Donald Trump became the 45th U.S. president in January 2017, having never held public office or served in the military. To his supporters, his lack of a political track record was a selling point, since he promised to tear up the Washington playbook and offer a new approach on issues such as immigration and trade. But his inexperience in government, haphazard approach to policy, and inability to build a cohesive team led to results that didn’t always reflect the rhetoric. And his final year in office was dominated by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result was a single presidential term marked by both achievements and multiple setbacks and scandals.

In pursuing his goals, Mr. Trump faced sustained and emotionally charged opposition from Democratic officials as well as resistance from military and civilian administrators, whom he labeled the “deep state.” He appointed three Supreme Court justices, paving the way for a landmark conservative victory on abortion. But he lost court battles over the legality of some of his more controversial policies. He was impeached twice, a record for any president. Yet even after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which many Republican leaders blamed publicly on Mr. Trump, his party didn’t desert him, as it had President Richard Nixon in 1974. 

Jim Bourg/AP/File

President Donald Trump waves after taking the oath of office as his wife, Melania, holds the Bible, and Tiffany Trump looks out to the crowd on Capitol Hill in Washington.

In many ways, Mr. Trump’s greatest impact was on the Republican Party and the United States’ political culture. His presidential run in 2024 has come against a backdrop of multiple state and federal criminal indictments, all of which he ascribes to political persecution. As in past campaigns, he has served up a welter of bold, if vague, promises to voters. His record from his previous term in office offers a guide to what may follow, should he win reelection. 

Economy: tax cuts and rising wages

During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to use his business experience to jump-start the U.S. economy. He inherited an expanding economy that was still recovering from the 2007-2009 financial crisis. His approach was to cut federal taxes; reduce regulations, particularly environmental rules; and reduce government spending.

In 2017, he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered taxes on corporations and individuals to the tune of $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Mr. Trump predicted that it would boost business investment and raise gross domestic product growth to 4% or higher. GDP did grow faster in 2018, hitting 3%, up from 2.5% in 2017, before slowing in 2019. Wages rose. Private investment also rose during the Trump presidency, as did after-tax corporate profits. Stock markets set new records. 

Mr. Trump had promised to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act – and said that this would reduce the deficit – but he failed to present a viable alternative to Congress. His tax cuts, along with spending bills he signed, increased the prepandemic budget deficit from $680 billion to $1 trillion in 2019. 

By the end of his term, emergency federal spending on the pandemic had hiked the national debt to a post-World War II high. 

Busting the consensus on trade

Many of Mr. Trump’s economic policies hewed to post-Ronald Reagan GOP orthodoxy. But not on trade. He rejected the consensus in Washington, among Democrats and Republicans, that free trade benefits U.S. companies and consumers. 

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

President Donald Trump holds up examples of tariffs in the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Long before he ran for president, Mr. Trump seethed at what he saw as unfair trade practices by other countries. Once in office, he imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and on imported steel and aluminum, while seeking to renegotiate trading agreements with Mexico, Canada, and countries in Europe. His tariffs applied to products collectively worth around $380 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. While Mr. Trump claimed that foreign exporters bore the costs, multiple studies have shown that U.S. consumers paid higher prices for tariff-affected goods. 

Steel producers and other domestic industries welcomed the tariffs and announced increases in investment and hiring. Those gains were offset, however, by losses in industries that use imported parts to produce finished goods and by exporters who faced retaliatory tariffs. For example, China imposed 25% tariffs on U.S. agricultural products, resulting in a federal bailout for farmers. 

Still, Mr. Trump’s attacks on free trade proved politically popular, including in regions impacted by shuttered plants and job losses. By targeting China in particular, he raised doubts about the benefits of integration between the world’s two largest economies. 

“He effectively woke the U.S. up to the reality that Chinese trade policy was in fact extremely disruptive when it came to the U.S. and the global trading system,” says Robert Lawrence, a professor of international trade at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

Yet Mr. Trump’s ultimate goal of reducing the U.S. trade deficit – the value of the goods it imports minus the value of exports – didn’t pan out. The overall deficit rose in three out of the four years of his term. While the share of Chinese goods fell, importers switched to suppliers in Mexico and Vietnam.  

Trump administration officials renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, now known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and cut deals with other exporting countries, using tariffs as leverage. But China balked at U.S. demands to open up its economy to greater competition. Today, China continues to apply high tariffs to U.S. goods, while lowering tariffs for other exporting countries. “Americans and their products are more discriminated against than they had been before,” says Professor Lawrence. 

On immigration, tougher tone and action

In all three of his campaigns, Mr. Trump has made immigration a signature issue. In 2016, he vowed to stop illegal immigration, deport millions of unauthorized migrants, and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that Mexico would pay for. He also called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” citing the security risk posed by extremists. 

Evan Vucci/AP/File

In San Diego, President Trump talks with reporters as he reviews border wall prototypes.

The “Trump effect” on immigration policy was far-reaching: Nearly 500 administrative changes were made, mostly via executive actions. Refugee resettlement was slashed to the lowest level since 1980. Asylum-seekers faced far greater scrutiny, and those crossing from Mexico were deemed ineligible if they hadn’t claimed asylum in third countries during their journeys. 

The most controversial policy was family separations: Authorities deported adult migrants back to their home countries and took custody of their children. As many as 5,000 children were separated from their parents under Mr. Trump, who promoted the policy as a deterrent to families crossing illegally. A court ruled in 2018 that the policy was illegal and ordered families to be reunited.

Mr. Trump’s executive order rejecting entry to refugees and travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries, known as the “Muslim ban,” was also blocked by federal courts in 2017. A revised order that included Venezuelan officials and North Koreans was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2018. 

Other categories of migrants were largely unaffected, though the Trump administration instituted multiple rule changes that caused delays in visa processing, says Doris Meissner, former head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “He was certainly successful in slowing the immigration system down with technical changes.” 

Border apprehensions – a major talking point in the 2024 campaign – fell in Mr. Trump’s first year, in response to his tough rhetoric about deportations. But as the threat appeared to subside, apprehensions more than doubled in 2019. The administration responded by forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their initial hearings. 

Following a battle with Congress, the bill for Mr. Trump’s border wall was paid by U.S. taxpayers. A total of 458 miles of barricades, mostly replacement fencing, was constructed during his administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection report. By the end of his term, roughly 36% of the 1,954-mile border had some kind of fence or wall. 

The Supreme Court and judiciary under Trump

Mr. Trump was the first president since Richard Nixon to appoint three Supreme Court justices. The first, Neil Gorsuch, replaced Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative who died during President Obama’s final year in office, after which Senate Republicans refused to consider a replacement, leaving the position open. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett (left) talks with Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court in Washington ahead of her 2021 investiture ceremony.

Mr. Trump’s second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, weathered a stormy Senate hearing to replace a retiring Republican-appointed justice who’d often served as a swing vote. His third appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, the youngest member of the court, replaced late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, locking in a conservative supermajority.

In addition to making those appointments, Mr. Trump nominated over 220 federal judges, including appellate circuit judges. 

When he ran for president in 2016, Mr. Trump promised to appoint judges who would rule favorably on conservative priorities such as gun rights, abortion restrictions, and religious liberty. The Supreme Court, under his appointed justices, has largely delivered on those promises. Among its most consequential rulings were the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, which ended a national right to abortion, and a 2023 decision against affirmative action in college admissions. 

Of potentially great personal impact for Mr. Trump was the court’s ruling in July that granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution, after an appeal by Mr. Trump’s team in a federal election interference case. The ruling, which surprised many legal scholars in its scope, all but guaranteed that Mr. Trump wouldn’t go on trial before this November’s election. 

Handling the pandemic

In January 2020, a new coronavirus first detected in China began showing up in the U.S. Mr. Trump’s advisers warned him that a coronavirus pandemic, for which no vaccine or medical cure existed, could lead to millions of deaths. 

In public, Mr. Trump initially downplayed the outbreak and claimed the virus would “miraculously” go away. Even after a pandemic was declared in March and states restricted public gatherings and closed businesses, he insisted the risk was low. In White House briefings, he promoted unproven cures and contradicted his own scientific advisers.

By May, the U.S. had the world’s highest COVID-19 toll, with 100,000 deaths. That month, Mr. Trump approved Operation Warp Speed, a $10 billion investment in vaccine development and manufacturing. Seven months later, an emergency-use vaccine became available – just weeks after Mr. Trump lost reelection, in part because of disapproval of how he handled the pandemic. 

Mr. Trump’s defenders argue that he faced a once-in-a-century pandemic and that other wealthy nations also failed to prevent transmission and deaths. They also highlight his decisive action on vaccines. Uptake of COVID-19 and other vaccines in the U.S., however, has become increasingly skewed by partisan beliefs, due to Republican skepticism. 

By the time Mr. Trump left office, more than 400,000 deaths had been attributed to COVID-19. One international panel convened by The Lancet, a medical publication, estimated that 40% of these deaths could have been averted, based on outcomes in peer countries with different policies. It criticized Mr. Trump for failing to develop a national strategy for personal protective equipment and testing, while denigrating mask-wearing and other mitigation measures. 

David Himmelstein, a co-chair of the panel, says the U.S. had public health disadvantages, including unequal access to health care and high levels of chronic diseases, that predated Mr. Trump and hobbled the pandemic response. Still, “The U.S. really stands out for its bad results,” says Dr. Himmelstein, a professor of public health at Hunter College in New York. “I think it’s pretty clear that alternative leadership could’ve prevented many deaths. How many we’ll never know.” 

Effects on U.S. democracy

In 2016, Mr. Trump won an Electoral College majority despite receiving fewer votes overall. He claimed that millions had “voted illegally” for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and formed a commission to investigate. It disbanded in 2018 without presenting any evidence to support the claim.

Four years later, he returned to the same playbook. In August 2020, he told supporters, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”

Jose Luis Magana/AP/File

Supporters of President Donald Trump gather for a rally Jan. 6, 2021, at the Ellipse near the White House. Pro-Trump protesters rioted against the 2020 election result that day at the U.S. Capitol, where members of Congress were counting the Electoral College votes.

Early results on election night raised Republican hopes of victory. But as more ballots were tallied and states called, the tide began to turn in favor of Joe Biden. Later that night, Mr. Trump declared a “fraud on the American public” and claimed, falsely, that he had won the election. “We want all voting to stop,” he said in a live broadcast. 

His claims became the basis of “Stop the Steal,” an effort by his campaign and activists to toss out ballots cast for Mr. Biden. Multiple recounts in six battleground states found no evidence of significant irregularities. Mr. Trump’s attorneys filed 64 lawsuits containing 187 counts in six states, of which 34 were dismissed. Of the remaining 30 cases that included a hearing on the merits, only one was successful, in Pennsylvania, but it affected too few votes to change the result.

Mr. Trump personally called election officials in Georgia and Arizona to urge them to decertify election results. All rejected his requests. He continued to claim that he had won “in a landslide,” even after Attorney General William Barr told him that investigators had found no evidence for his claims, which included conspiracy theories about voting machines. 

On Dec. 12, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit filed by Texas against four battleground states that sought to overturn their results. Two days later, the Electoral College met to affirm Mr. Biden’s victory. 

Mr. Trump tried repeatedly to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to block the ceremonial counting of Electoral College votes in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. After Mr. Pence refused, Mr. Trump held a massive rally near the White House that day and urged attendees to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop the certification. He then retreated to the White House to watch TV coverage. 

Thousands of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, forcing Mr. Pence and other lawmakers to shelter. More than 140 police officers were injured in the melee, and several later died. Four protesters also died that day. Later that night, after order was restored, Congress confirmed Mr. Biden as president-elect; 121 Republican House members and six senators voted against certification. 

Prosecutors used these actions and others by the former president and his allies to convince a grand jury in Washington to indict Mr. Trump in January 2023, on four counts of election interference. He has also been indicted in Georgia over his calls to state election officials in 2020. Neither case has gone to trial. 

Mr. Trump was separately convicted by a New York jury for falsifying business records over a hush money payment in 2016 to a porn star. He has appealed the verdict. He also faces a federal criminal case over the removal of classified documents from the White House. 

His presidential term ended Jan. 20, 2021, the day of Mr. Biden’s inauguration. Earlier that day, Mr. Trump left the White House by helicopter, en route to Florida. He was the first living president not to attend the inauguration of his successor since 1869.

Aziz Taher/Reuters

People walk on a beach as smoke billows over southern Lebanon following Israeli strikes on Hezbollah positions, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities.

As Israeli jets continued to pound Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, and Hezbollah extended its barrage of rocket fire ever deeper into Israeli territory, concerns grew that brinkmanship could tip the Middle East into a wider regional war.

For the time being, Hezbollah appears unwilling to raise the stakes. The heavily armed militia “is ready” for an all-out war, says one of its fighters in Beirut, but is “trying to avoid” such an outcome for fear of heavy civilian casualties. “But if we are pushed into a corner, yes, we will fight,” he says.

Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, also appears cautious. “We do not want to be the cause of instability in the Middle East,” Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian told reporters in New York on Monday. “Its consequences could be irreversible.”

But he pledged that Tehran would “defend any group that is defending its rights and itself,” and later told CNN that “Hezbollah cannot stand alone against a country that is being defended and supported and supplied” by the U.S. and Western countries.

Israel, meanwhile, is acting unusually belligerently, stepping up hostilities last week with two mass attacks on Hezbollah communications networks. In the most lethal day of conflict in Lebanon for decades, on Monday, 558 people died as Israel struck 1,600 targets and claimed to have destroyed thousands of Hezbollah rockets.

“Israel is on the fast track to war, even if the public has not been told,” military analyst Amos Harel wrote in Tuesday’s Ha’aretz newspaper.

Vahid Salemi/AP

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian (right) listens to the commander of the Revolutionary Guard's ground force as he reviews an annual armed forces parade.

Who wants war, who doesn’t?

This has put Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an awkward spot, as he seeks to maintain his group’s credibility while avoiding all-out war that could leave Hezbollah in shreds. Balancing those two considerations will not be easy in the middle of such a swift spiral of escalation, this time driven by Israel, after a year of carefully calibrated increases in Hezbollah rocket fire.

“It is evident from Hezbollah’s [limited] actions that they still don’t want a war and won’t be goaded into it,” says Nicholas Blanford, author of “Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.”

“I think the Israelis have concluded that, because Hezbollah does not want a war, because Iran doesn’t want a war, it gives them more leeway to escalate, in the knowledge that there is little risk of a major blowback,” Mr. Blanford suggests.

Notably, in a bid to find an acceptable balance, Hezbollah has shown no signs yet of being ready to use its high precision long-range guided missiles that could wreak havoc on Israeli cities. Nonetheless, warns Mr. Blanford, “The intensity of fighting on both sides has risen much closer to that threshold which, when crossed, will lead to war.”

Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

People in heavy traffic drive north from Lebanon's southern coastal city Sidon as they flee Israeli bombardment.

The two sides last waged an all-out conflict in 2006, for 34 days. Since then, mutual deterrence has prevailed, as each side has spent the intervening years preparing for a decisive, final fight against the other – while also avoiding such a costly and destructive battle.

Those calculations may now be changing, after a year of ever-widening regional conflict triggered by Hamas’ cross-border attack from Gaza on Oct. 7 last year, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and 250 hostages.

What’s it all about?

Israel’s declared goal for its current wave of air raids on Hezbollah rocket installations is to “change the security balance, the balance of power in the north” of Israel, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s words.

That would then make it safe for the region’s 60,000 residents to return home, after having been evacuated last October when Hezbollah, in support of Hamas in Gaza, began rocketing Israeli towns and villages in the area. Hamas is a member of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance against Israel.

Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Israel's Iron Dome antimissile system intercepts rockets are launched from Lebanon amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel.

Some observers, however, see a broader aim behind the stepped-up Israeli operation than ensuring security for Israeli citizens in the north of the country.

“There appears to be a change in the Israeli approach … for something deeper – breaking down the Axis of Resistance that supports one another,” says Ehud Eiran, a professor of International Affairs at Haifa University. “If Israel can take Hezbollah out of the equation, that’s a big statement on the limitations of the [anti-Israel] alliance.”

Such an effort, though, would almost certainly provoke an Iranian response in support of the most powerful arm of its Axis of Resistance. It would likely also prompt Mr. Nasrallah to play his trump card – the precision guided missiles – in a last ditch effort to force Israel to back down.

In the meantime, says Mr. Blanford, an analyst with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, “the Israelis are now intensifying, presumably in the hope that Hezbollah will say ‘OK, we give up, we’ve had enough, stop.’”

“That’s never going to happen,” he predicts. “That is not in Hezbollah’s DNA. They will not stop because that would be tantamount to surrender and defeat, and then they would face a massive backlash from the Lebanese … for dragging Lebanon into a costly war without getting anything out of it.”

Special correspondent Dina Kraft contributed reporting to this article from Tel Aviv, Israel.

Shelly Boyd descends into the depression on the banks of the Kootenay River in British Columbia.

She’s Native American, but her Sinixt ancestors once sheltered in these pit houses, or traditional Indigenous dwellings, to wait out long winters. Being here today, she says, she feels “sacredness” all around her.

She’s always been able to visit these lands in Canada, across the border from where she was born in U.S. territory. But now, after a groundbreaking Canadian Supreme Court decision, she’s more than just a tourist.

Members of the Lakes Tribe of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington state are now one of the “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” under the country’s constitution, with protected rights – regardless of the fact that they aren’t Canadian citizens or residents.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Colville Tribal Chairman Jarred-Michael Erickson poses during a gathering of the Sinixt tribe with provincial government officials at Selkirk College, in Nelson, British Columbia, April 25, 2024.

In many ways, their work has just begun.

It has been over three years since the case was decided, and one year since the Sinixt Confederacy, as the Sinixt people have named their branch in Canada, established a physical office in Nelson, British Columbia. Now they are on a fact-sharing and education mission with federal, provincial, and local officials in this western province to teach their ethnographic history – and find ways to formally establish themselves.

The provincial and federal governments have been slow to recognize the Sinixt – “glacial” is how their lawyer puts it. How they eventually find their place and recognition in Canada could have enormous implications for other Indigenous people across North America whose communities were disjoined by the United States-Canada border. Some of those communities are already testing the new rights conferred by the ruling.

“Borders don’t define us,” says Jarred-Michael Erickson, chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation on the sidelines of a conference the Sinixt Confederacy held in Nelson with local stakeholders. “The border is an imaginary line that the Canadian and U.S. governments made up, and all of a sudden we were stuck on one side of it.”

Until now.

Reunited with their ancestors’ land

This fight started with an elk hunt.

Many Sinixt, whose traditional territory extends from Kinbasket Lake north of Revelstoke in British Columbia southward to Kettle Falls in Washington, today reside on the U.S. side of the border on the Colville Reservation. The Canadian government declared them “extinct” in 1956.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Sinixt Confederacy member Rick Desautel speaks about hunting in Canada and the lawsuit that resulted.

More than 50 years later, Rick Desautel, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and a U.S. citizen, shot a cow elk for ceremonial meat in British Columbia in a strategic effort to get arrested. It was 2010, and he was charged for not having a license and for hunting big game without being a provincial resident. In his defense, he argued he was exercising his Aboriginal right to hunt in ancestral territory.

His case drew support from over a dozen cross-border groups and other Indigenous organizations. Mr. Desautel won three successive victories in the lower courts, and in 2021, a majority of Canada’s Supreme Court agreed with him, too. The court effectively ruled that Indigenous people who are descendants of those who lived in what is now Canada prior to European contact, but without modern Canadian citizenship or residency, can be considered “Aboriginal peoples of Canada.” To deny that right, the court ruled, would “risk perpetuating the historical injustice suffered by Aboriginal peoples at the hands of Europeans.”

It also reverses the ruling on the Sinixt’s extinction. “If we’d lost, it would have just wiped us out of this country,” says Mr. Desautel in an interview in Nelson. Specifically, the case affirmed that the Sinixt have Canadian constitutional rights to fish, hunt, and gather on their ancestral lands.

But, he adds, “we’ve opened a can of worms.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A Sinixt pictograph, or painting on stone using natural pigments, can be seen on a rock by the Kootenay River, outside Nelson, British Columbia, April 26, 2024.

Among the questions now being posed: What other rights are they entitled to as one of the “Aboriginal peoples of Canada”? How should they be consulted on development or resource projects that go through their ancestors’ territory? Do they have the right to cross the border and live and work freely?

Among the biggest questions right now, says Mark Underhill, the lawyer who represented the Sinixt at the Supreme Court, is how many other transborder groups in the U.S. will try to establish rights in Canada. Already, seven tribes in Alaska have sought a say in a mining project in northern British Columbia, citing the Desautel case.

That’s why the case was so contentious to begin with. Six provinces and territories that border the U.S. intervened against the Sinixt. Attorneys argued that granting rights to non-Canadian citizens outside Canada would be incompatible with Canadian sovereignty.

“If Indigenous Mexicans tried to interfere with California’s internal affairs, there would be outcry [in the U.S.] against foreigners trying to interfere,” says Peter Best, a retired lawyer in the mining community of Sudbury, Ontario, who has written against this case.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A territory map hangs on a pillar during a gathering of the Sinixt tribe with provincial government officials at Selkirk College, in Nelson, British Columbia, April 25, 2024. The Sinixt Confederacy is the newest American tribe in Canada.

A mixed reception up north?

The new Sinixt office in Nelson primarily deals with fish and wildlife services. And for the most part, the Sinixt say they feel welcome in this liberal town that has traditionally drawn artists and Americans escaping the draft during the Vietnam War.

“We have been working very diligently in ‘Truth and Reconciliation,’” says Mayor Janice Morrison, referring to the Canadian government’s framework, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for justice for Indigenous peoples across Canada. She sees this fight as part of their town’s Reconciliation work.

SOURCE:

Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

But much confusion remains. James Baxter, a biologist who is non-Indigenous and runs the Sinixt Nelson office, says that the Sinixt should be consulted on development work under the constitution, but aren’t in the consultative databases as they should be. “If someone wants to build a gravel pit in Nelson [right now], the Sinixt Confederacy isn’t going to come up as one of the groups they have to engage with.”

Cindy Marchand, who sits on the Colville Business Council and was the second tribe member to hunt on Canadian soil, says the fight to establish themselves has been slow. “We are still fighting tooth and nail just to be recognized up here,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Sinixt tribal member Cindy Marchand poses during a gathering of the Sinixt Confederacy at Selkirk College.

They’ve come against some opponents, including other Indigenous groups in the area skeptical of their rights claims. The Sinixt, or other transnational peoples, could face opposition over future development and resource extraction, too.

“It’s almost like with any relationship you have – in order to develop and grow it, you have to have conversations. And that’s where we’re at right now,” Ms. Marchand says. “Sometimes we’re welcome, and sometimes we’re not. And unfortunately we’re not welcomed even by other First Nations.”

Ms. Boyd says that despite all the pejorative terms that Indigenous people have been called in the past, a new one has emerged after the Supreme Court ruling: “American Indian.”

She remains undeterred. This is not about power or money, she says. “We want to be consulted on what happens with land issues, and that we will have input and a hand in what happens here,” she explains. “It doesn’t mean that you’re owning [the land]. It means you’re taking care of it.”

Ms. Boyd says, “All we ever really wanted was to come home.”

Courtesy of Bashar Ahmed Aldulymi

Bashar Ahmed Aldulymi (front) greets Iraqi family members he's sponsoring through Welcome Corps, an initiative started by the U.S. State Department, at a Texas airport in August 2024.

Mohammed Humed spent 16 years in a refugee camp. That’s almost half his life so far. 

The Eritrean fled his East African home in 2008, fearing threats from a repressive government that detained his family members. At a refugee camp in neighboring Ethiopia, unable to work, he says meals weren’t guaranteed.

Now, in southern Colorado, a group of American strangers has found Mr. Humed a home. They’ve also found him a job. And a griddle for injera flatbread. All this came through a new program called Welcome Corps that allows private citizens to sponsor refugees.

In July, these Colorado volunteers, with the backing of the U.S. State Department, brought Mr. Humed and his family to their mountain-flanked town of Trinidad. The roughly 11,000 residents are mostly white. And no one else here speaks Afar, his native language, says Mr. Humed. Still, he’s grateful enough for the warm welcome to stay for now – with the hope of one day bringing more people like him here.

“Welcome Corps is my second family,” Mr. Humed says through an interpreter. He calls one of his sponsors “like my father.”

That sponsor, Tim Crisler, is also moved. The retiree doesn’t have children and has enjoyed this new fatherly role.

“It’s been very profound for me,” Mr. Crisler says at his home, where he sits across from Mr. Humed. “I feel like – OK, I’ve had some purpose in life.”

Launched last year, Welcome Corps counts on the generosity of everyday Americans to financially – and logistically – support refugees for their first 90 days in the country. It’s part of an effort by the Biden administration to expand refugee admissions at a time of historic displacement globally, and to promote neighborliness toward newcomers. 

Welcome Corps arrivals – 919 so far, with more arriving each week – are modest compared with the more than 84,000 refugees admitted to the country this fiscal year. Still, they represent an expansion of the nation’s refugee admissions program, which is on track to reach a three-decade high. Donald Trump downsized the refugee program while president and has pledged to suspend refugee resettlement if reelected. 

Though the future of Welcome Corps remains unclear past the November presidential election, a State Department spokesperson reports that more than 100,000 people have applied to sponsor refugees through this opportunity.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen interviews with participants and program leaders point to a common theme: Improving Welcome Corps means balancing an outpouring of help with the right kind of help – as some efforts may result in unintended hardships for refugees.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Tim Crisler and his wife, Jean Crisler, part of a group sponsoring an Eritrean refugee family through Welcome Corps, sit outside their home in Trinidad, Colorado, Aug. 22, 2024. “It's been very profound for me,” says Mr. Crisler of private sponsorship. “I feel like – OK, I've had some purpose in life.”

As a former private sponsor, Erin Schutte Wadzinski in Minnesota knows that challenge firsthand. 

Just as sponsors and their communities benefit from welcoming refugees, she says, “My hope is that refugees, too, find satisfaction in this model.”

U.S. refugee program under Trump, then Biden

Refugees, who are those fleeing persecution or have a well-founded fear of persecution, can eventually apply for U.S. citizenship.

Unlike asylum-seekers, refugees apply for protection while still outside the United States, and undergo intensive vetting before their arrival. Refugees are typically resettled by a core group of nonprofits with offices across the country. But those sites, often in sizable cities, have a 100-mile service radius.

Overseen by the State Department, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is a bipartisan creation of Congress.

“Ever since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, there’s been a great interest on the part of the federal government in helping refugees,” says Alan Kraut, distinguished professor of history at American University.

While in office, Mr. Trump lowered the country’s annual cap on refugee admissions to historic lows, citing a need to devote more  resources to the southern border. He dropped the ceiling for refugee admissions by over 80% – from 85,000 in fiscal year 2016 under President Barack Obama, to 15,000 in fiscal year 2021, a record low. That caused some resettlement agencies to downsize. The pandemic further restricted resettlement efforts.

The next president, Joe Biden, pledged not just to rebuild, but to expand. In his second month in office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order urging the country to “innovate” on refugee resettlement, and referenced private sponsorship to explore. He raised Mr. Trump’s final cap and, for fiscal year 2022 onward, set the refugee admissions cap at 125,000, a figure his administration has so far been unable to meet. 

SOURCE:

U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

In designing Welcome Corps, the U.S. drew on lessons from Canada, where just over half of its 51,080 refugees admitted last year came through private sponsorship.

The State Department announced Welcome Corps in January 2023, allowing groups of five or more Americans or permanent residents to sponsor refugees. This way, sponsors take over the reins of resettlement from nonprofits, but still undergo vetting, training, fundraising targets, and oversight from organizations with resettlement experience.

“At a time when people feel so divided or isolated from their neighbors, sponsorship really helps foster that collaboration across communities,” says Sarah Cross, deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which is part of the State Department.

Some analysts view Welcome Corps skeptically. Private funding alleviates some of the burden on American taxpayers, as sponsors are required to secure at least $2,425 in funds for each refugee, says Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. But he questions the extent of the savings.

“What happens after the $2,000 per head that they raise runs out, which, you know, is likely to be within a very short time frame?” he says. “Who then picks up the cost at that point?” 

The program is meant as an on-ramp to self-sufficiency, advocates say. The federal government reports that refugees are a net benefit to the economy, at least measured over a 15-year period.

“Acts of compassion” from volunteers

Welcome Corps is in its early stages. But the State Department expects it to become an “enduring and foundational piece” of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program over time, says Ms. Cross.

Supporters cite the abundance of goodwill, from volunteers who want to help, as one of the program’s core strengths.  

“Those acts of compassion are, I think, what motivate us every day,” says Maggie Mitchell Salem, executive director of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services in Connecticut. “Welcome Corps is the Peace Corps of refugee resettlement.”

Other strengths include placing refugee families in new areas, says Una Bilic, deputy director of new resettlement pathways at the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit working with Welcome Corps. Refugee caseworkers often have more clients than they can manage well, without the time and individual attention that a private sponsor group can dedicate, says Ms. Bilic, a former refugee from Bosnia.

Yet from the start, some resettlement experts were skeptical of Welcome Corps. They worried that well-meaning but inexperienced volunteers might be overwhelmed, with refugees left to suffer. Researchers at Stanford University, currently studying a co-sponsorship that predates Welcome Corps, report mixed results around incorporating private citizens into resettlement.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Newly arrived Syrian father Zyad Al Mahameed (right) poses for a family portrait with his wife and their four children in front of their temporary home, March 14, 2024, in New Britain, Connecticut. The family came to the United States under the Welcome Corps program, but eventually left to be closer to family in Canada.

“These relationships do have their own kind of power dynamics, because the families are dependent on the volunteers for accessing resources,” says Pei Palmgren, a postdoctoral fellow with Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab. “I think that’s a big worry as well for the Welcome Corps,” he adds, especially if there’s limited oversight.

Private sponsors aren’t resettlement experts – especially when faced with complex tasks such as applying for a refugee’s public benefits. That’s why the International Rescue Committee, which is part of a coalition of groups administering Welcome Corps, launched a “support line” for sponsors in March. And as volunteers scramble to find refugees affordable housing amid a nationwide crunch, Airbnb.org has offered housing-support grants. 

Making the match 

Ms. Schutte Wadzinski lives in farm country in Worthington, Minnesota. Her private sponsor group greeted the first Welcome Corps arrivals in June 2023 – a family of five from Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

As an immigration lawyer, Ms. Schutte Wadzinski says even she was surprised by challenges posed by tracking official paperwork. Delays in the processing of documents, for instance, complicated the refugee family’s access to public benefits.

“We all came away from it having gained more than we would have anticipated,” she says. “But also it was more work, perhaps, than many of us anticipated.”

The biggest issues for the refugees her group sponsored appeared to be cultural and linguistic isolation. Language expertise that Ms. Schutte Wadzinski says was highlighted in her group’s sponsorship application – such as the East African languages of Amharic and Tigrinya – wasn’t reflected in its match.

The Community Sponsorship Hub, which leads Welcome Corps operations, acknowledges the challenge. The nonprofit has seen “a lot of improvement” in matching, as more certified sponsors mean more options for refugees, says Annie Nolte-Henning, the executive director. 

While not common, some Welcome Corps refugees have chosen to move away from their original destination within the first 90 days, she says. Refugees risk losing access to sponsors’ resources, and potentially public benefits, if they do.

Ms. Nolte-Henning notes that “out-migration” has been a normal feature of refugee resettlement for decades. And instead of a failure, she sees those moves as a “success – that a family found agency to make a choice.”

Zyad Al Mahameed made that choice. The Syrian refugee and his family first settled in Connecticut in March, through Welcome Corps. They then traveled to Canada several months later to be closer to the comfort of family there. The father says they hope to stay.

The decision was “mostly for my children. They felt very isolated,” says Mr. Al Mahameed in Arabic through an interpreter. “Welcome Corps helped us a lot – they weren’t the reason why we left,” he clarifies, though he wishes he had been enrolled in English classes. 

Welcome Corps creates new pathways 

Welcome Corps is now expanding with opportunities for U.S. employers and higher education institutions. The latter, Welcome Corps on Campus, with more than a dozen U.S. colleges and universities on board so far, recently announced the arrival of more than 30 refugee students for the start of fall semester. Welcome Corps also now allows volunteers to name whom they want to sponsor, such as family members still abroad. 

That’s what Bashar Ahmed Aldulymi did. And after years of anguished waiting, the Texan greeted his Iraqi brother at an airport last month, wrapping him in an American flag.

Mr. Ahmed Aldulymi fled Iraq in 2008, five years after the American invasion. Now a U.S. citizen, he says he’s tried for over a decade to bring over Iraqi family members displaced in Turkey. 

He watched as the Trump administration curbed refugee admissions and announced what some called a Muslim ban. Then he watched Americans roll out the welcome mat for displaced Afghans in 2021 and Ukrainians in 2022.

An avid news reader, Mr. Ahmed Aldulymi remembers the exact date of the Welcome Corps launch: Jan. 19, 2023. The hopeful sponsor of his family dove into learning and application mode. Meanwhile, his older brother, who’d waited for years in Turkey, died.

While sponsorship is a huge responsibility, says Mr. Ahmed Aldulymi, he recommends it. The relief of reunion came last month when he welcomed his younger brother’s family to Texas. 

Welcome Corps “gave me access to my family,” says Mr. Ahmed Aldulymi. 

Abdulrahman Ismail contributed Afar interpretation, and Yasmeen Othman contributed Arabic interpretation for this story.

A typical weekday turns metro Manila into a smoggy, gridlocked “Carmageddon” teeming with cars and jeepneys. But with most people off work and school on this sunny Sunday morning, the streets are calm – the perfect time for 100 cyclists to ride through Marikina and the neighboring city of Antipolo. 

Wearing unassuming beige jerseys marked “marshal,” about 20 women and men from the Firefly Brigade direct stops at red lights and block cars at intersections to ensure everyone can pass, including a father on a custom bike with children in tow, a man carrying shih tzu in a cargo bike, and a group of girlfriends on road bikes.

The Firefly Brigade is helping to keep ride participants safe as they celebrate one day in advance of World Bicycle Day in early June. But cyclists such as Warren Demdam and his friends have joined the event to show solidarity with the nongovernmental organization’s advocacy for safer bike lanes and less air pollution. 

“Cyclists face many challenges, but we cannot tackle them on our own. We need allies,” says Mr. Demdam, a metro Manila resident who has been a regular participant since 2016 in the Firefly Brigade’s monthly mass rides.

Birth of the brigade

Katti Sta. Ana never imagined founding a cycling group when, in 1997, she joined a long-distance mass ride in the Philippines, aspiring to become a triathlete. She grew frustrated during the event as she cycled down streets filled with homeless people. “I remember that day clearly,” Ms. Sta. Ana says. “I cried in front of my desktop computer, telling God that He was not doing anything to help the poor.”

“It did not take long before I envisioned people marching and riding bikes converging at Quezon Memorial Circle in protest,” she adds. She also soon realized that while she could not solve poverty, she could make an impact on the environment through her passion for cycling. 

Bernice Beltran

Roselle Leah Rivera, shown outside her home in Quezon City in the eastern district of metro Manila, is chairperson of the Firefly Brigade.

As a visual artist, Ms. Sta. Ana often came up with ideas she never pursued, but this one was different – she couldn’t stop talking about organizing the event at Quezon Memorial Circle. A publishing company she designed bookmarks for proposed the advertising tagline, “When was the last time you saw the fireflies?” – a reference to the lightning bugs that serve as indicators of ecosystem health and that are disappearing with light pollution, pesticides, urban growth, and climate change. Fellow cyclists planned the route and secured permits, while Ms. Sta. Ana’s artist friends drew illustrations for newsletters to show how cycling reduces carbon emissions.

In April 1999, the inaugural Tour of the Fireflies attracted 200 cyclists in nature-themed costumes and helped the Firefly Brigade establish relationships with officials in all 17 local government units in metro Manila’s capital region.

A quarter century later, the women-led organization still promotes cycling and is still guided by its mission to “bring back the fireflies.” Besides organizing the monthly mass rides and the annual Tour of the Fireflies, the brigade holds clinics to teach biking skills and bike maintenance, donates safety gear and bike racks, and lobbies the government to create and maintain safe bikeways.

“When we started our group, having bike lanes here was unimaginable,” says Firefly Brigade chairperson Roselle Leah Rivera. “Motorization was seen as a benchmark for development in the Philippines, but it’s unsafe.”

Every year, air pollution from fossil fuels causes 27,000 premature deaths in the Philippines, according to a study by Greenpeace and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In 2022, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority documented 2,182 road crashes involving bicycles.

Raymond Palatino, secretary-general of the New Patriotic Alliance, a network of organizations in the Philippines advocating for human rights and the environment, echoes Ms. Rivera’s concerns. He emphasizes that car-centric development in the country exacerbates road congestion.

Bernice Beltran

More than 100 cyclists showed up for a Firefly Brigade event in early June.

“Cars can only move a few passengers at a time,” explains Mr. Palatino. But he stresses that the primary problem is the limited public transportation options. Commuters face long lines to cram onto crowded buses, trains, and jeepneys.

It took the COVID-19 pandemic for the government to construct 497 kilometers (about 309 miles) of bike lanes across the Philippines’ metropolitan areas. Completed by June 2021, the bikeways supported many workers who turned to cycling when mass public transit systems were suspended. In 2021 alone, a nationwide survey by Social Weather Stations, a research group, noted that about 6.2 million households had at least one member who uses a bike for transportation, outnumbering car-owning households by 4 to 1.

But when traffic jams returned post-lockdown, motorists encroached on bike lanes, posing risks to cycling commuters. “Unfortunately, most bike lanes are just painted lines on roads,” and many cars ignore them, Mr. Palatino laments. 

He emphasizes that bike lanes marked off with barriers would benefit commuters who ride bicycles as well as those who rely on their bikes for their livelihood. “Some food vendors operate custom-built bicycles as mobile food stalls,” he says.

“We need advocates to pressure the government for better active transport infrastructure,” Mr. Palatino adds. “I appreciate the efforts of the cycling groups, including the Firefly Brigade. People can see the viability of using bikes every day.”

“A collective voice”

The Firefly Brigade has 20 to 30 active volunteers running cycling initiatives and 50 marshals tasked with keeping participants safe. Meanwhile, its Facebook community has more than 7,000 members. Many who volunteered or participated in the brigade’s mass rides over the years have formed their own cycling groups. Among them is Mia Bunao, who was inspired by the 2002 Tour of the Fireflies and joined the brigade two years later.

As the group’s project coordinator, Ms. Bunao has helped increase participation in the Tour of the Fireflies to more than 10,000 cyclists yearly. In 2009, she helped organize a forum at which the Metro Manila Development Authority presented a 200-kilometer bikeway plan. When the effort did not come to fruition, the Firefly Brigade secured sponsorship from the Embassy of the Netherlands to install bicycle racks in public spaces.

Commuters “know there’s safe parking” in such places, Ms. Bunao explains. She says the racks at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City, at Quezon City Hall, and at Pasig City Hall are the most utilized. 

Today, Ms. Bunao also runs Kalyetista, a group that advocates for sustainable transportation. She says devoting her time to cycling benefits bike riders like her and those in low-income communities whom she considers the “heroes” of the movement. 

“These people have been biking to work long before the pandemic,” Ms. Bunao says. “They don’t have time for mass rides. They just want to survive.”

Although Ms. Rivera says she believes metro Manila has a long way to go to become bike-friendly, she contemplates passing the torch to younger advocates such as Ms. Bunao. She reminisces about her days biking through Marikina when she was one of the few bike commuters and notes with satisfaction how far the Firefly Brigade has traveled.

“We have a collective voice now,” Ms. Rivera says. “It’s a huge leap.”

Reuters

A person in Colombo, Sri Lanka, reads news about the election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake from the National People's Power alliance as the new president, Sept. 23.

Headlines can capture events. Yet trends often give them meaning. In South Asia, a series of recent political events has suddenly changed the region from being low in democratic values, as one think tank put it, to possibly enjoying a “South Asian Spring.”

In India, for example, voters broke a decade of one-party rule in elections earlier this year. Protests in Bangladesh ousted an autocrat in August and relaunched democracy. In the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan, residents are casting ballots this week for the first time since 2014.

Now it is Sri Lanka’s turn. On Sunday, voters in the island nation rejected the established parties and elected a former Marxist as president, marking the first leftist government in the country’s history.

And in a victory for a peaceful transfer of power, the defeated incumbent, Ranil Wickremesinghe, gracefully bowed out. “With much love and respect for this beloved nation,” he said, “I hand over its future to the new president.”

What may bind voters across the region are rising concerns about basic economic issues, corruption, and the rule of law. The desire for change, noted Swasthika Arulingam, a Sri Lankan human rights lawyer, reflects a shift from political consciousness based on ethnic identity to equality and accountability for all.

“Political parties and candidates can no longer come and say whatever they want,” she told The Associated Press. “People are asking questions now.”

Sri Lanka’s new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has promised more of a course adjustment than of major disruption. The country is still reeling from an economic crisis that erupted two years ago. He has vowed to uproot a culture of graft and impunity in government. His former passions as an insurgent have cooled after a quarter century in Parliament. While he seeks to ease the impact of economic reforms on poor people, he pledges continued cooperation with austerity-minded international lenders.

One signal from him may matter more than others. “We will work hard to rebuild the trust that people have lost in politics,” Mr. Dissanayake said in his inauguration speech. He also promised to rebuild the nation “in unity and cooperation.”

A similar humility in listening to the people is reshaping democracy in Bangladesh, where famed economist Muhammad Yunus was appointed to steer a transitional government. “In times of great difficulty, it is crucial to be patient,” the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said. “We are one family. We have one goal.”

The election in Sri Lanka has ushered in what may be a peaceful transformation of politics and economics. Yet as in much of South Asia, voters have shifted their expectations, demanding honesty and responsiveness in their leaders.