Immigration enforcement at America’s southern border teetered on the edge of an uncertain new era Tuesday, as a flurry of rulings from federal courts grappled with whether a controversial Texas law can temporarily take effect.

Texas Senate Bill 4, or SB4 for short, makes it a state crime to enter Texas illegally. Amid court challenges from the Biden administration and others, however, the state has never been able to enforce the law. As recently as early Monday evening, Justice Samuel Alito extended a stay preventing SB4 from going into effect.

But less than 24 hours later, an unsigned ruling from the full Supreme Court effectively reversed that order. If that wasn’t enough whiplash, hours later, a federal appeals court announced it would be hearing oral arguments concerning a more permanent stay of SB4. As quickly as the law could be enforced, it now couldn’t again. 

The actual constitutionality of SB4 may not be decided for months. Yet the legal turmoil of the past three days has threatened to upend over a century of U.S. immigration law, while triggering confusion and panic across the Lone Star State. 

There are signs of a ripple effect, too. Iowa lawmakers on Tuesday passed a bill that also challenges federal immigration authority, creating a state crime for illegal reentry. 

If the Texas law goes into effect, “that is a huge change in the way our legal system works,” says Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

“It just seems that at a minimum what is due is serious consideration on the merits of the legal issues,” she adds. “It shouldn’t be that you don’t know from one hour to the next if you will be subject to deportation by the state of Texas.”

Eric Gay/AP/File

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shakes hands with members of the Texas National Guard as they prepare to deploy to the Texas-Mexico border, in Austin, May 2023.

Expanded immigration authority 

SB4 would give Texas immigration powers that no other state government has had in over a century. Under the law, state law enforcement officers can arrest people they suspect of entering Texas illegally from a foreign nation, and state judges have the authority to initiate deportations to Mexico.

Courts have previously found that immigration enforcement is a federal, not state, authority. Republican-led Texas over the past three years has stepped up border enforcement, including trespassing arrests of migrants, while arguing the Biden administration has neglected to curb record-high illegal migration. In the past two fiscal years, U.S. Border Patrol encountered migrants between ports of entry along the southern border more than 2 million times each of those years. 

“Know this: What they have stayed is the Texas enforcement of SB4,” said Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday during a previously scheduled speech in Austin. “We will continue to use our arrest authority and arrest people coming across the border illegally.”

Court challenges to the new Texas law were inevitable, and to date, three different federal courts have issued rulings on SB4. But no court has yet to rule definitively on the law’s constitutionality.

Unpacking the legal whiplash 

Instead, a month of legal challenges to the law has revolved around the procedural question of whether SB4 can be enforced while federal courts weigh the law’s constitutionality.

In February, a district court judge in Austin said SB4 is likely unconstitutional and blocked it from taking effect. Texas immediately appealed the ruling, and a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed it.

Days later, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito – who, as the circuit justice for the Fifth Circuit, handles all procedural questions arising from that court – stayed the appeals court’s ruling. SB4 was, again, temporarily blocked from taking effect.

But the Fifth Circuit’s handling of the case has been unusual. In reversing the district court’s ruling, the panel issued an administrative stay that let Texas enforce SB4. An administrative stay is often limited to a short period of time, usually a few days. But in this case, the stay is likely to be in place until the panel hears arguments on the merits – a month later in early April, says Professor Gilman.

Eric Gay/AP

Migrants are taken into custody by officials at the U.S.-Mexico border, Jan. 3, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.

The Supreme Court generally defers to lower court decisions in procedural matters like this. Because its ruling was an unsigned order, it’s unclear what rationale the court used for its ruling Tuesday allowing SB4 to go into effect.

But it came with a jargon-filled but biting concurrence from Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The case reached the high court “in an unusual posture,” she wrote. While the justices still chose to defer to the appeals court, she added that “the Fifth Circuit should be the first mover.” If the lower court did not act soon to issue a more permanent order, she continued, the Biden administration “may return to this court soon.”

Hours later, a Fifth Circuit panel lifted the administrative stay and scheduled a virtual oral argument for the next morning to consider a more permanent stay. While there was some discussion of SB4’s legal merits during the one-hour argument, Professor Gilman expects the April 3 hearing on the district court’s ruling to feature much more. 

“One of things you have to analyze [at that point] is if the law is likely to be found unconstitutional,” she says.

A court cannot make that determination without reaching some conclusion, albeit a provisional one, on the legality of the law. But even that hearing next month will be a procedural one, she says.

“The bottom line question here is, should this law be allowed to go into effect” while courts spend the next several months deciding if SB4 is constitutional or not, she adds. Whether it’s the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court who does it, she continues, the law “should be halted, so as not to change a whole legal regime leading to the deportation and arrest of migrants based on a law that hasn’t really been examined by the courts.”

Whatever the decision is, it will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court. With a full docket already this term, the justices likely wouldn’t decide SB4’s future until the next term, starting in October. And as this uncertainty lingers, the legal landscape continues to shift. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds says she plans to sign the law passed Tuesday, which allows state law enforcement to arrest immigrants who were previously deported or denied U.S. entry.

“A nightmare come true” for one resident 

Caught in the eye of this storm of legal papers and procedures have been those SB4 stands to affect most.

Foremost among them are Texans with mixed-status families. For one medical assistant in Austin, who declined to have her name published for fear of legal consequences, it has been a month of agonizing uncertainty, punctuated by the emotional roller coaster of the past three days. 

She was brought to the United States from Mexico as a baby, but in 2015 gained Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, meaning she would not be subject to SB4. But her parents are unauthorized immigrants, and for the past month, she says, they’ve been afraid that their family could be quickly broken up if SB4 goes into effect.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Immigrant advocates protest a new Texas law, SB4, in Brownsville, Texas, Feb. 22, 2024.

Even though it only ended up being a few hours, that time with SB4 in effect “was a nightmare come true,” she says.

“So many scenarios went through my head,” she adds. “Thinking about being separated from my parents, having to explain to [my] young kids what might happen [was] so hard.”

Speaking on Wednesday morning, she says, “There’s happiness, a little bit, because it was [stayed]. But there’s still uncertainty. ... It’s just confusing, and it’s stressful. I just wish they would say if it’s unconstitutional or it’s not.”  

All month, her family has debated leaving Texas, and for a few hours on Tuesday, those thoughts began morphing toward concrete action. They thought about moving to Louisiana, but ultimately decided against it. She and her siblings have jobs, and their children are settled in school. Moving to a new state would just be too much disruption. Instead, she and her siblings are planning to do all the family’s errands and chores so their parents don’t have to be outside too often.

“There’s really nothing we can do but wait,” she says. “The best option right now is for [us] to continue working and helping my parents.”

On-the-ground realities 

Exactly how SB4 would be enforced on the ground is unclear. Notably, Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday said the country would not accept individuals deported under the law.

Meanwhile, for law enforcement in Texas, the judicial back and forth has been a prelude to, essentially, a return to business as usual. Police departments in major cities like Houston, Austin, and Fort Worth said Tuesday that they will continue to focus on top public safety priorities, which don’t include immigration enforcement.

“Although we will always follow the law, the primary responsibility for immigration enforcement and border protection should be left to our federal and state partners,” Fort Worth Police Chief Neil Noakes said in a video released in English and Spanish.

The speaker of the Texas House of Representatives pushed back against that approach on X, formerly Twitter: “Any local law enforcement agency that refuses to enforce Senate Bill 4 is abandoning their sworn duty to uphold the rule of law.”

There is also an expectation among many in Texas law enforcement that the statute would mostly be enforced in border counties.

“Those counties are already forward-leaning on border security and crime in general,” says Skylor Hearn, executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas. SB4 is “really not going to fundamentally change how sheriffs do their business.”

“It’s as good a [border security] measure as Texas, as a state, probably can provide. But it doesn’t secure the border,” he continues. “We are still dependent on the federal government to step up and do its job.” 

The legal uncertainty around SB4 “feels like a roller coaster,” says Professor Gilman. “It is a roller coaster, [and] the stakes are very high.”

On a warm spring day in March 2021, the Queen of Sheba restaurant in Los Angeles’ Inglewood neighborhood got an unexpected visit from the city’s health department. It was the first surprise visit by health officials in the restaurant’s seven-year history.

Soon, things got even stranger. Over the next few months, officials showed up unannounced again and again. Salem Mengesha started to ask questions.

“When we asked why they were visiting so many times, they said that they were receiving [anonymous] calls” complaining that the restaurant was unclean, says Ms. Mengesha, whose sister owns Queen of Sheba, and who has worked there on and off since its opening.

While all this was happening, Ms. Mengesha noticed another troubling trend. Once charmed by Queen of Sheba’s commitment to promoting their culture through food, Ethiopians had mostly stopped patronizing the restaurant.

The reason could be traced to a civil war happening more than 9,000 miles away, in the Mengeshas’ homeland. The family’s origins are in Ethiopia’s northernmost region, Tigray, where fighting had pitted the local community against the national government.

“As soon as the war broke out,” the restaurant’s non-Tigrayan Ethiopian clientele “completely stopped coming,” Ms. Mengesha says.

More than three years later, even though fighting in Tigray has formally ended, violence continues in other parts of the country, and divisions like this linger in communities across Ethiopia’s global diaspora. However, even as misinformation continues to fuel mistrust, a small but determined group of Ethiopians are pushing back. From peace conferences to podcasts, they are working to heal their fractured communities however they can.

Amir Aman Kiyaro/AP

Ethiopian women gather at a community meeting in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The area is peaceful, but fields lie barren and the war’s effects linger.

A torn social fabric

For nearly three decades, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was Ethiopia’s ruling party. As a result, although Tigrayans make up just 6% of Ethiopia’s 110 million people, they dominated the country’s politics, military, and economy. Resentments built, and in 2018, other parties from the ruling coalition unseated the TPLF and chose a non-Tigrayan prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, for the first time.

The TPLF was incensed, tensions grew, and eventually a TPLF assault on government military bases in November 2020 sparked a civil war. To date, as many as 600,000 people have died as a result of the conflict, and 5 million more have been displaced. Now, fighting has mostly ended in Tigray itself, but violence has broken out elsewhere and Tigray remains in the midst of a devastating hunger crisis that aid agencies warn could become famine.

Over the past three years, the war’s tensions have also spilled over into the diaspora. Ms. Mengesha began experiencing them just months after fighting started, when she attended rallies calling for a cease-fire and protection of civilians in Tigray, where her extended family still lives. Immediately, she says, she began to receive social media comments from strangers calling her a spy and saying her community “deserved” violence.

The messages rattled her, but she didn’t think her trolls would go further. That is, until the barrage of unfounded complaints about Queen of Sheba’s hygiene levels began.

The war “very much fragmented the social fabric amongst Ethiopians,” says Meaza Gidey Gebremedhin, an anti-war activist from Tigray who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. “You see people associating with their ethnic group and forming their own private and smaller community centers, rather than a bigger Ethiopian community.”

In part, people closed rank around their communities in response to the appalling violence against civilians that occurred on both sides of the conflict. International observers have found substantial evidence that both Tigrayan and Ethiopian forces have committed war crimes, including the mass rape and murder of civilians. 

Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP/File

Ethiopian demonstrators in Washington protest in 2021 against the U.S. and other Western countries' intervention in their country and call for an immediate end to Ethiopia's civil war.

Repairing trust 

But the tension and mistrust was also deepened by disinformation, many say.

“I saw the media – the diaspora media, the church media – everyone was warmongering,” says Getachew Assefa, a professor of architecture at the University of Calgary with Tigrayan roots. “That shocked me to the core.” 

In response, he decided in mid-2021 to start a news platform devoted to spreading accurate information about the war in Tigray and advocating for an end to the killing of civilians on both sides. UMD Media – short for “understanding, measuring, doing” – publishes articles and hosts panel discussions. Today, it reaches more than 30,000 subscribers of multiple ethnicities, faiths, and countries on YouTube, and sometimes broadcasts by satellite into Ethiopia and Eritrea as well, Dr. Assefa says.   

“The vast majority of people are at peace with each other,” says Moges Teshome, an Ethiopian Ph.D. student living in Vienna. Like Dr. Assefa, he believes amplifying these voices is the only way forward. “The social fabric has not been totally torn apart,” he says. “The trust is deteriorating, but [it] is still there.”

About a year ago, Mr. Teshome, who studies ethnic conflicts at the Vienna School of International Studies, began recording a podcast to support this message. “Buffet of Ideas,” which focus on politics and peace in Ethiopia, now has more than 40,000 subscribers on YouTube.

There are other flickers of hope too. Last July, diaspora members from different Ethiopian ethnicities came together for a peace conference in San Diego. In October, a coalition of diaspora groups in the United States published a list of demands aimed to bring fighting across Ethiopia to an end, including the release of political prisoners and a national dialogue.

“The scar of war is still there,” says Mr. Teshome. But “there is hope. There is a possibility for dialogue and possible reconciliation.”

More Americans identify as independents (42%) than as Democrats (30%) or Republicans (28%). And as the two major parties coalesce around their prospective nominees, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a majority of voters say they would like a third choice. 

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is riding that wave of discontent, averaging 15% support in national polls. The group No Labels is also pressing ahead with plans to field a “unity ticket” that it says will provide voters with a “moderate” choice. Other candidates running outside the two-party system include the Green Party’s Jill Stein and independent Cornel West.

Yet those mounting third-party bids for the White House face daunting hurdles. They must navigate a complex labyrinth of rules governing ballot access and a winner-take-all electoral system that gives voters a strong incentive not to “waste” their ballot on a long-shot contender.  

The independent presidential candidate with the highest vote share in more than a century, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, won 19% of the popular vote against Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush in 1992, yet failed to win a single state. 

“It’s not as though we banned third parties. They’re allowed,” says Scot Schraufnagel, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University. “But it’s really tough for them to get any traction under the current election law.”

What are the barriers to ballot access?

Any path to the White House hinges on ballot access, and each state makes its own rules. The deadlines for qualifying also vary by state, and a few have already passed. 

In Alabama, for instance, any political party that receives 20% of the vote in a previous election automatically qualifies for the ballot. Others need to collect signatures – at least 3% of the number of voters in the state’s previous gubernatorial election.  

Alaska gives ballot access to any political party whose candidate for governor in the previous general election won at least 3% of the popular vote. Independent candidates need to collect signatures that total at least 1% of the number of voters in the most recent presidential election.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

Supporters of the group No Labels rally outside Capitol Hill in Washington, July 13, 2013. The group says it will be on the ballot in all 50 states but has yet to identify a candidate.

In Michigan, new political parties need signatures of qualified, registered electors totaling at least 1% of the number of votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election, with at least 100 signatures each from half of the state’s congressional districts.

The patchwork of rules and regulations requires different strategies in different states, says Daron Shaw, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s a problem for less well-funded, less well-organized, less institutionally established political movements.” 

Mr. Kennedy is pursuing different tactics to try to gain ballot access. He’s running as an independent in states that require fewer signatures for unaffiliated candidates. In states that make it easier for those with party affiliations, supporters have formed a party called We the People. The party is on the ballot in Hawaii, and Mr. Kennedy is listed as an unaffiliated candidate on Utah’s ballot. The Kennedy campaign said this week that it also has enough signatures to qualify in Nevada and New Hampshire. A super PAC called American Values 2024 is working on his behalf in at least a dozen states, and it claims to have enough signatures to get him onto ballots in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and South Carolina. 

Many states require independent candidates to name their running mate when filing papers to get on the ballot. Mr. Kennedy announced at the end of March his pick for vice president: attorney and tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, from Northern California. 

No Labels has vowed that it will make it onto the ballot in all 50 states and says it has secured spots in 17 states so far, although the party has yet to announce candidates. As of this week, the Green Party lists 20 states plus the District of Columbia as “on ballot.”

What other hurdles do independent candidates face?

Once a candidate makes it onto the ballot, Duverger’s law kicks in. Winning the U.S. presidency actually comes down to winning individual states, most of which are winner-take-all. French political scientist Maurice Duverger concluded in the 1950s that this system results in two-party dominance. Voters become reluctant to cast ballots for minor-party candidates they see as having no chance of actually winning, preferring to throw their support to one of the two major parties.  

If the dominant parties fracture, there could be an opening for a new one. In the 1850s, as America drew closer to civil war, the Republican Party was formed as an anti-slavery coalition and eventually replaced the Whigs as the primary political opposition to the Democrats. In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in a four-way race with less than 40% of the popular vote.

Today, third-party candidates are most often considered “spoilers.” In a close election – and U.S. presidential elections in recent years have generally been quite close – any votes siphoned away from the two major parties can be seen as the difference between a narrow win and a narrow loss. 

Rick Bowmer/AP/File

Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader appears at the National Press Club in Washington, Nov. 7, 2000. Democrats faulted Mr. Nader for taking votes away from Vice President Al Gore in states like Florida.

In 2000, many Democrats faulted Green Party candidate Ralph Nader for taking key votes away from Vice President Al Gore in Florida, which Mr. Gore wound up losing by 537 votes. In 2016, when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Donald Trump despite winning the popular vote, some Democrats argued that Green Party candidate Jill Stein may have shifted just enough votes in key states away from Mrs. Clinton to put Mr. Trump in the White House.  

It’s impossible to know definitively whether voters who cast ballots for third-party contenders would have backed one of the major-party nominees instead – or simply stayed home. But this year, Democrats appear to be taking the threat more seriously, forming a dedicated team at the Democratic National Committee and a coalition of outside groups to hit back at third-party campaigns on both political and legal fronts.

How does the Electoral College fit in?

The Electoral College creates a huge hurdle for third-party candidates. Forty-eight states (all but Maine and Nebraska) award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins a plurality of the popular vote. 

Mr. Perot’s 1992 bid demonstrated how even strong third-party showings can be stymied by the Electoral College. He achieved ballot access in all 50 states, funded by his own personal wealth and fueled by a powerful grassroots movement collecting signatures on his behalf. In the end, he won nearly one-fifth of the popular vote, a rare achievement for an independent candidate. But he received zero Electoral College votes. 

Many Americans now say the system needs to change. A Pew Research poll from a few months ago shows nearly two-thirds of voters believe the popular vote alone should determine the presidency. 

“The interest in a third-party candidate seems pretty substantial,” says Dr. Shaw. But that attraction is often offset by the power of negative polarization, in which voters are motivated to cast ballots for one major-party candidate largely out of strong opposition to the other. “Whatever antipathy there is to the major-party candidates seems to be overwhelmed by the fear, the anger about the other side winning.”

But even if they don’t win, third-party candidates can have real influence on the national conversation. Mr. Perot made the budget deficit a central issue of his campaign in 1992. The following year, Congress passed a deficit reduction bill.

“Third parties are a source of energy; they’re a source of policy innovation,” says Dr. Shaw. The candidates themselves may fall short, but their ideas often wind up being co-opted by the major parties. “So that’s an important part of the process.”

Editor’s note: this story has been updated to reflect evolving campaign events, and to correct information related to the 2000 presidential race. 

Sushmita Pathak

Kusma, a mother of four, poses beside the earthen stove where she used to cook over firewood, inhaling toxic smoke before every meal.

For years, Kusma cooked on an earthen stove for her family of six. Stirring pots placed over firewood on a short, U-shaped clay structure, she had to inhale toxic smoke that turned the roof of her one-room shanty gray. Until December, when a red cooking gas cylinder and new steel cooktop arrived at her doorstep.

“We felt very good that day; the kids were also happy,” she recalls, keeping one eye on the lunch she has stewing in a pressure cooker.

Kusma, who like many in India goes by one name, is among more than 100 million Indians who’ve received cooking gas connections under one of the federal government’s flagship welfare programs. It’s part of an ambitious welfare agenda that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rolled out since coming to power in 2014.

Hundreds of programs now deliver benefits – electricity, affordable housing, toilets, and cash – to roughly 950 million people across the country. Late last year, Mr. Modi’s government announced that a program providing free food grains to more than 800 million Indians will continue for five more years.

Coupled with a Hindu nationalist push, Mr. Modi’s populist welfare agenda has helped him expand his support base and will play a key role in general elections, set to begin April 19. Welfare programs are at the front and center of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) advertising campaign these days, and opposition parties are taking note, unveiling their own promises.

“This is a free-for-all when it comes to welfare schemes in Indian politics,” says political scientist Sanjay Kumar at the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

In a country with high inequality and widespread poverty, “it’s a sign of a healthy democracy that this is what governments would like to compete on,” says Yamini Aiyar, president and CEO of the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi. But Ms. Aiyar and others say the Modi administration’s approach to welfare often falls short. The new programs provide immediate relief, but fail to address structural issues that block the country’s poorest from a path to long-term prosperity. 

Mahesh Kumar A./AP

A fruit juice vendor waits in front of a billboard featuring Hindu deity Lord Ram and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Hyderabad, India, Jan. 17. Hindu nationalism and the expansion of welfare programs have been cornerstones of the Modi administration.

A unique welfare push

Professor Kumar says the BJP has made “enormous electoral gains” through the expansion of welfare programs. Between 2014 and 2019, the vote share of the BJP increased across all economic classes, but the jump was the highest among poor voters – 12%. While upper-caste Hindus have been traditional supporters of the BJP, new welfare programs have helped the party win over low-caste and tribal voters too, many of whom are poor, he says. 

While welfare has always been a part of Indian politics, what is new, according to Ms. Aiyar, is the use of technology. Mr. Modi’s policies have homed in on cash handouts deposited electronically to people’s accounts. The amount of direct cash transferred in 2019 and 2020 was over 28 times the amount in the year before Mr. Modi took office, and the number of beneficiaries in the same period grew sixfold.

The nature of benefits has changed as well, with more focus on providing private goods like cooking gas cylinders rather than on providing public services like health or education, which traditional welfare programs tend to center around, says Ms. Aiyar. 

Mr. Modi’s brand of welfare politics is also very personalized. At several metro stations and other public spaces around Delhi, posters splashed with Mr. Modi’s face boast the benefits of his welfare programs.

Gas pumps have selfie points where customers can take a photo with cardboard cutouts of the prime minister alongside a larger-than-life red cylinder. The official names of many programs begin with “Pradhan Mantri,” or “Prime Minister’s,” leaving little room for doubt about whom to give credit.

This form of welfarism, Ms. Aiyar says, shifts the balance of power between citizens and the state.

“Increasingly, we talk about welfare less in terms of rights, but much more in this patrimonial kind of framework where the welfare is being given as a kind of patronage or a charity to the poor,” says Ms. Aiyar. “You’re telling people that they’re just beneficiaries of a program, as opposed to rights-bearing citizens who have full socioeconomic rights that they can demand of the state.”

Sushmita Pathak

Santosh Kumar and his wife, who both have a locomotor disability, make a living by selling dumplings and other snacks on the street, with the help of a government welfare program.

Short-term relief

Thanks to her new cylinder, Kusma no longer has to go into the forest to collect firewood, nor does she have a coughing fit before every meal. But she worries about the day the gas runs out.

Even at a subsidized rate of roughly $7, a refill costs more than what Kusma’s family, which includes four kids, can afford. Her husband struggles with drug abuse and disappears for days, she says. “Either I’ll have to leave my baby and go to work, or go back to cooking on firewood,” she says. She wants the government to further reduce the cost of cooking gas.

Free food grains or subsidized gas may help people in the short term, Professor Kumar says, but are not “changing their fortunes in the long run.” He says the current welfare policy lacks vision.

Ms. Aiyar agrees, noting that no political party in India has been able to resolve two key issues: a lack of investment in health and education, and limited employment opportunities, which together hinder social mobility.

Santosh Kumar, who lost his job as a quality-checker at an eyewear company during the COVID-19 pandemic, feels this failure acutely. 

After struggling for years to find work and surviving on ration kits provided by nongovernmental organizations, he and his wife now sell dumplings by the roadside. They received a loan of roughly $120 under a welfare program for street vendors, but the money is hardly enough to cover his expenses, which include rent, food, school fees for his kids, and the costs to run his business. 

“On paper, the government says we have done so much, but in reality what are we getting?” he asks. “The poor are being squeezed from all sides.”

Shortfalls aside, when asked who she will vote for in the upcoming election, Kusma is quick to answer: Modi.

Sanyu Musoke was barely out of her teen years when she found herself with responsibilities coming from all directions. 

Her mother already needed full-time cognitive care when, in 2015, her father was in a horrific car crash. It left him disabled and Ms. Musoke in a position that has a legal definition in the United Kingdom but felt anything but clear to her: young carer.

From negotiating with doctors and navigating medical equipment, to grocery shopping and ensuring siblings’ homework was completed, her new purview covered nearly everything. She remembers struggling to learn to fold her father’s wheelchair.

“I suddenly had to care for a physical disability as well as a mental disability,” says Ms. Musoke, who dropped out of college for a time. “It’s like, does my father have the equipment he needs, are the bathrooms OK, and what are these new medications, and has my mother taken her own medications?”

The obligations and responsibilities add up for young carers. Many find themselves falling behind in school or forgoing college. They have more frequent mental health issues. And they often feel they cannot ask for help, perhaps due to cultural expectations or social stigmas.

So now, Ms. Musoke is using her unique understanding to help young carers. 

Through a social enterprise charity she founded named Yucan, she aims to give young carers mental and emotional support, help educate school staffs about how to identify carers in their midst, and even train carers for the workforce later on. Yucan also works to reach those from underrepresented communities, such as ethnic minorities and those caring for relatives with alcohol or drug addictions.

Such nonprofits and charities are vitally needed, particularly as the number of young people needing support has grown and funding is becoming more limited, says Andy McGowan, policy and practice manager at Carers Trust, a charity that supports unpaid carers. “Yucan has done a lot of work in trying to reach those groups who are currently not being reached,” he says. “These carers are more often hidden from services, and are underrepresented.”

Caregivers under pressure

When Ms. Musoke thinks of her teen years, she remembers loneliness, particularly as she stepped into the role of caregiving for her mentally ill mother and, later, her disabled father. For a while, she left school to focus on helping her family.

“Not only am I dealing with all that, but teenagers are trying to figure out life and you think the whole world is against you,” says Ms. Musoke. “Girls are going shopping with their moms and going to prom, and it’s like, ‘Man, I wish I had what Julie had.’”

Courtesy of Yucan

Sanyu Musoke (right) speaks to young carers who were organizing an assembly for teachers and fellow students on young carer awareness at their London school in 2022.

Ms. Musoke’s plight is common, according to British charities that assist young carers. In the United Kingdom, about a million young people under 18 years old spend more than 50 hours a week caring for family members struggling with illness, disability, addiction, or other afflictions, according to Carers Trust. Some carers are extremely young: Roughly 15,000 of them are children, with 3,000 just 5 to 9 years old.

Ms. Musoke points out that young carers from ethnically diverse backgrounds face even greater challenges. Her own parents emigrated from Uganda, and she was born in east London and grew up facing complexities and responsibilities outside even the traditional definition of young carer.

“You’re even maybe doing the parent evenings [at school for younger siblings], or translating for a parent who doesn’t speak English,” says Ms. Musoke. “Or it’s the cultural expectation of looking after elders in your families or grandparents.”

Such circumstances have a devastating impact on young carers’ well-being, according to research submitted to the first-ever parliamentary inquiry on their plight. Carers miss an average of 30 days of school a year, go on to college in smaller numbers, and have more trouble finding jobs later in life. They also have a higher prevalence of self-harm and are twice as likely to attempt suicide than noncarers.

“Young carers and young adult carers need to be recognised as a priority group within financial support schemes, such as bursaries, grants or scholarships,” Baowen Xue, a social epidemiologist at University College London and one of the researchers involved, told the Monitor in an email. 

But support for these young people is wildly uneven across the U.K., the parliamentary inquiry found. Duncan Baker, a member of Parliament and the chair of the inquiry group, says the government must do much more to identify and support young carers, and ultimately reduce their numbers. 

At present, resources and funding to support the charities are down, just as more young carers are being identified and those charities are under pressure to do more, says Mr. McGowan of Carers Trust.

“Kids still need to be kids”

The support that charities like Yucan provide to young carers comes both indirectly and directly. 

On one track, Yucan hosts “awareness assemblies” and training workshops to help schools identify young carers, as educators are often the first and only point of outside contact for these children. The parliamentary inquiry found that some young carers are left to cope alone for a decade, and the average waiting time to get support is three years.

“Teachers often identify the boys because they’re very overt – as in Johnny’s punching a wall and he has a support worker,” says Ms. Musoke. “But the girls can be really overlooked in their mental health.”

More directly, Yucan’s youth camps help carers take a break from their responsibilities, perhaps by giving them a chance to learn how to skateboard or arrange flowers. The actor Michael Sheen has supported one of their campaigns, and Ms. Musoke has invited Sandro Farmhouse, a celebrity cake-maker from “The Great British Bake Off,” to run a baking workshop with them.

“You’re 13 and running a household,” Ms. Musoke says. “With the stress of what they’re going through, kids still need to be kids and have a bit of fun.”

She’s also found herself needing to counsel disadvantaged and minority families about a systemic distrust of social services, such as a fear that a parent will be investigated if their child is caught grocery shopping for the family. There is shame and stigma, she says.

“We’re protecting them as well as supporting them to know that it’s OK to receive the help.” 

AP

People in Cuba walk during a power outage in the city of Bauta on March 18, the day after hundreds of Cubans protested for freedom and basic services.

When leaders of the world’s democracies opened their third annual summit on Monday in South Korea, they focused mainly on how to defend themselves, particularly from foreign influence. The tone was dark. Just the day before, however, news broke of democracy on the march, literally.

In Cuba, hundreds of people protested March 17 in several cities, shouting, “Freedom” and demanding basic services like electricity from the Communist regime. Also on Sunday, thousands of Russians lined up at noon outside voting stations in a silent challenge to a sham election designed to keep Vladimir Putin in power. Just a few days earlier, thousands of people in Iran used the country’s annual fire festival to dance in the streets, shouting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom” against the harsh rule of clerics.

Such courageous displays of democratic rights – peaceful assembly and free speech – are not easy to tally in global surveys that lately show a decline in the number and quality of democracies. Yet the frequency of the protests, even against dictatorships like North Korea, is a reminder that the values of democracy, such as a right to equality and freedom, are an inherent truth for individuals living under repression.

“So many autocracies are so badly governed and people realise that they are being badly governed,” Hauke Hartmann, an author of a new global survey of democracies by the German foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung, told the London-based newspaper The Times. “Look at the millions of people who took to the streets in impossible countries like Myanmar, Iran [or] Belarus. That takes courage.”

Dr. Hartmann added, “These instances highlight the importance of uniting street-level activism with institutional checks on government power to effectively resist authoritarian trends.”

Few autocracies provide the efficiency in governance that they claim is achieved under one-person rule. They rarely bend to people’s desire for a social order in which their views are taken into account. “That will not be sustained, that cannot be sustained,” Dr. Hartmann said.

The resilience of democracy does not only happen in the corridors of power or on the internet, said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday in response to the Bertelsmann survey. Local people, either on the street or in quiet daily protest, make the difference. “It’s us: We have to protect democracy ourselves,” he said.