When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids

The US Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people since summer 2021; among these refugees are an alarming number of children who are traveling alone, most of them fleeing Haiti. In this heartbreaking story, Seth Freed Wessler details a 10-year-old Haitian boy’s harrowing journey. Wessler’s meticulous reporting reveals an immigration policy at sea that is opaque, inconsistent, and dangerous.

The treatment of children is perhaps the starkest difference between immigration policy on land and at sea. At land borders, unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada cannot simply be turned back. They are assigned government caseworkers and are often placed in shelters, then with family members, on track to gain legal status. That system has its own serious failings, but the principle is that children must be protected. Not so at sea.

Tcherry fell asleep on the larger cutter and woke at around dawn to commotion. He saw an EMT pressing on the chest of a middle-aged woman who lay several yards away from him. She had been moaning in pain the night before. The crew member keeping watch had found her dead, her nose and mouth covered in blood. Another Haitian woman began to sing a hymn as the EMT performing CPR cried. A small boat took the woman’s body away and then returned for another man who had been complaining of pain and could not urinate. “I thought they would take us to land after the woman had died,” Tcherry says. “I thought they would let us go.” But that afternoon, he was transferred to yet another cutter that pulled away from Florida and into the high seas. Tcherry finally understood he was being sent back.

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The Year Mahbuba Found Her Voice

In November 2021, a young Afghan girl, Mahbuba, and her family resettled in Chicago. Mahbuba is deaf: in Afghanistan, she had no exposure to language, and her family, not able to communicate with her and having no access to resources, saw a bleak future.

But as Elly Fishman reports in this uplifting piece, Mahbuba has made incredible progress in Chicago, thanks to her school’s deaf education program. With the help of a few people—notably her teacher and a refugee youth program manager—in just a few months Mahbuba has learned to sign simple sentences.

Hoffman spent the first few days sitting with Mahbuba on the floor of her classroom and playing games — mostly Jenga. She showed her toy houses where Mahbuba could play with plastic dolls and animals.

“I was really just trying to help her feel safe,” Hoffman recalls. “I could feel her fear.”

Over time, the teacher started to introduce numbers and colors. They slowly worked their way through the alphabet, both written and in sign. She used cards to begin to teach Mahbuba everyday objects, food and words to describe her day at school.

But before any of that, Hoffman introduced Mahbuba to a concept both simpler and far more profound: her own name.

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My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas

Kiese Laymon takes us back to 1984 and childhood Friday nights, where he, his grandmama, and her boyfriend Ofa D. went to Jr. Food Mart for takeout dinners Laymon remembers with great fondness.

I loved that we could get batteries and gizzards. I loved that we could get biscuits and Super Glue. I loved that we could get dishwashing soap, which was also bubble bath, which was also the soap we used to wash Grandmama’s Impala, and the good hot sauce in the same aisle. I was 8 years old. I never knew, or cared, that my favorite restaurant served gas. My Grandmama and Ofa D were deep into their 50s. They seemed to never know or care that our favorite restaurant served gas, either.

I suppose there were choices of where you’d eat out in Forest. There was a Pizza Inn. There was a McDonald’s. There was Penn’s Fishhouse. There was Kentucky Fried Chicken. But there were no choices in what we’d eat on Friday. Ofa D would order a box of dark meat, a Styrofoam container of fried fish, and a brown bag filled with ’tato logs. Grandmama would grab a box of a dozen donuts. Grandmama and Ofa D would let me pick my own cold drank. I picked the six-pack Nehi Peach or RC Cola every single time.

Maybe 35 minutes later, I’d eat myself into a lightweight coma while Grandmama and Ofa D lightly petted and pecked each other on the couch with the week’s greasiest lips. This was our practice.

This was their romance.

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To Catch a Catfish

Rebecca Mason is the UK’s leading romance fraud specialist, so skilled that she can track down victims before they even know they are victims. In this riveting piece, Stuart McGurk explores how Mason discovered an international ring of fraudsters—and told people they were in love with a fantasy.

But Mason was developing something of a specialism: she had begun tracking down victims before they even knew they were victims, locating fraudsters before anyone had reported a fraud. As she and a colleague sat at Baldwin’s dining room table, which was covered with assorted paperwork, they explained what had brought them to him.

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The Quiet Part Loud

In this nuanced essay for Seattle Met, Allecia Vermillion writes about what it’s like to raise a family when your partner lives with hearing loss.

After a few minutes she told us he had passed his hearing screen. That’s when I heard the sound of crying. Not the infant kind. Across the dark room, Seth’s breathing was ragged. A few sobs escaped before he could dry his eyes and compose himself back into stoicism.

Sure, we were all tired and running on raw emotion. But his tears were my first, my only, clue that Seth had worried our child might inherit the hearing loss that had demarcated so much of his life.

Every other year, Seth visits his doctor for routine hearing tests. They measure the difference between his hearing and that of a typical ear. They also record whether that hearing has diminished since his last visit. So far both right and left are holding steady at the same levels as when we met. Still, I lie awake sometimes, imagining how we would conduct our lives if Seth’s hearing went away entirely. Would we set up some sort of marital Slack channel? Could witty text messages sustain our closeness? They already get us through the workday. When we hug, if I get too close to his ear, it squeals with feedback, like someone adjusting a microphone as their band comes onstage for its set. The sound used to make me retreat. But after all these years I know to tilt my head the other way, and just keep on holding tight.

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The Bitter Taste of ‘Not Too Sweet’

What does it mean when someone says a dessert is “not too sweet”? For older generations of the Asian diaspora, it might be a comment of the highest praise. For younger Asians and Asian Americans, perhaps it’s a mark of maturity (and a sign that they’re becoming their parents). For Eater, Jaya Saxena unpacks this common phrase, which is a lot more complicated than it seems.

Like any in-joke among a marginalized group, “not too sweet” is a defiant shorthand, and one that in its construction necessitates a binary: “too sweet” compared to what? Often, in the Asian American usage, it’s a contrast to Western desserts filled with milk chocolate, sticky caramel, and corn syrup. To say “not too sweet” is to say actually, I don’t want your frosted red velvet cupcakes or your sticky toffee pudding; I long for the subtlety of red bean, the freshness of mango over sticky rice. It’s to say that Asian dessert traditions and flavors — matcha, black sesame, jellies laced with lychee — are superior to flavors associated with whiteness. It’s to proclaim that my culture has given me different tastes, better ones, and no amount of soft power can take that away.

This is what got my hackles up every time I saw a blanket “Asian” or “Asian American’’ descriptor around this supposed preference. Estimates put Asia as encompassing about 50 countries, and 4.7 billion people. Do you hear how silly it sounds to describe a cuisine, a behavior, literally anything as “Asian”? How dare you speak for everyone! I called my Bengali grandmother and asked her about desserts, just for extra proof, and she waxed about the roshogulla in her hometown outside Kolkata, the kalakand she ate at college in Lucknow, her mother’s kheer. “I love sweets,” she told me, even though at 93 she now limits her intake. Still, this was proof that the preference for “not too sweet” is not universal among Asians, and that “Asian” and “Asian American” cease to be useful frameworks when we start talking about the nuances of culture.

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Where Are All The Caribou?

Indigenous communities have long relied on the far north’s caribou herds for sustenance. But the herds are disappearing, and there’s not a clear cause of the decline, nor is there a remedy:

To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.

In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.

This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”

One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.

“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”

*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.

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