By Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, images by Brian Otieno for ProPublica
On July 18, a gentle, overcast night time in Nairobi, Kenya, a workforce of President Donald Trump’s prime overseas help advisers ducked into a gathering room on the Tribe Lodge, their luxurious lodging within the metropolis’s diplomatic quarter, for a personal dinner.
The guests from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent recognized for a collection of public lawsuits towards the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil government who had finished a stint in authorities below the primary Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d beforehand managed communications for town of Fort Price, Texas. This 12 months, all had been appointed to management roles within the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement, the premier authorities humanitarian company on the earth.
5 months earlier, a number of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job finished, they’d launched into a world tour of half a dozen cities, together with the Kenyan capital. They have been granted particular permission to fly enterprise class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” in accordance with an inner memo. Thornton alone acquired authorization to expense greater than $35,000 in taxpayer cash for the journey. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s prime specialists, who have been being compelled out of the company amid the administration’s said dedication to austerity.
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When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi realized of the go to, officers there organized the dinner with a purpose in thoughts. It could be their final alternative to elucidate, face-to-face, the catastrophic influence of Trump’s drastic cuts to overseas help.
A prime concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Meals Program’s operation in Kenya, the place about 720,000 refugees, among the many most susceptible individuals on earth, relied on the group to outlive. After offering $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly reduce off cash in January with out warning, leaving this system with no time to search out enough help or import the meals wanted for the remainder of the 12 months.
For months afterward, U.S. authorities and humanitarian officers warned Washington that the cutoff had led to more and more dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, together with Thornton, to resume WFP’s grant and provides the cash it wanted to avert catastrophe. The embassy in Nairobi despatched not less than eight cables to the workplace of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the state of affairs on the bottom and projecting mass starvation, violence and regional instability.
These warnings went unheeded. Rubio, going through stress from lawmakers and humanitarian teams, however publicly asserted that the company’s mass cuts had spared meals packages — even because the administration did not fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio informed reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP nonetheless had not acquired funding, ran low on provides and can be compelled to cease feeding a lot of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp on the earth, WFP reduce rations to their lowest in historical past, trapping a lot of the 308,000 individuals within the camp with virtually nothing to eat.
They started to starve, and lots of — largely youngsters — died as a result of their malnourished our bodies couldn’t struggle off infections, ProPublica discovered whereas reporting within the camp. Moms had to decide on which of their children to feed. Younger males took to the streets in protests, a few of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant ladies with life-threatening anemia have been so determined for energy that they ate mud. Out of choices and mortally afraid, refugees started fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped vehicles, threatening a brand new migration disaster on the continent. They stated they’d moderately threat being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly ravenous in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the state of affairs in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officers enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of greater than twenty years. Pajevic arrived on the Tribe Lodge early. She introduced props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a group of Tupperware containers with totally different quantities of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she positioned every container on the desk. The biggest represented 2,100 each day energy, what humanitarians like her contemplate the minimal each day consumption for an grownup. The following container confirmed 840 energy. That’s what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma have been set to obtain come August. One other third would get simply over 400 energy. Then she confirmed an empty container. The remaining — virtually half of the individuals in Kakuma — would get nothing in any respect.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she stated a authorities official in Liberia had as soon as informed her: The one distinction between life and demise throughout a famine is WFP and the U.S. authorities, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic stated, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, in accordance with different individuals acquainted with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for administration and sources, stated the choice to resume WFP’s grant was now with the State Division, and gave no indication he would enchantment on the group’s behalf. Thornton, a overseas service officer who ascended to a management publish below Trump, didn’t converse. As an alternative, he spent a lot of the meal taking a look at his cellphone.
Over a dinner on the luxurious Tribe Lodge in Nairobi, Kenya, World Meals Program employees demonstrated the influence of Trump administration funding cuts.
The dinner plates have been cleared and the guests headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of many attendees stated, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The small print of this episode are drawn from accounts by six individuals acquainted with the journey, in addition to inner authorities information. Most individuals on this article spoke on the situation of anonymity for worry of reprisal. This 12 months, ProPublica, The New Yorker and different retailers have documented violence and starvation because of the help cuts in Kenya’s camps. However the scale of struggling all through Kakuma — and the string of selections by American officers that contributed to it — haven’t been beforehand reported.
The camp had seen comparable spikes in pediatric malnutrition lately, however they have been tied to pure causes, reminiscent of malaria outbreaks, excessive drought or COVID-19, in accordance with employees of the Worldwide Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s solely hospital.
This was one thing totally different: an American-made starvation disaster. To date this 12 months, neighborhood well being employees have referred virtually 12,000 malnourished youngsters for speedy medical consideration.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” stated one help employee who has been in Kakuma for many years. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to an in depth checklist of questions, a senior State Division official insisted that nobody had died on account of overseas help cuts. The official additionally stated that the U.S. nonetheless provides WFP tons of of hundreds of thousands a 12 months and the administration is shifting to investments that can higher serve each the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official stated, pointing to current endorsements by authorities officers there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
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The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Lodge, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl mattress within the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old child, Santina. The identify means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary may solely pray that God would save her child’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital 4 days earlier after the toddler developed extreme diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for his or her 2-year-old, Grace.
Mary Sunday and Juma Lotunya at their residence in Kakuma
Religious Christians of their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma collectively from South Sudan. They thought of parenthood a sacred duty — particularly Sunday, whose personal mom died when she was younger. As their household grew, Lotunya had hoped to begin a small store so he may afford to ship their daughters to highschool. “I had that simple dream,” he stated.
However in June, when Santina was 6 months outdated, WFP reduce the camp’s meals rations. Households like theirs have been allotted only a small quantity of rice and lentils — 630 each day energy per particular person — which they have been anticipated to make final till August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it so long as they might, consuming one small meal per day. However the meals ran out earlier than the tip of June. Sunday stopped producing sufficient breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby child started to waste away. By the point they arrived on the hospital, Santina weighed solely 11 kilos. Workers famous in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly below the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital employees pumped her child with medication and tried to reintroduce extra energy.
On the clinic’s partitions, subsequent to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of information monitoring what number of youngsters and infants had died within the room this 12 months. Sunday spoke no English, however she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per thirty days on common, together with the very best variety of edema circumstances, a key marker of severity, in years.
One other row on the whiteboards tallied those that by no means left the clinic: At the very least 54 youngsters have died within the hospital with problems introduced on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, together with a surge within the spring when households first started rationing their meals due to the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this 12 months is the primary in a long time that early childhood deaths will improve, the Gates Basis not too long ago reported. Researchers stated a key issue is the cuts to overseas help.
Within the hospital’s courtyard, one other mom, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned towards a tree together with her two youngsters at her ft and stated she was contemplating an excessive answer. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she informed ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Girls line as much as obtain dietary meals for his or her infants, who’re affected by malnutrition, on the solely hospital in Kakuma.
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa for the reason that United Nations and Kenyan authorities started accepting refugees there in 1992. Individuals have come fleeing lethal violence in some two dozen nations — primarily from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but additionally as far-off as Afghanistan. Masking an space about half the dimensions of Manhattan, Kakuma is a unfastened constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metallic slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched collectively by rutted bike trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Films have been made, together with a documentary in regards to the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a gaggle of unaccompanied minors escaping warfare and battle. Angelina Jolie opened a college there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. as soon as known as Kakuma the most well liked, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she stated, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
Girls carry jerricans of water within the Kakuma Refugee Camp. Entry to wash water stays a each day problem for a lot of residents.
Previously, USAID gave WFP’s world operations billions yearly, together with the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The help is one finish of a cut price to deliver stability to the area. International locations like Kenya soak up refugees from a number of different nations fleeing violence, famine or pure disasters. In trade, the U.S., together with different rich nations vested in saving lives, assist foot the invoice for important providers. With out meals, specialists say, refugees would seemingly spill out of Kenya into different nations. Conflicts could last more, declare extra lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for thus lengthy that it’s a literal constructing block within the camp; hundreds of thousands of outdated cans of cooking oil bearing the company’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
Newcomers are supposed to keep at this reception heart for less than two weeks, however with no area for them within the camp, many have been dwelling right here for months or years.
When the Trump administration froze hundreds of USAID packages throughout a putative overview of the company’s operations in January, Rubio insisted meals packages can be spared.
However then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to increase WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the standard timetable the group wanted so as to ship meals to Kakuma by summer season.
WFP was blindsided. The group’s leaders had acquired no discover forward of the cuts and no communication about whether or not the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” stated one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even earlier than the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls lately had compelled the group to drop rations by round 20% to 40% all through the camp. To regulate for the long run, WFP was planning to reform its mannequin in Kenya to ensure the small minority of individuals with some earnings, like small-business house owners, didn’t obtain meals.
Hundreds of Refugee Households in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, meals rations have been reduce to historic lows. Nearly half the Kakuma camp acquired nothing in any respect.
However this 12 months, WFP’s leaders have been compelled to stretch their remaining provides from final 12 months. They made the drastic resolution to chop rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s historical past. In addition they lowered distributions to as soon as each different month as an alternative of month-to-month.
In August, the handouts would turn out to be much more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize households based mostly on want. They decided solely half the inhabitants would obtain meals. Most individuals realized which half they have been in from a quantity stamped on the again of their ration card.
Internationally in Washington, the destiny of locations like Kakuma was within the palms of a choose few political appointees, together with Thornton, who was named the company’s deputy chief of employees on March 18. Thornton first labored beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of overseas help, and later below Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk rent. Moreover Rubio, none of them have been topic to Senate affirmation.
Kakuma, in northern Kenya, is the third-largest refugee camp on the earth.
As pleas poured in from authorities officers in Washington and overseas to restart help operations in Africa, together with WFP in Kenya, the appointees usually did not act, information and interviews present.
On March 18, USAID’s political management invited profession authorities help officers from the company’s main bureaus to pitch the handful of packages they thought have been most important. It was the one time the company’s Africa bureau had a chance to make a full-throated case for its improvement packages throughout the continent. That they had simply 45 minutes to do it.
Within the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, a company that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton stated in podcast appearances that his marketing campaign towards President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal employees launched him to a authorities forms “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come back to heel, Mom Jones reported.
As a part of the assembly, Brian Frantz, performing head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with practically 25 years of expertise, pitched Kenya as an essential commerce and nationwide safety associate. At one level when discussing one other nation, Frantz talked about the U.S. Commerce and Improvement Company, utilizing the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, in accordance with two attendees. Then he requested: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan felony group Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officers have been surprised. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of many attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated across the company earlier than he was laid off in late summer season, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how that they had prevented lifesaving packages from coming again on-line by refusing to pay for providers already rendered and proscribing entry to USAID’s cost programs. He stated that they had regularly modified the method for tips on how to enchantment program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” one other former official recalled.
Refugees put together to depart the Kalobeyei settlement, an extension of the Kakuma camp, in August after operating out of meals.
Months earlier than the last-ditch enchantment on the Tribe dinner, embassy employees in Nairobi had additionally tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the performing U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital the place Sunday and Santina would later examine in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a collection of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and demise in Kakuma and different camps brought on by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On Might 6, the embassy wrote that declining meals help had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one level, a gaggle of youngsters and younger males in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set hearth to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by capturing at them, wounding not less than two, together with an adolescent who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the pinnacle. Ordinarily thought of among the many most peaceable refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Support employees hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and different crimes would solely improve with out help, Kenyan authorities officers warned the embassy, in accordance with one other cable. They predicted the cuts may destabilize considered one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
Many individuals, notably these from South Sudan, returned residence to the specter of violence.
At a roadside staging space, a few of these fleeing Kakuma employed smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the identical nation the place that they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen ladies, youngsters and infants contorted inside vehicles with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one girl stated by way of the cracked window of a automotive about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-Might, USAID’s humanitarian help bureau in Washington delivered a memo once more requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the enchantment said, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Data present seven advisers within the chain of command signed off on extra funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request acquired to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of employees, he didn’t. No cash went by way of at the moment. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official stated.
Thornton didn’t reply to a request for remark. In response to questions on episodes like this, the senior State Division official stated the Workplace of Administration and Funds, not USAID or the State Division, has final authority to approve new overseas help cash. They stated they labored intently with OMB to overview all the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official stated, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
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Santina declined quickly within the days after arriving on the clinic. Hospital employees tried every little thing. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen help and up to date the analysis to marasmus, a extreme type of malnutrition the place the physique begins to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s coloration light and she or he struggled to breathe. She turned unresponsive to ache.
The household’s solely image of Santina is on their refugee registration. (ID quantity blurred by ProPublica.)
Cradling her child, Sunday considered her oldest daughter again at residence. Two-year-old Grace wore somewhat bell round her ankle as a result of she was vulnerable to wandering off. Sunday thought: What’s going to Grace eat right now? Tomorrow? Will she find yourself right here too?
Simply after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital employees pronounced Santina useless.
A health care provider and vitamin specialist with the Worldwide Rescue Committee stated Santina virtually actually would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the trigger was clear: After ravenous for weeks, his spouse may not breastfeed, which is why Santina had turn out to be so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he stated.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete constructing on the fringe of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, simply on the opposite facet of the hospital fence.
As soon as proud to be the mom she’d grown up lacking, disgrace washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she stated later, practically in a whisper.
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In early August, Sunday got here residence after serving to to reap the sallow greens a neighbor was rising out of dry, cracked earth. In trade, that they had given her a couple of handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in cloth. It was the household’s solely meals.
The August meals distribution was supposed to come back any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings decided that solely half of Kakuma would obtain meals, a call most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace have been amongst those that would get nothing.
Somebody had stolen the roof off the household’s single-room mud home, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cowl, which was disintegrating within the sizzling solar. Grace performed on the filth patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her dad and mom, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they stated, was the one means to deal with shedding Santina. They’ve only one image of their youngest baby: a fuzzy, black-and-white picture on the household’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday stated, taking a look at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
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In late September, the State Division signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This 12 months, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% lower than it acquired final 12 months and, critically, the funds arrived 9 months into the 12 months.
WFP has informed refugees it plans to supply meals by way of not less than March. Even then, most households are set to obtain between one-fifth and three-fifths of the beneficial minimal each day energy.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would every get the equal of 420 energy a day.
