Devon Parfait steers his truck into the parking lot of what used to be a firehouse on Shrimpers Row in Dulac, Louisiana. He tries to get his bearings in a landscape both familiar and strange. He spies a bayou down a side street, so we walk in that direction, searching for traces of the home his family fled as Hurricane Rita barreled in. Back then, in 2005, Parfait was a second grader who collected Ranger Rick Zoobooks. Today he’s a 25-year-old coastal scientist with a mop of curls, a nose ring, and a puzzled look in his brown eyes.

“I’m scanning through the memory of all my old neurons,” he tells me. “Maybe this is it. Maybe it really has just changed so much I don’t even recognize it.”

Parfait’s January 2023 visit isn’t just for nostalgia. He’s the new chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and he’s getting reacquainted with his community. The 1,100-citizen tribe has traditionally fished and hunted along this fertile edge of the Gulf of Mexico. But human engineering and extreme storms have reshaped Louisiana’s coastline, swallowing up 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s. Many of the land patents granted to the tribe’s ancestors in a 19th-century treaty are now largely or wholly underwater. Land loss has chiseled away at tribal livelihoods and traditional diets, exacted a toll on citizens’ mental health, exacerbated chronic illnesses, and displaced families.

The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and its neighbors also serve as harbingers of a climate crisis that threatens more intense high-tide floods on every U.S. coast by the mid-2030s. Unless protective measures are taken, rising waters could displace up to 13 million Americans by century’s end—“a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans,” wrote the authors of a 2016 University of Georgia analysis.

As we stand alongside the bayou, overshadowed by tall dry grass, a car pulls up to a nearby house. An older couple gets out and Parfait approaches them. “I’m trying to figure out if this is the place I used to live,” he says, naming his grandparents.

“I’m a Parfait,” the woman volunteers.

“Oh! Hey! Give me a hug then,” the chief says.

The couple lead Parfait to the footprint of his old home, now a garden bed that, later in the year, will produce mustard greens, speckled butter beans, and tomatoes. A fig tree Parfait remembers remains, but the rope swing of his childhood has vanished. The couple, who have lived here almost 50 years, say the land has eroded so much that the backmost six feet of their property has crumbled into the bayou.

Parfait understands the changes he sees represent both an existential crisis and a leadership burden. He prepared for this moment by leaving Louisiana to study geosciences. Now he’s back, crafting a plan to hold his tribe together, and shaking the hands he needs to get it rolling. Still, he’s cognizant of the obstacles ahead.

Coastal land loss has upended life in South Louisiana—for Cajun, Black, and Creole residents, for Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, and in particular for the half-dozen Indigenous tribes that rely on the abundance of its wetlands. Some 11,000 Native Americans live in the four coastal parishes (counties) with the highest Indigenous concentrations—flat expanses of two-lane roads that parallel bayous lined with oaks, elevated houses, and shrimp boats, and occasionally converge on small, industry-thick cities.

Cleveland “Coco” Rodrigue, a 61-year-old shrimper and citizen of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, says he used to walk into the woods near his house in Dulac and hunt ducks and rabbits—“live off the land.” But those woods are gone, replaced by water. “Now, you step out your back door,” he says, “you’re going to sink.”

These losses stem from vast projects that altered the Mississippi River and its delta. The building of flood-control levees, according to many scientists, has prevented sediment from reaching and replenishing wetlands that naturally subside. The dredging of 10,000 miles of artificial canals by oil and gas companies altered the delta’s hydrology. Shipping channels allow saltwater to penetrate inland. Until recently, climate change was a minor factor, but now accelerating sea-level rise threatens even more inundation. Fewer wetlands mean less protection from hurricanes, which lately have intensified. The storms themselves erode the coast—a feedback loop of destruction.

Land loss impedes not just hunting and trapping but also raising livestock. Vegetable gardens face higher flood risk. Fishing and shrimping have become dicier, partly because the wetlands serve as nurseries for aquatic animals. Loss of natural food sources mean tribal citizens now have to rely more on grocery stores than in the past. But historic discrimination, like being kept out of public schools until the 1940s, has created barriers to wealth that have spanned generations. In the parish that includes Dulac, the poverty rate is 30 percent for Native Americans and 12 percent for non-Hispanic White people.

“When you don’t have the funds to purchase foods that are healthier, or better quality, you’re going to get what you can get [to] fill your stomach,” says Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Parfait’s predecessor as chief. Alongside this shift toward less healthy processed food, she has seen a rise in heart disease and diabetes.

Parfait-Dardar’s anecdotal observations square with national figures (local data are hard to come by). Native Americans, for whom diabetes was once rare, now have twice the rate of White Americans. Obesity and cardiovascular illness run rampant, too. A key culprit is the shift from traditional to Western diets, whether because of forced migration, environmental degradation, or government policies like the mandated thinning of livestock herds.

Beyond dietary disease, tribal leaders describe crushing stress from living in a place that’s increasingly uninhabitable. “Everyone here is suffering from PTSD, myself included,” says Parfait-Dardar, whose home Hurricane Ida leveled in 2021. Researchers studying the Gulf Coast have seen domestic abuse and substance-use disorders spike after hurricanes. The former chief has seen similar patterns in her tribe.

Health experts call the psychological and dietary tolls inseparable. “Stress triggers hormones that let you eat more, and eat more junk,” says Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who has researched and collaborated with Indigenous people in the Louisiana bayous. “Stress also triggers sleeping less. A short night’s rest actually increases obesity. So, the physiological consequences of stress feed into the social consequences of stress. And that, I think, is a cycle very difficult to break.”

Julie Maldonado, an anthropologist who has studied Louisiana’s tribes and is now working with them on issues like climate adaptation, says contemporary stresses are intertwined with a collective trauma that stretches back centuries. European colonization set the stage for the altered coastal landscape, the pollution, the hurricane damage, the growing untenability of commercial fishing, the scattering of neighbors.

“What people often talk about is a legacy of atrocities, or these cascading effects as these disasters are layered upon each other over time,” says Maldonado, associate director of the non-profit Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Now, as these climate-driven events get closer together, become more intense…you’re still recovering from one when the next one hits.”

That’s a lot of history to place on the shoulders of a Generation Z chief. But Parfait is in an unusual position: He knows firsthand how environmental changes can affect a community’s health, and he has done the academic work to help him address the underlying causes.

The summer of 2005, when Parfait’s family was forced from its home, was especially bad for land loss: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone claimed 217 square miles. After Rita destroyed the house and ruined his grandfather’s shrimp boat, the three-generation family uprooted three times. They traveled a 200-mile circuit before settling into the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. Parfait’s mother, Dana, wanted him to have a male mentor, so she sent him to live with her brother. But his uncle was also struggling, and eventually committed suicide.

Already diagnosed with ADHD (a condition linked to childhood trauma) and depression, Parfait retreated into himself. “He rarely came out of his room,” says his mother. He failed his freshman year of high school.

But Parfait’s curious mind caught the attention of his mother’s cousin, then-chief Parfait-Dardar. As early as age 12, he watched her try to gain federal recognition for the tribe, a cumbersome, elusive, ongoing process that could bring financial benefits and self-governance rights. He asked questions and offered to help, and over time Parfait-Dardar identified him as her eventual successor. (Each chief names the next.) “When I recognized that it was him—and I still get chills today—it was like the ancestors spoke,” she says.

To face the tribe’s issues, Parfait needed a specific kind of education. It happened that the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band has a relationship with the Williams-Mystic Program, a collaboration of Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum that runs a coastal field seminar in Louisiana. Rónadh Cox, a geosciences professor at Williams and seminar instructor, invited him to a scientific meeting in 2017, noticed his drive and curiosity, and wondered if her school might entertain a transfer from his community college. “This could be a moment where we can do something,” she remembers thinking, “to make a difference, to give back to the tribe.”

Admissions officers at Williams, a competitive liberal arts college, looked at Parfait’s grades and declined his application. After another year of academic preparation, he reapplied to Williams and this time was accepted. At Williams, Parfait studied geosciences and collaborated with Cox on several mapping projects related to the tribe’s historic territory. One showed the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and nearby Jean Charles Choctaw Nation were losing land faster than the surrounding basins, and at more than double the rate of Louisiana’s entire coast.

Parfait always imagined his tenure as tribal chief would begin in the distant future. But as he was finishing up his undergraduate degree in 2022, Parfait-Dardar called to say she was ready to step down. “I knew what we were facing,” she says: further land loss, potential dispersion, continued public health challenges. “And Devon had the education that I don’t have.” Knowing the burden Parfait would be taking on, the outgoing chief also called his mother. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

After graduating, Parfait returned home and started working as a coastal science coordinator for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). In August 2022, he recited the oath of office at a kitchen-table ceremony scaled down for the pandemic. That same month, he turned 25.

One of Parfait’s first orders of business as chief was to assist an intertribal effort to get the federal government’s attention. The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band had teamed up with four other tribes—one from Alaska, the others from Louisiana—that have seen their traditional lands disappear. The five had petitioned for a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleging that the government had failed to protect them from the impacts of climate change and other human-caused disasters.

The consequences, the petition claimed, amounted to a forcible displacement. Grand Bayou Indian Village, home to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha, has lost nearly all its land; the handful of remaining houses sit on pilings and can only be reached by boat. Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has watched its ancestral island erode down to a sliver and the state’s relocation plans devolve into conflict over how much decision-making power the tribe would retain.

The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, had scheduled a hearing for October, two months after Parfait’s swearing-in. The commission lacks binding powers for the U.S. government, “but it’s still important,” says Maryum Jordan, an attorney with EarthRights International who worked with the tribes on the hearing. “This is a key moment to put displacement on the radar at the international level. And it’s also an opportunity to pressure the government to do more.”

The hearing was online, but there were private in-person meetings, too. The day before, Parfait took an early-morning flight to Washington, D.C., where the team huddled over sandwiches and cupcakes, crafting testimony and supplemental material. They met with a White House official. And they talked with an IACHR attorney to provide more context than they could squeeze into the 90-minute hearing. Parfait talked about how colonialism had altered the coastal environment, making it harder for the tribes to stay self-sufficient.

The next day, Parfait watched off-camera as his predecessor, Parfait-Dardar, logged in from a hotel ballroom in Thibodaux, Louisiana—in her emerita role as elder chief, she retains moral authority and years of knowledge. She sat at a conference table with Rosina Philippe, an elder from Grand Bayou. Tribal banners hung behind them.

“The lands once lush and fruitful have eroded away, so that all that remains today are strips of land that stick out like fragile fingers on a badly wounded hand,” Parfait-Dardar testified. The declining harvest, compounded by education discrimination, “has led us into lifeways that have also caused negative consequences for our mental and physical health.” And without federal recognition, she said, the tribe can’t secure the funding it needs to recover from hurricanes and adapt to climate change.

After Parfait-Dardar and three other tribal representatives made their case, the U.S. government responded. Department of Interior staffer Joaquin Gallegos, who is from the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the Pueblo of Santa Ana, acknowledged that climate change poses “existential threats” to Native economies and health. But, Gallegos said, the government “takes its political and legal responsibilities to Indigenous people seriously,” funding climate-resilience programs, supporting traditional food systems like fisheries, and consulting with tribes on issues like relocation.

Still, the panel seemed alarmed by the tribes’ testimony. “Why is it taking so long…to assist these communities?” asked commissioner Margarette May Macaulay, a Jamaican attorney. She announced the IACHR would submit an official request to visit Louisiana and Alaska. “Around the world,” she said, Indigenous tribes “have the least footprint and suffer the greatest crisis from climate change, which is committed by the industrialized state in pursuing industrialized profits.”

Then the laptop screen went dark. Parfait-Dardar turned to Philippe. “OK,” she said. “We survived.”

Philippe exhaled. She had watched the federal officials talk about collaboration. But that didn’t square with her own experience of a process that solicits tribal input without any real intention of disrupting the oil-and-gas economy. “The government—they maintain that whip hand,” she said. “So they can tout and say, ‘We are engaging the tribal communities.’ …But in the end product, we don’t see our suggestions. We see them just forging ahead with what they planned to do in the beginning.”

As winter approaches, Parfait confronts the enormity of his unpaid role as chief. His tribe’s mental and physical health, limited food access, and economic insecurity all demand attention, but so does his full-time day job at EDF. “I can’t do everything,” he says.

Sometimes, public-health problems require action in areas that look tangential but are actually foundational. “You could treat that diabetes, you could tell people to walk,” but health is collective, too, says the University of Pittsburgh’s Lichtveld. “The sense of community cohesion, or the gaps in it, in Indigenous communities is very strong.”

And so Parfait gravitates toward the issue that, to him, undergirds all the others. “How do you live a healthy, happy, productive life,” he says, “when you can physically see your lands eroding away in your backyard?” He fixes on a primary task: pushing for coastal restoration efforts that would slow the degradation enough for his tribe to plan an orderly retreat.

Louisiana has a 50-year, $50 billion coastal master plan, released in 2007 and updated every five to six years. Some of the funding comes from a Deepwater Horizon oil-spill settlement. But no amount of money can fix the entire coast. “It’s not like restoring a chair, where you’re going to strip the old varnish off and put some new stuff on, and it’s going to look exactly the same as it was,” says Denise Reed, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans and a member of the master plan development team. “If you have limited resources, where are you going to put them? Where can you achieve most of your objectives?”

A keystone of the state’s coastal program is the $2.3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion: a gated structure, built into the levee system downriver from New Orleans, that will allow river water and sediment to flow back into the delta. According to the 2023 draft update to the master plan, the diversion could build 21 square miles of new land over the next half-century. “That will serve to protect everything inland,” says Kelly Sanks, a Tulane University sedimentologist. “From a protection-of-New-Orleans standpoint, it’s good and lots of people want it,” including a coalition of large environmental groups.

But the diversion will make flooding more severe for the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha in nearby Grand Bayou, and tribes like Grand Caillou/Dulac live too far from the river to benefit.

“So it costs billions of dollars,” Parfait tells me. “It only benefits people 50 years from now. And it does nothing to help the tribal communities.”

The state’s plan acknowledges that some places won’t survive intact. For those residents, it recommends voluntary property acquisition and relocation assistance. This is not a reassuring prospect for Native Americans who watched Jean Charles Choctaw Nation’s dispute with the state over resettlement. “[It] indicates to these communities who are on the frontlines that people have given up on them,” Parfait says.

The chief understands that land loss might continue to force the tribe inland. But he wants the state to invest more in slowing down that loss—“buying time” to prevent citizens from dispersing helter-skelter as his family did after Hurricane Rita. “If you were to do coastal restoration projects to save the land now, and have that community stay there and develop a plan, you have a better chance to save culture, to keep the community cohesive, and to keep families together,” he says.

Topping Parfait’s priority list: seeing those oil-and-gas canals backfilled with the piles of dredged material that run parallel to them. This, some researchers say, could help restore the hydrology the canals wrecked decades ago. The tribes have consulted with R. Eugene Turner, a coastal ecologist at Louisiana State University who calls backfilling a cheap, fast, and effective way to rebuild wetlands. Those wetlands, he says, would in turn provide habitat for the seafood and game that make up the traditional Indigenous diet.

Stuart Brown, the state official who oversees the plan’s development, calls backfilling “one of many tools in the toolbox, not a panacea.” But after meeting with Turner and tribal leaders, he added one sentence to the 2023 draft endorsing the practice. “Now,” he says, “those seeking funding for it can go to the master plan and specifically say, ‘Look, it’s consistent with the plan.’”

When Parfait saw the draft update, he initially had mixed feelings: happy that backfilling got mentioned at all, and saddened by the brevity. “It is kind of an asterisk,” he says.

But he has moved past his disappointment and now views that sentence as a potential pipeline. “It feels like they’re saying, ‘Hey, connect,’” he says. “And that’s exactly what I’m doing.” His calendar is filling with meetings, and his head with strategies. He has met with local officials about a potential backfilling demonstration project that, if it comes about, would be managed by the parish government with tribal input. If that project succeeds, Parfait hopes it will nudge backfilling higher on the state’s priority list.

Parfait often thinks in stories; he calls this a product of his Indigenous heritage. “When I leave this world, what story do I want my life to represent?” he asks. “I don’t want to move forward into a world where we have to be constantly displaced, where we have to be constantly worried about our next meal, where we have to be constantly worried about land loss.” He thinks about his 8-year-old self, fleeing the bayou without his Zoobooks, and all the upheavals he has experienced since. Those memories remain close, guiding his plans for the future.

Listen to this story on The California Report

Allensworth, a farmworker town of about 500 people in California’s San Joaquin Valley, sits at the edge of an area called the Tulare Lake Basin, a patchwork of scrub brush and irrigated farmland that’s part of the most productive agricultural region in the nation. Last March, California’s barrage of atmospheric rivers overwhelmed the area, flooding pistachio orchards and swamping communities, and Allensworth found itself all but surrounded by a shallow sea. Residents were told to evacuate. They were also told that this flood was just the beginning.

California is fighting a slow-motion disaster, one that could become its largest flood in recent history. As the near-record snowpack in the Sierra mountains melts, the water making its way through the foothills is pooling in the basin, reviving a lake that had long disappeared. This process is expected to accelerate over the coming weeks and months, and it could take up to two years to subside. And while the return of Tulare Lake could devastate everyone in the region, historically disenfranchised communities like Allensworth are uniquely vulnerable. 

“It’s a horrific situation,” said Denise Kadara, an Allensworth community leader and the vice chair of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We’re here like sitting ducks, waiting for the water to come and flood us out.”

Part of Allensworth’s problem stems from the politics of water: For over a hundred years, water in the Tulare Lake Basin has been controlled and hoarded by a handful of powerful landowners, usually at the expense of everyone else. The Basin’s water management system still favors those powerful landowners, leaving the town with little recourse when floodwaters approach. 

‘I don’t need a whole bunch of people to break the law’

That was evident one windy night in March, when Allensworth residents Takoa Kadara and his father, Kayode, called an emergency town meeting. The goal was simple: to keep the water massing in the basin from pouring into people’s homes.

At the time, water was flowing toward town through culverts that run under railroad tracks to the east. The culverts are on private property, and the tracks that run on top of them are owned by BNSF Railway, one of the top freight transportation companies in the nation. The last time community members tried to block the culverts with rocks, gravel and plywood, a BNSF employee called the police, then removed the makeshift dam they had built. 

Now the group wanted to protect the community, but knew they might be at risk of breaking the law. Residents only saw two options: act illegally, or not at all, and they couldn’t come to an agreement.

“If you guys disagree with this solution, then let’s go home,” Kayode Kadara said.

“No, it’s not, ‘let’s go home!” his son, Takoa Kadara, said, “let’s come up with another solution.”

“I’ll just say it like it is,” said one resident, who declined to give his name. “If I’m gonna break the law, I don’t need a whole bunch of people to break the law [with me]. Ten minutes? We’re gone.”

Allensworth residents have tried to block the culverts legally—many, many times. But BNSF wouldn’t give them permission to do it, and so far, the town hasn’t been able to find a government agency with the power to override the corporation’s decision, or persuade it to reconsider. Their local stormwater district doesn’t have jurisdiction over the railroad’s property, and representatives from several state agencies, including Caltrans, CalFire and the Department of Water Resources, said they couldn’t do anything either, even though community members said those agencies agreed that the water spilling through the culverts is a problem. 

BNSF did not respond to requests for comment, but in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a company spokesperson claimed that blocking the culverts could damage their tracks.

When Allensworth was put under a mandatory evacuation order back in March, the Kadaras and most of their neighbors refused to leave. Who would defend their town if they did?

“The water flowing is natural,” said Denise Kadara. But added it’s also determined by men who say “‘This is where they want the water to go.’”

The history behind today’s water politics

To understand the power dynamics in the Tulare Lake Basin—and how Allensworth ended up on the losing side of it—we have to go back to when the town was founded and Tulare Lake was still alive. In 1908, Lt. Col. Allen Allensworth was a formerly enslaved person who had become the highest ranking Black military officer of his time. As Jim Crow tightened its grip throughout the South, he moved to California to create what he hoped would become the “Tuskegee of the West,” a thriving Black community and college town. Founded by a dream team of Black doctors, professors and farmers, the community of Allensworth became the first town in California to be founded, financed and governed by Black Americans.

Allensworth picked a spot near Tulare Lake, which used to be the largest lake west of the Mississippi. Accounts from the late 1800s describe it as shallow, thick with tule reeds, and ringed by marshland. Herds of elk waded through the shallows, and millions of migratory birds flocked to its shores every year.

But by the time Lt. Col. Allensworth got there, the lake was rapidly disappearing—it had been for years.

“Geologists call that end of the San Joaquin Valley one of the most engineered landscapes in human history,” said Mark Arax, a journalist and expert in the Central Valley’s history and water politics. “[The] human hand has altered that land in a way that few places have been altered.”

Allensworth’s residents weren’t the only people who’d settled along Tulare Lake. A group of white landowners had settled there, too—some of them descending from slave-owning families.

“Many of them were Southerners who’d come from the Confederate states,” said Arax. “They arrived here and they started grabbing the snow melt out of those rivers, and then diverting that onto their farmland.”

In the 1920s, two particularly bold landowner families, the Boswells and the Salyers, made a move on the lakebed itself. The soil at the bottom was dark and unusually rich; it’d be the perfect place for a farm, if the lake wasn’t in the way. So they drained it and diverted the water for irrigation. According to Arax, those diversions ended up drying up the lake completely.

Meanwhile, Allensworth couldn’t get enough water to sustain itself, no matter how hard the community tried. White farmers diverted a river they relied on. A white-owned company refused to dig the community’s wells, but it was more than happy to dig wells for a white town nearby. By the 1920s, a lot of Allensworth’s original settlers had moved away. And by the 1940s, the white landowners in the Tulare Lake Basin had become some of the most powerful farmers in the country, and had successfully seized control of the water for themselves.

Those long-established power dynamics are still at work in the region. Today, Allensworth is a farmworker town where the tap water isn’t safe to drink. Many of its neighbors are large corporations and wealthy farmers, and they control many local agencies—like water and reclamation districts—which make decisions about who gets water in dry years and what to do when the floods come.

“You have these quasi-government agencies, but they’re controlled by the biggest landowners,” says Arax. “It’s a no man’s land in a lot of ways, and that’s the way it’s operated. It resorts to its own devices all the time.”

The Tulare Lake Basin also has a long history of levee sabotage. Historically, when the basin has flooded, some farmers cut levees and blocked canals to protect their land, but it also threatened the town with flooding. This is still happening today. Denise Kadara remembers getting the news from their local stormwater manager in March that a levy on the west side of town had been intentionally breached, prompting calls to evacuate.

As communities like Allensworth brace for the snowmelt this spring—and the floods they know are coming—this history of water theft, sabotage, and discrimination is always in the backs of their minds. 

Although residents at that March meeting decided against blocking the railroad culverts, they haven’t stayed quiet. Allensworth’s community leaders have been calling every government official they can think of, trying to find someone who can help them. And in the past few weeks, Takoa and his family say some politicians and government agencies have started to respond.

CalFire’s emergency response team blocked the levee that was allegedly sabotaged, as well as other breaches, and saved the town from flooding. California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the community in April and promised to send more resources. Allensworth residents are used to the system in this basin working against them, but they hope that’s finally changing. How state agencies act may be the only thing standing between Allensworth and catastrophic flooding.

“We need all the help we can get, from every agency, and every person that wants to help and believes in communities like ours,” Denise Kadara said.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced proudly in August that 100,000 people had applied for her state’s free college program, Michigan Reconnect.

The program, which covers community college tuition for Michigan residents age 25 or older to get them to go back to school, is “a game-changer,” Whitmer said, “not only for the people enrolled in the program, but also for their families, small businesses and the state.”

More than 24,000 of those applicants have enrolled in the program, and 2,000 have completed a degree or a certificate, the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity says. It’s part of a wave of 32 such “free college” programs nationwide, according to the Campaign for Free College Tuition — a third of them added in the last five years.

But there’s a hitch. Most statewide programs, including Michigan’s, don’t necessarily help the lowest-income students finish or pay for college.

Many cover only the tuition that is still outstanding after federal aid is used up. These are called “last-dollar” free college programs. Since federal aid to the lowest-income students — usually in the form of Pell Grants — almost always covers the full cost of community college tuition, low-income students don’t benefit, while higher-income students do.

Despite a perception that free college programs are meant for lower-income students, “the only students who would qualify are students who aren’t eligible for Pell — wealthier students,” said Wil Del Pilar, vice president of higher education policy at the Education Trust. “These become messaging bills a lot of the time,” he said of the preponderance of free college legislation.

What low-income students really need is help with other expenses, such as housing, books and transportation — things free college programs don’t often cover. Those essentials account for about 80 percent of the cost of attending community college, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Free college often is “a false promise,” Del Pilar said. “I don’t think equity is at the heart of these programs, because if it was, they would be designed a bit differently than what we see.”

Related: Bachelor’s degree dreams of community college students get stymied by red tape — and it’s getting worse

Now a handful of states are trying something different. They’re launching “first-dollar” programs, in which money from the state can be applied first to tuition. That means low-income students can use their Pell Grants and other federal aid for all those other costs of college.

This can be a hard sell to legislators, since not all politicians think taxpayers should be on the hook for students’ room and board. Some researchers, including those at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, estimate that these first-dollar programs can be at least  twice as expensive to implement as last-dollar ones.

“All things being equal we prefer first-dollar programs” said Ryan Morgan, chief executive of the Campaign for Free College Tuition. But it can be tough to win bipartisan support. “There are political realities to paying for students’ meals and housing.”

Some states are trying to do it anyway. New Mexico in the fall launched its Opportunity Scholarship, one of the most generous such programs in the country. It covers full tuition at two- and four-year public colleges and universities, before — instead of after — federal aid kicks in. (The state uses the term “middle-dollar” to describe its scholarship because other state money is applied first.)

The Opportunity Scholarship will cost more than $100 million to operate this year, said Stephanie Rodriguez, secretary of the New Mexico Department of Higher Education, and the governor’s office asked for more than $157 million to cover it next year. Part of that increase is because it’s been so popular, helping boost enrollment at New Mexico public universities and colleges by 4 percent in the last year. Some 34,000 students received the scholarship this fall.

But Rodriguez said the investment is worth it.

“What the benefit will be over time is a high return on investment with individuals staying in New Mexico, working in our workforce and having those family-sustaining wages that will keep New Mexico running over time,” Rodriguez said.

Related: ‘Wasted money’: How career training companies scoop up federal funds with little oversight

The design of the program means that students can stack federal financial aid on top of Opportunity scholarships to cover basic needs beyond tuition. Rodriguez said there’s evidence that students are indeed using the scholarships in that way. First-year students including those who get the scholarship also received Pell Grants and other federal aid, she said her department found.

At Eastern New Mexico University, about 30 percent of students at the main campus receive Opportunity scholarships, and others receive separate state aid to help them cover their tuition, said President James Johnston. Enrollment grew nearly 7 percent this fall from the last academic year, Johnston said.

Some states with the more common and less generous last-dollar programs are experimenting with giving students who already used their Pell Grants to cover tuition an additional award to help them pay for books and other necessities. Oregon, for example, provides a minimum award of $2,000 to eligible students.

Some experts say that even when free college programs bring no real financial benefit to the lowest-income students, they can still have a positive impact. They can motivate students to look into and eventually pursue a higher education, whether or not they actually end up making any difference in the price. The word “free” is a powerful motivator, advocates say.

“There’s a lot of confusion and uncertainty and lack of transparency around college prices,” said Michelle Miller-Adams, a senior researcher for the Upjohn Institute who studies free college programs. “The benefit of these last-dollar community college programs has more to do with the messaging and the signaling that higher ed is affordable than it does with actually new financial resources.”

The less expensive last-dollar programs also can be more politically viable and likely to win bipartisan support. And they help many middle-income students who find paying for college difficult and might not qualify for other kinds of help.

Related: What’s a college degree worth? States start to demand that colleges share the data.

“There are people right above the Pell cutoff who don’t have access to federal financial aid, but also don’t have a lot of money,” Miller-Adams said. “Making college tuition-free for them is a big deal and great.”

How well a program works and how equitable it is also depends on whether it’s easy to understand. Some have potentially burdensome eligibility requirements, such as cutoffs based on grade-point averages or a requirement that recipients stay in the state for a certain period of time after graduating.

In many state legislatures, the rhetoric around free college has been more about producing workers with the skills employers need than helping the most marginalized students.

That’s the case in Michigan, where Whitmer is now hoping to expand her signature Michigan Reconnect program.

Ryan Fewins-Bliss, executive director of the Michigan College Access Network, said that while first-dollar programs are generally better for students, the last-dollar approach allows Michigan to spread money to more people.

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Just a few years ago, the state was near the bottom of the list in terms of money spent on financial aid, Fewins-Bliss said. Now it’s spending millions. With that increase, it’s hard to complain about the details.

“People have lost faith in their government and institutions. We need to renew that by investing in people,” he said. “And there’s no better way to change someone’s life than getting them more education.”

This story about free college programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post How the promise of free college doesn’t always help low-income students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

If you’ve eaten a burger and fries recently, there’s a chance that the potatoes were picked by middle schoolers, working through the school day in a field in Idaho. The steer that became the beef patty may well have been killed at a slaughterhouse where teenagers work, and the bone saws used to process the meat could easily have been cleaned by a 13-year-old, wearing a bulky hard hat and oversized gloves. It’s also quite possible that the burger was grilled, flipped and assembled by a child working at McDonald’s on a school night, far later than federal law allows.

This sort of child labor—culled from thousands of examples in U.S. Department of Labor investigations—has been mostly illegal in the U.S. since the 1930s, but that hasn’t stopped a surprising number of companies from engaging in it. In February, the department announced that the nation is experiencing a sharp rise in child labor violations across all industries; since 2018, the agency has documented a 69-percent increase in children who were employed illegally.

The vast majority of employers committing this wave of violations have something in common: they grow, package, deliver, cook, sell and serve the nation’s food.

A FERN analysis of investigation data released by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—which is tasked with enforcing federal child labor laws—found that more than 75 percent of recent violations were committed by employers in the food industry. The agency uncovered more than 12,000 child labor violations in the nation’s food system—out of 16,000 total violations across all industries—between Jan. 1, 2018 and Nov. 23, 2022, the most recent date for which data were publicly available. Investigators found minors working illegally at vegetable farms in Texas and Florida, at dairy farms in Minnesota and New Hampshire and at poultry plants in Alabama and Mississippi. Children are involved in every step of the food supply chain, working illegally from farm to table.

Restaurants were by far the worst offenders. More than 64 percent of all the violations were committed by food service employers. Culprits ranged from regional pizza chains to high-end restaurants, and certain fast food chains were well represented. McDonald’s franchises, for instance, committed 8.7 percent of the violations in the WHD data. The National Restaurant Association did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and McDonald’s declined to comment for publication.

Supermarkets and other food and beverage stores were well represented, too, responsible for 7.7 percent of the violations. In one particularly egregious example, from 2021, a 16-year-old supermarket worker in Clarksburg, Tennessee, was tasked with cleaning out a meat grinder, even though federal law prohibits employers from having minors clean or operate them. As the boy reached into the machine, the grinder switched on and ripped off half of his arm.

Most jobs that workers under the age of 18 do in this country are not considered child labor. The United Nations’ International Labour Organization defines child labor as work that is mentally or physically dangerous for children, interferes with their schooling or both, and U.S. law largely reflects that definition. For the most part, businesses are prohibited from hiring children younger than 14. Fourteen- and 15-year-olds can only work three hours a day on school days, and they can’t legally work during school hours, or take early morning or night shifts. Children under the age of 18 are barred from operating a range of hazardous machinery, like band saws and meat choppers.

Child labor is notoriously difficult to document, and while these data provide meaningful insight into industries that commit child labor violations, they also provide insight into the limitations of the agency’s investigations. Underfunded and understaffed, WHD is tasked with regulating more than 11 million employers with only about 800 investigators. Because of this, the agency mostly investigates companies it receives complaints about—and in many industries, labor violations are chronically underreported.

“What you’re seeing [in this data] is where we go,” a senior Wage and Hour Division official told FERN, referring to the fact that complaints drive the agency’s investigations.

Labor abuses in the restaurant industry frequently go unreported. In a report released by the UCLA Labor Center last year, more than a third of fast food workers surveyed said they’d kept quiet about dangerous conditions in their workplace and other issues, mostly because they were afraid they’d lose their jobs or certain shifts if they complained. And yet, the senior WHD official says, WHD investigators receive far more complaints about food service employers than other types of employers in the food system, such as farmers. “I’m sure a big part of that has to do with workers’ ability to get other jobs,” he says. While food service employers regularly retaliate against employees who speak out about labor violations, workers “could go to the restaurant across the street [for work],” he says. “So they might be more forthcoming to complain.”

The severity of the child labor violations that restaurants commit ranges widely. According to WHD officials, children often work earlier, later and longer hours than they’re supposed to, and in some cases, managers are unaware they’re breaking the law. Other violations are both deliberate and more severe. In 2020, WHD found that Manna Inc., a fast food franchise company, had hired 446 14- and 15-year-olds to work the graveyard shifts at nearly a hundred Wendy’s and Fazoli’s locations across the country. Last December, WHD fined a Chick-fil-A more than $6,000 after discovering it had illegally hired three teenagers, then paid several employees in chicken.

Teenage food service workers are often desperate for work. These are not “teenagers working [to buy] comic books or trading cards,” says Manuel Villanueva, the western regional director for the workers rights’ group Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. “I’ve seen people manage to work three jobs just to get by, and then they have to send their kids to work.”

In Villanueva’s experience, abuses are particularly prevalent in the fast food industry, where hiring workers is outsourced to franchisees. “It’s a free-for-all,” he says. Because child workers lack seniority, he adds, they’re sometimes given dangerous jobs that other workers don’t want to do, like disposing of oil and cleaning deep fryers.

Agricultural jobs and certain food processing jobs, like meat and poultry processing, are particularly dangerous for child workers, but WHD also finds them particularly hard to investigate. Many child employees in food processing work night shifts at isolated facilities away from public view, and “that is not an industry that we are typically looking at at two in the morning,” says the senior WHD official. Farmworkers also tend to be physically isolated and routinely face workplace retaliation; many are undocumented, which can make workers all the more reluctant to speak out. Between January 2018 and November 2022, employers in food processing and agriculture collectively accounted for only about 3 percent of the child labor violations that WHD uncovered—but child labor is known to be widespread in both industries.

In February, WHD forced Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI), one of the country’s largest food safety sanitation service providers, to pay $1.5 million in civil penalties after investigators discovered the company had illegally employed over 100 children to work overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities. Teens as young as 13 worked the overnight shift, cleaning brisket saws and head splitters, and several child workers suffered chemical burns on the job. It was indicative of a much larger problem. In February, a New York Times investigation found that migrant child workers are routinely hired, illegally, by food processing companies, where they described feeling sick, exhausted and trapped by circumstances beyond their control.

Child labor also is commonplace in agriculture—though in many cases, it’s legal. Farmers are largely exempt from federal child labor laws, and children as young as 12 can work unlimited hours harvesting crops, provided they have their parents’ consent and they don’t miss school. As a result, hundreds of thousands of children under the age of 18 work on farms across the country. According to Human Rights Watch, children are often hired to work for 10 or more hours a day, five to seven days a week, in violation of the few federal laws that do apply. Agriculture also is the most dangerous work open to children in the United States; over half of all work-related child fatalities happen in agriculture, even though child farmworkers account for less than 5 percent of the country’s child workforce.

According to Edgar Franks, the political director for the farmworker’s union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, child farmworkers are often expected to work as quickly as adult workers, and they’re sometimes disciplined or even fired when they don’t. “There’s even pressure [for them] to go faster than experienced pickers,” he says, “because their bodies aren’t broken down yet.”

When FERN showed its findings to a dozen WHD officials, labor experts and organizers, many of them were unsurprised that child labor violations are so prevalent in the nation’s food system. In many ways, experts said, a confluence of economic trends and political decisions has made the food industry an ideal environment for this kind of exploitation.

David Weil, who served as the head of the Wage and Hour Division under the Obama administration, says the recent “explosion” of child labor violations has been a long time coming—and that he would expect these violations to be more prevalent in food-related industries.

According to Weil, the modern food industry has been shaped by several economic trends. Since the 1980s, major U.S. corporations have increasingly outsourced the hiring of employees to subcontractors and staffing agencies, which insulates them from liability. “The companies where child labor is being used, their first comment is, ‘I’m shocked that there are children working here,’” he says. “But their second comment is, ‘They’re not our employees.’”

At the same time, many employers also have had trouble hiring adult U.S. citizens, who can command better benefits and wages in the current strong job market. This apparent labor shortage has coincided with an immigration and humanitarian crisis. In the last two years, more than 250,000 unaccompanied minors have fled unrest in their home countries and sought refuge in the United States. According to multiple Times’ investigations, government agencies quickly lose track of them, and an increasing number of employers are hiring them illegally.

“It’s a little bit of chickens coming home to roost, I hate to say,” says Weil. “It’s the systemic result of all these forces coming together.”

The Department of Labor has launched an interagency task force to crack down on child labor exploitation, vowing to hold all employers accountable, including companies that hire employees through subcontractors. It also urged Congress to increase the fines that guilty employers are forced to pay; the maximum penalty for committing a child labor violation is $15,000, which WHD officials argue is far too low to deter any major corporation.

Weil is encouraged by these initiatives, but without more funding he thinks they’ll be difficult to deliver on. “You cannot adequately [provide] what the U.S. workplace needs in terms of enforcement with the amount of funding that Congress has been giving to these agencies,” he says.

House and Senate members are considering an increase in WHD’s funding and have proposed two bills that would more than triple the fines for child labor violations. In the meantime, state lawmakers across the country are moving in the opposite direction. Last month, Arkansas made it easier for employers to hire 14- and 15-year-olds, one of at least 10 states in the past two years that have introduced or passed legislation weakening child labor laws. “This is less time that they [kids] will be spending on social media, like TikTok and others,” said Republican Ohio State Sen. Jerry Cirino last month, after passing a bill that allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work later on school nights. The legislation is currently in committee.

Some labor experts hope increased unionization in the food industry could help address the problem. In an overwhelming number of child labor cases, “the direct employer is non-union,” says Debbie Berkowitz, who served as chief of staff and senior policy adviser for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under the Obama Administration. “Unions make sure that this doesn’t happen.”

Unionization rates are still low throughout the food industry, but some organizers are optimistic—particularly about the young employees they work with.

“The kids of color that I work with,” says ROC United’s Manuel Villanueva, “they’re already politically educated. They’re like, no, this needs to change.”

Sonner Kehrt contributed reporting to this article.