Since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, pupil journalists have been instrumental in masking his administration’s assaults on all the pieces from the gutting of the Division of Schooling, to the rollback of variety and fairness initiatives, to the crackdown on free speech and tried deportation of worldwide college students talking out on Palestine. Throughout this time of elevated repression, we stay proud—in addition to astonished—to be alone amongst nationwide information retailers in recurrently publishing pupil views. Because the sources and alternatives for rising writers proceed to dwindle, it has by no means been extra necessary to help the subsequent technology of journalists.
StudentNation revealed almost 100 authentic articles in 2025; we’ve chosen three of those items to focus on their extraordinary vary and reporting. Learn extra at TheNation.com/content material/studentnation. We’re deeply grateful to the Puffin Basis, whose generosity to the Nation Fund for Unbiased Journalism makes this work doable.
Utah is the third-driest state in the US. From the parched Colorado Plateau to the even drier Nice Basin, it’s nearly all desert.
In highschool, I rowed with Utah’s solely membership crew workforce. Every spring, we drove our boats to the Nice Salt Lake—the one place for miles with sufficient water to row on. The lake’s salty water stank of sulfur, which made all the pieces it touched stink too. 1000’s of brine flies swarmed our docks. They’d carpet my arms so thickly that once I seemed down, I’d see extra flies than flesh.
However away from shore, I noticed magnificence throughout. The water stretched to this point in each path that I couldn’t see the land past. Except the wind picked up, the lake lay flat, gleaming and blue. Mountains appeared to pierce its floor and clone themselves within the ripples under. They seemed like spinning tops—stretching from peaks to flared bases, then winnowing again to sharp factors.
I observed with awe how the lake teemed with life. I’d look down, and what I assumed had been floating flakes of sediment would start to swim. They had been brine shrimp: crustaceans that carry the Nice Salt Lake’s ecosystem on their centimeter-long backs. Waterfowl stuffed the sky, diving to dip their beaks and spindly legs into my wake.
The yr I left for school, certainly one of my sisters joined the crew workforce. I’d hoped we may bond over rowing on the lake. However that November, a former teammate known as me. She stated our workforce wouldn’t be rowing on the Nice Salt Lake subsequent yr—that the workforce may by no means row on it once more. Utah was in a drought, and the lake had shriveled to its lowest ranges on report.
The shoreline had receded a lot that our docks had been unusable. A lot of the boats had been hauled out of the water because it crept down their bows. The boats that remained lay beached in a dry marina—a ghost city the place, simply months earlier than, I’d rowed each afternoon.
The Nice Salt Lake lies 20 miles northwest of my home in Salt Lake Metropolis. You see it everytime you take a look at the horizon: a streak of silver separating land and sky.
From its perch, the lake sustains all of northern Utah. Moisture evaporates from its floor and falls within the close by mountains (largely as snow, giving Utah fabulous snowboarding). Come spring, this water trickles via Utah’s valleys and returns to the lake. On its means, it hydrates the crops, animals, and folks alongside the close by Wasatch Entrance, house to Salt Lake Metropolis.
The primary time I visited the Nice Salt Lake, on a fifth-grade discipline journey, it lined 1,700 sq. miles. Although I didn’t comprehend it but, that was half the dimensions it had been 30 years earlier, when my mother was a fifth-grader. Within the Nineteen Eighties, the lake unfold over 3,300 sq. miles—an space bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware mixed.
Now my youngest sisters are in fifth grade. And once more the lake has halved, dropping to 888 sq. miles in 2022. With out significant change, the Nice Salt Lake will vanish inside my lifetime.
This might spell disaster for Utah. State lawmaker Joel Ferry advised The New York Instances that the Nice Salt Lake’s disappearance would represent an “environmental nuclear bomb.” Water provides would dwindle, and ecosystems would perish—from the brine shrimp within the lake to the over 10 million migratory birds that refuel in its marshes annually. Utah’s inhabitants might vanish with them.
When Utah industrialized, mines started improperly dumping waste, which then leached into the lake, polluting it with heavy metals like arsenic. As a terminal lake, the Nice Salt Lake has inlets however no retailers aside from evaporation. All of the metals which have ever been poured into it have amassed in its lake mattress over time, with no means out.
Now retreating water ranges are exposing stretches of cracked, arsenic-laden lake mattress. Windstorms have begun to blow throughout the mattress, choosing up clouds of toxic mud. They carry it into the Wasatch Entrance, which is house to 2.6 million of Utah’s 3.4 million residents. Inhaling even strange mud might be devastating to well being, however arsenic-laced mud carries an additional hazard. As extra storms from the Nice Salt Lake’s dried basin arrive, the air will flip poisonous. Tens of millions of Utahans—together with my whole household—will breathe poison.
This mud gained’t kill you in a single day, however the EPA hyperlinks it to “bronchial asthma, coronary heart assaults, and untimely dying.” Related disasters have occurred to different lakes, and close by cities haven’t fared nicely. After Owens Lake, a saline lake in California, dried up and poisonous mud storms began, cities alongside its coast emptied. The arid lake mattress stuffed the encompassing air with PM10—tiny particles which have critical well being results if inhaled. Owens Lake turned the nation’s largest single PM10 supply, spreading air pollution throughout the area. The Nice Salt Lake is 15 instances bigger than Owens Lake ever was. Its collapse could be much more catastrophic.
It terrifies me to consider what’s going to occur to my neighborhood if the Nice Salt Lake vanishes. My youthful siblings all have extreme bronchial asthma, and two dwell with simply 60 % of regular lung capability.
When my brother visited the Nice Salt Lake on his personal fifth-grade discipline journey, his rowdy class kicked up mud on the lake shore, which plunged him right into a extreme bronchial asthma assault. Thankfully, he had his inhaler with him. However what’s going to occur to my siblings if these mud storms invade Salt Lake Metropolis—and the air outdoors our home? Will my brother have the ability to survive in a spot the place he can barely breathe?
My household has the means to go away Utah, and if the lake dries up, I do know we’ll. That’s what occurred to the cities round Owens Lake: Those that may afford it fled. The much less lucky stayed and handled the results.
The subsequent few years will decide the Nice Salt Lake’s destiny. Utah faces two choices: We will reply with apathy and watch because the lake disappears, together with lots of Utah’s residents. Or we are able to get up to the hazard and enact substantive laws, supply water-conservation incentives, and applicable cash to save lots of the lake.
Saving the Nice Salt Lake gained’t be simple. The College of Utah estimates that the quantity of water that flows into the lake should improve by 33 % for it to achieve wholesome water ranges by the 2050s. This implies Utahans should make sacrifices. We should curb municipal water use—by eliminating water-intensive lawns, for instance.
Utah’s agriculture business, the biggest client of water from the lake, should additionally cut back its consumption. It seemingly gained’t do that by itself, so Utah’s Legislature should go laws. And Utah’s authorities should tighten water-use rules round thirsty crops like alfalfa and make investments state funds to lease water rights again from agricultural teams in order that extra water can move to the lake.
Such actions shall be politically charged and economically expensive within the brief time period. However they may make sure that Utah, its individuals, and its industries survive far into the long run.
I fear that my siblings might by no means know the Utah I do know. My littlest sisters are 10 years youthful than me, and rather a lot can change in a decade. Will they ever ski via lake-effect snow, or discover themselves enveloped within the good sunsets that may be seen solely whenever you’re rowing on the Nice Salt Lake?
I pray they may. However greater than that, I rely on myself and different Utahans to take motion.
The Case for Letting Noncitizens Vote
by Fatimah Azeem
Carlos Perea remembers listening to his mom’s tales about dodging immigration raids within the textile factories of Orange County, California.
“There was this fascinating dynamic in Orange County on the time, being closely anti-immigrant however counting on immigrant labor,” Perea stated. “It confirmed me how we’re handled as Mexicans, as undocumented individuals.”
Perea, a Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, got here to the US at 14, becoming a member of his mom, who had immigrated a decade earlier. He arrived in Santa Ana simply because the George W. Bush administration launched sweeping office raids concentrating on undocumented staff throughout the nation. On the identical time, Los Angeles erupted in historic protests, together with “La Gran Marcha,” the place greater than half 1,000,000 individuals marched for immigrants’ rights. A couple of years later, Perea would turn out to be concerned within the Dreamers motion, which challenged President Barack Obama’s mass deportation insurance policies.
In 2012, after years of stress, Obama enacted DACA via government motion. However the prospect of extra protecting pathways to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented individuals died in Congress and has by no means been revived. “A variety of these fights began to sharpen our politics,” stated Perea, now the manager director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Financial Justice. “Are we going to proceed to have our immigrant communities be this chess piece for the Democratic Get together or Republican particular pursuits? Are we going to continually be tossed round and acquire no significant end result?”
For 1000’s of progressives in Santa Ana, the best way ahead was clear: Energy wanted to return from the underside up. Recognizing a “disaster of democracy” on the native degree, Perea and others within the Latino and Vietnamese communities of Santa Ana started campaigning for the correct to vote as noncitizens.
In November 2024, these efforts culminated in a measure on the Santa Ana poll that may prolong the correct to vote to noncitizens typically municipal elections by 2028. The primary of its sort to be proposed in Southern California, Measure DD in the end failed by a margin of 59 to 41 %. But the result wasn’t all unhealthy: “This was one thing individuals thought was inconceivable to even get on the poll,” Perea recalled. “I believe it speaks volumes that there have been a lot of individuals in Santa Ana prepared for noncitizen voting on our first strive.”
Twenty-two localities in the US already enable noncitizen voting of some kind, together with San Francisco, Oakland, the District of Columbia, and a number of other cities and cities in Maryland and Vermont. Every of those municipalities has distinct legal guidelines governing noncitizen voting. Many enable solely lawful everlasting US residents to vote, and most restrict it to oldsters in school-board elections.
Measure DD was one of many boldest and most inclusive proposals so far, with its definition of noncitizen encompassing everlasting residents, refugees, undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients, and people on college or work permits.
“We established a story—now individuals know what noncitizen voting is,” Perea stated. “It’s going to be our job now to make the case of presenting this because the North Star of the [immigrant-rights] motion. It’s going to be a tricky battle, however we now have nothing to lose.”
From the nation’s founding till 1926, 40 states at varied instances allowed noncitizen immigrants to vote in native, state, or federal elections, in keeping with Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State College. “Historical past flies within the face of this concept that immigrants by no means may or by no means ought to be voting—that it’s improper, that it’s unconstitutional, that it’s unlawful. Actually, historical past reveals that it’s the other,” Hayduk stated. “I prefer to say that it’s as American as apple pie and older than our nationwide pastime, baseball.”
Noncitizen voting, then known as “alien suffrage,” was seen as a pathway to foster citizenship and integration. Tens of millions of immigrants from Western and Northern Europe voted, usually advancing antislavery and pro-worker causes. However these legal guidelines started to vary as extra immigrants got here to the US from Southern and Japanese Europe—Italians, Slovaks, and Jews—who had been usually seen as nonwhite or as related to socialist and anarchist ideologies.
Between 1840 and 1900, voter turnout in presidential elections was between 70 and 80 % of the eligible inhabitants. By 1924, nevertheless, voter turnout had plummeted to 49 %, coinciding with broader efforts to curtail each voting rights and immigration. The Chinese language Exclusion Act of 1882 marked the start of those restrictive insurance policies; it was adopted by limits on immigration that lowered annual admissions from as many as 800,000 to 150,000 individuals. These modifications—together with restrictive election reforms corresponding to state ballot taxes, literacy exams, and felon-disenfranchisement legal guidelines—restricted democratic and progressive prospects for many years. Arkansas was the final state to get rid of alien suffrage in 1926.
Immigrant voting was restored in New York Metropolis in a restricted means in the course of the civil-rights period, led by African American and Latino activists as half of a bigger motion for neighborhood management in school-board elections. Within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, the sanctuary motion impressed the restoration of noncitizen voting in Maryland.
In 1993, present Consultant Jamie Raskin (D-MD), then a legislation professor, wrote a seminal law-journal article that put immigrant voting again on the map and helped Takoma Park, Maryland, enact noncitizen-voting legal guidelines. “He stated on the time, ‘Immigrant rights are just like the civil rights of the day.’ And by that logic, noncitizen voting is the suffrage motion of our time,” Hayduk stated.
In early 2023, pushed by Santa Ana’s rising immigrant inhabitants (in keeping with county knowledge, 29.5 % of town’s residents are foreign-born, largely from Asia and Central America), the marketing campaign to revive noncitizen voting discovered its footing. A coalition known as Santa Ana Households for Honest Elections spearheaded the marketing campaign, with help from the ACLU of Southern California.
Mayor Valerie Amezcua strongly opposed Measure DD, citing issues in regards to the bills of a brand new voting system and expensive litigation. Moreover, two Metropolis Council members, backed by the police union and the Police Officers Affiliation, opposed the measure, and one progressive council member who was working for reelection known as it too radical a step.
The coalition pushed again and seized on the centuries-old American slogan “No taxation with out illustration,” framing noncitizen voting as each a democratic and an financial subject. Immigrants in Santa Ana contribute greater than $117 million in state and native taxes but haven’t any political say in how these funds are spent.
“Strong and inclusive political participation results in extra various consultant our bodies, making representatives extra aware of all constituents and fostering simpler public coverage,” Hayduk stated. Research on immigrant-voting packages in the US, in addition to international research on noncitizen voting in Sweden, Norway, and Latin America, have discovered optimistic outcomes in selling naturalization and immigrant integration. Over 40 nations on almost each continent enable for some type of noncitizen voting in native, regional, and even nationwide elections.
The opposition to Measure DD raised greater than $1 million, whereas the grassroots marketing campaign in its favor operated on a finances of simply $10,000. Perea stated that this degree of expenditure on council races or poll initiatives was “unprecedented” in Santa Ana. “[It] speaks volumes as to who feels threatened by immigrants and refugees having a seat on the desk,” Hernandez stated.
As Measure DD failed in November 2024, voters in eight states—Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—handed constitutional amendments to ban noncitizen voting. The proponents of those measures, like Michael Meredith, a Republican state consultant in Kentucky, argued that they had been a option to “get forward of” potential modifications to native charters which may enfranchise noncitizens sooner or later and to safeguard elections for eligible voters.
A surge in election skepticism and anti-immigrant rhetoric accompanied the amendments, pushed partly by then-President-elect Donald Trump and Home Speaker Mike Johnson. Each perpetuated false claims about noncitizens voting in federal elections. In September, Johnson threatened to close down Congress if the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act— a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections—was not handed.
Even so, the combat to develop voting rights continues. Elsewhere within the state, the California Native Voting Coalition continues to push for native noncitizen-voting initiatives statewide. Related campaigns are underway throughout the state and the remainder of the nation. In the meantime, the authorized problem to New York Metropolis’s noncitizen-voting legislation is ready to obtain a last ruling within the coming months.
“I believe [Trump] goes to radicalize lots of our neighborhood,” Perea stated. “Many people are going to turn out to be lively. If the intense proper is saying essentially the most outrageous issues about immigrants, we’re going to need to push for essentially the most radical concept.”
“We Deserve Life”: College students Converse Out From Gaza
by Tareq Alsourani and William Liang
At daybreak in southern Gaza, Hasan Barghouth wakes to the decision of the muezzin. He steps out of the tent the place his household lives and makes his well past rows of plastic shelters to the shade of an olive tree, the place he has arrange a wood desk. The bottom crawls with bugs, however right here he escapes the mess of every day tent life. He brings a laptop computer with no battery, wired to a photo voltaic panel. (“One thing solely individuals in Gaza know the right way to do,” he says.) Earlier than the warmth of the solar turns into insufferable, Hasan works via his classes.
As of Could 2025, in keeping with UN companies, a minimum of 95 % of Gaza’s faculties had been incapacitated or destroyed, and greater than 5,400 college students, 261 academics, and 95 college professors have been killed, with the numbers rising every day. Larger schooling has been, within the phrases of the France24 information community, “wiped off the map,” as all 17 of Gaza’s universities lie in ruins. Greater than a decade in the past, the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi coined the phrase scholasticide to explain the deliberate dismantling of the establishments, individuals, and processes that make schooling doable. In the present day, Gaza is essentially the most full manifestation of that time period.
Hasan ought to be getting ready for the Tawjihi, a high-stakes examination that determines faculty placement in Palestine, however the battle has postponed the take a look at indefinitely. Although variations of the Tawjihi are nonetheless administered outdoors the Gaza Strip, high-schooler Anas AlSous, like tens of 1000’s of different college students, has not been in a position to take the examination. Based on the UN, greater than 76,000 college students have missed the take a look at in the course of the previous two tutorial years, and UNICEF reviews that almost 40,000 college students in Gaza missed it in 2024 alone. A small on-line session this yr reached about 1,500 candidates.
Gaza’s shortages are all too acquainted: electrical energy, water, meals, and—critically for college kids—Web entry. Many stroll miles to discover a sign to obtain lectures and be a part of classes, gathering in on-line networks of scholars who attempt to protect a way of highschool neighborhood. Notebooks are so laborious to return by that some college students remedy their math issues on the backs of flyers. Lots of Hasan’s friends have given up on their classes, as a substitute spending their days within the seek for meals. “They drop their pens,” he stated, “to both eat or get shot.”
The suitable to schooling is assured underneath human-rights treaties just like the Conference on the Rights of the Little one. Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Conference additionally obliges an occupying energy to facilitate the right working of all establishments dedicated to the care and schooling of youngsters. However Israel rejects each, claiming that solely the narrower framework of humanitarian legislation governing lively hostilities applies in Gaza, recasting the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s schooling system because the collateral injury of battle. Even underneath humanitarian legislation, Israel is required to differentiate civilians from navy targets and to protect fundamental civilian infrastructure, but it has proven no proportionality or restraint in its assault. Chandni Desai, an assistant professor on the College of Toronto, wrote that such concentrating on is “a key characteristic of genocide.”
Eighteen-year-old Menna Abu Imara remembers the morning her education ended on October 7, 2023. “In a number of seconds, all the pieces was paused. The battle began, and faculties closed their doorways,” she stated. Inside days, her home was bombed, killing her father, uncles, and grandparents. She survived, critically wounded, alongside together with her mom and siblings. Menna has not accomplished eleventh or twelfth grade. She earned a scholarship overseas however then misplaced it—nobody can go away Gaza, and even when she may, Menna can not journey alone, as her proper arm stays disabled.
“I really feel like I’m betraying the useless by pretending life goes on, as if the straightforward act of finding out is a sort of lie,” stated 18-year-old Yara Nasser, who cowrote the guide Gaza Held in Time with Tareq AlSourani. “How can I scribble down equations when my neighbor’s youngster was buried yesterday? However to present it up seems like give up. Like we’re giving up the long run.”
College students advised us that hours as soon as used to jot down essays or put together for exams are actually spent ready in line for meals and water. “My final purpose of securing admission to a college become a mission of survival,” stated AlSous.
In weeks of conversations by way of e-mail and letters, we’ve heard accounts from dozens of scholars in Gaza and in exile which might be uniformly grim. But many proceed to pursue their schooling, apply for scholarships, dream of careers, and picture futures realizing full nicely they could by no means attain them. They perceive that to maintain finding out is to insist on a future the battle is attempting to disclaim them.
The phrase scholasticide captures this double actuality: the destruction of lecture rooms and college, but in addition the theft of alternative. It’s a means of making certain that Palestinians can not rebuild, can not produce professionals, can not narrate their very own story. However even amid exhaustion and hunger, college students cling to their books and laptops in an assertion that life itself continues to be doable.
Underneath an olive tree, Hasan explains why he research—why, when the meals traces eat up a lot of the day and the possibilities of utilizing his classes are slim, he insists on persevering with his schooling. His reply is temporary. “We research,” he says, “not as a result of we now have the privilege to dream, however as a result of it’s the one means we are able to scream that we deserve life.”
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