It's Friday, October 24, 2025 and in this morning's issue we're covering: In Durham, tenants get new tool to fight landlords who won’t fix dangerous rentals, Federal regulators give NC hospital deadline for plan to fix problems, Arizona sues over House Speaker’s refusal to seat Adelita Grijalva, Mass. faces grim reality of fewer international students, Study: Mobile Health Clinics Offer Alternative Access to Care, New Orleans officials still unable to say why voter education on redistricting was lacking, Broadband’s broken promise: How federal failures and funding fights keep Native and Black farmers offline.

Media outlets and others featured: NC Newsline, Carolina Public Press, Cronkite News, CommonWealth Beacon, The Daily Yonder, Verite News, Investigate Midwest.

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In Durham, tenants get new tool to fight landlords who won’t fix dangerous rentals

by Greg Childress, NC Newsline
October 21, 2025

Cheers erupted Monday after the Durham City Council unanimously approved an amendment to the city’s housing code that prohibits landlord from collecting rent if a housing unit is found to be “imminently dangerous” to tenants’ health and safety.

Under the new ordinance, which is modeled after one in Charlotte, landlords can be charged with a misdemeanor if they collect rent on housing that has immediately dangerous conditions such as rotted or damaged structural supports, unsafe wiring, unsafe roofs, no potable water supply or no operating heating equipment in cold months, among other violations.

The city’s housing code gives landlords up to 72 hours to fix violations. If they do not, landlords can be found in violation of the new ordinance.

“The police aren’t gonna go and arrest them [landlords], but if that ends up going to court, the tenant has a very good chance of winning and being able to get not only a portion of their rent back, but all their rent back if the tenant takes the landlord to court,” C.R. Clark, an organizer with the Triangle Tenant Union, said in an interview.

Meanwhile, if the landlord takes the tenant to court and tries to evict them, the ordinance can serve as a defense for the tenant: the landlord can’t evict the tenant for not paying rent because the landlord can’t legally collect rent when an apartment is falling apart or if it is dangerous, Clark said.

The Triangle Apartment Association pushed backed against the amendment.

“While we understand there may exist some circumstances in which residents experiences less than habitable conditions, it is our belief that those circumstances do not involve the greater majority of housing providers,” the association said in a letter to the council.

The association argued that the language in the amendment could confuse residents and falsely lead them to believe they don’t have to pay rent if they believe an apartment is in violation of the ordinance.

“If anything, it [the ordinance] will have a tendency to drive more summary ejectment filings because of the withholding of rent,” the association said.

Clark stressed that it is illegal for tenants to withhold rent for infractions. The amendment is intended to give tenants an extra tool to force landlords to make critical repairs or address tenants’ safety concerns, he said, not minor issues.

“We definitely don’t want that message out there because that can burn tenants,” Clark said.

Monday’s 7-0 council vote made Durham the third municipality to adopt an ordinance prohibiting landlords from collecting rent if apartments or houses are deemed unsafe. In addition to Charlotte, Pittsboro also has such an ordinance in place.

City Councilwoman Chelsea Cook, a leading supporter of the amendment who introduced it to council, said it adds teeth to city’s Neighborhood Improvement Services Department, which oversees the Code Enforcement Division.

“Our city code inspectors used to have the ability to enforce their inspections,” Cook said. “We used to have a criminalized component to that. The criminalization component was stripped by the state.”

Nick MacLeod, executive director of the NC Tenants’ Union, said the amendment provides tenants with much needed protection against unscrupulous landlords.

“I think it’s a widespread and deep problem,” MacLeod said. “It’s not all housing, but we don’t write law for people who are doing the right thing. We write laws to make sure that people are protected and this is a really critical step forward in making sure that residents are protected from being take advantage of in these dangerous conditions.”

The council’s vote came after dozens of residents shared harrowing stories of living in dangerous and squalid conditions.

Brenda Solomon, a Triangle Tenant Association member, said she was forced to spend rent money on a refrigerator for her insulin because the landlord wouldn’t repair the one in her apartment.

“That expense left me behind on rent and now my landlord is trying to evict me because I had to do his job for him,” Solomon said. “We need this ordinance so tenants like me don’t face the consequences for our landlord’s failures”

Brianda Barrera, a Durham renter and Triangle Tenant Union leader, said the ordinance is a step toward “justice, health and dignity.”

“This ordinance is a shield for the most vulnerable members of our community,” Barrera said. “It’s for our elderly neighbors living with black mold who are afraid to complain for fear of retaliation from landlords who only view them as an obstacle to profits. It’s for our undocumented neighbors enduring severe pest infestations because their landlord counts on their silence.”

During an Oct. 9 work session, speakers told council members that immigrant tenants sometimes did not report unsafe living conditions because of language barriers and fear of legal status.

“Whenever they try to mention anything, they are told that the landlords will alert ICE and that will flag something in the system,” said Ken Chiha, director of Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham. “So the danger gets worse and worse every day.”

Public housing residents and recipients of Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8 vouchers, directed their criticism at Durham Housing Authority, nonprofit housing developers and management firms selected to run low-income housing apartments.

“I’m a resident at Willard Street [Apartments] and we’ve had so many complaints, so many maintenance problems, so many retaliations [for making complaints],” said Cynthia Hoskins. “

Across the state, 194,526 families faced an eviction filing this year, according to the N.C. Housing Coalition. Forty-eight percent of the state’s renters are burdened by housing costs, according to the coalition. That means they spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

In Durham, 6,918 families faced an eviction filing, according to the coalition and 47% of renters are burdened by housing costs.

The effort to change the ordinance was led by members of Riverside High School Affordable Housing Club and others who lobbied the council to increase protections for tenants.

Milo Graber, a Riverside senior who founded the student group, said he was driven to do so because affordable housing is a major issue in Durham that affects “lots of people, including a lot of Durham Public Schools students.” The ordinance will encourage landlords to properly maintain housing, he said.

“A lot of students live in unsafe housing, unhealthy conditions and are living in fear of getting evicted due to being charged such high levels of rent,” Graber said. “They can be evicted, and that’s very disruptive, especially when they are forced to move school districts because they have to find housing in a different area.”

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Laura Leslie for questions: info@ncnewsline.com.

Federal regulators give NC hospital deadline for plan to fix problems

by Jane Winik Sartwell, Carolina Public Press
October 22, 2025

Federal regulators have officially placed Asheville’s Mission Hospital in Immediate Jeopardy for the second straight year. The hospital now has 18 days to make things right, or else lose its Medicaid certification and the critical funding that comes along with it. 

Preventable patient death, unsafe patient transport, patient misidentification and harmful infection protocol — instances of all four were found at Mission in recent months. 

In response, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services recommended the hospital face Immediate Jeopardy, the most serious citation regulators can deliver.

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The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Atlanta, or CMS, agreed. Mission, then, is officially in violation of the conditions of participation in Medicaid.

By Nov. 9, Mission must outline and enact a plan to stop and prevent harm to patients. 

If CMS approves Mission’s removal plan, and verifies the plan’s enactment, this could all be over without much consequence for the hospital. That’s what happened last year, even after DHHS identified four instances of preventable patient death.

If CMS does not approve Mission’s plan, it would be disastrous for the hospital. Mission would lose Medicare and Medicaid funding, face fines and potentially lose its state license to operate. 

Mission CEO Greg Lowe claimed that widespread misinformation and outside pressure were key factors in the disastrous ruling.

Lowe emailed hospital staff in the wake of the CMS citation, so that his employees could hear directly from him, “given the large amount of misinformation that has been circulating online and in the press about the incidents that prompted the survey leading to these developments.”

“There were several aspects of this survey that were unusual,” Lowe wrote. 

“This includes the length of time surveyors were on-site and … that more than two-thirds of the complaints they were sent to investigate were determined to be baseless. …. I want to be clear: I have a tremendous amount of respect for the surveyors and they were simply doing the jobs required of them. However, it is unfortunate that there seemed to be outside pressure on these surveyors to find a problem.”

This is the third time Mission has been threatened with Immediate Jeopardy since Tennessee-based, for-profit HCA Healthcare purchased the formerly nonprofit Mission Health hospital system in 2019. Mission Hospital in Asheville is the flagship hospital of the Mission Health group, which is the primary health care provider for several Western North Carolina counties.

“CMS has taken appropriate action to hold HCA accountable,” said Aaron Sarver, a spokesperson for Reclaim Healthcare WNC, a coalition whose goal is to replace HCA as owner of Mission Health.

“Unfortunately, this is not the first-time that Immediate Jeopardy has been invoked against them due to staffing that continues to put patients in danger of serious injury, harm, impairment, or death,” Sarver said. 

“Step one is to restore staffing at Mission to safe levels. The core issue is that nurses, techs and support staff are overburdened and cannot reasonably provide quality care to all the patients they are responsible for. 

“The pattern we now can see clearly since HCA purchased Mission in 2019, is after being sanctioned by regulators, HCA surges resources to the hospital for a period of time to have an IJ lifted. Then, they return to a baseline of unsafe staffing levels. That can be fixed tomorrow by bringing in more staff, but it must be a permanent fix.”

The hospital has already formulated a plan to correct the violations, according to Lowe, and that plan has been proactively shared with CMS. 

“We welcome the follow-up survey and remain confident in the ability of our team to provide compassionate, high-quality care,” Lowe wrote in his email.

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Arizona sues over House Speaker’s refusal to seat Adelita Grijalva

by Nick Karmia, Cronkite News
October 21, 2025

WASHINGTON – Four weeks after Adelita Grijalva won a special congressional election, the state of Arizona sued the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday to force Speaker Mike Johnson to swear her in.

The lawsuit accuses him of illegally refusing to seat the Tucson Democrat – who won her late father’s seat by a landslide on Sept. 23 – silencing Arizona voters and depriving the state of its full voice in Congress.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced the lawsuit a few hours after Grijalva made her second attempt to take the oath by showing up on the House floor without the speaker’s invitation.

“Speaker Johnson has not identified any valid reason for refusing to promptly seat Ms. Grijalva,” the lawsuit says, asserting that his motive is to delay a vote on releasing the Epstein files and “strengthen his hand” in the budget stalemate that triggered the ongoing government shutdown.

“Constitutional rights cannot be used as a bargaining chip,” the lawsuit says.

Grijalva won nearly 70% of the vote to succeed her father, 12-term Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March.

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to the lawsuit, which was filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He shrugged off the suit when approached by an MSNBC reporter.

"I think it’s patently absurd. We run the House. She has no jurisdiction. We’re following the precedent. She’s looking for national publicity. Apparently she’s gotten some of it, but good luck with that," he said.

The speaker has refused to swear in Grijalva until Senate Democrats accept a GOP spending plan to end the shutdown. 

He has kept the House out of session since Sept. 19, other than a few brief pro forma sessions at which no business is conducted, including the one on Tuesday.

“This case is about whether someone duly elected to the House … may be denied her rightful office simply because the Speaker has decided to keep the House out of `regular session,’” the lawsuit says. “If the Speaker were granted that authority, he could thwart the peoples’ choice of who should represent them in Congress.”

There is no rule that precludes a swearing-in during a shutdown, a pro forma session or even during a recess.

Typically, only the speaker administers the oath, though he can designate the duty to another House member.

“Speaker Mike Johnson is actively stripping the people of Arizona of one of their seats in Congress and disenfranchising the voters of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District in the process,” Mayes said in a statement, accusing Johnson of treating Arizonans “as second-class citizens in their own democracy.”

Grijalva said the delay goes “far beyond petty partisan politics – it’s an unlawful breach of our Constitution and the democratic process.”

Grijalva has said she intends to sign a petition forcing a vote on release of the full investigative files involving convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Her signature is the last one needed to circumvent Johnson’s refusal to put the issue on the House floor. She accused him of delaying her oath to “shield this administration from accountability and block justice for the Epstein survivors.”

The Chronology

March 13: Twelve-term Rep. Raúl Grijalva dies at age 77 after a battle with cancer. Adelita Grijalva launches her bid to succeed her father two weeks later. She sails through the July 15 Democratic primary.

Sept. 19: The House approves a stopgap plan to avert a government shutdown. The speaker then dismisses the House except for occasional pro forma sessions at which no business is conducted.

Sept. 23: Adelita Grijalva wins the special election with nearly 70% of the vote.

Sept. 30: Grijalva, now a representative-elect, appears on the House floor during a pro forma session hoping to take the oath of office. Republicans adjourn in less than three minutes despite chants of “Swear her in!” from Democrats.

Oct. 1: Government shutdown begins. It would become the second longest in U.S. history after a 35-day impasse in 2018 and 2019.

Oct. 6: House Speaker Mike Johnson rejects criticism that he is treating Grijalva differently from two Florida Republicans he swore in during pro forma sessions. He made a “unique exception” because their ceremonies were scheduled during full sessions that were cut short unexpectedly, he says.

Oct. 7: Johnson tells reporters he’s willing to swear in Grijalva “as soon as she wants,” though he and aides quickly walk that back, reiterating his condition that Democrats must first approve the GOP plan to end the shutdown.

Oct. 8: Arizona Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly engage in a heated exchange with Johnson outside his office. Gallego accuses him of delaying the swearing-in because Grijalva will sign a petition forcing a vote to release the Epstein files. “Stop covering up for the pedophiles,” Gallego says. Calling that “totally absurd,” Johnson blames the Grijalva delay on them and their fellow Senate Democrats.

Oct. 14: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes threatens legal action if Johnson doesn’t swear in Grijalva “without further delay.” She gives him three days to comply. That same day, she, Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes certify the Sept. 23 special election. 

Oct. 15: Grijalva appears with Arizona’s senators and other allies at the Capitol to condemn the ongoing delay. “Is it because she’s a Democratic Latina?” said a leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Oct. 16: Johnson defends the delay by citing what he calls the “Pelosi precedent.” Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., waited 25 days to be sworn in after a March 2021 special election. Letlow replaced her husband, who had died of COVID-19 before taking office. 

In the lawsuit, Mayes notes that Speaker Nancy Pelosi consulted with Letlow and they picked a date the incoming lawmaker requested.

Oct. 17: The deadline Mayes set passes without a swearing-in or legal action against the speaker. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sends Johnson an open letter demanding he relent.

Oct. 18: Day 25 since Grijalva’s election, matching the pandemic-era delay for Letlow. 

Oct. 21: Grijalva’s second attempt to be sworn in during a pro forma session fails.

“While we’re getting a lot of attention for not being sworn in, I’d rather get the attention for doing my job,” she told reporters moments later. 

Johnson spoke to reporters beforehand.

“We are not in legislative session,” he said. “The chronology is important. Rep. Grijalva won her race … after we had already gone out of session. So I will administer the oath to her, I hope, on the first day we come back (into) legislative session. I'm willing and anxious to do that.”

Later that afternoon, Mayes announced the lawsuit.

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mass. faces grim reality of fewer international students

by Jon Marcus, CommonWealth Beacon
October 20, 2025

It was three months into the second presidential administration of Donald Trump when a small group of New England university administrators convened at a 1902 Beaux-Arts mansion owned by Boston University, just a few blocks from the main campus on an unobtrusive treelined side street in Brookline.

They filed into a high-ceilinged conference room in a one-time steel magnate’s estate turned events center, with huge picture windows overlooking the sleepy residential neighborhood. Representatives of the international student recruiting company that was hosting the meeting strategically positioned themselves at the entrances, handing out agendas.  

The peace and quiet were a stark contrast to the growing chaos in the broader world outside. Billions of dollars of federal research funding for many of the universities where these administrators worked was being cut, and investigations and sanctions were being fired at them by the Trump administration. Soon budgets would be slashed, programs shut down, and employees laid off. This day-long event was about a group that seemed to be facing yet another threat — one with equally grave implications for these schools and the larger Massachusetts economy: international students.

Just days earlier, masked agents had arrested a Tufts University doctoral student on a street in Somerville and whisked her to a detention center in Louisiana. Thousands of student visas were being revoked. International students already admitted to US universities faced a slowdown in appointments for required consular interviews and would soon be required to provide their social media histories. The administration would later try blocking Harvard from enrolling international students at all, limit the proportion other elite schools others could admit, restrict the time these students could stay in the country, and increase the cost of the follow-on visas many have historically used to remain and get jobs here.

A succession of speakers broached these topics at the conference, which was sponsored by the Norwegian international student recruiting company Keystone Education Group. Some triggered nervous laughter, and there were anxious whispers between sessions and over the buffet lunch, from which some attendees had to excuse themselves to take phone calls from colleagues helping international students worried they might also be detained or wouldn’t be allowed to return to the US if they went home for the summer. 

I’ve always worried about Massachusetts being a little too complacent about our position in the academic world. Massachusetts has a brand internationally, so some of these international students have just come to us because of who we are.

Richard Freeland, Northeastern’s former president

The message of the gathering was grim. The seemingly ceaseless flow of international students so critical to Massachusetts universities and colleges would almost certainly slow — probably dramatically.

“You cannot pretend that students from X countries are going to be coming to us in Y numbers anymore,” Vera Grek, director of graduate and international enrollment at Wentworth Institute of Technology, told the meeting.

That’s a $4 billion-a-year problem for Massachusetts alone, which ranks fourth among states  — after California, New York, and Texas  —  in the number of international students at its universities and colleges. More than 82,000 international students studied here last year, supporting an estimated 35,849 jobs.

But there was something else the officials in this room knew. The institutions that they represented largely had themselves to blame for becoming so financially dependent on international students. Many schools in Massachusetts recruited higher proportions of international students than colleges and universities almost anywhere else, federal data show, increasing their numbers year after year to help fill each successive class. That’s largely because of a demographic decline in the number of domestic students in the Northeast, and the comparatively high cost of higher education here, which makes it less appealing to American applicants from places in the country where the number of 18-year-olds is steady or rising.

While international students comprise less than 5 percent of total enrollment at US universities, they make up 35 percent at Northeastern University, 34 percent at Clark University and Babson College, 31 percent at MIT, 29 percent at Berklee College of Music, 27 percent at Brandeis University, and 26 percent at Harvard. Even onetime commuter schools like the Boston and Lowell campuses of the University of Massachusetts state system have hugely increased their number of international students. International graduate students in particular proved so lucrative that, on one Massachusetts campus — Northeastern — they had come to make up more than two-thirds of graduate enrollment.

Yet as international students became increasingly essential, there were signs that fewer of them were coming, even before the turmoil of Trump’s second term. Global demand for American higher education had already started slipping under pressure from geopolitical tensions, increased competition, and concerns among prospective applicants about cost and safety. Fewer of the international students who were still coming could afford to pay full tuition. While the United States is still where the largest proportion of international students end up, its lead has been eroding, Keystone data show, In the fall before Trump’s reelection, the number of international graduate students and new undergraduates had already started to decline, according to the Institute for International Education, or IIE, threatening Massachusetts colleges’ reliance on them.

“I’ve always worried about Massachusetts being a little too complacent about our position in the academic world,” says Richard Freeland, Northeastern’s former president, who was also state commissioner of higher education from 2009 to 2015. “Massachusetts has a brand internationally, so some of these international students have just come to us because of who we are.”

That complacency now presents a potential multibillion-dollar hit to the economy, if international student flows further decline, as projections suggest they will. The number of international students arriving in the United States in August, before the start of this semester, was down nearly 20 percent compared to the same period last year, new figures show. International students don’t only help universities balance their books and inject dollars into the local economy by patronizing restaurants, buying cars, and renting off-campus apartments. They also create research that fuels business, fill jobs in knowledge industries, and create their own startups.

“The calling card for the Massachusetts economy for decades has always been access to the best talent in the world. That’s our sweet spot,” says JD Chesloff, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, an industry group. “People coming here to be educated and staying here has been a foundation of our innovation ecosystem for decades. You can’t help but appreciate how devastating that would be to our economy if they stopped coming.”

Massachusetts universities and colleges started doubling down on international student recruitment around 2011, when domestic enrollment began a long decline. Since then, the number of students overall has fallen by more than 14 percent, but the number of international undergraduates at Massachusetts colleges and universities jumped by about 20 percent, an analysis of federal data show. The number in graduate programs, which are big money makers for universities, nearly doubled.

University admissions offices employ designated international recruiters who spend months living out of suitcases as they travel across the globe to entice students. Some team up with schools that teach English to prospective applicants and with companies like Keystone, which works with 5,500 institutions in more than 190 countries. These recruiting agents generate leads from online inquiries and help students pick countries and schools, complete their applications, and find places to live. As an indication of how important international students have become, many universities pay commissions to these agents, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors.

However they recruit, there were plenty of signs, even before Trump, that it was becoming harder for US universities to enroll international students — especially those who could afford to pay full American tuition. Instead, the market has shifted away from China and the Middle East to students from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, where many need financial aid. This means less revenue than in the past for the US universities they choose.

“The countries where [cost] is not a hurdle are flattening,” Anne Corriveau, BU’s director of international admissions, told the meeting at the mansion.

In 2023, the last year for which the figures are available by country, the number of international students from China fell by four percent after years of increases, the IIE reports. Numbers were also down from other more affluent nations, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Japan, and flat from Europe, but up from places in the world with less wealth, including Mexico, Bangladesh, Colombia, and Ghana.

Meanwhile, there has been intensifying competition from other countries — notably Canada, Australia, and the UK, which last year surpassed the United States as a preferred destination, according to a 2024 Keystone survey. Interest in Italy and Spain is also up. Schools in these countries charge less, on average, than colleges in the United States, and generally make it easier for international students to stay and work when they graduate. Far higher proportions of prospective international students also say they feel more welcome and safe in those places than the United States, another Keystone survey of more than 41,000 students worldwide found in April — though two-thirds said their biggest concern about going to college in the US was the cost.

How vulnerable US universities and colleges were to their reliance on international students was laid bare by the pandemic, federal data show; the number fell by 72 percent in calendar year 2020 alone. The greatest decline was in the Northeast, which saw a drop of nearly 20 percent. Even before Trump returned to office, more than 40 percent of student visa applications to the United States last year were denied under the Biden administration, up from 15 percent 10 years ago.

The impact on enrollment of the Trump administration’s visa revocations and research funding cuts will take time to know conclusively. NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which represents international education professionals worldwide, projects based on available State Department data that the number of international students will decline by 30 percent to 40 percent this year nationwide with an estimated $7 billion economic hit. The association’s numbers suggest the Massachusetts economy will lose nearly $620 million — more than any other state except for California and New York. (Other estimates are less dire, an indication of how hard it is to track this, and of mistrust in federal data.) Even before the election, however, the enrollment of international students declined in two key nationwide measures. The number in graduate programs dropped by 2 percent last fall, or more than 10,000 enrollees, according to IIE, after years of increases and in spite of pent-up demand that accumulated during Covid. The number of first-time international undergraduates also fell by 5 percent.

“We often think about year-to-year enrollment, and really that’s not where we can see change. It’s about the slow erosion of what America represents,” says Chris Glass, a professor of higher education at Boston College who studies international shifts. “There are actually concerning trends that have been happening for years.”

Massachusetts universities prefer not to talk about this. Northeastern, for example, did not respond to repeated requests to for an interview. Most of the international student administrators at that Brookline conference wouldn’t go on the record. Another school, Gordon College, gave a response that has become typical across higher education. It “decided to pause on providing comment due to the deep sensitivity surrounding international students and ongoing current events,” a spokeswoman wrote.

All of this comes at a time when university enrollment overall is projected to decline further starting next year, as the number of 18-year-old prospective first-year students plummets – a product of the low birth rates coming out of the 2008 Great Recession called the “demographic cliff.” US high school graduates have also started going to college at lower rates, questioning the return on the investment.

A mile and a half from the Wightman Mansion, where university officials huddled to discuss international student enrollment, the smell of Korean barbecue wafted through a neighborhood of boba tea cafes, dumpling dives, ramen shops, and restaurants that sell malatang, a particularly spicy kind of hot pot. Young people balancing book bags and backpacks pedaled on Blue Bikes past storefronts advertising rental apartments. Others fidgeted with their phones while waiting for the 57 bus to Boston University. This bustling enclave in the student-packed Allston neighborhood of Boston is increasingly embracing its identity as a reminder of home for some of the tens of thousands of students who pour into Massachusetts from around the globe to go to college.

Upstairs at Stage Karaoke, a sleek space hung with video screens, LED lights, and lyrics projected in various languages, owner Alex Vichienrat says international students make up most of his business. Private, soundproofed VIP rooms encircle a communal main stage, where karaoke brings cultures together. “This is our melting pot space,” Vichienrat said. Without international students, he added, “this entire neighborhood would be gone.”

These more nuanced contributions of international students are often celebrated by advocates of international education. They’re also easy to see, in places such as Allston.

International students broaden the experience on campuses for everyone, says Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which represents public college and university faculty and staff.

“This is an increasingly interconnected, global world. We want to train our young people to understand the rest of the world,” Page says. Without international students, “you don’t get exposed to other people and their ideas and it can breed a narrowness of thinking. That would be a real loss, if that kind of thing was to stop.”

The calling card for the Massachusetts economy for decades has always been access to the best talent in the world. That’s our sweet spot. People coming here to be educated and staying here has been a foundation of our innovation ecosystem for decades. You can’t help but appreciate how devastating that would be to our economy if they stopped coming.

JD Chesloff, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable

Less evident are the long-term economic implications of what could happen here if international students stop coming. 

The preponderance of international students in graduate programs isn’t entirely because of universities trying to meet revenue targets. It’s also because Americans are comparatively less well prepared for science, technology, and other fields. US students score lower than those in 36 other countries in math on the Program for International Student Assessment, a test  that measures how well 15-year-olds can solve real-life challenges using skills they’ve learned. Only one in five college-bound American high school students is equipped to pursue a major in science, technology, engineering, or math, the National Science and Technology Council has found.

International students now earn nearly two-thirds of all master’s degrees from US universities in computer science and more than half in engineering. Two-thirds of graduate students in artificial intelligence at American universities are foreign born.

This portends another grim scenario for Massachusetts if the slide continues or accelerates in the number of international student numbers already under way: There will be fewer of them to work in or help start businesses in increasingly competitive industries. More foreign-born than native-born residents in Massachusetts have graduate degrees, and nearly three in 10 workers here in science, technology, engineering, or math come from other countries, according to the American Immigration Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports immigration.

One bright spot — for US universities, if not for students — is that competing destinations have begun to impose their own restrictions. Canada has tightened international student caps. In Australia, the government failed in a proposal to put a limit on international students last year. But it increased visa fees and slowed down processing times. While the UK has a goal of increasing the number of international students, it has restricted most of them from bringing dependents, required them to prove they have enough money to support themselves, and banned them from working until they finish their degrees.

Massachusetts could have an edge with international students who still want to come to the United States but to a place more outwardly accepting of migrants, some experts say. That’s been a concerted approach at BU, for instance, Corriveau said at the April conference in Brookline. “I used to try to sell the US in general, and now I focus more locally,” she said. “I think it’s more important that students understand what it means to be in Boston.” BU even produced a video for prospective international students acknowledging “recent events” but promoting Boston as “remarkably diverse and inclusive.”

Many international students in Massachusetts stuck around for the summer, instead of going home, out of fear they might not be allowed to re-enter the country, university administrators say. Schools including Wentworth helped find them houses and summer jobs, Grek said at the BU meeting. UMass Amherst set up a fund to help them. Bunker Hill Community College canceled summer study abroad programs out of fear that international students wouldn’t be allowed to come back.

Over the longer term, however, the state’s strength in attracting international students makes it more vulnerable than other places in the United States to a continued decline in the number of them, says Chris Slatter, Boston-based managing director at the education consulting firm Huron.

“They rent apartments, they spend in local businesses, they support innovation through research, and in many cases they contribute to the workforce,” Slatter says. “International students are the cornerstone of both institutional strategy and regional economic vitality in Massachusetts.”

If they don’t keep coming, “and, when appropriate stay, and work here, what we’d have is a different economy,” says Tom Dretler, CEO of the Boston-based international student recruitment company Shorelight. “We would be a poorer state.”

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Study: Mobile Health Clinics Offer Alternative Access to Care

by Liz Carey, The Daily Yonder
October 14, 2025

A new report found that mobile health clinics can provide rural communities with access to healthcare in areas where healthcare facilities and healthcare workers may be scarce.

The report from the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reform looked at more than 160 studies about mobile healthcare clinics. The study found that these “doctor’s offices on wheels” can improve health for both individuals and their communities, while reducing healthcare costs. Additionally, the mobile clinics expand the healthcare workforce by giving healthcare workers hands-on training in their field.

“One of the key things is that it obviously brings care closer into the communities and overcomes a lot of geographic and transportation-related barriers, which prevent a lot of rural patients from accessing care. We saw in some studies that folks had to drive 30 or 60 miles to get their care,” Maanasa Kona, associate research professor with the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. 

“The other big element is that telehealth has gained a lot of prominence, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, but a lot of rural communities still face barriers to accessing telehealth services because of various issues related to broadband access.”

In some cases, Kona said, mobile health programs were able to partner with hospitals and other telehealth providers, and bring with them a hot spot so local providers could combine in-person care with telehealth specialists.

According to Mobile Health Map, an estimated 3,000 “doctors’ offices on wheels” operate across the country. That’s double what a study in the American Journal of Managed Care found in 2014. A decade ago, research estimated 1,500 mobile clinics received some 5 million visits per year while providing services to “vulnerable populations.” The Mobile Health Map grew out of those initial research forays and now shows the location of mobile health programs nationwide.

More than just providing access to hospital services, the CHIR study found, mobile clinics bring other services such as mental health and behavioral health services, dentistry, and preventative care like mammography and cancer screenings to rural communities.

“First, of course, is access to chronic disease screening and vaccination services, but in other places we’re seeing it being used in mental health services and access to methadone and buprenorphine and substance-abuse disorder medication that is harder to come by in rural areas,” Kona said. “We've also seen vision care and dentistry, but those tend to be more focused on school-age kids and nursing home populations.”

In some rural communities, mobile clinics are being used as community paramedicine services or mobile integrated healthcare. Those mobile health programs use the local EMS system to provide ongoing care to people who may have challenges caring for themselves during an illness.

“These might be folks who've been released from the hospital to their home, and they will get post-release support through the EMS system. In these instances, the EMTs and paramedics) will come check in on them and provide some ongoing care to ensure that there is not as much readmission (to the hospital),” she said. 

“And we’ve seen EMS workers providing more preventive and chronic disease management services for rural populations in a bid to reduce emergencies and to keep their condition from escalating to an emergency.”

The research found that mobile health programs don’t just expand access to healthcare — they also provide measurable clinical and financial effects. Studies showed that the programs had better health outcomes, higher patient satisfaction, and more continuity of care. Researchers found examples of patients in areas served by mobile health programs as having lower blood pressure, less tooth decay, and earlier diagnoses of cancer. The programs also resulted in a reduced number of emergency department visits and fewer hospitalizations, which lowered costs for both the patients and the hospitals.

“Expanding mobile health is a cost-effective way to increase the availability and proximity of care sites — expanding the reach of fixed-site facilities and telehealth, particularly in rural areas, or operating independently in areas that fixed-site facilities and telehealth can’t reach — while complementing the efforts to address workforce shortages,” the study found.

Mobile programs also help to develop the healthcare workforce, the research found. The programs provided a culturally competent workforce pipeline that got hands-on training. But the programs also increased the workforce pipeline outside of the healthcare sector, studies showed. Areas where there were mobile health programs saw a drop in minor crime and arrests, and helped to curb the spread of infectious disease which, in turn, prevented educational losses.

Still, more needs to be done, the researchers argued. In order to create a solid foundation of data on the effectiveness of mobile health programs, the researchers said policy makers need to work on standardizing data collection across mobile health programs and track the use of various healthcare systems, like mobile health, telehealth, and fixed-site care. 

Use of each of the systems by different populations across time would also help foster a better understanding of how each healthcare delivery system is used, the study found. More funding is needed to do more research on effective mobile health programs and to build mobile health programs for use in rural and other underserved communities.

“Mobile health is a real option for improving access. It's not something to look into when you have a little bit of extra funding to put towards it as a side project,” Kona said. 

“Thinking about it systematically, instead of as ad hoc funding, and finding a way to make it work with all of the other existing pieces of the puzzle in the healthcare delivery system in a rural area can help supercharge the ability of all of these providers to reach people.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

City officials still unable to say why voter education on redistricting was lacking

by Aliana Mediratta, Verite News New Orleans
October 16, 2025

On Saturday, voters took to the polls with the highest voter turnout in two decades for a municipal primary to cast a ballot for mayor, sheriff, and their City Councilmember. 

Some residents were voting in a new City Council district for the first time, but they may not have known it until they entered the voting booth. 

While the new City Council districts that take effect in January 2026 were created and approved in 2022, Verite News published an article on Sept. 16 speaking to voters, local officials and City Councilmembers, some of whom were unaware that residents would be casting a ballot in their new districts. 

It’s still unclear to many why they were not told about redistricting ahead of time, despite the fact that some City Councilmembers have made efforts to educate voters. 

Many city and elections officials, in interviews with Verite News, were hesitant to provide any specific cause of the miscommunication or concrete plans to improve voter education in the future. 

“I really want to know why there wasn't more said by the city to make this information clear to everyone,” said Bronwen Wyatt, who was moved from District D into District C.

Voter education for some, but not all

While the council as a whole did not put out any voter education materials, District D Councilmember Eugene Green said that he sent out mailers to affected voters — some of them, anyway. 

“I sent letters to the people who are new to the district,” Green said, noting that he used money from his campaign, rather than City Hall funds, to pay for the mailers. He didn’t send any materials to the voters moving out of his District. 

When asked about whose responsibility it would be to inform the voters who were moving out of his district into District C, Green avoided placing blame on any specific individual. 

“There has been publicity relative to the changes, but I don’t want to say that someone else didn’t take on their responsibilities,” Green said. “The main thing I want to say is I reached out to the people who are new to my district to let them know.”

King’s office has said they sent out mailers to registered voters moving into District C over the summer. King, who also won a second term on Saturday, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Kelsey Foster — who hoped to beat King during Saturday’s election but fell short with only 30% of the vote — spent two weekends door-knocking and handing out mailers to voters moving into her district.

“Some people I talked to as recently as four days before early voting, so people had already done their research, made a voting plan, and now I’m on their doorstep telling them, ‘actually, you’re in a whole new district,’” Foster said. 

Foster said that no one who her team spoke to had received a mailer from King, or knew that they would be voting in a new district. 

“I haven’t met a single resident who was aware that they had been redistricted,” Foster said. “We were talking to a lot of folks who actively had District D yard signs up because that's who they thought that they would be voting for.” 

The Registrar’s Office did not respond to requests for information on how many voters were affected by redistricting. Foster’s team estimated that 3,500 were moved into District C, while Green’s team estimated that 175 voters were moved into District D from District A. 

In her time talking to voters, Foster said she noticed a lot of frustration with local politics. 

Foster said she has seen voter trust dwindling across New Orleans. She hopes to see an improvement in civic infrastructure to help bring it back.

“I really hope that … we move towards rebuilding resident trust and repairing some of these broken relationships,” she said, “and this doesn't feel like a great first step.”

None of the six other members of the council responded to repeated requests for comment. 

'This actually really matters'

Wyatt, who is a Treme resident, considers herself someone who is up-to-date on local politics. A recipe developer who has lived in New Orleans since 2001, she said she’s been following the City Council races pretty closely over the past few months. 

Still, Wyatt did not know that she had been moved from District D to District C until she saw Verite News’ coverage of redistricting on social media. 

She was one of the residents who got a mailer from Foster in late September informing her that she was moving into District C. But she heard nothing from Green — who represents her old district — or Councilmember Freddie King III — who represents her new one. 

“This actually really matters because I want to be able to research candidates before I vote for them and if needed also reach out to them and see if they care about the issues that are important to me,” she said. 

Wyatt said neither she nor her wife remember getting a mailer from King, and she spoke to some friends in the neighborhood who were unaware of the change. 

She added that she has not seen a lot of outreach from any City Council candidates overall throughout the election cycle. 

“It just feels like they’re kind of taking for granted that it won’t matter for people or that it’s not important enough to take very seriously,” Wyatt said. 

Conflict over responsibilities

Darren Lombard, Orleans Parish Criminal District Clerk of Court who serves as the city’s chief elections officer, told Verite News that voter education is the responsibility of the Registrar of Voters Office.  

“What most people don't understand, including some elected officials, is that, that responsibility is on the parish council and the Registrar of Voters office,” he said. 

The Registrar’s website,  says that the office’s duties include “community outreach efforts to promote voter education and participation” and “serving as the "nexus" for election information.” 

Verite News published an initial article about redistricting confusion on Sept. 16; at the time of publication, the Registrar’s Office did not have any information on their website about redistricting. Later that day, the office issued a press release informing voters that they would be voting in new districts. 

The Registrar’s Office declined to comment for this story beyond sharing the press release. 

In September, the Registrar’s Office  told Verite News in September that voter education was the responsibility of the Clerk’s Office. Lombard said that was “very surprising.” 

“Nobody seemed to know of anyone who made that comment, so I thought it was kind of odd that someone would say that to anyone,” Lombard said. “It's a lot of information that's flying around, and sometimes people get distracted and may not realize the comments they're making.” 

Looking to the future, Lombard said that he would be happy to take on the responsibility of voter education if he was “allowed to” but did not provide any specific plans.

“I would love for the public to be able to understand [whose responsibility this is], but I also understand that dealing with government, period, is difficult for the average person,” Lombard  said. “I understand it from both perspectives, the whole process and how challenging it can be to navigate.” 

Civic infrastructure, voting trends 

Bruce Reilly, deputy director of the the nonprofit organizations Voters Organize to Educate and Voice of the Experience, was involved in the initial redistricting debate back in 2022 when City Council was initially trying to determine where the boundaries should be moved.

He was critical of Green for only sending mailers out to residents entering his district and not those leaving it, which Reilly connected to a trend of only engaging in voter education when it can score political points.

“Where is the love to your former constituents? You could even have a really beautiful goodbye mailer, like ‘it's been great knowing y'all and working with y'all,’” Reilly said. 

Reilly said that VOTE noticed that, until recently, the Clerk’s Office had the wrong information about districts on their website. 

“Where is the community engagement, where's the outreach, where's the education?” He said. “From the Mayor on down, who's going to own the fact that basically nobody votes in New Orleans?

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Broadband’s broken promise: How federal failures and funding fights keep Native and Black farmers offline

by Melissa Dai, Investigate Midwest
October 22, 2025

Kelsey Scott spotted it from her deck: a sudden lightning flash, then a flame.

Lightning storms are common in rural Eagle Butte, South Dakota. When one rolled through in July, Scott had to act fast or the blaze would sweep across the 7,200-acre cattle ranch.

But emergency response is complicated, Scott said, in this remote area of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Calling 911 was a game of “phone tag” with multiple dispatch centers, one of them a Bureau of Indian Affairs fire department. And even when responders came, she knew they’d be stopping for other fires along the way. 

So Scott turned to another source for help. With 911 on speakerphone, she fired off texts to family and neighbors, who arrived to stop the blaze at only five acres of damage before emergency services arrived.

“Every minute counts, and having access to safe and reliable internet and cell phone service helps ensure that we get as many of those minutes to count as possible,” Scott said.

Kelsey Scott fixes a fence on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota in November 2018. photo by Amanda Lucier for The New York Times*

While Scott was able to call others for help, nearly 1,700 miles away in Boydton, Virginia, John Boyd could not. 

The 60-year-old farmer — and founder of the National Black Farmers Association — has internet coverage on only half of his 2,000 acres. In 2023, Boyd’s combine caught fire while harvesting grain, and he was in a dead zone. 

He had to walk a mile and a half just to find cellular service. By then, the fire had destroyed his combine.

“A complete loss, and insurance wouldn’t pay,” Boyd said. 

Internet access is more than a convenience for farmers and ranchers. It’s become critical infrastructure, and not only for emergency situations. Research has linked high-speed internet access to increased crop yields and reduced operational expenses, largely through precision agriculture — advanced farm technologies that leverage timely, detailed data. 

However, an analysis of census data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture exposes race-based disparities in farm internet access. 

Clockwise, from bottom left: 1) Kelsey Scott raises beef on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. photo by Amanda Lucier for The New York Times* 2) Kelsey Scott checks on one of her favorite cows and its calf in May 2017. photo by Morgan Marley Boecker for Angus Media 3) Kelsey Scott poses on The DX Ranch in South Dakota during a February 2023 photo shoot. photo by Jenn Zeller for South Dakota Cowgirl Photography 4) In June 2024, Kelsey Scott rides horses with her husband Monte Scott after moving cattle to a fresh pasture on the South Dakota ranch. photo by Anthony Pavkovich on behalf of the Intertribal Agricultural Council

In 2022, 79% of farms nationwide reported having internet access. Farms run by white, Asian and Pacific Islander producers met or exceeded that average. But Native-operated farms trailed at 71%, and Black-operated farms at 67%. A separate data set, which tracks ethnicity in addition to race, revealed Hispanic- or Latino-operated farms also fell short of the national average. 

For many Indigenous and Black farmers, the digital divide is stark. But even as these communities push to narrow the gap, shifting policies, industry influence and flawed federal data compound distinct connectivity challenges for each.

“You’ve got an availability crisis in some areas, you’ve got an affordability crisis with some people,” said Mignon Clyburn, former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2009 to 2018. “But you also have this historic discrimination that has set the tone for a very horrible baseline.”

‘Digital redlining’ deepens the divide

For Native and Black communities, being last in line for broadband access is another chapter in a long history of exclusion. Advocates and experts call it “digital redlining.” 

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey reveals only 71% of Indigenous households on tribal lands had broadband subscriptions — among the lowest rates in the nation. Rates for Black households reached 86%, but still fell below the 90% national average.

On farms, the gap widens. In 2022, USDA data shows only about one in three Native- and Black-operated farms had access to broadband, compared with nearly half of white-operated farms — a rate marginally better than the national average.

At the time, the FCC defined broadband as 25/3 megabits per second, a threshold that increased to 100/20 Mbps in 2024. By the new measure, FCC data shows that the broadband gap was even wider in rural and tribal areas.

On Boyd’s farm in Virginia, home to soybeans, grain and cattle, internet infrastructure is sparse. Dead zones spot his land, rendering precision agriculture technologies inoperable.

Connected farms, Boyd said, often use tools like GPS mapping and remote sensors to streamline operations and monitor real-time conditions. But without broadband infrastructure in his area, he can’t follow suit.

“I can farm, but guess what?” Boyd said. “If you have cutting-edge technology that gives you an edge, it doesn’t matter how good a farmer I am. I’m not keeping up with you because you have a technical advantage here.”

Research confirms a link between broadband connectivity and agricultural benefits, including higher crop yields and lower costs. Farmers and experts also point to benefits like real-time market updates and online consumer outreach. 

Nearly 500 miles west of Boyd, on his farm in Lexington, Kentucky, Jim Coleman enjoys what’s known as “last-acre connectivity” — the extension of broadband access across every corner of farmland. In recent years, momentum has grown behind the last-acre movement, most recently with a House of Representatives bill in May. 

For Coleman, 100% coverage across his 13 acres means easy access to weather conditions and online repair tutorials.

“When I’m out on my tractor, if the tractor stops, I don’t have to run up to the house, get on the landline to call someone to come fix it, wait two weeks and pay $500,” Coleman said. “I can just get off the tractor, go on my phone to YouTube and type in ‘tractor stopped.’ I love the independence and the sustainability of having immediate, 24/7 access to problem-solving via the internet.”

Jim Coleman, pictured above, uses the internet across many aspects of his 13-acre farming operation, Coleman Crest Farm, in Fayette County, Kentucky, on Aug. 22, 2025. photos by Ryan C. Hermens for Investigate Midwest

Coleman’s great grandfather first purchased the farm in 1888 — the same land he had tilled while enslaved — and it’s remained in the family since. It wasn’t until 2020, when Coleman moved back to the land, that his farm got internet access. Stationed only six miles from Lexington’s city center, Coleman was able to leverage an existing network at a relatively low cost.

“I didn’t have to create any kind of extra infrastructure on my farm,” Coleman said. “It was easy for me to just connect.”

That’s not the case for farmers like Boyd, who want access but lack nearby infrastructure. Boyd said he’s spent years pressuring AT&T to build an affordable and reliable network in his area, but to no avail. 

It’s a common occurrence in the rural stretches of America: the high costs of deploying infrastructure throughout vast and sparsely populated areas deter even the most prosperous internet service providers. 

Tedd Buelow, who served as the USDA Rural Development’s tribal relations team lead for nearly two decades — from 2006 to last March — said he doesn’t fault telecommunications companies for being “fiscally conservative” in rural areas. 

“But that doesn’t mean the person that’s not being serviced, who’s in a tribal area, who’s ethnically different, isn’t going to feel like they were discriminated against,” Buelow said.

In addition to controlling infrastructure buildout, internet service providers (ISPs) wield immense influence over federal policy.

An analysis of OpenSecrets data shows that from 2019 through July of this year, 10 major ISPs and trade associations spent more than $611 million lobbying on telecommunications issues, including internet-related legislation. 

Investigate Midwest reached out to each of these companies and trade groups about their lobbying expenditures, and most did not respond to a request for comment. Two that did respond offered statements but declined to provide specifics on their lobbying efforts. 

Charter Communications, which offers internet services under the Spectrum brand, spent more than $69 million on telecommunications lobbying across six years. Kim Ripp, Charter’s vice president of communications, said in a statement that Charter remains committed to rural expansion through a multi-year deployment initiative backed by “more than $7 billion in private investment.” 

A spokesperson for the trade group USTelecom said in a statement that its 112 member companies, including AT&T and Verizon, have long promoted “connectivity for all,” including rural Americans.

Deployment disparities aren’t the only crises fueling the digital divide. Even when infrastructure reaches rural areas, farmers often can’t afford to connect their land — much less every acre.

Research found that in 2022, farmworkers collectively earned 40% less than comparable non-agricultural workers. Agricultural census data from the same year reveals that farms operated by Indigenous and Black producers were more often classified in lower economic classes.

In northwest and central Kansas, an ISP called Nex-Tech has managed to deliver last-acre connectivity to some local farms, according to CEO Jimmy Todd.

But Todd — who also serves as board liaison for the Fiber Broadband Association’s Precision Agriculture Working Group — said that level of coverage is rarely attainable.

“It’s expensive, and that’s why it’s such a challenge,” Todd said. “Your small- and mid-sized farms generally are not profitable enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars on network equipment.”

Policy shifts threaten fragile progress

Federal programs have provided lifelines for rural connectivity but their gains have proven fragile. 

A monumental infrastructure law signed in November 2021 by President Biden allocated $65 billion to a slew of broadband programs targeting both affordability and deployment. However, the initiatives remain divided across the FCC, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and USDA without sufficient coordination, research shows. 

Over the past decade, the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, has repeatedly flagged “overlap” and “fragmentation” in these programs, urging the White House to adopt a unified “national strategy.” In April, GAO acknowledged the agencies have increased coordination, but that their efforts still fall short. 

Changes under the current administration have hit communities of color hard. In addition to stripping DEI-related criteria from broadband initiatives, the government delivered the toughest blow to a major program from the 2021 law: the Digital Equity Act. 

In May, President Trump announced the end of what he described as a “racist and illegal” $2.75 billion grant program, created to promote digital inclusion and equity. The NTIA notified grantees shortly after.

Brandon Forester, senior campaign lead at the nonprofit advocacy group MediaJustice, said the move undercuts more than communities of color.

“The intent of that law was to make sure that, yeah, people of color are heard from, but also seniors and people in rural areas,” Forester said. “The people in these Trump-supporting, rural red states are going to be hurt just as much or even more by these changes.”

The Trump administration also announced plans to redirect funding under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program away from fiber, the gold standard of connectivity.

Critics argue it was a move to funnel funds to satellite internet technologies — notably, to Elon Musk’s Starlink. 

“There’s no question fiber is the best, but it’s very expensive. It is easy to justify in an urban-suburban area. It is very hard to justify in rural America,” said Garland McCoy, co-founder of the nonprofit Precision Ag Connectivity & Accuracy Stakeholder Alliance. “But satellite broadband has trouble scaling. The quality and speed start to go down when you add customers.” 

Christopher Ali, author of the book “Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity,” said demoting fiber does a disservice to the areas and communities BEAD is meant to target for improvements. 

“We’ve taken an approach to broadband in rural areas that anything is better than nothing. I call it the ‘politics of good enough,’ ” Ali said. “It’s like it doesn’t matter what technology, it doesn’t matter how much there is. It just matters that there’s something there, because that’s all rural Americans deserve.”

Even with enough funding, there’s disagreement on which areas actually have broadband service. 

In 2022, members of Congress raised concerns over the accuracy of the FCC’s National Broadband Map, which the federal government uses to disperse funding. Experts say the problem stems from the map’s reliance on self-reported ISP data. 

“There is a natural inclination to overreport coverage because it keeps competition away,” Ali said. “If I say that I serve this area, it keeps a competitor from seeking out federal funding to go into those areas.” 

That’s what happened in Utica, Mississippi, a rural, majority-Black town featured in a MediaJustice documentary. Despite lacking a reliable network, the FCC map listed Utica as 100% covered, blocking it from federal dollars.

The same pattern plagues tribal areas, according to a 2023 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Center for Indian Country Development. H Trostle, the report’s co-author and a senior policy analyst at the Minneapolis Fed, also flagged flaws in how the FCC measures access.

“When data points were being put together, a lot of farms got left out, or only the house on the farmland would be included in the data as one of those points,” Trostle said.

Communities can challenge errors through an FCC process, but research finds the system is slow, costly and so complex that it often requires legal help. 

“Why is it that we are mandating that communities double-check the veracity of a provider’s claims?” Ali said. “That’s a huge amount of labor that falls on the community rather than the provider or the federal government.”

Cost of competition for tribes

The U.S. Census counts Native communities as a racial group. In practice, federal policy treats them as sovereign governments. That’s why equity-related cuts don’t affect tribes, which continue to depend on federal funding to build broadband.

But funding is finite. With 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., competition is fierce, and those without enough resources fall behind, experts say. 

Securing funds from initiatives like the $3 billion Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program — established in December 2020 to support infrastructure buildout — hinges on the strength of tribes’ grant proposals. And crafting an application with a fighting chance isn’t cheap or easy. Experts say proposals can cost tens of thousands of dollars in staff time and expertise, a high bar for many tribal governments already stretched thin.

Enter specialists like Lee Vasquez-Ilaoa, tribal programs manager at Oklahoma-based project-planning firm Reagan Smith. Vasquez-Ilaoa said she’s spent 20 years writing federal grants.

“How resourced the tribe is dictates if they can apply for any kind of funding,” she said. “To even get to a place where a tribe could be federally funded, they have to have a proposal team, a broadband team, an environmental team, an engineering and design team, and work very closely with the federal government for one to two years before they can even apply for the funding.”

Vasquez-Ilaoa said she worked with 11 tribes through multiple funding rounds of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, always juggling several projects at once, each a complex “web” of its own.

It started with identifying and connecting with key tribal stakeholders. Then came the relentless, months-long hunt for permissions, licenses, financial statements, reservation maps, survey insights and third-party consultations to construct a 200-plus-page proposal — all while maintaining a weekly email dialogue with the federal program officer for critical “relationship-building,” she said. 

The payoff varied. Some well-resourced tribes landed multimillion-dollar awards for their projects. Others walked away with the $500,000 “equitable distribution” award — a “thank-you-for-playing” prize insufficient for major buildout, Vasquez-Ilaoa said.

Now, experts say funds have dried up for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program after multiple rounds of funding. Even when funds were available, not all tribes could compete on equal footing. And with many nations being “federally reliant,” as Vasquez-Ilaoa put it, some tribal projects in the neediest of areas stalled before they could begin. 

When tribal communities become providers

When lightning hit the cattle ranch in July, Scott relied on high-speed internet to mobilize neighbors — access she didn’t have growing up.

In 2015, however, fiber finally reached her home after the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe bought a local telecommunications company and secured a $38 million USDA loan to extend service reservation-wide.

“I appreciate what it meant for my tribe to invest in something so significant across such an expansive area of land in such a rural, remote community,” said Scott, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

Scott’s uncle and fellow rancher, Guthrie Ducheneaux, presides over the company’s board of directors. He said it continues to expand infrastructure across the reservation and is on track to pay off its federal loan by the early 2030s. 

“I live 54 miles from the central office, nine miles down a gravel road, and I have fiber-optic internet that competes with most urban areas,” Ducheneaux said.

Across Indian Country, nations have stepped in to close the digital divide. Kelli Case, senior staff attorney at the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative, said such efforts reflect a long tradition of tribal problem-solving.

“I never count out any tribe’s capacity to meet the needs of their citizens,” Case said. 

In southeastern Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation — the country’s third-largest tribe — has built its own broadband team. Broadband director Robert Griffin said he works with multiple carriers and federal partners to expand service across the reservation’s 11,000 square miles, securing hundreds of millions of dollars in support.

By Griffin’s count, about 72% of the reservation now has broadband access under the old federal standard of 25/3 Mbps, a figure expected to reach 80% by the end of 2026. For rancher and tribal councilmember Anthony Dillard, that progress means fiber may finally reach his 700-acre ranch by year’s end. Until then, he relies on Starlink for a connection.

“What I would like to do eventually is to possibly integrate technology like drill monitors, rainfall monitors and stuff of that nature to help me make better management decisions,” Dillard said.

Elsewhere, tribal governments have launched their own internet service providers. 

In south central New Mexico, the Mescalero Apache Tribe established Mescalero Apache Telecom in 1999, which eventually became the reservation’s sole internet service provider. With USDA loans, the company has delivered fiber to homes across all 720 square miles, according to founder and general manager Godfrey Enjady.

“The biggest thing now is education,” said Enjady, who is also president of the National Tribal Telecommunications Association. “How can we best utilize this new resource and tool to hopefully spark economic development, and also maybe look at some new ventures into agriculture?”

Black communities build their own solutions

Local telecoms are known as “community broadband networks,” a term that covers everything from nonprofits to utility cooperatives, according to Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. 

“The thing that links them all together is that they are focused on providing an important service to the community, to connect the people who are often left behind, and not just figuring out how to maximize wealth extraction,” Mitchell said.

These networks often support people most impacted by the digital divide, including Black communities, Mitchell said. 

In Enfield, North Carolina — a town that’s 88% Black and heavily agricultural — LaShawn Williamson and her husband launched Wave 7 Communications after a 2018 tornado left their home without service for weeks. 

As in many rural communities, Enfield’s largest broadband obstacle was affordability. Major providers, Williamson said, often saddled residents with steep prices, so Wave 7 uses a “pay-for-what-you-use” model built on local trust. Though Enfield’s farms are currently beyond the company’s reach, she said agricultural expansion may be on the horizon.

Hundreds of miles away in Lake Providence, Louisiana — a predominantly Black agricultural town — a coalition of community groups called Delta Interfaith has been working to expand broadband to households and farms. 

The group once had a stake in Louisiana’s proposal for federal BEAD funds. But when the Trump administration dropped BEAD’s fiber-first priority in June, the state redirected money to Starlink instead.

“We’re not pleased because it creates no local jobs,” said Nathanael Wills, an organizer at Delta Interfaith. “None of the money stays in our community.”

As federal dollars dry up, Delta Interfaith and similar organizations say they have little choice but to keep pushing — because without broadband, their communities fall further behind.

“We’re trying every way we can to still bring and build a fiber network,” Wills said. “We’re not giving up.”

*Note to publishers: This story may be republished under Investigate Midwest’s standard republishing guidelines. However, all photos by Amanda Lucier are licensed for use only in this original publication and may not be republished, copied, redistributed, or used in any derivative form. Please remove these images and associated captions before republishing.

Note: This story has been updated to reflect Tedd Buelow's previous role as the USDA Rural Development’s tribal relations team lead.

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.