Since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, student journalists have been instrumental in covering his administration’s attacks on everything from the gutting of the Department of Education, to the rollback of diversity and equity initiatives, to the crackdown on free speech and attempted deportation of international students speaking out on Palestine. During this time of increased repression, we remain proud—as well as astonished—to be alone among national news outlets in regularly publishing student perspectives. As the resources and opportunities for emerging writers continue to dwindle, it has never been more important to support the next generation of journalists.

StudentNation published nearly 100 original articles in 2025; we’ve selected three of these pieces to highlight their extraordinary range and reporting. Read more at TheNation.com/content/studentnation. We’re deeply grateful to the Puffin Foundation, whose generosity to the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism makes this work possible.

—Peter Rothberg and Julian Epp, editors of StudentNation

The Great Salt Lake Is a Ticking Time Bomb

by Adelaide Parker

Utah is the third-driest state in the United States. From the parched Colorado Plateau to the even drier Great Basin, it’s almost all desert.

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In high school, I rowed with Utah’s only club crew team. Each spring, we drove our boats to the Great Salt Lake—the only place for miles with enough water to row on. The lake’s salty water stank of sulfur, which made everything it touched stink too. Thousands of brine flies swarmed our docks. They’d carpet my arms so thickly that when I looked down, I’d see more flies than flesh.

But away from shore, I saw beauty all around. The water stretched so far in every direction that I couldn’t see the land beyond. Unless the wind picked up, the lake lay flat, gleaming and blue. Mountains seemed to pierce its surface and clone themselves in the ripples below. They looked like spinning tops—stretching from peaks to flared bases, then winnowing back to sharp points.

I noticed with awe how the lake teemed with life. I’d look down, and what I thought were floating flakes of sediment would begin to swim. They were brine shrimp: crustaceans that carry the Great Salt Lake’s ecosystem on their centimeter-long backs. Waterfowl filled the sky, diving to dip their beaks and spindly legs into my wake.

The year I left for college, one of my sisters joined the crew team. I’d hoped we could bond over rowing on the lake. But that November, a former teammate called me. She said our team wouldn’t be rowing on the Great Salt Lake next year—that the team might never row on it again. Utah was in a drought, and the lake had shriveled to its lowest levels on record.

The shoreline had receded so much that our docks were unusable. Most of the boats had been hauled out of the water as it crept down their bows. The boats that remained lay beached in a dry marina—a ghost town where, just months before, I’d rowed every afternoon.

The Great Salt Lake lies 20 miles northwest of my house in Salt Lake City. You see it whenever you look at the horizon: a streak of silver separating land and sky.

From its perch, the lake sustains all of northern Utah. Moisture evaporates from its surface and falls in the nearby mountains (mostly as snow, giving Utah fabulous skiing). Come spring, this water trickles through Utah’s valleys and returns to the lake. On its way, it hydrates the plants, animals, and people along the nearby Wasatch Front, home to Salt Lake City.

The first time I visited the Great Salt Lake, on a fifth-grade field trip, it covered 1,700 square miles. Though I didn’t know it yet, that was half the size it had been 30 years earlier, when my mom was a fifth-grader. In the 1980s, the lake spread over 3,300 square miles—an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Now my youngest sisters are in fifth grade. And again the lake has halved, dropping to 888 square miles in 2022. Without meaningful change, the Great Salt Lake will vanish within my lifetime.

This would spell catastrophe for Utah. State lawmaker Joel Ferry told The New York Times that the Great Salt Lake’s disappearance would constitute an “environmental nuclear bomb.” Water supplies would dwindle, and ecosystems would perish—from the brine shrimp in the lake to the over 10 million migratory birds that refuel in its marshes each year. Utah’s population may vanish with them.

When Utah industrialized, mines began improperly dumping waste, which then leached into the lake, polluting it with heavy metals like arsenic. As a terminal lake, the Great Salt Lake has inlets but no outlets other than evaporation. All the metals that have ever been poured into it have accumulated in its lake bed over time, with no way out.

Now retreating water levels are exposing stretches of cracked, arsenic-laden lake bed. Windstorms have begun to blow across the bed, picking up clouds of poisonous dust. They carry it into the Wasatch Front, which is home to 2.6 million of Utah’s 3.4 million residents. Inhaling even ordinary dust can be devastating to health, but arsenic-laced dust carries an extra hazard. As more storms from the Great Salt Lake’s dried basin arrive, the air will turn toxic. Millions of Utahans—including my entire family—will breathe poison.

This dust won’t kill you overnight, but the EPA links it to “asthma, heart attacks, and premature death.” Similar disasters have happened to other lakes, and nearby cities have not fared well. After Owens Lake, a saline lake in California, dried up and toxic dust storms started, cities along its coast emptied. The arid lake bed filled the surrounding air with PM10—tiny particles that have serious health effects if inhaled. Owens Lake became the nation’s largest single PM10 source, spreading pollution across the region. The Great Salt Lake is 15 times larger than Owens Lake ever was. Its collapse would be far more catastrophic.

It terrifies me to think about what will happen to my community if the Great Salt Lake vanishes. My younger siblings all have severe asthma, and two live with just 60 percent of normal lung capacity.

When my brother visited the Great Salt Lake on his own fifth-grade field trip, his rowdy class kicked up dust on the lake shore, which plunged him into a severe asthma attack. Fortunately, he had his inhaler with him. But what will happen to my siblings if these dust storms invade Salt Lake City—and the air outside our house? Will my brother be able to survive in a place where he can barely breathe?

My family has the means to leave Utah, and if the lake dries up, I know we will. That’s what happened to the cities around Owens Lake: Those who could afford it fled. The less fortunate stayed and dealt with the consequences.

The next few years will determine the Great Salt Lake’s fate. Utah faces two options: We can respond with apathy and watch as the lake disappears, along with many of Utah’s residents. Or we can wake up to the danger and enact substantive legislation, offer water-conservation incentives, and appropriate money to save the lake.

Saving the Great Salt Lake won’t be easy. The University of Utah estimates that the amount of water that flows into the lake must increase by 33 percent for it to reach healthy water levels by the 2050s. This means Utahans will have to make sacrifices. We must curb municipal water use—by getting rid of water-intensive lawns, for example.

Utah’s agriculture industry, the largest consumer of water from the lake, must also reduce its intake. It likely won’t do this on its own, so Utah’s Legislature must pass legislation. And Utah’s government must tighten water-use regulations around thirsty crops like alfalfa and invest state funds to lease water rights back from agricultural groups so that more water can flow to the lake.

Such actions will be politically charged and economically costly in the short term. But they will ensure that Utah, its people, and its industries survive far into the future.

I worry that my siblings may never know the Utah I know. My littlest sisters are 10 years younger than me, and a lot can change in a decade. Will they ever ski through lake-effect snow, or find themselves enveloped in the brilliant sunsets that can be seen only when you’re rowing on the Great Salt Lake?

I pray they will. But more than that, I count on myself and other Utahans to take action.
 
 

The Case for Letting Noncitizens Vote

by Fatimah Azeem

Carlos Perea remembers listening to his mother’s stories about dodging immigration raids in the textile factories of Orange County, California.

“There was this interesting dynamic in Orange County at the time, being heavily anti-immigrant but relying on immigrant labor,” Perea said. “It showed me how we’re treated as Mexicans, as undocumented people.”

Perea, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, came to the United States at 14, joining his mother, who had immigrated a decade earlier. He arrived in Santa Ana just as the George W. Bush administration launched sweeping workplace raids targeting undocumented workers across the nation. At the same time, Los Angeles erupted in historic protests, including “La Gran Marcha,” where more than half a million people marched for immigrants’ rights. A few years later, Perea would become involved in the Dreamers movement, which challenged President Barack Obama’s mass deportation policies.

In 2012, after years of pressure, Obama enacted DACA through executive action. But the prospect of more protective pathways to citizenship for millions of undocumented people died in Congress and has never been revived. “A lot of these fights started to sharpen our politics,” said Perea, now the executive director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice. “Are we going to continue to have our immigrant communities be this chess piece for the Democratic Party or Republican special interests? Are we going to constantly be tossed around and gain no meaningful outcome?”

For thousands of progressives in Santa Ana, the way forward was clear: Power needed to come from the bottom up. Recognizing a “crisis of democracy” at the local level, Perea and others in the Latino and Vietnamese communities of Santa Ana began campaigning for the right to vote as noncitizens.

In November 2024, these efforts culminated in a measure on the Santa Ana ballot that would extend the right to vote to noncitizens in general municipal elections by 2028. The first of its kind to be proposed in Southern California, Measure DD ultimately failed by a margin of 59 to 41 percent. Yet the outcome wasn’t all bad: “This was something people thought was impossible to even get on the ballot,” Perea recalled. “I think it speaks volumes that there were a large number of people in Santa Ana ready for noncitizen voting on our first try.”

Twenty-two localities in the United States already allow noncitizen voting of some sort, including San Francisco, Oakland, the District of Columbia, and several towns and cities in Maryland and Vermont. Each of these municipalities has distinct laws governing noncitizen voting. Many allow only lawful permanent US residents to vote, and most limit it to parents in school-board elections.

Measure DD was one of the boldest and most inclusive proposals to date, with its definition of noncitizen encompassing permanent residents, refugees, undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients, and those on school or work permits.

“We established a narrative—now people know what noncitizen voting is,” Perea said. “It’s going to be our job now to make the case of presenting this as the North Star of the [immigrant-rights] movement. It’s going to be a tough battle, but we have nothing to lose.”

From the country’s founding until 1926, 40 states at various times allowed noncitizen immigrants to vote in local, state, or federal elections, according to Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “History flies in the face of this idea that immigrants never could or never should be voting—that it’s improper, that it’s unconstitutional, that it’s illegal. In fact, history shows that it’s the opposite,” Hayduk said. “I like to say that it’s as American as apple pie and older than our national pastime, baseball.”

Noncitizen voting, then called “alien suffrage,” was seen as a pathway to foster citizenship and integration. Millions of immigrants from Western and Northern Europe voted, often advancing antislavery and pro-worker causes. But these laws began to change as more immigrants came to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe—Italians, Slovaks, and Jews—who were often seen as nonwhite or as associated with socialist and anarchist ideologies.

Between 1840 and 1900, voter turnout in presidential elections was between 70 and 80 percent of the eligible population. By 1924, however, voter turnout had plummeted to 49 percent, coinciding with broader efforts to curtail both voting rights and immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 marked the beginning of these restrictive policies; it was followed by limits on immigration that reduced annual admissions from as many as 800,000 to 150,000 people. These changes—along with restrictive election reforms such as state poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon-disenfranchisement laws—limited democratic and progressive possibilities for decades. Arkansas was the last state to eliminate alien suffrage in 1926.

Immigrant voting was restored in New York City in a limited way during the civil-rights era, led by African American and Latino activists as part of a larger movement for community control in school-board elections. In the 1980s and ’90s, the sanctuary movement inspired the restoration of noncitizen voting in Maryland.

In 1993, current Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), then a law professor, wrote a seminal law-journal article that put immigrant voting back on the map and helped Takoma Park, Maryland, enact noncitizen-voting laws. “He said at the time, ‘Immigrant rights are like the civil rights of the day.’ And by that logic, noncitizen voting is the suffrage movement of our time,” Hayduk said.

In early 2023, driven by Santa Ana’s growing immigrant population (according to county data, 29.5 percent of the city’s residents are foreign-born, mostly from Asia and Central America), the campaign to restore noncitizen voting found its footing. A coalition called Santa Ana Families for Fair Elections spearheaded the campaign, with support from the ACLU of Southern California.

Mayor Valerie Amezcua strongly opposed Measure DD, citing concerns about the expenses of a new voting system and costly litigation. Additionally, two City Council members, backed by the police union and the Police Officers Association, opposed the measure, and one progressive council member who was running for reelection called it too radical a step.

The coalition pushed back and seized on the centuries-old American slogan “No taxation without representation,” framing noncitizen voting as both a democratic and an economic issue. Immigrants in Santa Ana contribute more than $117 million in state and local taxes yet have no political say in how those funds are spent.

“Robust and inclusive political participation leads to more diverse representative bodies, making representatives more responsive to all constituents and fostering more effective public policy,” Hayduk said. Studies on immigrant-voting programs in the United States, as well as global studies on noncitizen voting in Sweden, Norway, and Latin America, have found positive outcomes in promoting naturalization and immigrant integration. Over 40 countries on nearly every continent allow for some form of noncitizen voting in local, regional, and even national elections.

The opposition to Measure DD raised more than $1 million, while the grassroots campaign in its favor operated on a budget of just $10,000. Perea said that this level of expenditure on council races or ballot initiatives was “unprecedented” in Santa Ana. “[It] speaks volumes as to who feels threatened by immigrants and refugees having a seat at the table,” Hernandez said.

As Measure DD failed in November 2024, voters in eight states—Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—passed constitutional amendments to ban noncitizen voting. The proponents of these measures, like Michael Meredith, a Republican state representative in Kentucky, argued that they were a way to “get ahead of” potential changes to local charters that might enfranchise noncitizens in the future and to safeguard elections for eligible voters.

A surge in election skepticism and anti-immigrant rhetoric accompanied the amendments, driven in part by then-President-elect Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Both perpetuated false claims about noncitizens voting in federal elections. In September, Johnson threatened to shut down Congress if the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act— a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections—was not passed.

Even so, the fight to expand voting rights continues. Elsewhere in the state, the California Local Voting Coalition continues to push for local noncitizen-voting initiatives statewide. Similar campaigns are underway across the state and the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the legal challenge to New York City’s noncitizen-voting law is set to receive a final ruling in the coming months.

“I think [Trump] is going to radicalize a lot of our community,” Perea said. “Many folks are going to become active. If the extreme right is saying the most outrageous things about immigrants, we are going to have to push for the most radical idea.”
  
 

“We Deserve Life”: Students Speak Out From Gaza

by Tareq Alsourani and William Liang

At dawn in southern Gaza, Hasan Barghouth wakes to the call of the muezzin. He steps out of the tent where his family lives and makes his way past rows of plastic shelters to the shade of an olive tree, where he has set up a wooden desk. The ground crawls with insects, but here he escapes the mess of daily tent life. He brings a laptop without a battery, wired to a solar panel. (“Something only people in Gaza know how to do,” he says.) Before the heat of the sun becomes unbearable, Hasan works through his lessons.

As of May 2025, according to UN agencies, at least 95 percent of Gaza’s schools were incapacitated or destroyed, and more than 5,400 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors have been killed, with the numbers rising daily. Higher education has been, in the words of the France24 news network, “wiped off the map,” as all 17 of Gaza’s universities lie in ruins. More than a decade ago, the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi coined the word scholasticide to describe the deliberate dismantling of the institutions, people, and processes that make education possible. Today, Gaza is the most complete manifestation of that term.

Hasan should be preparing for the Tawjihi, a high-stakes exam that determines college placement in Palestine, but the war has postponed the test indefinitely. Though versions of the Tawjihi are still administered outside the Gaza Strip, high-schooler Anas AlSous, like tens of thousands of other students, has not been able to take the exam. According to the UN, more than 76,000 students have missed the test during the past two academic years, and UNICEF reports that nearly 40,000 students in Gaza missed it in 2024 alone. A small online session this year reached about 1,500 candidates.

Gaza’s shortages are all too familiar: electricity, water, food, and—critically for students—Internet access. Many walk miles to find a signal to download lectures and join lessons, gathering in online networks of students who try to preserve a sense of high school community. Notebooks are so hard to come by that some students solve their math problems on the backs of flyers. Many of Hasan’s peers have given up on their lessons, instead spending their days in the search for food. “They drop their pens,” he said, “to either eat or get shot.”

The right to education is guaranteed under human-rights treaties like the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also obliges an occupying power to facilitate the proper working of all institutions devoted to the care and education of children. But Israel rejects both, claiming that only the narrower framework of humanitarian law governing active hostilities applies in Gaza, recasting the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s education system as the collateral damage of war. Even under humanitarian law, Israel is required to distinguish civilians from military targets and to preserve basic civilian infrastructure, yet it has shown no proportionality or restraint in its assault. Chandni Desai, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, wrote that such targeting is “a key feature of genocide.”

Eighteen-year-old Menna Abu Imara remembers the morning her schooling ended on October 7, 2023. “In a few seconds, everything was paused. The war started, and schools closed their doors,” she said. Within days, her house was bombed, killing her father, uncles, and grandparents. She survived, seriously wounded, along with her mother and siblings. Menna has not completed 11th or 12th grade. She earned a scholarship abroad but then lost it—no one can leave Gaza, and even if she could, Menna cannot travel alone, as her right arm remains disabled.

“I feel like I am betraying the dead by pretending life goes on, as if the simple act of studying is a kind of lie,” said 18-year-old Yara Nasser, who cowrote the book Gaza Held in Time with Tareq AlSourani. “How can I scribble down equations when my neighbor’s child was buried yesterday? But to give it up feels like surrender. Like we’re giving up the future.”

Students told us that hours once used to write essays or prepare for exams are now spent waiting in line for food and water. “My ultimate goal of securing admission to a university turned into a mission of survival,” said AlSous.

In weeks of conversations via e-mail and letters, we’ve heard accounts from dozens of students in Gaza and in exile that are uniformly grim. Yet many continue to pursue their education, apply for scholarships, dream of careers, and imagine futures knowing full well they may never reach them. They understand that to keep studying is to insist on a future the war is trying to deny them.

The word scholasticide captures this double reality: the destruction of classrooms and faculty, but also the theft of opportunity. It is a way of ensuring that Palestinians cannot rebuild, cannot produce professionals, cannot narrate their own story. But even amid exhaustion and starvation, students cling to their books and laptops in an assertion that life itself is still possible.

Under an olive tree, Hasan explains why he studies—why, when the food lines eat up much of the day and the chances of using his lessons are slim, he insists on continuing his education. His answer is brief. “We study,” he says, “not because we have the privilege to dream, but because it’s the only way we can scream that we deserve life.”