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About 20 million tons sit in storage, as this season’s harvest begins.
Ukraine provides about 10 percent of the global share of wheat exports, and almost half of the world’s sunflower oil. Alongside Russia, Ukraine makes this region one of the world’s “breadbaskets.” But Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia have squeezed agricultural exports from the entire Black Sea region. These products can be replaced on the global market, but at a cost. Food is harder to afford for poor countries, and for poor people in rich countries. It could deepen a worldwide hunger crisis. United Nations food agencies warn that a record 49 million people, in 46 countries, are at risk of falling into famine conditions this year.
Ukraine exported a lot of its 2021 crop before Russia’s invasion, including a lot of its wheat, but some of that, and products like corn, are still in storage. Exporters are struggling to get what’s left out, because Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, like the key city of Odesa, are under blockade. Russian fleets are blocking the route, and the area is heavily mined.
Now this season’s harvest is beginning, but with limited places to put the new crops. This backlog means that some crops could rot, and as long as they’re sitting there, they remain vulnerable to Russian attack or theft.
Ukraine is still shipping out its grains west, through Europe. But infrastructure challenges and a raging war mean it is only a fraction of what it would otherwise be. Rachid Bouda, the managing director of shipping company MSC Ukraine, typically shipped about 10,000 containers each month from Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, like Odesa and Chornomorsk. They were filled with all kinds of agricultural commodities: wheat, barley, corn, sunflower oil in flexitank containers. Now, it’s more like 1,000, maybe 1,500 containers — though none leave from Ukrainian ports.
One route is through Constanta, a port on the Black Sea, in Romania. But to get containers there, they must first travel overland, either by truck or by train. These routes are time-consuming, logistically complicated, congested, and costly. Most of all, these methods cannot deliver the volumes necessary to move this amount of grain.
“The only way to ship grain from Ukraine is to use the Ukrainian ports of the Black Sea,” Bouda said.
Ukraine ships the majority of its grain through ports on the Black Sea
Before the war, Ukraine exported about 5 million metric tons of grain each month, around 90 percent of it from Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea, like Odesa, where massive silos store grain before it departs. “The whole infrastructure of the country was designed in this way, to export grains through these Black Sea ports,” said Paskal Zhelev, an associate professor of international economic relations at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Russia’s invasion interrupted all that. Russian forces have periodically attacked Odesa, although the port is still within Ukrainian control. (Russia controls ports in Ukraine’s southeast, like Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, though those are less critical for grain shipments.)
But Russian fleets largely control the waters off Ukraine, and their blockade has disconnected Ukraine from these sea routes. Ukraine also closed the port and mined the coastline off Odesa to defend against any Russian attempts to land there. Mines are also afloat in the sea. Ukraine blames Russia for stealing mines and setting them loose to block grain shipments; Russia claims they’re Ukrainian mines that broke free.
The blockade is extreme, but once Russia invaded, trading as usual couldn’t happen. Many commercial firms don’t want to send their ships to dock in a port that might become a target for a missile strike, and the dangers of doing business in a war zone dramatically increases insurance premiums, which increases the cost of transporting any cargo. That is, if firms want to take that risk at all.
A lot of grain, with places to go — but no easy way to get there
With Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea closed off, Ukraine is scrambling to find alternative routes, mostly through other countries’ ports on the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, or Adriatic Sea. But to reach any of those places, shipments of wheat or corn or barley have to travel overland, or from river ports on the Danube.
A lot of Ukrainian grain is bound for Constanta, on the Black Sea in Romania, with about 50 percent of current exports shipped from there, said Nikolay Gorbachov, the head of the Ukrainian Grain Association, an industry group for grain exporters and processors. About 30 percent of Ukrainian grain exports are leaving through Poland near Gdansk, on the Baltic Sea, and the rest are headed everywhere else — or wherever they can go.
Instead of 5 million tons of grain each month, Ukraine is only managing about 1 million to 1.5 million tons, though some experts said that may be over-representing what is physically moved.
Even that figure obscures the cost, delays, and logistical complications. “Finding alternative roads to neighboring countries exposes a longstanding problem of the Black Sea region,” Zhelev said. “This is the substandard infrastructure and the lack of proper interconnectivity between those countries.”
To get grain to Constanta, Bouda said he had two options: truck or train. At the beginning of the war, it was hard to get truck drivers, since Ukrainian men couldn’t leave the country. And Bouda wasn’t the only one trying to send cargo by truck; others had the same exact idea, which created heavy congestion on the roads to Romania, and a back-up at the border crossing, where customs didn’t have the technology or personnel to handle this kind of volume. The wait at the border, Bouda said, could take six or seven days. Once at the port, truckers also had to wait to unload cargo. The costs added up.
The train option presented its own challenges, and is one many Ukrainian exporters face, no matter what they’re shipping, because the railway gauge in Ukraine, as in other parts of the former Soviet Union, is about 10 centimeters wider than the ones typically used across Europe. That means once the Ukrainian train hits the border with, say, Poland, grain has to be reloaded onto different trains, or the freight wagons have to be placed onto a train with a narrower base. This, of course, is very complicated, very costly, and very time-intensive. Bouda said the backlogs make it hard to find available train cars.
“The volume, it cannot be processed just by sending grains by railway,” said Arthur Nitsevych, a partner at Interlegal Law Firm, a Ukrainian firm that works in shipping and maritime transport in the Black Sea region. “There are bottlenecks on the railway on the crossroads between Ukraine and the European countries, and there is a lack of infrastructure, lack of terminals, there is a lack of wagons, locomotives. So everybody is doing their best, but it seems it’s not possible. It’s not possible.”
Fighting in Ukraine is concentrated in the east and the south, but a lot of the nation’s infrastructure is mobilized for war and so already strained for capacity. Badly damaged infrastructure and detours further complicate overland travel. Ukrainian soldiers have blown up bridges to stop Russia’s advance. Train lines and stations are how Ukraine resupplies its weapons, and Russia has targeted those delivery points.
Ukraine’s river ports on the Danube remain open, but Gennadiy Ivanov, general manager of BPG Shipping, said that because these ports did almost zero grain exports before the war, they cannot handle the load. About 100 ships, he said, had built up to the entrance to the Sulina Canal, with a wait time of about 20 to 25 days to make berth.
When grain arrives at another European seaport, those places are not necessarily equipped to deal with the influx of cargo. “Constanta was not ready to handle Ukrainians’ volumes, and immediately it became congested,” Bouda said.
This is true for other ports in the region, like Varna, in Bulgaria, which has promised to help ship Ukrainian grain, but Zhelev said doesn’t really have the infrastructure to do so. Lithuania has also proposed sending out Ukrainian grain through its Baltic Sea ports, which sounds great on paper — a nice, deep harbor for big ships, silos to store grain, and a railroad with the same gauge width. There’s just one hiccup: to get there, Ukrainian wheat would transit through Belarus, a client state of Russia’s, which probably would not be on board with this idea. It’s more likely that the wheat would have to go through Poland first, requiring two train changes.
“Physically, you just cannot really get this grain out of the country by railway, by trucks, and by boats,” said Oleg Nivievskyi, the vice president for economics education at the Kyiv School of Economics, who specializes in agricultural economics. “It’s simply not possible.”
The only viable way to get Ukrainian grain out is by ending the Black Sea blockade. But how?
Ukraine’s peak grain export happens between July and December, experts said, once the harvest season is on — people want the freshest, best wheat, and then other crops that get harvested after that. The remaining grain is distributed through the next year, until the season picks up again in July.
That’s why the grain situation in Ukraine is becoming so urgent. Ukraine’s wheat is planted in winter, and was largely already in the ground when the war started. Other crops planted in the spring, like corn and sunflower, are down, but not extraordinarily so. “Farmers plant, that’s what they do,” said Mike Lee, director of Green Square Agro Consulting, which forecasts crop yields for the Black Sea region. “Even in the extreme situation of a war, they still went out and planted.” Ukrainian officials estimated earlier this year that grain harvest yields will be down about 20 percent.
Ukrainian farmers will still harvest, and they need a place to store it. But because last year’s grain is stuck, silos are in short supply. The EU may bring in some portable silos, and US President Joe Biden has suggested building silos along the Polish border to be more easily able to move grain overland. Some crops like wheat are a little easier to store, but still challenging as other crops start coming in later in the year. Storage is costly for farmers, especially if it’s not clear they can even sell their grain. “You have to spend money to keep the grain in good condition. If this is bad, that also means that the quality of grain is going to be lower, and the price is going to be lower,” Nivievskyi said.
All of these solutions — EU countries easing cross-border checks for overland wheat shipments, new silos — are Band-Aids on a gaping wound. There is only one solution, Gorbachov said, and it is “open the ports.”
Turkey is brokering talks with Russia on the ports, including a United Nations proposal that would create a kind of secure corridor for grain transport, potentially with Turkish naval escorts. Others have proposed using NATO or United Kingdom or United States fleets — something like the US did in the 1980s in the Persian Gulf. That plan would potentially put NATO ships uncomfortably close to Russian ones, and the United States has, for now, ruled it out.
Russia has also suggested it could ease the blockade, in exchange for relief from Western sanctions, a quid pro quo that plays to Russia’s strategy of trying to blame the United States and the West, not its unprovoked war, for the coming food crisis.
Even if some deal is reached, the region’s waters would still need to be de-mined, which experts said is technically possible, but will take time, perhaps months. Ukraine is worried that this would leave Odesa vulnerable to attack, especially since Russia has a track record of violating these deals. But as experts said, there has to be some sort of diplomatic breakthrough, because the Black Sea is the only viable way to get the grain out. “Otherwise,” Zhelev said, “the whole world suffers.”
Uvalde police stand outside of Robb Elementary School. (photo: Pete Luna/Uvalde Leader-News/Reuters)
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"Since early 2017, one of every three people held in a Border Patrol facility was a minor, a far bigger share than has been reported before now." (photo: Kristen Luce/Marshall Project/POLITICO)
Thousands of kids have been routinely detained in cold, overcrowded cells built for adults, while authorities have resisted improving conditions.
Instead, when they reached the border in March, they were detained — dirty with mud from the Rio Grande and shivering with cold — in frigid cinder block cells. They spent sleepless nights on cement floors, packed in with dozens of other children under the glare of white lights, with agents in green uniforms shouting orders.
The siblings were booked by officers who asked questions they didn’t understand and were told to sign documents in English they couldn’t read. Even after their release three days later, they feared the U.S. would never be the haven they had longed for.
Since early 2017, one of every three people held in a Border Patrol facility was a minor, a far bigger share than has been reported before now, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project of previously unpublished official records. Out of almost 2 million people detained by the Border Patrol from February 2017 through June 2021, more than 650,000 were under 18, the analysis showed. More than 220,000 of those children, about one-third, were held for longer than 72 hours, the period established by federal court rulings and an anti-trafficking statute as a limit for border detention of children.
For most young migrants crossing without documents, the first stop in the U.S. is one of some 70 Border Patrol stations along the boundary line. The records reveal that detaining children and teenagers has become a major part of the Border Patrol’s everyday work. The records also show that conditions for minors have not significantly improved under President Joe Biden. While the numbers of kids in Border Patrol custody peaked in 2019 under former President Donald Trump, they rose again when Biden took office and have remained high.
Those numbers could surge to new highs when the Biden administration eventually lifts Title 42, a public health order that border authorities have used for more than two years to swiftly expel most unauthorized border crossers, including many children.
But the Border Patrol has resisted making changes to its facilities and practices to adapt to children, even while officials acknowledge that the conditions young people routinely face are often unsafe.
“A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the nation’s highest immigration official, has repeatedly said. However, even now, as authorities are scrambling to beef up enforcement and expand detention capacity in preparation for a post-Title 42 influx, the Border Patrol’s basic approach to kids remains the same: Just move them out of custody as fast as possible.
Without broader changes, many thousands of kids seeking protection will remain at risk for harsh, demeaning and sometimes dangerous treatment as their first experience of the United States.
1 in 3 people detained is a minor
Of the total people detained by the Border Patrol between February 2017 and June 2021, 1 in 3 was under 18 years old. More than 650,000 children and teenagers have been held during that time, including at least 220,000 who spent more than 72 hours in custody. After dropping sharply at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic due in part to Title 42, these detentions have risen again under Biden.
The Marshall Project analysis is based on data on detentions of all migrants under 18 years old — including minors who came without a parent, called unaccompanied children, and those who crossed the border with their families. The data was obtained by freedom of information requests from Customs and Border Protection, the larger agency that oversees the Border Patrol, and it ranges from February 2017, through the Trump administration, to June 2021, including the first five months under President Biden. In recent years, public reports of child detentions by the Border Patrol included only unaccompanied minors, omitting tens of thousands of children in families.
The Marshall Project compared the child detention data to counts of overall detentions posted publicly by CBP. The agency declined to comment on the record on the findings.
The Title 42 emergency order, first activated by Trump in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, allows agents to expel unauthorized border crossers immediately, with no legal proceeding or chance to request asylum. When Biden took office, he instructed agents to exempt unaccompanied minors from the order, but many children in families continue to be expelled. On May 20, a federal district judge in Louisiana imposed a nationwide halt to Biden’s plans to completely lift Title 42. But the administration is appealing, and border officials say they are getting ready for the order to be lifted sooner or later.
After the Title 42 expulsions end, officials say they are bracing for a big upsurge of migrants entering the country, with estimates as high as 18,000 a day, including many children. With a return to regular law, many of those migrants will be detained for processing, potentially overwhelming already packed Border Patrol facilities, and intensifying crowding and prolonging processing times for minors in custody.
Yet a 20-page border security blueprint Mayorkas released in late April, outlining extensive preparations for lifting Title 42, includes no details of any plan to improve the Border Patrol’s handling of children.
Officials are well aware that most Border Patrol stations were built like police lockups, with crude cells designed for a time decades ago when the majority of migrants apprehended for crossing without authorization were adult men, who were likely to be held briefly and rapidly deported.
“My goal and my priority is to limit the time that a child has to stay in our facility,” Raul L. Ortiz, the chief of the Border Patrol, said in an interview.
But as the numbers of migrants have swelled, logjams occur, and young migrants can be trapped in Border Patrol stations for many days. Even a day or two in jail, surrounded by armed officers and cut off from the outside, can be searing for a child. The dismal conditions in many stations have led to constant reports of neglect and abuse. Little has been done to improve conditions for children in Border Patrol facilities, or to prevent them from ending up there at all, with official efforts focused primarily instead on reducing the time children spend detained.
“It’s a false choice,” said Marion Donovan-Kaloust, directing attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, which represents thousands of unaccompanied minors. “Because we could also have facilities that are not so dangerous for children and still want to get them out of there quickly.”
While migrant children have been held at many different Border Patrol facilities, their accounts of the conditions are strikingly consistent.
Drawing on interviews with a total of 25,602 minors, four legal services organizations presented four separate complaints to the civil rights oversight office of the Department of Homeland Security on April 6. Children reported being yelled at, cursed, kicked and shoved by Border Patrol agents. Teenagers said they were badgered by officers who contended they were lying about their age to conceal that they were adults.
Many young people said the food was stale and made them sick. Kids with fevers, coughs and stomachaches could not get basic medical care, even during the height of the pandemic. Children were held for days in filthy, sodden clothes after fording the Rio Grande. Toilets and showers lacked privacy, so children were mortified to use them.
The youths’ most universal memory was of bone-chilling cold in the air-conditioned stations, which are known across the border as hieleras, meaning iceboxes in Spanish.
The Marshall Project separately analyzed data from two of the legal services organizations. Interviews with more than 1,300 children counseled by the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, from March through July 2021, showed that about one in five experienced some form of this mistreatment while in Border Patrol custody. Almost a third of the children were held longer than 72 hours. More than 6,000 minors were interviewed by the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, from January to mid-August, 2021. At least 780, or about one in eight, said they were held more than 72 hours, often for longer than a week, and more than 200 said they experienced some other form of mistreatment, according to the Marshall Project analysis and the interviews.
In Del Rio in March, one of the Zaragoza children, Alejandra, 11, recalled to The Marshall Project that the Border Patrol station provided only Mylar sheets for cover. Alejandra said she had lost her only jacket in the river. “The whole time in that jail I was very, very, very cold,” she said.
She told the story with her father and two siblings outside a gas station where the family, dazed and disoriented, had stopped to regroup, hours after the Border Patrol had released them, allowing them to remain in the country to pursue an asylum claim.
Her father, Alberto Zaragoza, 44, said he had been a federal policeman in Venezuela. But he ran afoul of the authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who was transforming the police into a political militia controlled by the military. Zaragoza said he was forced out of the police and driven from his home by threats. His wife left him. But his children wanted to come with him when he decided he had to flee.
After the family made it across the icy, churning Rio Grande, Border Patrol agents closed Alejandra and her sister in a teeming cell with a dirty sink and a toilet with no door, “in the plain light,” she said, for other migrants to see. The lights in the cell were never turned off.
“We never knew what time it was, because we couldn’t see the night or the day,” Alejandra said.
Her father was held nearby, but her brother, who is 19, was separated from the family, leaving the sisters sobbing in panic that he would be deported back to Venezuela. The family reunited only by luck after they were released, when they all found their way to the same nonprofit respite center in Del Rio.
Her time in detention, Alejandra said, left her afraid that police in the U.S. were no different from the police her father was escaping.
Another Venezuelan family, Diana Obispo Ortega and her three daughters, said they were held for five days at a different facility in the Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, in a tent for families. Hours after their release in late March, they were crouched in a shaded corner outside the Del Rio airport, hoping somehow to collect enough money to travel to relatives in Florida.
“I don’t know why they treated us like they hated us,” said Arrinys Gomez Obispo, one of the daughters, who is 14.
Two days in, Arrinys developed a sore throat, a dry cough and a headache. Her fever shot up. An attendant told her no medication was available. “Don’t worry, you won’t die of that,” she said the woman told her. At that time, none of the four family members was tested for Covid-19, and they didn’t hear of anyone in the Border Patrol facility who had been.
In five days, they said, they were not able to bathe or brush their teeth. “I wasn’t expecting all that much,” Arrinys said. “Just some water, a toothbrush, maybe a bed.” Instead, she said, “I cried every day I was in there.”
Among Border Patrol officers, frustration has simmered over the responsibilities they have for dealing with children, when the agency has given them little training or support to meet the demands for child-oriented care.
In Del Rio, agents regularly risk their own safety along the turbulent stretch of the Rio Grande to save migrant children from drowning. In March, agents pulled two children, ages two and three, from the water as their Venezuelan parents lost their footing in the rushing water.
Border Patrol officials say they would prefer for agents, rather than coping with children, to be in the field defending against drug traffickers, human smugglers and terrorists. Their emphasis has been on speeding the release of minors.
“We consider the children a vulnerable population,” Chief Ortiz said. “So this is a fast-moving process. When you try to keep children less than 24 hours and a portion of that time is for processing, they won’t have the comfort of somebody in your custody for long periods of time.”
In every month so far this year, stations across the border have been full beyond their 5,000-person total daily capacity, with more than 16,000 migrants in custody on some days, Chief Ortiz said, crowding the spaces for children. “It’s not going to be as comfortable as they would like,” he said.
Channels for children from the Americas to migrate legally to the U.S. are very limited and choked with backlogs. Few official avenues have been open, even as new levels of danger and desperation have spurred child migration across the hemisphere.
Gangs that live by extortion and bloody turf feuds have dug in across the northern triangle countries of Central America, threatening teenagers with forced recruitment and sexual violence. Hurricanes and droughts devastated food supplies. The pandemic crippled economies in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which are also staggering under misgovernment and political crises.
Because of the insecurity, workers drawn by the magnet of a strong U.S. labor market no longer leave their children behind at home, as they did for generations, so family migration has soared. Many young people who come unaccompanied are pulled by a longing to be reunited with a parent already living in the U.S.
Early in his term, Biden exempted unaccompanied minors from the Title 42 order, rejecting Trump’s summary expulsions of those children. But Border Patrol stations soon were swamped. By law, most unaccompanied minors must be transferred within 72 hours from the Border Patrol to the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs a nationwide network of shelters. In the disarray early last year, that limit was frequently violated.
The administration raced to establish emergency processing centers to take kids from the stations, and to expand the health department shelter system. But in spite of all the resources and high-level attention expended on that crisis, little was done at the time to upgrade Border Patrol facilities to accommodate children. The opportunity was lost.
By contrast, children who come with their families have continued, under Biden, to be subject to Title 42 expulsion. But increasingly the administration has allowed families with children, like the Zaragozas, to enter and apply for asylum, under regular enforcement laws. In particular, many families from Cuba and Venezuela have been released from detention and allowed to stay in the U.S. with pending immigration proceedings. Governments in those countries do not generally accept deportations from the U.S., and Mexico has often refused to accept expulsions of migrants from those countries.
While the acute crisis for children has ebbed since last fall, according to CBP figures, overall numbers of children detained by the Border Patrol have stayed consistently high.
It was during that chaos in the spring of 2021 when M.J., an unaccompanied 14-year-old girl from Guatemala, landed in a Border Patrol facility in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Instead of the maximum of 72 hours, as required, she was held for 18 days, according to case records reviewed by lawyers with the Immigrant Defenders, who are representing her in her immigration case.
M.J. had been injured in the last days of her journey across Mexico. She leapt from a moving freight train, landing on her shoulder in a bank of rocks, M.J. said in an interview in California in March. (Because she is a minor in legal proceedings, she asked that her name and exact location not be published.)
With her arm swollen and blue, M.J. turned herself in to the Border Patrol soon after crossing the Rio Grande. Agents kept her in handcuffs for 24 hours, she said, aggravating the ache.
She was moved to a vast tent holding families and minors, most likely, based on court documents, in Donna, Texas. Crammed with dozens of girls into a cell defined by clear plastic walls, M.J. slept on a narrow metal bench for nearly three weeks. To leave the cell to use the bathroom, she had to ask each girl for permission to step over. She never had a change of clothes, she said.
She fashioned a sling from a borrowed cloth to relieve the throb in her shoulder. An attendant, citing security rules, took it away, M.J. said. There were nurses on duty, but they declined to give her medication for the pain.
“No one told you to come to the United States,” she said one attendant told her.
The only food was egg burritos and beans, often half-frozen. On the fourth day, M.J. said, she started to vomit from stomach cramps and shoulder pain. The medical staff, relenting, sent her to a local clinic, where examinations revealed a fractured shoulder and severe dehydration.
A physician gave her a sling and prescribed a painkiller. After she was returned to the detention facility later that day, M.J. said, a guard took away the new sling. She never received the medication.
M.J. said she understood that she had entered the U.S. without papers and could be deported. But she recalls the sting of being treated like the gangsters she had fled Guatemala to escape. “Like a prisoner, someone who had committed a terrible crime,” she said.
Data analyzed by The Marshall Project shows little change for kids between the Trump administration and the initial months of the Biden administration. Half of the people detained by the Border Patrol in Biden’s first five months were minors, the data shows, and 30 percent of those kids spent more than 72 hours in custody. Under Trump, 35 percent of them had stayed longer than 72 hours.
By September of last year, although the unaccompanied minors crisis had abated as the expanded health department shelter system took them in more efficiently, conditions for children passing through Border Patrol facilities remained poor.
But pressures for change have been intensifying. During the Trump administration, CBP was jolted by several deaths of children in its custody. Under Biden, demands for the Border Patrol to improve conditions are coming from Congress and advocates, and from agents within the force, who say they have been maligned for their handling of children, a job they were never prepared to do.
Recently, CBP has started to respond. The Border Patrol has hired cleaning custodians, medical providers and childcare assistants, Chief Ortiz said. CBP opened or expanded at least five temporary tent facilities for families and unaccompanied minors, designed with laundry rooms and play spaces, according to CBP officials. With a concerted effort to coordinate between agencies, the Border Patrol has reduced times that unaccompanied minors spend in those tents, improving compliance with the 72-hour limit, Ortiz said. About 285 civilians have been hired to assist uniformed agents with booking and transfer of minors, congressional records show, and Congress has authorized funds for 1,200 more.
“That allows me to get Border Patrol agents back into the patrol duties,” Ortiz said. But as long as the numbers of children remain high, he said, “our priority certainly is their welfare and care.”
But more than 180,000 minors were likely detained by the Border Patrol from October 2021 through this past April, based on estimates by The Marshall Project, still roughly one-third of detentions. With the prospect of a sharp increase in migrants and Border Patrol detentions looming after Title 42 expulsions end, lawmakers say these measures will not be enough and are calling for more expansive reforms. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a Democrat from California who chairs a key House Appropriations subcommittee, secured $14.7 million this year for CBP to hire, for the first time, licensed child welfare workers trained in trauma care. She also secured funding for new inspectors to make unannounced visits to Border Patrol stations.
Drawing on $1.4 billion Congress authorized to supplement border enforcement, CBP is considering plans for two new family centers with no hard-cell detention at all. They would combine government agencies and non-profit groups in one location, to launch children and families on their immigration cases and organize their safe release.
But many legal advocates are clamoring for a more fundamental shift: posting child welfare workers at the front lines, to take over the interviewing and care of young people before they ever reach a Border Patrol cell.
“This is an agency that should have nothing to do with children,” said Laura Belous, an advocacy attorney at the Florence Project.
In Eagle Pass, Texas, one day in late March, an eight-year-old boy huddled with his mother in a corner of a chaotic respite shelter, not long after being released from a big Border Patrol tent. The family was Cuban, and they had joined a growing exodus from the island to escape a dead-end communist regime and critical shortages, even of food.
The boy, Andrew Cordero Bullain, said they were hoping to go to live with his grandfather in Miami. He had been promised a new Atari video game, which had made the grueling two-month journey seem worth it. He had been brave, he said, even when the Rio Grande waters rose to his forehead and, for a moment, he couldn’t breathe.
But, lowering his voice to a whisper, the boy said he was still thinking about his time in detention.
“I’m telling you this,” Andrew said. “I was scared in there. I didn’t like being in that jail.”
People take pictures next to a mural during a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 2021. Last year, the U.S. designated Juneteenth a federal holiday with President Joe Biden urging Americans 'to learn from our history.' (photo: Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: The New Juneteenth Federal Holiday Traces Its Roots to Galveston, Texas
Myth #1: President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, and it's outrageous that it took two and a half years for the news to finally reach enslaved people in Texas.
Fact: Many slaves knew about Lincoln's executive order emancipating them. The news was widely covered in Texas newspapers—with an anti-abolitionist spin—and Black people would have overheard white people discussing it in private and in public. Moreover, "There was an incredibly sophisticated communication network among slaves in Texas," says Edward T. Cotham, Jr., Texas Civil War historian and author of Juneteenth, The Story Behind The Celebration. "News like that spread like wildfire. We know some slaves knew about the Emancipation Proclamation even before slaveowners. It didn't mean anything because there was no army to enforce it."
June Collins Pulliam is a fifth-generation Galvestonian whose enslaved great-great-grandparents, Horace and Emily Scull, were freed by the Juneteenth Order. "It wasn't that all these poor people didn't get the message," she says, "It was that there was no one enforcing it, no one making it happen!"
Myth #2: Major Gen. Gordon Granger penned General Orders No. 3, the Juneteenth Order, and is credited with freeing Texas slaves.
Fact: The order—which includes the powerful language "all slaves are free" and "absolute equality"—was actually written by Granger's staff officer, Maj. Frederick Emery, who hailed from an abolitionist family in Free Kansas. "As a crusader against slavery in Kansas, Emery was well versed on the subject of emancipation," writes Cotham in his Juneteenth book.
Sam Collins III, the unofficial ambassador of Juneteenth tourism in Galveston, says, "Granger is just one of the characters in the story. He's not any great hero. Matter of fact, he was no friend of the enslaved people. There are reports of Granger sending runaway slaves back to slave states."
Myth #3: Gen. Gordon Granger read the Juneteenth Order from a balcony to the people of Galveston, announcing that "all slaves are free."
Fact: According to Cotham, Gen. Granger never read the order publicly, nor did any member of his staff. It would have been posted around town, particularly at places where Black people gathered, such as "the Negro Church on Broadway," as Reedy Chapel-AME Church was then called. Most enslaved people in Texas learned of General Orders No. 3 when the slavemaster called them together and read them the news.
Myth #4: The Juneteenth Order was basically a Texas version of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Fact: General Orders No. 3 stated unequivocally "all slaves are free," but it also contained patronizing language intended to appease planters who didn't want to lose their workforce. Forty-one words of the brief 93-word order urged enslaved people to stay put and keep working.
"The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."
Sam Collins: "The last two sentences advised the freedmen to remain at their present homes and work for wages. So you're free, but don't go anywhere."
Ed Cotham: "Many years later, the formerly enslaved (interviewed for the 1930s WPA Slave Narratives) remembered when the Freedom Paper was read to them. The slaveholder wanted to keep them working, but they didn't hear it that way. Once they heard "all slaves are free" they said to hell with you. That's what made the Juneteenth Order so memorable and made it succeed."
Diana Hernandez, 24, left, gets a follow-up vaccination at a clinic in Playa, the northernmost municipality in Havana, alongside her daughter, Manuelita Sarracino, 15 months, and husband, Juan P. Sarracino, 25, look on. (photo: Sarah L. Voisin/WP)
His specialty was vaccines. In the 1990s, he helped create an inexpensive vaccine targeting the bacteria known as haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, which had been killing children under 5. It was a global hit. So when covid-19 came along, Vérez knew what he had to do.
“We didn’t have much experience with viral illnesses,” he said. ”But obviously, facing an emergency situation like we had, a pandemic — well, we had to try something.”
Today, as the United States finally rolls out coronavirus vaccines for small children, Vérez is celebrating an unlikely achievement: Most of Cuba’s youngsters got their shots months ago. His Soberana 02, used in children as young as 2, is one of a pair of homemade vaccines credited with taming covid-19 on the communist island.
The Cuban vaccines have not yet been approved by the World Health Organization, although they’ve gotten the green light from regulators in Mexico, Iran and Vietnam. Scientists say their development might become a case study of how poorer countries can invent their own shots.
“They were not privy to the gazillion dollars some of these companies received,” said Maria Elena Bottazzi, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, referring to multinationals like Pfizer and Moderna. “Sometimes, with very little, you can get very far.”
A coronavirus vaccine was a moonshot, even for the world’s most sophisticated laboratories. For Cuba, the obstacles were titanic. It faced U.S. sanctions, a snarled global supply chain and a domestic economy in free fall. Cuba had such a shortage of syringes it had to beg for international donations. A New York-based charity, Global Health Partners, sent 6 million.
“Sometimes vaccines take 14 or 15 years to develop,” said Vérez, head of the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Havana.
How did Cuba reach the finish line so fast?
Its vaccine-makers credit the extraordinary teamwork of scientists around the globe. When the pandemic began, they quickly shared discoveries on the internet, such as the genetic sequencing of the new virus, known as SARS CoV-2.
But Cuba wasn’t starting from scratch. In the 1980s, then-leader Fidel Castro poured more than $1 billion into an ambitious new biotech industry. He sent students abroad for PhDs and built a “Scientific Pole” in Havana consisting of around 50 research institutions and enterprises.
“When covid came, they had three decades of experience” inventing and manufacturing vaccines, said Amilcar Pérez Riverol, a Cuban scientist who now works at the Institute for Medical Genetics at the University of Oldenburg in Germany.
Vérez’s scientific achievements won him global acclaim — but he couldn’t accept an award in 2005 from the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif. The chemist was denied a U.S. visa, he said, on national-security grounds. At the time, the U.S. government worried Cuba might be developing a bioweapons program. Asked to comment on the case, the State Department declined, saying visa records were confidential.
René Roy, a prominent Canadian chemist and Vérez’s partner in developing the synthetic Hib vaccine, said they picked on the wrong guy. “He is a model for many people,” he said. “He is dedicated to human health in general, and in particular to kids.”
Years of work on children’s vaccines turned out to be an advantage for the Cuban scientists. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines used a new technology called mRNA, which instructs cells to make the spike protein that, in turn, triggers an army of antibodies to stand guard against the arrival of the coronavirus. The Cubans relied on a more traditional approach. They created subunit vaccine conjugates, which include harmless parts of a virus that stimulate the immune system to make antibodies.
That technique had been used “in hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines for children in the world,” said Vérez. He strongly believed it was effective — and safe.
Around 400 people worked on developing, testing and producing the Cuban vaccines. “For two years, there was no such thing as Saturday or Sunday,” said Gerardo Guillén, another leading scientist, whose team created Abdala, the shot used on most Cuban adults.
The challenges weren’t just the complexities of a new virus. Much of the state-of-the-art equipment and inputs for pharmaceuticals come from the United States or Europe. Cuba tried to skirt U.S. sanctions by making purchases through third countries. “We always have to be changing intermediaries, because when they [U.S. authorities] identify them, they cancel them,” said Guillén, director of biomedical research at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana. The Cuban scientists resorted to traveling abroad to borrow foreign colleagues’ equipment.
Asked for response, the State Department said the embargo “includes important exemptions and authorizations” for exports such as “agricultural commodities, medicine, medical devices, and certain other items.” Yet some companies shy away from selling to Cuba, worried they could fall afoul of American regulators. The United Nations’ human rights office warned in 2020 that the U.S. embargo was hurting Cuba’s pandemic response.
Cuba managed to control the pandemic early on, closing borders and vigorously screening for cases. But once the island partially reopened to tourism in November 2020, the highly infectious delta variant swept in.
With cases soaring, Cuba started vaccinating adults in May 2021, even before its own regulators had approved the shots. The country’s vaccine success stood in sharp contrast to the woeful state of its public health system, which had long been touted as a major achievement of the 1959 Revolution. Between the pandemic, U.S. sanctions and the inefficiencies of state planning, Cuba’s economy withered. A lack of medication was one factor spurring last July’s nationwide protests.
Vérez was confident his Soberana 02 would succeed — so much so, that he tested it on himself in early clinical trials. (Cuba has now authorized it for both adults and kids). Last September, Cuba launched the world’s first mass children’s coronavirus vaccine campaign, reaching 1.7 million youngsters, from age 2 to 18. “We had very few adverse effects,” he said of the three-shot regimen. Scientists are now working on a vaccine for babies.
According to a Reuters tally, 94 percent of Cuba’s 11 million people have received at least one dose of the domestically made vaccines. With cases plunging, Cuba jettisoned its strict mask mandate last month, after nearly three weeks without a covid-19 death.
The Cuban vaccines have been sent to Vietnam, Venezuela, Syria and Nicaragua. Soberana 02 is also being manufactured in Iran. But their international adoption has been slowed by the global approval process. Abdala is being studied by the WHO, and the application for Soberana 02 will be submitted after it’s reviewed by a private research organization to identify any gaps, said Vérez.
Results from the first two sets of clinical trials for the Cuban vaccines have been published by respected scientific journals. Peer review is still pending for the third phase.
The vaccines could offer advantages for poorer countries that lack the ultracold freezer network that some shots require. “The storage and transportation is much easier,” said Pérez Riverol.
In some ways, the vaccines represent the culmination of Castro’s vision of a thriving Cuban biotech program. Yet Pérez Riverol’s experience shows how endangered that dream is. He recalls being among about 30 students in Cuba who received bachelor’s degrees in 2007 in microbiology and virology. More than 90 percent of them have since emigrated, he said, part of an accelerating brain drain.
While it’s not unusual for bright young scientists from small countries to study or work abroad, this is different, said Pérez Riverol.
“It’s a migration of no-return.”
Area in Amazon Forest deforested for cattle and remaining forest. (photo: Leo F. Freitas/Getty Images)
These small actions can help better protect our tropical rainforests.
Those were the startling findings from the first-of-its-kind State of the Tropical Rainforest report published in 2020.1 Aside from all of the species and animals being harmed by deforestation, tropical rainforests are an extremely important support system for our entire planet for many reasons, including:
- They absorb carbon dioxide and release the oxygen we depend on for survival.
- They maintain the world’s water cycle by adding water to the atmosphere to help create clouds.
- They’re a source of food and medicine for humans — more than 25% of modern medicines originate from tropical rainforests.
- They’re home to more than 30 million species of plants and animals.2
We’re losing tropical rainforests at a rapid rate. But to know how to save the rainforest, we first need to know what’s putting it at harm.
Biggest Threats to the Rainforest
Rainforests are declining mostly due to deforestation and climate change. The reason for deforestation is mostly for economic gain, including agricultural interests, mining operations, land development and materials. Let’s review some of the biggest threats:
Demand for Beef, Soy and Palm Oil
The expansion of agriculture for beef, soy and palm oil is the biggest driver of deforestation, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
The global greed for beef has led to slash-and-burn techniques to clear out land for cattle not only in rainforests, but in grasslands and savannas as well. WWF says beef and soy are driving more than two-thirds of the recorded habitat loss in South America’s rainforests, including the Amazon and Cerrado regions.3
Demand for Wood and Building Materials
Much of the rainforest is cleared for logging interests, and unfortunately, a lot of it is done illegally. Timber from rainforest trees is used in construction, flooring, furniture and other in-demand items.
Other Threats to the Rainforest:
While cattle raising, soy and palm oil production, and logging are the biggest threats, they’re far from the only threats. Other big drivers of deforestation include:
- Power plants cutting and burning trees for energy
- Paper products being made from rainforest trees
- Subsistence farmers clearing land to make room for crops and cattle grazing
- Mining operations
- Governments and industries cutting forests for service and transit roads
- Hydroelectric projects that cause flooding4
8 Ways You Can Help Save the Rainforest
We could keep diving into the doom-and-gloom statistics about our rainforests, but that wouldn’t be productive. Instead, we’d rather focus on the solutions. What can we do to save the rainforests and fight deforestation?
1. Eat Less Beef
If beef production is the No. 1 product of deforestation, eating less beef is a great place to start.5 According to the Rainforest Foundation, consuming less beef is one of the biggest ways that you can help stop deforestation. Plus, it also helps with energy efficiency, water pollution and methane reduction.6
If you do choose to eat beef, do so ethically by buying locally raised, grass-fed beef. (Assuming you don’t live near the rainforest.)
2. Check the Ingredient Label
Second to beef, soybeans and palm oil are the main drivers of deforestation in the Amazon. Check food and product labels, and if you see these ingredients, refrain from purchasing.
Businesses are starting to feel the impact of eco-conscious buying, and choosing products that aren’t contributing to deforestation will force these companies to change their ways.
3. Buy Responsibly Sourced Materials and Foods
Mahogany, rosewood and ebony are all threatened woods that are driving rainforest destruction, and they’re often used in furniture, flooring and even instruments. Also, stick to paper products that are made from recycled materials and ask your jeweler if it uses recycled gold or other metals in pieces.
Look for farm and forest products stamped with the green frog — certified by the Rainforest Alliance. Or anything that has the FAIRTRADE Mark, which is a globally recognized ethical label. When you buy fair trade items, like bananas or coffee, you support farmers and individuals who work hard to produce these products fairly and ethically.
Below is a list of common foods and spices that are found in the rainforest. When buying these products, be extra vigilant about the company you’re buying from and look for the seals mentioned above:
- AçaÃ
- Bananas
- Black pepper
- Blueberries
- Cinnamon
- Chocolate
- Coffee
A full list of Rainforest Alliance-certified products can be found here. Also, check out the Forest 500 list — it’s a great resource that ranks companies that are driving tropical deforestation so you know which companies to avoid.
4. Support Indigenous Communities
Buying artisanal products made by indigenous people is a more unique way to support rainforest preservation.
Research shows that indigenous people can achieve conservation results at least equal to that of the government.7 In fact, one study from the Amazon found that annual deforestation rates inside tenured indigenous forest lands were two to three times lower than outside of them.8
5. Encourage Sustainable Agriculture
Aside from buying products from sustainable farmers, you can advocate for incentives for sustainable agriculture and restrictions on uncertified beef imports.
Unfortunately, a lot of deforestation happens at the hands of poor farmers who are clearing land to provide for their families. A better way to address their needs is to advocate for permaculture — a cultivation technique that helps diversify farmers’ crops and allows them to rely on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem. Permaculture has also been shown to improve the soil in the rainforest.9
6. Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
Climate change is a huge threat to the rainforest and the species that inhabit it. While big corporations are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, we all add to it, which means we can help reduce it, too. There are simple lifestyle changes you can make to reduce your carbon footprint, like driving less, consuming less energy and recycling.
Check out our article for five ways to reduce your carbon footprint.
7. Contact Your Representatives
For big changes to happen, the government needs to take action. But you can still help by letting your elected officials know that rainforest preservation is important.
Call them. Email them. Attend public meetings. Ask them to support environmental bills and low-carbon agendas. Tell them that protecting rainforests and supporting indigenous communities are critical solutions to climate change. Advocate for policies that force or incentivize businesses to use responsibly sourced materials and fair trade practices.
You can find your member in the U.S. House of Representatives here.
8. Support Organizations Dedicated to Rainforest Preservation
While we can all do our part, trying to help the rainforest is a full-time job for many people. If you’re not able to dedicate your work weeks to the cause, consider donating your money to organizations that do just that. The following organizations have been vetted by EcoWatch for legitimacy:
- Rainforest Alliance: Works to bring farmers, forest communities, companies and consumers together to change the way the world produces, sources and consumes products from the rainforest.
- Rainforest Foundation: Equips indigenous peoples with tools, training and resources proven to reduce deforestation.
- Rainforest Trust: Works to safeguard critical habitats in the world’s most biodiverse areas.
- Cool Earth: Protects the world’s rainforests by giving control back to the people who live in them.
- Survival International: Amplifies the voices of indigenous leaders who are pivotal in Amazon Rainforest conservation efforts.
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