On this week’s episode, reporters Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel expose the brutal work that keeps cheap sugar flowing into the United States. On massive sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic, workers still harvest sugarcane with machetes amid harsh conditions. 

On six reporting trips to the sugar plantations over two years, Tolan and Nuel talked to workers who say the working conditions have left them sick, injured and trapped in debt. Workers who are long past retirement age told the reporting team that if they can cut 2,200 pounds of sugarcane a day, they make $3. One worker, who is almost 80, says he worries about how to pay for medical care: “If you don’t have money, you’re going to die.” Meanwhile, the company that runs the plantation, Central Romana Corp., is the Domincan Republic’s largest private employer and is estimated to generate $1.5 billion in revenue every year.

Listen to the episode: The Bitter Work Behind Sugar

Read the magazine version of the story at Mother Jones: The High Human Cost of America’s Sugar Habit

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The Other Victims of 9/11

America’s “forever war” has finally come to an official end. But around the world, America’s foreign policy after 9/11 has shaped an entire generation. Reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11, we asked three journalists in countries that became battlegrounds during the U.S. “war on terror” to share their stories. 

In his essay on Afghanistan, Afghan Austrian journalist Emran Feroz explains  that after the American invasion, he was surrounded by media that portrayed American soldiers as saviors of the Afghan people. But as he traveled around the country in 2017, he met people whose lives had been shattered by U.S. drone warfare. Feroz says moving forward in Afghanistan means reckoning with the past.  

Saudi journalist and filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad shares her experiences in Yemen, a country she came to love. Yemen was no paradise before 9/11 – Yemenis had endured political repression and corruption. But as she traveled through the country in 2017 and 2018, Al Ahmad met people traumatized by American drone strikes. 

Fallujah is remembered as the site of major battles during the invasion of Iraq. But to journalist Feurat Alani, it’s his parents’ hometown. While American TVs filled with images of the city as a jihadist stronghold, Alani knew it was a bustling city full of people whose lives would be forever changed by the invasion. He recounts some of his sweet memories of Fallujah, like swimming in the Euphrates River with his cousins and seeing football matches with his uncles. But after the invasion, the playgrounds of his youth became graveyards, the football stadium a cemetery.  

Read the essays: The Other Victims of 9/11 

Listen to the episode: Forever Wars

The detention center that’s a ‘dark hole of secrets’

Last year, Reveal Investigative Fellow Esmy Jimenez started digging into a loophole in federal law: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can detain and deport immigrant children if officials decide they are a threat to public safety. Without explanation, ICE officials can hold a child who they deem to be “charged with, is chargeable, or has been convicted of a crime.”

In her new investigation, Jimenez shines light on what is normally a secretive process, using internal ICE records to show how children ended up being detained at a rare ICE juvenile detention center in Longview, Washington. The documents showed that one teenager had been detained in the facility for 450 days. 

In some cases, the documents show minors were accused of serious crimes such as assault or robbery. But in records released for three of the youth, ICE did not list a reason for their detention. Additionally, in 2019, a teen was arrested by ICE while agents were looking for another youth. He was never charged with a crime, though, according to court records. In at least four cases, the children had already served their time in the criminal justice system or had been placed on parole and were free to go home, only to be picked up by ICE officials and detained once more. They effectively exited the criminal justice system only to be pulled back into an immigration void, with little explanation and without knowing what to expect.

Samantha Ratcliffe, an immigration attorney at the Metropolitan Public Defender in Portland, Oregon, says she often wasn’t told why her teenage clients were being held at Cowlitz. “It feels like this dark hole of secrets,” she told Jimenez.

Proposed California law takes aim at Amazon’s unsafe working conditions

A groundbreaking new California law would force Amazon to ease up on the breakneck quotas that have been injuring its warehouse workers at a high clip. 

The law comes as a result of reporting by Reveal’s Will Evans, who has shown that Amazon workers are injured at rates nearly double the industry standard and the great lengths to which Amazon executives have gone to hide that fact.

Workers told Evans that the company’s production expectations drive the injury crisis, and the numbers suggest the company’s reliance on robots have compounded the issue, as workers can’t keep up with the ultra-efficient machines. 

The bill, which has been passed by both of California’s legislative bodies and awaits the governor’s signature, would clamp down on warehouse speed quotas, forbidding companies from forcing workers to take risky shortcuts or to skip rest breaks. It would ban penalties and retaliation related to productivity rates, make sure companies detail their quotas to employees and regulators, and create legal paths for employees to challenge working conditions. 

While this proposed law, the first of its kind in the country, would affect all warehouse distribution centers, Amazon would likely be the company that is affected most – its workers suffer more than twice as many injuries as they do at the other warehouse giant, Walmart, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Companies’ workplace injury records are now public, thanks to a lawsuit Reveal filed related to its Amazon reporting.) 

If this law is passed, it would come at a crucial time for workers: Internal records show that injuries peak at Amazon during the busy holiday season, when Amazon sees sales soar and brings in brand-new workers to help out.  

Read our reporting on Amazon’s working conditions: 

Part 1: Behind the Smiles

Part 2: How Amazon Hid its Safety Crisis

This newsletter was written by Sarah Mirk. Drop her a line with feedback and ideas.