand is not just spurred by the rising cost of groceries, but a second round of devastating flooding following the historic regional floods of 2022, she said.

“They need everything, because they lost everything,” Goble said. “They lost their medicines, they lost their food, they lost their refrigerators… so there’s been a great need for that.”

Goble says many of the people they serve are already enrolled in SNAP, but still need the food bank to supplement their family’s groceries. Others they serve have slipped through the cracks and aren’t eligible for the program.

Eastern Kentucky families who were already struggling under inflationary pressure and repeated natural disasters are now contemplating a new threat — a bill estimated to cut hundreds of billions in SNAP benefits over the next decade and drop millions from enrollment.

Under the reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House last month — dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by President Donald Trump and its supporters — states would now be required to pick up a large part of the tab for SNAP benefits and a larger portion of administrative costs.

As a result, Kentucky would have to fill a $239 million hole in its annual budget to maintain benefits for the 13% of residents enrolled in the program, or nearly 576,000 people, according to progressive think tank Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. An early Senate version of the bill would make a cut of nearly half that amount, but add more stringent work reporting requirements that could drop the state’s enrollment.

If Kentucky lawmakers choose not to fill this SNAP funding hole in future state budgets amid forecasts of declining tax revenue, they would be forced to either drop many Kentuckians from food assistance benefits or reduce benefits for everyone. With the Republican supermajority in Frankfort focused on reducing spending and cutting taxes, that could be a heavy lift.

GOP Rep. Hal Rogers, who has represented most of eastern Kentucky for more than four decades, voted for the House bill and has not publicly addressed its SNAP cuts. In his district, 22% of households are receiving SNAP benefits. Republican supporters argue these measures are needed in order to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the system.

Goble of Hand in Hand said she fears what would happen if a reconciliation bill with major SNAP cuts passes into law and the state doesn’t fill in the large budget hole. The Auxier food bank and others in the region are already stretched near capacity of what they can offer people in need, she said.

“If that bill passes, I think it’s going to be very hard to provide for all the families,” Goble said. “It’s already bad enough that the economy is so bad and everything is so expensive, but to take away their SNAP benefits, or lower their SNAP benefits? That would just be horrific.”

Demand for food assistance rising in eastern Kentucky 

The spiked demand for food that Goble sees in Auxier is seen throughout the Appalachian region by Michael Halligan, the CEO of God’s Pantry Food Bank, which coordinates and distributes food to nonprofits across central and eastern Kentucky, including Hand in Hand.

When pandemic-era stimulus checks, increased SNAP allotments and child tax credits vanished, demand at food banks exploded. God’s Pantry has scaled up their services by more than 30% in the past two years to fill the need, Halligan said.

“Folks who have limited resources have to make difficult choices on whether to put food on the table, whether to pay for housing costs, whether to pay for medical expenses, basically the necessities of life,” he said.

Another round of natural disasters in the region this year has now created the highest demand for food he’s ever seen, as they now provide free meals to nearly 280,000 food insecure people in central and southeastern Kentucky. They recently distributed nearly 100,000 pounds of food to groups impacted by deadly tornadoes in London.

Halligan says the meals are only meant to supplement SNAP benefits — and can in no way be viewed as a feasible or realistic replacement for them.

“For every nine meals someone who’s eligible for SNAP receives, we can do one,” Halligan said. “(SNAP) is a critically important piece of the hunger safety net, particularly for folks that don’t have the financial resources to go to a grocery store. If those benefits decline, we cannot grow enough in scale or fast enough to replace them.”

Congress seeks to shift SNAP costs onto states

Under the House version of the reconciliation bill, states would for the first time pick up between 5% and 25% of the cost of SNAP benefits based on what’s called their “error rate.” That measures the state’s unintentional under or overpayment of benefits to individuals.

Kentucky’s most recently calculated error rate was 7.27%, meaning the state would have to pick up 15% of the cost of SNAP benefits if the House bill was in effect, totaling $172 million. Combined with the $67 million of newly shifted administrative costs, that would mean the state would have to find $239 million in its state budget to cover the benefits of all its current SNAP enrollees for one year.

In an interview with the Bowling Green Daily News, western Kentucky GOP Congressman Brett Guthrie said they needed state governments to have “investment in” how SNAP is administered in order to prevent abuse.

“There are (…) people that absolutely desperately need food stamps, but there are also people that sell them to do other things with them, and we want states to be more vigorous,” Guthrie said.

The House proposal would punish states based on their unintentional error rates, not necessarily the amount of fraud in SNAP. Spokespersons for Congressmen Rogers and Guthrie did respond to a request for comment on this story.

An early Senate version of the bill proposed in committee this month is still in significant flux, but would significantly lessen the cost shift to Kentucky. Under that version and the state’s latest error rate, Kentucky would pick up 5% of the costs of SNAP benefits, at a total cost of $124 million when combining new administrative costs. It would also add a significant expansion of current work reporting requirements to include older adults and parents of older children, which would likely drop many from coverage even if the state filled the budget hole.

Opponents of the bill in Kentucky question if the state has the funds to cover any proposed federal cuts, arguing it will instead force states to reduce benefits or eligibility. After several years of budget surpluses that were spurred by pandemic era federal stimulus spending — as well as cuts to the individual income tax rate — Kentucky is now forecast to have slightly lower tax revenue in the current fiscal year ending in July. State revenue is then forecast to drop another 2.3% in the first six months of the next fiscal year.

It’s also unclear if the GOP-dominated Kentucky General Assembly is interested in increasing expenditures on SNAP benefits. Last year, the Kentucky House passed a bill that would have dropped thousands of Kentuckians off SNAP benefits by reinstating a financial asset test and making income requirements more restrictive. The bill, however, was voted down in a Senate committee.

One of the top goals of Republican state lawmakers is to keep lowering the income tax via a set of budget triggers that rely on keeping overall spending low and not drawing down from the budget reserve trust fund. With lawmakers set to craft a new two-year state budget in the session that begins in January, increasing spending on SNAP benefits could significantly lower the odds of future tax cuts under the current system.

If Congress does pass SNAP cuts resembling what’s in the House bill, Halligan with God’s Pantry said he hopes Frankfort would step up and fill the massive $240 million hole in the budget, “but it’s a pretty daunting number to just have to automatically come up with.”

He believes that SNAP is an overall effective program. While small changes and improvements may be called for, he said cost-shifting to states doesn’t address alleged waste, fraud or abuse.

“I sort of have this fundamental belief that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Halligan said.

Advocates fear hunger and economic impact of cuts

Goble of the Auxier food bank says if Congress cuts SNAP and the state can’t fill that budget hole, that will pile onto their already unprecedented demand from hungry Kentuckians.

“A lot of people that don’t come are probably drawing SNAP benefits as well, and they would end up here,” Goble said. “So they would probably end up getting less food than what we were able to provide, which is not a whole lot anyway.”

While adding to food insecurity among hungry Kentuckians, rural grocery stores and farmers would also likely feel the loss of federal funds.

Jennifer Weeber, the Northfork local food coordinator with the Community Farm Alliance, said programs that encourage SNAP recipients to spend their benefits at farmers’ markets were just beginning to see success in Perry County, where she’s based.

Weeber said agriculture has become an increasingly important part of the post-coal economy in the region. She fears cutting one of farmers’ revenue streams will be a blow to the rest of the local economy too.

“That’s not just $5 in tomatoes, but it’s $5 in tomatoes going to someone who is rooted in the community, who is spending their money in the community, who is supporting community events,” Weeber said.

There are also larger economic implications of cutting SNAP. The USDA Economic Research Service estimated that for every $1 the government spends on SNAP benefits, it increases the country’s gross domestic product by $1.54 in an otherwise slowing local economy. That infusion of spending also helped to improve production for rural industry by 1.25%, according to a five year study that ended in 2014.

The Food Industry Association, which represents grocery stores and food wholesalers, says around 5% of all supermarket purchases are made via SNAP, and Halligan suspects that percentage is higher in rural areas that are more dependent on the benefits.

With the Trump administration’s focus on “Make America Healthy Again,” Weeber said she would have thought programs like SNAP would be a priority.

“A lot of the programs that we already have in place that enable people to access fresh produce, lean proteins and all of that are being cut,” Weeber said. “They are the exact same programs that have helped build our local food economy all across the country, but particularly here in southeastern Kentucky.”

SNAP cuts now in hands of the Senate 

The reconciliation bill is now in the hands of a Senate committee, where an amended version would create less of a budget hole to fill for Kentucky, but also expand work reporting requirements for SNAP eligibility.

For the past three decades, non-elderly and non-disabled SNAP enrollees were limited to three months of benefits unless they reported 80 hours of work per month, but parents and caregivers of children were exempted. This Senate version of the bill would now add work requirements for those ages 55 to 64, as well as the caregivers of children ages 10 to 17.

The Senate version would also remove benefits from refugees and asylum seekers and restrict states’ ability to waive the work requirements in areas with high unemployment rates. In Kentucky, 117 of its 120 counties currently have this waiver, but the bill would limit waivers to counties where unemployment is at least 10% — a level that only 10 counties in the country, and zero in Kentucky, currently reach.

One major roadblock to Republican SNAP reforms in any bill coming out of the Senate is a ruling by the chamber’s parliamentarian last week, which determined that its provision shifting of costs to states based on their error rates violates a procedural rule and would need 60 votes in the chamber to proceed. As part of the reconciliation process, the bill itself only needs a majority vote in each chamber, with the GOP holding a small majority in each — and little margin for error.

Halligan of God’s Pantry says if a bill ultimately passes with large cuts to SNAP, the state will be left with few good options — forced to either shift hundreds of millions of tax dollars from other key priorities to fill the budget hole, or cut SNAP enrollment and benefits for the many who are desperately in need.

“This is really about nutrition,” Halligan said. “This is really about a pathway forward. This is about better education, better employment, better health.”

Weeber of the Community Farm Alliance in Perry County added that the same House reconciliation bill also makes major cuts to Medicaid that could drop close to 300,000 Kentuckians from the federal health coverage, which would also have an outsized impact on the same Appalachian region that is heavily dependent on the program.

“With Medicaid on the chopping block as well, we’re really creating a perfect storm for having a really unhealthy community and really creating the next generation of people who are unhealthy,” Weeber said.

State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.

The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings. 

Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been. 

For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.

Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.

“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program. 

And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier. 

“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.

An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.

No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.

Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers. 

“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.

Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.

While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.” 

It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine. 

Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.

Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information. 

But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Millions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. on Apr 14, 2025.

Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky has the largest collection of Appalachian media archives in the world, but roughly 70% of its 30,000-item collection was damaged in the historic regional flooding of 2022.

The nonprofit received two federal grants last year totaling nearly $1 million to fully restore and digitize much of the damaged archive.

Now that funding is at risk of being zeroed out.

The grants are administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), two federal agencies that have been gutted in recent weeks by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Last week, DOGE told the NEH all of its outstanding grants would be cancelled and 80% of its staff placed on administrative leave. In March, all of the IMLS staff was placed on administrative leave, a move that is expected to essentially cancel all its grants.

Both agencies are responsible for funding programs of museums and libraries across the country. Appalshop and the Kentucky Humanities Council are two of the major recipients of such funding in Kentucky, with officials from both saying the cuts represent an existential threat to the services they provide.

Chad Hunter, the founding archivist of Appalshop, said the nonprofit’s grants to restore photographic collections and a vast amount of film, video and audio collections damaged by the 2022 flooding are likely gone. Unlike the preservation of normal archives, he says flood damaged items degrade at a much faster rate, “so we have a smaller window of time to save these collections.”

“That is what is at risk here. We are going to lose what we believe to be the largest collection of Appalachian media in the world,” Hunter said. “We’re going to lose large portions of it without this funding.”

Bill Goodman, the executive director of the Kentucky Humanities Council, says they receive roughly $850,000 of NEH grants annually, which is nearly 70% of their total funding. In recent years, the council has distributed more than $1.3 million to libraries, museums and cultural centers for reading programs and exhibits, much of which is in rural areas.

“We’re fortunate that we have friends and supporters, and we have a little savings in the bank, and we’re going to continue to do the work that we’ve done for the last 53 years,” Goodman said. “But frankly, it’s going to be tough, and we’re going to do our best going forward.”

Goodman says the council is fortunate to have already spent its grant money for a Smithsonian Institute collaboration to have seven Native American history exhibits in rural parts of Kentucky this year, but other programs are at risk going forward. Noting the recent widespread flooding throughout Kentucky, he said the council was able to send NEH grants to flooded museums and cultural centers in the Appalachian region after the 2022 floods, but now “that money is gone.”

“We would be granting out that money today, if we had it, but last week, when the Department of Government Efficiency came in and slammed the door in our face and zeroed out our budget overnight, we can’t do some of those programs now,” Goodman said.

The race to save the Appalshop archive

Appalshop received an NEH grant last year of $225,581 to preserve three large collections of photographic prints damaged in the flooding, as well as a $750,000 Save America’s Treasures grant administered by the IMLS to salvage and preserve hundreds of hours of video and film from its damaged archives.

Hunter said the NEH grant has already been cancelled, though it fortunately has completed the preservation process for one of the three photo archives — 3,500 negatives of William R. “Pictureman” Mullins, a self-taught portraiture photographer, from the 1930s through 1950s. The remaining collections include photographs of the Brookside Coal strike in 1973, which was portrayed in the landmark documentary Harlan County USA.

Another of Appalshop’s NEH grants now cancelled is one for $150,000 to collect oral histories that document Black voices and experiences in Appalachia.

Hunter says Appalshop hasn’t yet received official confirmation that its $750,000 grant to preserve a large portion of its flooded film, video and audio archive is cancelled, but assumes it is a certainty, as the IMLS no longer has staff and other similar nonprofits were informed earlier this week that all of their grants were terminated.

He says the flood-damaged archives are currently in cold storage containers at locations in other states, “just waiting for the day that we can have further funding to try to salvage those, as well,” but notes that “there’s evidence that those are degrading, even at low temperatures and humidities.”

With federal funding now also frozen — and the clock ticking to preserve the material — Hunter said finding a new funding source quickly is “absolutely critical to the work we’re doing to save this vital collection.”

“We need to raise funding to preserve these collections that are for everybody,” Hunter said. “They’re for the public, they’re not for Appalshop. It’s a historic and cultural record of central Appalachia, so we need to save it.”

Higher ed grants and potential litigation

The University of Kentucky Research Foundation, University of Louisville and Western Kentucky University have also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEH grants in recent years, according to its records database. Most of these grants involve efforts to maintain and preserve historic archives.

A spokesperson for U of L did not immediately return a request for comment on how the NEH cuts would affect its grants. Spokespersons for UK and WKU said they have not been made aware of any pauses to NEH grants affiliated with the universities.

Goodman of the Kentucky Humanities Council says he expects a group of state attorneys general across the country to soon file litigation soon against the DOGE cuts to the NEH, similar to what has happened with other litigation challenging the Trump administration’s cuts to other federal programs and funding appropriated by Congress.

He added that he has also forwarded information about the NEH cuts and its effects on Kentucky to the office of Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who has joined Democratic attorneys general from other states in previous lawsuits against the administration.

Spokespersons for Beshear did not immediately return a request for comment on the NEH and IMLS cuts and potential litigation.

State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the size of the William R. “Pictureman” Mullins negatives collection.

Libby Lindsay spent 21 years working underground as a miner for Bethlehem Steel in West Virginia. She saw many safety improvements over the years, and always felt grateful that she could call the local Mine Safety and Health Administration office whenever she wondered whether a rule was being followed. She joined the safety committees launched by the local chapter of the United Mine Workers, which collaborated with the agency to watchdog coal companies. She understood the price that had been paid for the regulations it enforced. “Every law was written in blood,” she said. “It’s there because somebody was injured or killed.”

Still, she and others who work the nation’s mines worry President Trump is about to limit the agency’s local reach. As his administration targets federal buildings for closure and sale, 35 of its offices are on the list. Fifteen are in Appalachian coalfields, with seven in eastern Kentucky alone and the others concentrated in southern West Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania. Of the remaining 20 offices, many are in the West, in remote corners of Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado. Miners’ advocates worry these closures could reduce the capacity of an agency that’s vastly improved mining safety over the past 50 years or so and could play a vital role as the Trump administration promotes fossil fuels like coal, and as decarbonization efforts increase the need for lithium and other metals.

Since its inception in 1977, the agency has operated under the auspices of the Department of Labor to reduce the risks of what has always been one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Before Congress created the agency, known as MSHA, hundreds of miners died each year, in explosions, tunnel collapses, and equipment malfunctions. (The number was far higher through the 1940s, often reaching into the thousands.) Last year, 31 people died in mining accidents, according to the agency’s data. Even after accounting for coal’s steady decline, that tally, while still tragic, reflects major strides in safety.

“Coal mining is a tough business. It’s a very competitive business. There’s always a temptation to compete on safety, to cut corners on safety, to make that your competitive advantage as a mine operator,” Christopher Mark, a government mine safety specialist who has spent decades making the job safer, told Grist. “And it’s our job to make sure that nobody can do that.”

Trump’s pick to lead MSHA, Wayne Palmer, who is awaiting confirmation, previously was vice president of the Essential Minerals Association, a trade association representing extraction companies. The Department of Labor declined to comment on the proposed lease terminations. A representative of the U.S. General Services Administration, which manages federal offices, told Grist that any locations being considered for closure have been made aware of that, and some lease terminations may be rescinded or not issued at all. 

Many of the country’s remaining underground coal mines – the most dangerous kind – are located in Appalachia. MSHA has historically placed its field offices in mining communities. Although the number of coal mines has declined by more than half since 2008, tens of thousands of miners still work the coalfields. Many of them still venture underground.

The dwindling number of fatalities comes even as the MSHA has been plagued by continued staffing and funding shortfalls, with the federal Office of the Inspector General repeatedly admonishing the agency for falling below its own annual inspection targets. It also has recommended more frequent sampling to ensure mine operators protect workers from toxic coal and silica dust. After decades of work, federal regulators finally tightened silica exposure rules, but miners and their advocates worry too little staffing and too few inspections could hamper enforcement. 

“There are going to be fewer inspections, which means that operators that are not following the rules are going to get away with not following the rules for longer than they would have,” said Chelsea Barnes, the director of government affairs and strategy at environmental justice nonprofit Appalachian Voices. The organization has worked with union members and advocates for those with black lung disease to lobby for stricter silica dust exposure limits.

Last month, the United Mine Workers’ Association denounced the proposed office closures. As demand for coal continues to decline, it worries that companies could pinch pennies to maximize profits — or avoid bankruptcy. ​​”Companies are completely dependent upon the price of coal,” said Phil Smith, executive assistant to union president Cecil Roberts. ”[If] it’s bad enough, they think, ‘Well, we can cut a corner here. We can pick a penny there.’”

The Biden administration made an effort to staff the agency. In the waning days of Biden’s term, Chris Williamson, who led the agency at the time, told Grist he was “very proud of rebuilding our team” because “you can’t go out and enforce the silica standard or enforce other things if you don’t have the people in place to do it.” The union worries that the Trump administration, which has pursued sweeping layoffs throughout the government, will target MSHA, where many of the Biden hires remain probationary employees. Despite the previous administration’s attempts to bolster the agency, it still missed inspections due to understaffing.

Anyone who isn’t terminated will have to relocate to larger offices if Trump shutters local outposts, placing them further from the mines they keep tabs on. In addition to inspecting underground mines at least quarterly and surface mines biannually, inspectors make more frequent checks of operations where toxic gases are present. They also respond to complaints. Work now done by people in the offices throughout eastern Kentucky likely would be consolidated in Lexington, Kentucky, or Wise County, Virginia, which are 200 miles apart. 

Field offices have been consolidated before, and mining experts acknowledged there may be a time and a place for such things, but it’s highly unusual to close so many without due process. In early March, the House Committee on Education and Workforce submitted a letter to Vince Micone, the acting secretary of labor, requesting documents and information on the closures and expressing concern that as many as 90 mine inspection job offers may have been rescinded. Their letter specifically referred to the agency’s history of understaffing that led to catastrophes like the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 people in 2010, the nation’s worst mining accident in four decades.

“One of the lessons of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, according to MSHA’s own internal investigation, is that staffing disruptions at the managerial level resulted in MSHA’s inspectors failing to adequately address smaller-scale methane explosions in the months leading up the massive explosion that killed 29 miners fifteen years ago this April,” read the letter, which was signed by Democratic representatives Bobby Scott of Virginia and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

The impact of potential cuts stretches far beyond coal, into the mines that will extract the lithium and other metals needed for clean energy and other industries. As of last year, the nation employed almost 256,000 metal and nonmetal miners who pull copper, zinc, and other things from the earth. “It’s an agency that matters, regardless of how we’re producing our energy,” said Chelsea Barnes of Appalachian Voices.

After spending so much time in the mines, Lindsay is concerned by the direction the Trump administration is heading, even as lawmakers in states like West Virginia and Kentucky have in recent years attempted to roll back regulations. “That’s going to be the future of MSHA,” she said. “They’re going to be in name only. Miners are going to die. And nobody but their families are going to care.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump administration moves to shutter mine safety offices in coal country on Mar 25, 2025.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.

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In a radical move to stave off perceived bureaucratic bloat, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of federal employees, including rural workers in public land agencies.

To pay for a proposed $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal workers, including 1,300 workers at the CDC in Atlanta, more than 1,000 at the Department of Veteran Affairs, and 3,400 at the Forest Service.

GOP lawmakers are also eyeing cuts to social programs, like Medicaid, that help the poor and working class.

When you picture federal employees, you might imagine bureaucrats in suits and ties in pristine DC offices. But over a quarter million federal employees are stationed in rural counties across  the country in positions like park rangers, field biologists, or grazing managers, just to name a few of the possible jobs. 

President Trump’s firings will hurt many rural communities that rely on the federal government for a large share of their economic base.

The following map shows the percent of total wages in 2023 that came from federal employment. 

(The latest county-level data we have on industry wages and employment is from 2023. These figures don’t represent recent federal layoffs. Figures are in 2023 inflation-adjusted U.S. dollars.)

In the above map, I chose to represent the share of total wages rather than the share of total employment because federal jobs pay more, on average, than private sector jobs in rural counties. Wages might therefore be a better indicator of the federal government’s economic importance.

"These higher, more stable wages would result in more local spending, supporting local businesses and communities," said Megan Lawson, Ph.D., of Headwaters Economics in an email interview with the Daily Yonder.

In 2023, wages in rural private sector jobs were $50,600 per job, on average, compared to $79,300 per job in the federal government. 

Federal jobs only make up 1.6% of the total rural workforce, but in many rural communities, they are one of the largest employers.

"Especially in the West, where many federal layoffs are affecting public land agencies, these employees will not be able to manage our natural resources and serve the public,” Lawson said. “Our gateway communities whose economies depend on natural resources or recreation on federal land will feel the ripple effects when the resources and their visitors aren't being managed well. It's unclear how quickly these effects will be felt." 

Federal wages accounted for $21 billion in nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties in 2023.

In 2023,  federal jobs made up 20% of the total workforce in rural Garfield County, Washington, a community in southeastern Washington. Garfield County lies partially within the Umatilla National Forest, which spans 1.4 million acres in southern Washington and northern Oregon.

Employment in the federal government made up 29% of wages, meanwhile, representing a total of $11 million in 2023.

In Santa Cruz County, Arizona, 12% of the workforce was employed in the federal government in 2023, while 25% of all wages came from federal jobs, representing a total of $199 million in wages.

Santa Cruz is a rural county in southern Arizona that borders Mexico. The Coronado National Forest, a 1.7 million acre piece of federal land, lies almost entirely within the county. 

We don’t know whether all of the federal jobs in Santa Cruz and Garfield counties are in the National Forest Service, however. The data doesn’t tell us. Some of those federal positions could have been remote workers for other federal agencies.

The post Federal Layoffs Will Hurt Rural Counties appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Washed out bridges, soggy sofas, and ruined ductwork: these are just a sampling of the kinds of damage that flood survivors need to thoroughly document to support a government application for financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Local county and city governments around the state are urging residents on social media to report any damages from extreme weather and flooding.

Whitney Bailey is the disaster response project director with AppalReD — a legal aid group in eastern Kentucky. She said survivors should take photos and, if possible, create an inventory of damaged items. For appliances and electronics, it may even be helpful to log models and serial numbers.

The documentation should extend to any infrastructure on private property too.

“Start taking pictures, if you haven’t yet, of any bridges, culverts, landslides, mudslides, anything around your home. Gravel roads also,” Bailey said. “You can start making repairs but, just make sure you take photos of everything so you have proof of the before and after. And absolutely hold on to every single receipt.”

In the meantime, Kentuckians will need to wait for FEMA to approve the state’s application for individual assistance programs to repair houses and items destroyed by flood waters. Governor Andy Beshear said it submitted the application on Tuesday for 10 eastern Kentucky counties to receive that aid.

If that aid is approved, it could green light immediate grants of more than $700 for survivors and nearly $44,000 for household repairs and replacement of damaged property. Households have 18 months to apply and appeal these financial awards, but can appeal as many times as needed.

Meanwhile, news outlets are reporting that many FEMA staff were fired the same weekend that disaster struck and more firings could come. President Donald Trump has posted on social media recently that FEMA should be “terminated” and offhandedly proposed the same while touring disaster-stricken areas. He has indicated he wants local governments and states to pay for more of the recovery costs.

Trump has approved an emergency declaration to assist Kentucky’s response, but that aid is limited to immediate emergency response and is capped at $5 million. It’s unclear how he might respond to Kentucky’s request for individual assistance programs, which have individual award limits, but typically have no overall limit to local governments.

President Donald Trump’s immigration plan aims to deport thousands of people that are living in the United States without proper documentation.

We wanted to get an idea of how Trump’s plan will impact Kentucky, a place that’s home to nearly 200,000 immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan immigration policy think tank based in Washington, D.C.

So, we called more than 40 local law enforcement operations — the sheriff’s and police agencies that could be tapped to assist federal immigration agents. And we went inside the state’s only full-time immigration detention center — the Boone County jail, where federal agents can hold up to 175 people to await deportation.

KyCIR reporters Morgan Watkins and Jared Bennett discussed what they found with LPM’s Bill Burton. You can listen to the conversation by clicking the audio player above, or you can read more below.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Bill Burton: Jared, has the jail been holding more people since President Trump took office?

Jared Bennett: The Boone County jailer, Jason Maydak, told me he hasn’t seen any evidence of raids or increased enforcement here in Kentucky.

And actually he wasn’t really expecting any in this new Trump administration.

So far they have seen a slight bump, though. There were 131 people held for ICE there when I visited. That was January 28. And by February 3rd, that number rose to 175 people, which is the jail’s capacity for ICE detainees.

BB: How long are people held there?

JB: The jailer told me the average stay for ICE detainees at the Boone County jail was around 45 days, that’s a month and a half, but some people are there for much, much longer, and that’s one of the main issues with ICE holds right now.

People are held for ICE either waiting deportation or for their cases to move through immigration courts, and that can take a really long time. There was a backlog in immigration courts of 3.6 million cases at the end of the 2024 fiscal year.

A federal judge this past August found someone’s year-long stay at the Boone County jail without a bond hearing was unconstitutional. There’s no hard and fast rule about when detainment becomes problematic, but lawyers told me that courts start to get skeptical around six months.

And when I looked at the records I found 20 people had been at the Boone County jail for over six months, and three people for over a year.

BB: You got to tour the jail, what’s it like?

JB: For the most part, a jail is a jail. It’s a big facility, it’s clean, a lot of fluorescent lighting, and it was pretty quiet when I visited. It was below capacity. The jail performs pretty well on ICE inspections, they have a lot of different standards they have to meet to hold people for ICE. That inspection found only three deficiencies that the jailer told me were addressed right away.

But the ICE detainees themselves, they tell a different story. I wasn’t able to talk to any directly, but two filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights in 2021 and said the jail wasn’t taking COVID-19 seriously, didn’t provide translators or regular access to outdoors and recreation. One man from East Africa said he was called racial slurs at the jail.

The Office of Civil Rights investigated and in 2024 made 34 recommendations to address civil rights violations they found. We only have a summary of the findings, so we don’t know what all of the findings were, but we do know ICE only agreed with 18 of the recommendations.

BB: Morgan, Trump wants local police to help ICE enforce federal immigration laws. What do Kentucky officers say, though?

Morgan Watkins: I contacted over 40 police departments and sheriff’s offices and a majority of them got back to me. None of them reported having a formal agreement to partner with ICE, but none said they’d refuse to work with the agency, either.

Several officers said they’d have to consider their available resources – which are limited, especially for small police departments – if ICE asks them for help with an immigration operation.

BB: Do the law enforcement agencies have official policies on working with ICE?

MW: Most of the ones I talked to do not have a policy on ICE, specifically. Louisville Metro Police is an exception. LMPD has policies that limit how and when it can help ICE. A couple of Republican state lawmakers are proposing bills that could force Louisville to drop the restrictions, though.

Opioid abuse and rural homelessness create a spiral for some rural residents, a new study has found.

For the study, researchers with the Rural Opioid Initiative at Georgia State University interviewed more than 3,000 people in rural communities across 10 states who had used drugs. Of those, more than half (54%) said they had experienced homelessness in the last six months. 

April Ballard, assistant professor at the Georgia State University School of Public Health, said the research suggests that the number of rural homeless is significantly larger than federal data suggests.

“Houselessness is an issue in rural areas, but it’s not talked about,” Ballard said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “That’s largely because it looks very different than in urban areas. It can look like couch surfing, or moving from place to place. It’s hard to count in the same way that we do in urban areas.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires a nationwide “Point in Time Count” of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. On that day, groups of volunteers spread out to count and talk to homeless people in a community. However, Ballard said, because of the nature of rural homelessness, getting an accurate count is difficult.

“In an urban area, there are groups of people that get together and they walk around the city and they talk to people (to get the homeless count),” she said. “That can be challenging, obviously, for urban areas that are really spread out or not walkable. But in rural areas, obviously, you’re not going to go climb mountains and go in the backwoods to count people. That’s just not feasible.”

Rural people without housing may live in different situations — with relatives, or in tents, or in cars, Ballard said — instead of living in shelters or on the street. That makes finding and identifying them difficult at best. And there is a greater prevalence of homelessness because of the nature of rural community economics, she said.

“In some rural areas there are fewer economic opportunities and more economic disparities,” she said. “There’s insufficient public housing infrastructure and a limited acknowledgement of rural houselessness, which means that less money and resources go toward it.”

In one case, the researchers counted up to five times as many people experiencing homelessness in Kentucky than the “point in time” counts had identified. In three counties, the research found, the “point in time” counts estimated there were no people who were homeless, while Ballard and her group found more than 100 people in those same counties who said they had used drugs and experienced homelessness in the previous  six months.

Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, agrees that homelessness in rural communities is undercounted.

“Every year, communities conduct an annual ‘point in time count, which is comparable to what we see in the Census —where folks go out knocking door to door to count people,” she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “But how do you count people that don’t have a door to answer?”

Rural homelessness, she said, stems not only from lower economic opportunities and a lack of affordable housing, but a lack of support services as well.

“We see a lack of service providers that are really responsible for a whole range of services to the community,” she said. “We do not seem to see the same concentration of service providers that you would see in, say, metropolitan Atlanta or Washington, D.C., or New York City.”

Ballard said her team’s research also indicated that there is a link between opioid use and rural homelessness, each one feeding off of the other.

“Obviously, it’s very clear that the opioid epidemic, as well as other sorts of drugs, has just been wreaking havoc on rural America for a while now. And I would say that houselessness has been an issue in rural areas, but it’s not talked about,” she said. “These two things, I think have been happening in parallel, and as the opioid epidemic has dramatically increased, it [has led] to that kind of cycle.”

The social losses that accompany opioid use disorder, Ballard said — such as unemployment, financial ruin, and the loss of family and social networks — can lead to housing instability and homelessness. In turn, the harsh living conditions presented by homelessness can perpetuate drug use as a coping mechanism. Together the two can create a self-reinforcing cycle that contributes to poorer health and shorter lifespans.

Homelessness can also inhibit treatment and medical care, Ballard said. People  without stable housing were 1.3 times more likely to report being hospitalized for serious bacterial infection and 1.5 times more likely to overdose, the study found. Ballard said the lack of access to clean water contributed to a higher infection rate, while the prevalence of homeless people to use drugs alone increased the risk of accidental overdoses.

Although the two often overlap, Kenion cautioned against equating homelessness with drug addiction.

“I would be really careful about drawing parallels to the narrative that sometimes takes over that the majority of people experiencing homelessness are addicted to opioids or other substances, because that’s not supported by the data,” she said.

Rather, many homeless people across the country have experienced financial hardships — even one unexpected expense —that spiraled out of control and forced them from their homes, she said.

“Not a lot of people realize how folks are just often one crisis away from experiencing housing instability and homelessness, but that is felt more acutely in rural communities,” she said. “If you look at the overall snapshot, rural homelessness has actually increased by 17% between the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and 2023. And 42% of people experiencing homelessness in rural areas are in unsheltered situations, with women and families with children being far more likely to be unsheltered outdoors.”

Both Ballard and Kenion agree that accurately counting the homeless in rural communities in necessary in order to ensure they have the services they need to get back on their feet.

Additionally, Ballard said, having an accurate count can help ensure the rural homeless who have drug abuse issues can get the help that they need.

“I feel like without that awareness, we are not allocating resources to this,” Ballard said. “From a policy standpoint, it’s incredibly important for us to be capturing accurate information and accurate estimates, so that we’re actually dedicating the right amount of resources to communities. If we are trying to stop deaths related to drug use as well as other epidemics related to HIV and hepatitis C, and we’re not considering housing status, efforts to mitigate that are not going to be as effective or as efficient.”

The post Study: Rural Homelessness Is Underestimated and Exacerbated by Opioid Epidemic appeared first on The Daily Yonder.