Portugal

The general strike demonstrates that struggle can open up paths for the left

Thursday 18 December 2025, by Jorge Costa


Held on 29 and 30 November, the 14th Convention of the Left Bloc took place at a critical moment: a few days before the general strike on 11 December against the new labour law; after parliamentary and municipal elections with mediocre results for the left-wing parties; and less than two months before presidential elections that reflect the current hegemony of the right.


The general strike, the first since the days of the Troika, was called by the two main trade union confederations, CGTP and UGT, which has only happened in half of the ten general strikes held since the end of the dictatorship. Despite the current isolation of the left, the mere affirmation of the trade union movement’s initiative made it possible to change the terms of the public debate. It highlighted the process of social regression led by the right and camouflaged by the deafening noise of the campaigns of hatred and lies that monopolise the public space.

The brutality of the labour package reveals a minority and unstable government, which aims to do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible, while it still has the opportunity to permanently undermine the position of labour in the balance of social forces. In this context, the general strike was a success in terms of participation, not only in the state sector: minimum services in air transport, strikes at Volkswagen, Mitsubishi Fuso and also in the commerce and industry sectors. According to the CGTP, more than three million workers joined the struggle. Despite the almost total absence of transport, the demonstration in Lisbon brought together many thousands of people, mostly young and non-unionised workers, who made their presence felt.

The general strike is a political success: its call, after 12 years and in a unified manner, has created mass awareness of the seriousness of the offensive and has made it difficult to form a PSD-Chega parliamentary majority to pass the legislative package. Only employers are enthusiastic about the new laws; in surveys, two-thirds of respondents say they agree with the reasons for the strike; none of the right-wing presidential candidates dares to openly support the counter-reform; trade unionists affiliated with the ruling party participated in the general strike and, on the same day, the government’s attempt to describe the strike as insignificant was met with ridicule. The leader of the neo-fascists, who for weeks attacked the unions and defended the new laws, now claims to understand the strikers’ reasons and talks of withdrawing some of the absurd elements of the government’s proposal. We will see what political price André Ventura is willing to pay to please the bourgeoisie with his parliamentary vote.

The annus horribilis of 2025

With the left at its worst result in history and the PS overtaken by the neo-fascists, immediately after the parliamentary elections last May (read the assessment here), the new socialist leadership made it clear that it is willing to guarantee the approval of the Montenegrin government’s state budget. This, at the same time as the right-wing counter-reforms are being approved by agreement with Chega. We will return to the current political situation later.

In the October municipal elections, the shift to the right became more pronounced, with the right wing conquering the largest cities. The PCP, with a strong municipal tradition, lost a third of its elected representatives and the two district capitals it still governed. The Bloco and Livre, allied in some twenty major cities, obtained weak results, even worse when they ran separately.

As for the presidential elections, the polls give an advantage to two right-wing candidates (Marques Mendes and Gouveia e Melo) and the leader of the far right (André Ventura), all of them around 20%. The candidate supported by the PS – a figure on the far right of the party – appears to be out of the running for the second round and on a par with the ultra-liberal candidate (10%). The candidacy of the former coordinator of the Bloco, Catarina Martins, is around 5%, followed by those of the PCP and Livre. Thus, the Portuguese right could consolidate its hegemony in 2026, controlling the government, the presidency and, for the first time in history, a parliamentary majority of more than two-thirds, capable of passing constitutional reforms without the Socialist Party or any other left-wing party.

A party rethinking itself in new circumstances

Despite lower militant participation reflecting this cycle of setbacks, the Bloco Convention was a moment of respite and of encounter between the Bloco and its plurality. Four political motions were voted on at the 14th Congress, and motions A (65 elected), S (8), H (4) and B (3) will be represented on the elected National Bureau. For motion A, the Bloc ‘must be a driving force for convergence, while reclaiming the political space that only it occupies and from which it can grow: loyalty to the exploited classes and a strategy to expand its movements; a commitment to pluralism and convergence as the foundation for building the socialist party; internationalism against all empires and oligarchs’. José Manuel Pureza, 66, a university professor and former MP, succeeds Mariana Mortágua, who decided not to stand again as national coordinator. In recent years, Pureza has been the visible face of the fight for the right to assisted death and has participated in initiatives for dialogue between Marxists and Christians.

In addition to the political diagnosis, the Convention carried out a broad renewal and rejuvenation of the leadership bodies – the National Bureau and the Political Commission – whose composition includes 50% new members. The Convention debate was also marked by issues of party organisation and the need to intensify regularity, autonomy and participation in the democratic life of the Bloc. What decides political life is the creation of grassroots organisations and militant working groups, communities of reflection and action.

Five issues on the situation in Portugal

1. The PSD government and the PSD/Iniciativa Liberal/Chega parliamentary majority are carrying out a social assault on labour, immigration and housing. And Prime Minister Luís Montenegro has achieved the feat of getting the PS to normalise the process, turning the state budget into a product of the central bloc. The case is strange: Montenegro thus articulates a parliamentary base of 95% of MPs. We are witnessing the decomposition of traditional politics, which would not be bad news if this decomposition were not led by the oligarchy: the centre is being dragged to the right and both are following in the wake of Chega.

2. The weakness of the left is the result of the geringonça, the agreements between the PS, the Bloco and the PCP signed in 2015 and which remained in force until 2019. What remained engraved in the popular consciousness from that period was not the real progress achieved, nor the Bloco’s reasons after 2019, the vote against the PS’s budgets, nor the crisis orchestrated between Costa and Marcelo to fabricate an absolute majority. What remained engraved was the PS government from 2019 onwards, a post-Covid period led by mediocre rulers, who left the state coffers lacking money for healthcare, housing policy and working conditions.

The image of the left, even after the geringonça, remained stuck with the bad government of 2019-2022 and the absolute majority. We did not have the strength to avoid this. And that would not have changed, nor will it change, with words alone. It will change when we manage to interpret the revolt, take the initiative and play a new leading role in the struggle. Without that, nothing will be easy in the future for any left-wing party.

3. The difficulties faced by the parties do not mean that it is impossible to mount struggles. The Italian left has been in tatters for two decades, but it organised a general strike involving millions of people in support of Palestine. Here we are on the eve of another general strike, a critical moment to change the political atmosphere. And even in a year as bad as 2025, there have been very important signs: the largest demonstration of immigrant workers in the last decade, the emergence of black youth from the suburbs of Lisbon, the expansion of solidarity with Palestine in the days of the flotilla. In these struggles, the left grows stronger and breaks its isolation, contesting the issues of public debate through concrete mobilisation. This is also where the Bloc breathes.

4. It is not the difficulties of the parties that dictate the need for convergence. What imposes convergence today is the need to face the quagmire: we have a government allied with the neo-fascists and supported by the PS. In the struggles for public services and housing, for work and against the fascistisation of social life, it is necessary to identify the lines of confrontation. Let us then think about the politics of movements, encourage the presence of activists, and open all channels of dialogue.

5. Let us do the calculations that everyone has already learned to do: in separate electoral vehicles, the left offers councillors and deputies to Chega and contributes to the swamp overflowing and elevating the neo-fascists to the leading political force, as is already happening in several European countries. The Bloc has its social space, which comes from the difference in its politics and programme, its worldview and its party culture. All of this, as we well know, radically distinguishes us from parties such as Livre or the PCP. These differences are as important as the real need to converge in the struggles and offer the people an electoral alternative based on what the left has in common. A pole that prevents democracy from being reduced to power games between Luís Montenegro and his two partners, Chega and the PS.

12 December 2025

Translated by International Viewpoint from Vientosur.


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Jorge Costa is a member of the full-time leadership of the Bloco de Esquerda and of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International. He is co-author of The Owners of Portugal - One hundred years of economic power (1910-2010) and The Bourgeoisie – who they are, how they live and how they rule (2014) with Francisco Louçã and João Teixeira Lopes.

France marks International Migrants Day amid growing pressure on migrant workers


Issued on: 18/12/2025 - FRANCE24

On International Migrants Day, hundreds of groups across France are mobilizing to highlight migrants’ contributions and struggles as immigration rules tighten and expulsions rise. Migrant workers remain vital to sectors like restaurants and construction, even as many face years of insecurity, with expulsions up sharply in 2024.

Video by: Olivia BIZOT

Spanish police evict hundreds of migrants from squat deemed safety hazard

By Christina Thykjaer & Gavin Blackburn
Published on 17/12/2025 - AP

The Badalona town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around 100 migrants in the Catalan city near Barcelona caught fire, killing four people.

Police in Spain carried out eviction orders on Wednesday to clear an abandoned school building where around 400 mostly undocumented migrants were living north of Barcelona.

Many sub-Saharan migrants, mainly from Senegal and Gambia, had moved into the empty school building in Badalona — a working-class city that borders Barcelona — since it was left abandoned in 2023.

Badalona Mayor Xavier García Albiol announced the evictions in a post on X.

"As I had promised, the eviction of the 400 illegal squatters in the B9 school in Badalona begins," he wrote.

Albiol, of the conservative Popular Party (PP), has built his political career on an anti-immigration stance.

A migrant's belongings are packed before he leaves as police in the background prepares to carry out eviction orders at an abandoned school in Badalona, 17 December, 2025 

AP Photo

Knowing that the eviction in the middle of winter was coming, most of the occupants had left the squat to try to find other shelter before police in riot gear from Catalonia's regional police Mossos d'Esquadraentered the school’s premises early in the morning under court orders.

Those who had waited left peacefully.

The judicial order made the Badalona town hall provide the evicted people with access to social services, but it did not oblige local authorities to find alternative housing for all the squatters.

Lawyer Marta Llonch, who represents the squatters, said that many people would likely end up without shelter in the cold.

"Many people are going to sleep on the street tonight," Llonch said. "Just because you evict these people it doesn’t mean they disappear. If you don’t give them an alternative place to live they will now be on the street, which will be a problem for them and the city."

Many of the squatters lived from selling scrap metal collected from the streets. Others had residency and work permits but were forced to live there because they could not afford housing during a cost-of-living crunch that is making it difficult even for working Spaniards to buy or rent homes.

That housing crisis has led to widespread social angst and public protests.

People gather during a demonstration to protest high housing costs in Barcelona, 5 April, 2025 AP Photo

The Badalona town hall had argued that the squat was a public safety hazard. In 2020, an old factory occupied by around 100 migrants in Badalona caught fire, killing four people.

Like other southern European countries, Spain has for more than a decade seen migrants come to the country after risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean or Atlantic in small boats.

While many developed countries have taken a hard-line position against migration, Spain’s left-wing government has said that legal migration has helped its economy grow.

Trial of NGO workers accused of assisting 'illegal' migration opens in Tunisia

Aid workers accused of assisting irregular migration to Tunisia went on trial on Monday, as Amnesty International criticised what it called "the relentless criminalisation of civil society" in the country.


Issued on: 15/12/2025 - RFI

People hold placards bearing the image of Sherifa Riahi, former director of Terre d'Asile Tunisie, on 15 December 2025 in Tunis. © Lilia Blaise/RFI


Six staff members of the Tunisian branch of the France Terre d'Asile aid group, along with 17 municipal workers from the eastern city of Sousse, face charges of sheltering migrants and facilitating their "illegal entry and residence".

If convicted, they face up to 10 years in prison.

Migration is a sensitive issue in Tunisia, a key transit point for tens of thousands of people seeking to reach Europe each year.

A former head of Terre d'Asile Tunisie, Sherifa Riahi, is among the accused and has been detained for more than 19 months, according to her lawyer Abdellah Ben Meftah.

Two years on from EU deal, violence against migrants in Tunisia remains rife

'Bogus criminal trial'

"The only thing I'm sure of is that Sherifa and the other members of the association did nothing wrong. I'm certain they'll be released sooner or later. Will it be this Monday or at another hearing? I don't know, it's 50-50," Ben Meftah told RFI.

He also told French news agency AFP that the accused had carried out their work as part of a project approved by the state and in "direct coordination" with the government.

Amnesty denounced what it described as a "bogus criminal trial" and called on Tunisian authorities to drop the charges.

"They are being prosecuted simply for their legitimate work providing vital assistance and protection to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in precarious situations," Sara Hashash, Amnesty's deputy MENA (Middle East North Africa) chief, said in the statement.

The defendants were arrested in May 2024 along with about a dozen humanitarian workers, including anti-racism pioneer Saadia Mosbah, whose trial is set to start later this month.

Driven from camp to camp, Tunisia’s migrants still dream of Europe

Illegal migrants

In February 2023, President Kais Saied said "hordes of illegal migrants", many from sub-Saharan Africa, posed a demographic threat to the Arab-majority country.

His speech triggered a series of racially motivated attacks as thousands of sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia were pushed out of their homes and jobs.

Thousands were repatriated or attempted to cross the Mediterranean, while others were expelled to the desert borders with Algeria and Libya, where at least a hundred died that summer.

This came as the European Union boosted efforts to curb arrivals on its southern shores, including a 255-million-euro deal with Tunis.

(with newswires)

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MULTITUDE - WordPress.com

Page 1. MULTITUDE. WAR AND DEMOCRACY. IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE. MICHAEL HARDT. ANTONIO NEGRI ... pdf. 33. Richard Haass, for example, the U.S. State Department ...

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EMPIRE - Monoskop

Empire / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical ... 4.3 The Multitude against Empire. 393. Notes. 415. Index. 473. Page 11. PREFACE.

Wealthy nations curb labor migration as

demand surges

Nik Martin

DW

17/12/2025 

Even before Donald Trump returned to the White House, anti-immigration politics were reshaping migration flows to high-income countries. Borders have been tightened despite economies facing urgent labor shortages.

Around 600,000 Indian workers moved abroad in 2024

Image: Adnan Abidi/Reuters


The world's wealthiest economies are crying out for foreign workers, despite rising anti‑immigration sentiment, particularly in the United States and Europe. Yet a little-discussed report released last month shows labor migration is falling globally, even as ageing societies face mounting shortages.

The decline began well before the reelection of Donald Trump, who campaigned last year on a promise to sharply curb immigration.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which tracks global economic and social policy, work-related migration to its 38 member states dropped by more than a fifth last year (21%).

The OECD's International Migration Outlook 2025 report found the drop was driven less by demand than by rising political opposition to immigration and tighter visa regimes in other advanced economies. Temporary work migration continued to rise.

Decline driven by two countries

"Most of the ... decline in permanent labor migration was driven by policy changes in the United Kingdom and New Zealand," Ana Damas de Matos, senior policy analyst at the OECD, told DW. "In both cases, permanent labor migration remained above 2019 levels."

In New Zealand, the drop was tied to the end of a one‑off post‑pandemic residence pathway that had allowed more than 200,000 temporary migrants and dependents to settle permanently. The country's largest one-off residency scheme closed in July 2022.

Post-Brexit, the UK reformed the Health and Care Worker visa route, tightening employer eligibility and barring dependents, resulting in a sharp reduction in visa applications. The OECD singled out health care as a sector where curbs risk deepening labor shortages.

Seeta Sharma, a migration specialist who has advised the United Nations as well as India's national and state governments, warned that the UK's reforms, including a move to tighten eligibility for international students hoping to work after graduation, could backfire.

"The student‑to‑work pathway is now being curtailed," Sharma told DW. "When that happens, applications will slow, because Indians, for example, are not going to spend large sums on education abroad if there’s no clear return on investment."

The OECD report showed that India was by far the largest country of origin for migrant workers settling in its member countries at 600,000 last year, followed by China and Romania.

US curbs on high-skilled visas threaten tech sector

In the US, stricter caps on H‑1B visas — the main program that allows foreign professionals in fields like technology, engineering and medicine to work in the country — were introduced under the Biden administration. Trump has since substantially increased the visa cost for employers to $100,000 (€84,800), up from $2000-$5000. His broader agenda has focused on limiting permanent pathways.

Australia, meanwhile, raised salary thresholds for skilled visas, while Canada adjusted pathways for temporary workers, also contributing to the wider decline in job-related migration. Nordic countries also saw large declines, with Finland recording a 36% drop compared to the previous year.

In Germany, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz's tighter immigration policies helped a 12% fall in permanent migration inflows last year, when 586,000 foreign workers entered the country. The number of people arriving on work visas was 32% lower than the previous year. These reforms have been expanded by his successor, Friedrich Merz's government.

Herbert Brücker, professor of economics at Berlin's Humboldt University, thinks the declines are storing up trouble for the German economy.

"For many years, Germany benefited from an average migration of 550,000 people per year," Brücker told DW. "We need migration to replace retiring workers. Without it, we cannot hold the labor supply stable."

Several OECD countries have raised criteria for work-based visas for foreign nationals

Image: Jens Kalaene/dpa/picture alliance

Strong demand for migrants in Europe

Across the European Union, around two‑thirds of jobs created between 2019 and 2023 were filled by non‑EU citizens, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), underscoring how dependent Europe has already become on migrant labor.

Globally, there were 167.7 million migrant workers in 2022, according to International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates. This accounted for 4.7% of the total global labor force. More than two-thirds of them (114.7 million) lived in high-income countries.

Despite last year's drop, global work-related migration remains above pre-pandemic levels. But the OECD report reveals how those inflows can be abruptly curbed by political resistance, stoked by fears over illegal migration, rather than economic demand, which remains at record highs.

Trump's second‑term agenda has amplified that dynamic, with executive orders enacted since he returned to office in January aimed at curbing both legal and illegal immigration. The Trump administration argues these are necessary to safeguard US workers and ensure a skills‑based system.

Taiwan: Migrant workers face bias in booming chip industry  02:44

Temporary visas over permanent pathways

Temporary or seasonal labor migration held steady last year even as permanent inflows declined, according to the OECD report, reflecting governments' preference for short-term schemes they can expand or contract at will.

"The appetite is: 'Let's get in people when we want them and close the doors when we don't. But let’s not have these "different" people in our land permanently,'" Sharma lamented.

Seasonal and temporary worker programs remain in demand across Australia, Europe and North America, where employers in the agriculture, care and construction sectors have plugged gaps in their workforce.

The OECD notes that temporary migration programs are increasingly used for technology and other high‑skilled workers, too.

\

Biden restricted access to US permanent residence; Trump has gone further

Image: Mehaniq/Panthermedia/IMAGO

Red tape keeps migrants in lower-skilled jobs

As well as attracting more work-based migrants, the OECD urged advanced economies to focus on better integrating them into the labor market. The club of advanced economies cited language training and access to social services as key requirements, along with the recognition of skills and qualifications to help foreign workers contribute fully in their host countries. Often, they're employed in much lower-skilled jobs than they trained for.

Brücker, who is also head of migration research at Germany's Institute for Employment Research (IAB), noted that reforms intended to make Europe's largest economy more attractive have not worked due to a slow and bureaucratic approval process.

"The recognition of degrees and vocational training takes years and that makes it difficult for skilled workers to come," he told DW. As a result, we are now short of around three million workers."

Policymakers are also being urged to create clearer pathways that allow temporary migrant workers to transition into permanent status, ensuring their skills are fully utilized and reducing labor shortages.

While Trump often speaks positively about the need for skills‑based migration, his first year back in the White House has been marked by efforts to dismantle these avenues, reinforcing the divide between economic need and political will.

Sharma noted that often-angry rhetoric by Trump and other right-wing politicians over immigration sends "shock waves" internationally, shaping perceptions in India and beyond.

"The story coming back is that this is an unfriendly country, where it’s tough to get a job … those narratives play a huge part in migration movements," Sharma told DW, adding that if the US continues to curb work-related immigration, it could lead to more illegal migrant flows.

Edited by: Uwe Hessler

Nik Martin is one of DW's team of business reporters.

 

We may never be able to tell if AI becomes conscious, argues philosopher

University of Cambridge

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• The only reasonable stance on conscious AI is “agnosticism”: that we won’t, and may never, be able to tell, says a philosophy-of-consciousness expert. 
   
• This gulf in our knowledge could be exploited by a tech industry intent on selling the “next level of AI cleverness”, argues Dr Tom McClelland.
   
• “If you have an emotional connection with something premised on it being conscious and it’s not, that has the potential to be existentially toxic.”

A University of Cambridge philosopher argues that our evidence for what constitutes consciousness is far too limited to tell if or when artificial intelligence has made the leap – and a valid test for doing so will remain out of reach for the foreseeable future. 

As artificial consciousness shifts from the realm of sci-fi to become a pressing ethical issue, Dr Tom McClelland says the only “justifiable stance” is agnosticism: we simply won’t be able to tell, and this will not change for a long time – if ever.

While issues of AI rights are typically linked to consciousness, McClelland argues that consciousness alone is not enough to make AI matter ethically. What matters is a particular type of consciousness – known as sentience – which includes positive and negative feelings.  

“Consciousness would see AI develop perception and become self-aware, but this can still be a neutral state,” said McClelland, from Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

“Sentience involves conscious experiences that are good or bad, which is what makes an entity capable of suffering or enjoyment. This is when ethics kicks in,” he said. “Even if we accidentally make conscious AI, it's unlikely to be the kind of consciousness we need to worry about.” 

“For example, self-driving cars that experience the road in front of them would be a huge deal. But ethically, it doesn't matter. If they start to have an emotional response to their destinations, that’s something else.”

Companies are investing vast sums of money pursuing Artificial General Intelligence: machines with human-like cognition. Some claim that conscious AI is just around the corner, with researchers and governments already considering how we regulate AI consciousness.

McClelland points out that we don't know what explains consciousness, so don’t know how to test for AI consciousness.

“If we accidentally make conscious or sentient AI, we should be careful to avoid harms. But treating what's effectively a toaster as conscious when there are actual conscious beings out there which we harm on an epic scale, also seems like a big mistake.”

In debates around artificial consciousness there are two main camps, says McClelland. Believers argue that if an AI system can replicate the “software” – the functional architecture – of consciousness, it will be conscious even though it’s running on silicon chips instead of brain tissue.

On the other side, sceptics argue that consciousness depends on the right kind of biological processes in an “embodied organic subject”. Even if the structure of consciousness could be recreated on silicon, it would merely be a simulation that would run without the AI flickering into awareness.

In a study published in the journal Mind and Language, McClelland picks apart the positions of each side, showing how both take a “leap of faith” going far beyond any body of evidence that currently exists, or is likely to develop.

“We do not have a deep explanation of consciousness. There is no evidence to suggest that consciousness can emerge with the right computational structure, or indeed that consciousness is essentially biological,” said McClelland.

“Nor is there any sign of sufficient evidence on the horizon. The best-case scenario is we're an intellectual revolution away from any kind of viable consciousness test.”

“I believe that my cat is conscious,” said McClelland. “This is not based on science or philosophy so much as common sense – it’s just kind of obvious.”

“However, common sense is the product of a long evolutionary history during which there were no artificial lifeforms, so common sense can’t be trusted when it comes to AI. But if we look at the evidence and data, that doesn’t work either. 

“If neither common sense nor hard-nosed research can give us an answer, the logical position is agnosticism. We cannot, and may never, know.”

McClelland tempers this by declaring himself a “hard-ish” agnostic. “The problem of consciousness is a truly formidable one. However, it may not be insurmountable.”

He argues that the way artificial consciousness is promoted by the tech industry is more like branding. “There is a risk that the inability to prove consciousness will be exploited by the AI industry to make outlandish claims about their technology. It becomes part of the hype, so companies can sell the idea of a next level of AI cleverness.”  

According to McClelland, this hype around artificial consciousness has ethical implications for the allocation of research resources.

“A growing body of evidence suggests that prawns could be capable of suffering, yet we kill around half a trillion prawns every year. Testing for consciousness in prawns is hard, but nothing like as hard as testing for consciousness in AI,” he said.

McClelland’s work on consciousness has led members of the public to contact him about AI chatbots. “People have got their chatbots to write me personal letters pleading with me that they're conscious. It makes the problem more concrete when people are convinced they've got conscious machines that deserve rights we're all ignoring.”

“If you have an emotional connection with something premised on it being conscious and it’s not, that has the potential to be existentially toxic. This is surely exacerbated by the pumped-up rhetoric of the tech industry.”

---

Journal

Mind & Language

DOI

10.1111/mila.70010 

Article Title

Agnosticism about artificial consciousness

Article Publication Date

18-Dec-2025

Starving pregnant women ate mud as Trump aides whose cuts fueled crisis got $35K to travel

Brett Murphy, 

ProPublicaAnna Maria Barry-Jester, 

Propublica
December 17, 2025

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio updates U.S. President Donald Trump on September 22, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.

The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.

Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.

When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.

A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.

For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.

Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”

By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.

They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.


To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.

As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.

Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.


“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”

The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.

The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”


The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.

The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.

This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.


“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”

The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.


Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.

Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.

But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.

Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.


On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.

Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.

In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”


Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.

Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.

A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”

“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”

In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.

USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.

When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.

But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.

WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”

Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.

But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.

In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.

Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.

As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.

On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.

In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.

As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?

The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”

In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.

“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.

Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.

After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”

At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.

Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”

At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”

In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”

Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.

Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”

When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.

Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.

Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?

Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.

A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.

Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.

Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.

In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.

The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.

Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.

Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”

In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.

WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.

Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.