After Trump Cuts to Kenya Food Aid, Children Died of Starvation — ProPublica

On July 18, a gentle, overcast evening in Nairobi, Kenya, a staff of President Donald Trump’s prime international support advisers ducked into a gathering room on the Tribe Lodge, their luxurious lodging within the metropolis’s diplomatic quarter, for a non-public dinner. 

The guests from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent identified for a collection of public lawsuits towards the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil govt who had completed a stint in authorities underneath the primary Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d beforehand managed communications for town of Fort Value, Texas. This yr, all had been appointed to management roles within the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement, the premier authorities humanitarian company on the earth. 

5 months earlier, a few of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job completed, they’d launched into a world tour of half a dozen cities, together with the Kenyan capital. They have been granted particular permission to fly enterprise class “to assist guarantee most relaxation and luxury,” in keeping with an inside memo. Thornton alone obtained authorization to expense greater than $35,000 in taxpayer cash for the journey. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s prime specialists, who have been being compelled out of the company amid the administration’s acknowledged dedication to austerity. 

When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi realized of the go to, officers there organized the dinner with a aim in thoughts. It might be their final alternative to elucidate, face-to-face, the catastrophic impression of Trump’s drastic cuts to international support. 

A prime concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Meals Program’s operation in Kenya, the place about 720,000 refugees, among the many most weak folks on earth, relied on the group to outlive. After offering $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly lower off cash in January with out warning, leaving this system with no time to search out enough assist or import the meals wanted for the remainder of the yr. 

For months afterward, U.S. authorities and humanitarian officers  warned Washington that the cutoff had led to more and more dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, together with Thornton, to resume WFP’s grant and provides the cash it wanted to avert catastrophe. The embassy in Nairobi despatched a minimum of eight cables to the workplace of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the scenario on the bottom and projecting mass starvation, violence and regional instability. 

These warnings went unheeded. Rubio, dealing with stress from lawmakers and humanitarian teams, however publicly asserted that the company’s mass cuts had spared meals applications — even because the administration didn’t fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s offering meals or drugs or something that’s saving lives and is speedy and pressing, you’re not included within the freeze,” Rubio advised reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know the way way more clear we may be than that.” 

By the spring, WFP nonetheless had not obtained funding, ran low on provides and can be compelled to cease feeding a lot of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp on the earth, WFP lower rations to their lowest in historical past, trapping a lot of the 308,000 folks within the camp with nearly nothing to eat. 

They started to starve, and plenty of — principally kids — died as a result of their malnourished our bodies couldn’t battle off infections, ProPublica discovered whereas reporting within the camp. Moms had to decide on which of their youngsters to feed. Younger males took to the streets in protests, a few of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant ladies with life-threatening anemia have been so determined for energy that they ate mud. Out of choices and mortally afraid, refugees started fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped vehicles, threatening a brand new migration disaster on the continent. They mentioned they’d somewhat danger being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly ravenous in Kakuma.

To press the urgency of the scenario in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officers enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of greater than 20 years. Pajevic arrived on the Tribe Lodge early. She introduced props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a group of Tupperware containers with completely different quantities of dry rice, lentils and oil. 

As they ate, she positioned every container on the desk. The biggest represented 2,100 every day energy, what humanitarians like her think about the minimal every day consumption for an grownup. The following container confirmed 840 energy. That’s what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma have been set to obtain come August. One other third would get simply over 400 energy. Then she confirmed an empty container. The remainder — nearly half of the folks in Kakuma — would get nothing in any respect.

Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she mentioned a authorities official in Liberia had as soon as advised her: The one distinction between life and demise throughout a famine is WFP and the U.S. authorities, its largest donor. 

“The one who’s not hungry can not perceive the beastly ache of starvation,” Pajevic mentioned, “and what an individual is prepared to just do to tame that beastly ache.”

The response was muted, in keeping with different folks acquainted with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for administration and assets, mentioned the choice to resume WFP’s grant was now with the State Division, and gave no indication he would enchantment on the group’s behalf. Thornton, a international service officer who ascended to a management publish underneath Trump, didn’t converse. As a substitute, he spent a lot of the meal his cellphone.

The dinner plates have been cleared and the guests headed to the airport. “They simply took zero duty for this,” one of many attendees mentioned, “and 0 duty for what’s going to occur.” 

The small print of this episode are drawn from accounts by six folks acquainted with the journey, in addition to inside authorities information. Most individuals on this article spoke on the situation of anonymity for worry of reprisal. This yr, ProPublica, The New Yorker and different retailers have documented violence and starvation because of the support cuts in Kenya’s camps. However the scale of struggling all through Kakuma — and the string of selections by American officers that contributed to it — haven’t been beforehand reported. 

The camp had seen related spikes in pediatric malnutrition lately, however they have been tied to pure causes, resembling malaria outbreaks, excessive drought or COVID-19, in keeping with workers of the Worldwide Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s solely hospital. 

This was one thing completely different: an American-made starvation disaster. To this point this yr, group well being staff have referred nearly 12,000 malnourished kids for speedy medical consideration.

“What has include Trump, I’ve by no means skilled something prefer it,” mentioned one support employee who has been in Kakuma for many years. “It’s large and brutal and traumatizing.”

In response to an in depth checklist of questions, a senior State Division official insisted that nobody had died on account of international support cuts. The official additionally mentioned that the U.S. nonetheless provides WFP a whole bunch of thousands and thousands a yr and the administration is shifting to investments that can higher serve each the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We simply signed a landmark well being settlement with Kenya,” the official mentioned, pointing to recent endorsements by authorities officers there. “That’s going to remodel their means to construct their home capability, to care for their populations, to enhance the standard of well being care in Kenya.”

The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Lodge, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl mattress within the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old child, Santina. The title means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary might solely pray that God would save her child’s life. 

Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital 4 days earlier after the toddler developed extreme diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for his or her 2-year-old, Grace.

Religious Christians of their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma collectively from South Sudan. They thought of parenthood a sacred duty — particularly Sunday, whose personal mom died when she was younger. As their household grew, Lotunya had hoped to start out a small store so he might afford to ship their daughters to high school. “I had that easy dream,” he mentioned. 

However in June, when Santina was 6 months previous, WFP lower the camp’s meals rations. Households like theirs have been allotted only a small quantity of rice and lentils — 630 every day energy per individual — which they have been anticipated to make final till August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it so long as they may, consuming one small meal per day. However the meals ran out earlier than the top of June. Sunday stopped producing sufficient breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby child started to waste away. By the point they arrived on the hospital, Santina weighed solely 11 kilos. Workers famous in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.

Sunday watched helplessly underneath the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital workers pumped her child with drugs and tried to reintroduce extra energy.

On the clinic’s partitions, subsequent to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of information monitoring what number of kids and infants had died within the room this yr. Sunday spoke no English, however she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 monthly on common, together with the very best variety of edema circumstances, a key marker of severity, in years. 

One other row on the whiteboards tallied those that by no means left the clinic: Not less than 54 kids have died within the hospital with problems introduced on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, together with a surge within the spring when households first started rationing their meals due to the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this yr is the primary in many years that early childhood deaths will improve, the Gates Foundation just lately reported. Researchers mentioned a key issue is the cuts to international support.

Within the hospital’s courtyard, one other mom, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned towards a tree along with her two kids at her toes and mentioned she was contemplating an excessive resolution. “The factor I take into consideration is committing suicide,” she advised ProPublica, “as a result of I heard the U.N. takes care of the children when the mother and father are gone.”

Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa because the United Nations and Kenyan authorities started accepting refugees there in 1992. Individuals have come fleeing lethal violence in some two dozen nations — primarily from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but in addition as distant as Afghanistan. Masking an space about half the scale of Manhattan, Kakuma is a free constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metallic slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched collectively by rutted motorbike trails.

Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Films have been made, together with a documentary in regards to the “Misplaced Boys of Sudan,” a gaggle of unaccompanied minors escaping struggle and battle. Angelina Jolie opened a faculty there. 

A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. as soon as referred to as Kakuma the most popular, driest land on earth, “a spot that could be very near the sting of Hades.”

“We’re sustaining life,” she mentioned, “by serving to fund the World Meals Program.”

Up to now, USAID gave WFP’s international operations billions yearly, together with the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The help is one finish of a cut price to carry stability to the area. International locations like Kenya absorb refugees from a bunch of different nations fleeing violence, famine or pure disasters. In alternate, the U.S., together with different rich nations vested in saving lives, assist foot the invoice for important providers. With out meals, specialists say, refugees would possible spill out of Kenya into different nations. Conflicts could last more, declare extra lives and create new refugees. 

USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for therefore lengthy that it’s a literal constructing block within the camp; thousands and thousands of previous cans of cooking oil bearing the company’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.

When the Trump administration froze 1000’s of USAID applications throughout a putative assessment of the company’s operations in January, Rubio insisted meals applications can be spared. 

However then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to increase WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the standard timetable the group wanted in an effort to ship meals to Kakuma by summer season.

WFP was blindsided. The group’s leaders had obtained no discover forward of the cuts and no communication about whether or not the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, besides inflicting ache,” mentioned one U.N. official. “And that isn’t forgivable.” 

Even earlier than the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls lately had compelled the group to drop rations by round 20% to 40% all through the camp. To regulate for the long run, WFP was planning to reform its mannequin in Kenya to verify the small minority of individuals with some revenue, like small-business house owners, didn’t obtain meals. 

However this yr, WFP’s leaders have been compelled to stretch their remaining provides from final yr. They made the drastic choice to chop rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s historical past. In addition they diminished distributions to as soon as each different month as an alternative of month-to-month. 

In August, the handouts would turn out to be much more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize households primarily based on want. They decided solely half the inhabitants would obtain meals. Most individuals realized which half they have been in from a quantity stamped on the again of their ration card.

The world over in Washington, the destiny of locations like Kakuma was within the arms of a choose few political appointees, together with Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first labored beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of international help, and later underneath Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk rent. Apart from Rubio, none of them have been topic to Senate affirmation. 

As pleas poured in from authorities officers in Washington and overseas to restart support operations in Africa, together with WFP in Kenya, the appointees usually didn’t act, information and interviews present. 

On March 18, USAID’s political management invited profession authorities support officers from the company’s main bureaus to pitch the handful of applications they thought have been most important. It was the one time the company’s Africa bureau had a possibility to make a full-throated case for its growth applications throughout the continent. They’d simply 45 minutes to do it.

Within the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton mentioned in podcast appearances that his marketing campaign towards President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal staff launched him to a authorities forms “that isn’t reflective of the values of the people who it serves” and requires “worry and accountability” to come back to heel, Mother Jones reported. 

As a part of the assembly, Brian Frantz, performing head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with practically 25 years of expertise, pitched Kenya as an essential commerce and nationwide safety companion. At one level when discussing one other nation, Frantz talked about the U.S. Commerce and Improvement Company, utilizing the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, in keeping with two attendees. Then he requested: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan prison group Tren de Aragua?

The USAID officers have been surprised. “That was the one factor he mentioned in that assembly,” one of many attendees recalled. “There was simply zero curiosity in the subject material.” 

In a blistering memo circulated across the company earlier than he was laid off in late summer season, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how that they had prevented lifesaving applications from coming again on-line by refusing to pay for providers already rendered and limiting entry to USAID’s cost techniques. He mentioned that they had incessantly modified the method for the right way to enchantment program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.

“We got make-work to maintain us spinning our wheels,” one other former official recalled.

Months earlier than the last-ditch enchantment on the Tribe dinner, embassy workers in Nairobi had additionally tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the performing U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital the place Sunday and Santina would later test in. 

After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a collection of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and different camps brought on by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On Could 6, the embassy wrote that declining meals help had “already contributed to a number of deaths and will end in escalating instability in Kenya.”

At one level, a gaggle of youngsters and younger males in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set hearth to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by capturing at them, wounding a minimum of two, together with an adolescent who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the top. Ordinarily thought of among the many most peaceable refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Help staff hid inside their compounds.

Sexual assault, violent protests and different crimes would solely improve with out support, Kenyan authorities officers warned the embassy, in keeping with one other cable. They predicted the cuts might destabilize one in every of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host 1000’s of refugees, a lot of whom would possible in any other case be a part of the unlawful migration flows sure for Europe and america.”

At a roadside staging space, a few of these fleeing Kakuma employed smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the identical nation the place that they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen ladies, kids and infants contorted inside vehicles with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s starvation that chased us,” one lady mentioned by means of the cracked window of a automobile about to depart. “It’s starvation that’s making us go away.”

In mid-Could, USAID’s humanitarian help bureau in Washington delivered a memo once more requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “With out this extra help,” the enchantment acknowledged, “the WFP-provided meals rations will scale back from regular ranges of 60% to twenty%, placing practically 1 million folks prone to hunger and demise and certain triggering further insecurity inside the refugee camps.” 

Data present seven advisers within the chain of command signed off on extra funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request obtained to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of workers, he didn’t. No cash went by means of at the moment. “Thornton turned an actual highway block,” a former USAID official mentioned. 

Thornton didn’t reply to a request for remark. In response to questions on episodes like this, the senior State Division official mentioned the Workplace of Administration and Funds, not USAID or the State Division, has final authority to approve new international support cash. They mentioned they labored carefully with OMB to assessment the entire funding requests. “In an effort to make an obligation like that,” the official mentioned, “it’s essential to have apportioned funds from OMB.” 

When ProPublica requested in regards to the funding delays and the State Division’s clarification, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley mentioned in an e mail, “That’s completely false. And that’s not even how this course of works.” She didn’t make clear what was false. 

Santina declined quickly within the days after arriving on the clinic. Hospital workers tried every part. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen assist and up to date the analysis to marasmus, a extreme type of malnutrition the place the physique begins to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s coloration light and he or she struggled to breathe. She turned unresponsive to ache.

Cradling her child, Sunday considered her oldest daughter again at dwelling. Two-year-old Grace wore slightly bell round her ankle as a result of she was liable to wandering off. Sunday thought: What is going to Grace eat at present? Tomorrow? Will she find yourself right here too?   

Simply after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital workers pronounced Santina lifeless.

A physician and vitamin specialist with the Worldwide Rescue Committee mentioned Santina nearly actually would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the trigger was clear: After ravenous for weeks, his spouse might now not breastfeed, which is why Santina had turn out to be so tiny and weak. “That’s the reason she died,” he mentioned.  

Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete constructing on the fringe of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, simply on the opposite facet of the hospital fence.

As soon as proud to be the mom she’d grown up lacking, disgrace washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mom sufficient,” she mentioned later, practically in a whisper.

In early August, Sunday got here dwelling after serving to to reap the sallow greens a neighbor was rising out of dry, cracked earth. In alternate, that they had given her a couple of handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in cloth. It was the household’s solely meals. 

The August meals distribution was supposed to come back any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings decided that solely half of Kakuma would obtain meals, a choice most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace have been amongst those that would get nothing. 

Somebody had stolen the roof off the household’s single-room mud home, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cowl, which was disintegrating within the scorching solar. Grace performed on the dust patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her mother and father, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.  

Doting on her, they mentioned, was the one method to deal with dropping Santina. They’ve only one image of their youngest little one: a fuzzy, black-and-white picture on the household’s refugee registration. “However,” Sunday mentioned, her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I’ve Grace.”

In late September, the State Division signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This yr, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% lower than it obtained final yr and, critically, the funds arrived 9 months into the yr. 

WFP has advised refugees it plans to offer meals by means of a minimum of March. Even then, most households are set to obtain between one-fifth and three-fifths of the advisable minimal every day energy. 

Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would every get the equal of 420 energy a day.