By Rebecka Pieder/Medill News Service

WASHINGTON – In a deal that could provide a major trade boost for American farmers, the White House said that during the recent summit, China committed to buying at least $17 billion in additional U.S. agricultural products annually for three years. 

But Beijing has not confirmed the figure and farm groups expressed skepticism that the deal would materialize.

“I think we are cautiously optimistic when it comes to these things because we’ve been on both sides of this equation. You know, the first time we went through the tariff crisis, we lost 20% market share,” said Todd Main, director of market development at the Illinois Soybean Association.

President Donald Trump visited Beijing in May for talks. Two days after the U.S. delegation returned, the White House shared a list of achievements reached between the two countries. 

This included a commitment that China would increase U.S. beef imports and buy at least $17 billion per year in additional U.S. agricultural products over the next three years. In a statement to Medill News Service on May 20, the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not confirm the $17 billion or the time frame. However, it discussed progress on the trade of beef and other agricultural products. 

Tariffs hit hard

American farmers have been caught in a cost pinch for years. Grain prices are down, and the costs of machinery and fertilizer are up, making it harder for farmers to break even. 

Last year, these pressures were exacerbated as the Trump administration placed high tariffs on Chinese imports, sparking Beijing to retaliate by halting imports of U.S. agricultural products. 

China is the world’s largest importer of agricultural products. This hit Midwestern farmers particularly hard. Iowa and Illinois produce the most soybeans in the United States, and China is their largest market by far.

If Beijing were to follow through on the commitments announced by the White House, it would increase total U.S. farm exports to China to $28 billion to $30 billion a year, according to Reuters. While this would be below the $38 billion exported in 2022, it would be higher than the $24 billion in 2024 and much higher than last year’s $8 billion. 

A return to predictable trade relations between the U.S. and China would benefit farmers, said Chris Chinn, Director of the Missouri Department of Agriculture.

“This announcement is a great first step in what we hope is a full commitment to purchasing American products,” he said.

Jerry Costello II, director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture, echoed this sentiment while expressing doubts at the likelihood of the deal panning out.

“If China truly committed to purchasing an additional $17 billion in U.S. agricultural products for three years and followed through on the purchases, it would provide meaningful support for Illinois farmers,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.”

When asked to confirm the $17 billion number, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy notably omitted any mention of the figure or the time frame. 

“It is hoped that both sides will create favorable conditions for two-way agricultural trade by jointly reducing tariffs, removing non-tariff barriers, and expanding market access, so as to promote the recovery and continuous expansion of cooperation in agricultural trade,” the spokesperson said. 

China also resumed registration of U.S. beef suppliers after the summit, according to the spokesperson.

Soybean imports cut off

After the Trump administration imposed sprawling tariffs on China last year, China halted imports of U.S. soybeans for several months. In November, the U.S and China reached a trade agreement in which China committed to purchasing 12 million metric tons of soybeans by the end of February. The order represented a sharp decrease from 2024 levels.

“The ag industry has heard big promises before, but the actual trade commitments have often failed to materialize,” Costello said. “During previous trade agreements, China fell well short of its pledged purchases, leaving farmers to suffer the economic impact.”

Lance Muirhead, a seventh generation farmer in Macon County, Illinois, has felt the costs of the trade war first hand. As a direct result of ongoing trade disputes, he has had to tighten the budget on the farm he operates together with his family, he said.

“It has put a halt on us buying any new equipment we might have been in the market for,” Muirhead said. “I run a 16-year-old combine that I’d like to upgrade to a slightly newer model, but that’s just not in the budget the way commodity prices have been.”

He is “skeptically optimistic” about the new proposed trade agreement. While a tweet or a promise can have positive effects on the market, that hype is short-lived unless commitments are followed through with concrete purchases the way they were last fall, he said.

“I think the proof will be in the pudding and only time will tell, but I sure hope the agreement is executed,” he said. “When China has that big of a basket, it’s hard not to want to put all of your eggs, or soybeans, into it.”

‘Just fluff’?

Senator Adam Schiff, D-Calif., also expressed skepticism.

“There’s a long history of the president coming back and misrepresenting what he’s achieved. My first question is, are any of these commitments real or are they just fluff?” Schiff, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, told Medill News Service.

When China halted imports last year, it was a massive blow to U.S. soybean exports, said Main, of the Illinois Soybean Association. It’s a market that has been built up over the last 30 years, and establishing new markets takes time. 

Even if the deal were to pan out, soybean farmers still should diversify their buyers so they are no longer so reliant on China, he said.

“If you look out a decade or so, we know that long-term China is not going to be the dominant buyer that it once was,” Main said. “And so we have to pivot.” 

Medill News Service articles are reported and written by graduate student journalists in the Washington program of the Medill School at Northwestern University.

By Naisha Roy/Medill News Service

WASHINGTON — Dozens of people gathered on a sandy lot in front of the White House construction zone Tuesday evening, carrying posters peppered with monarch butterflies and unfurling massive banners reading “Set kids free.”

The butterflies symbolized immigrants without legal status, as the protesters called to abolish all detention facilities in the United States as part of a “Close the Camps” vigil and protest organized by the Coalition to End Family and Child Detention and others, including the National Education Association.

“Migration is beautiful,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a communications manager who represented the NEA and her own firm at the event. “People move, and that should be celebrated.”

Many of the protesters were from Texas, rallying against the conditions in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Dilley Immigration Processing Center south of San Antonio. 

Over the last few months, several advocacy group reports and lawsuits have alleged the facility lacks potable drinking water, healthcare, adequate food and clean clothing for detainees, many of whom are children.

“Families are reporting worms and mold in the food that’s making children ill,” said Trudy Taylor Smith, a policy administrator for the Children’s Defense Fund in Texas who was at the protest. “They are reporting a lack of access to clean drinking water. The tap smells foul. It’s making children sick, and yet if people want to avoid the tap and access clean water, they have to pay their own money to buy bottled water from the commissary.”

Democrats demand release of families

Dilley is the larger of two facilities in the country that hold immigrant families with children. Both had been shuttered for nearly four years, until the Trump administration reopened them in early 2025. 

Since then, children at the Dilley detention center reported feeling “sadness and depression,” in handwritten letters to ProPublica news reporters. They also wrote about losing their appetites and missing home. 

On the same day as the protest, a delegation of congressional Democrats led by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, visited the Dilley facility and urged the Department of Homeland Security to release all families detained there. The delegation included Reps. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas; Christian Menefee, D-Texas; Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz.; Henry Cuellar, D-Texas; Mark Takano, D-Calif.; and Chellie Pingree, D-Maine.

“The kids, as you can imagine, were distraught. They were sobbing most of the time that we were with them,” Castro said after the inspection. “When it comes to the Dilley detention center, it’s one horror after another and one abuse after another.”

The Trump administration has denied the reports of mistreatment in Dilley, saying in a press release that all detainees have access to educational resources, infant care packages and regular medical screenings. “In most cases, this is the best healthcare illegal aliens have received in their entire lives,” the release reads.

Single mothers detained with children

Dianne Garcia, a pastor at San Antonio’s Roca de Refugio Church, led the protest with a moment of silence in honor of those detained and deported. so far. Garcia has seen 18 people in her community detained, including several single mothers sent to Dilley with their children.

“I knew a 3-year-old. He used to be the most gregarious kid,” she said. “Now he’s afraid all the time, always by his mother’s side.”

About 1 in 3 Texan children have an immigrant parent, per the Migration Policy Institute. 

The Austin school district lost over 3,000 students this year, partly because parents feared sending their kids to school amid immigration sweeps.  

“When children don’t feel safe to go to school, when enrollment drops, that means teachers are laid off, that means they lose funding,” Taylor Smith said.

Despite this, the Trump administration has announced plans to expand holding areas for children. 

Many demonstrators spoke out against a proposed detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, set to be a “short-term facility,” where migrant families and unaccompanied children would be held for three to five days. 

Trump administration officials have said the facility will only temporarily house people who have agreed to “self-deport,” or leave the country voluntarily.

The detention facility’s construction was sited inside the Alexandria International Airport complex, across from the tarmac. U.S. officials deport hundreds of immigrants without legal status every day on ICE-contracted planes from this airport. 

Already, an investigation by The Guardian found the former military facility to be heavily contaminated with PFAS, toxic “forever chemicals” directly linked to cancer and other diseases. 

‘The same thing as being in a cage’

The protest organizers hoped to prevent more detention centers, and abolish the ones that already exist. Some attendees were former detainees, like Sulma Franco, who came to the United States in 2009 from Guatemala and was immediately sent to a facility by the Border Patrol. She called the detention center where she was held a hielera, or icebox, referencing the frigid temperature. 

“Being in a detention center is the same thing as being in a cage or being in jail,” she said, in an interview conducted in Spanish. “I believe the solution isn’t improvement; the solution is to close them permanently.”

Shenker-Osorio, the communications manager, said part of the protest’s goal was to maintain pressure on the White House and shift the rhetoric around how detention is discussed. 

Instead of “facilities,” for example, some of those at the event specifically chose to use the word “camps,” referencing the similarity in conditions to Nazi concentration camps. 

The coalition has a policy working group that communicates with Congress, with the ultimate aim of passing legislation banning family detention.

“This isn’t a difficult moral question,” Taylor Smith said. “Children don’t belong in cages.”

Medill News Service articles are reported and written by graduate student journalists in the Washington program of the Medill School at Northwestern University.

By Zara Norman/Medill News Service

WASHINGTON — John Bailey said he’s saved tens of thousands of dollars over the last decade by relying on a generic prescription to lower his cholesterol.

The 68-year-old from central Texas was able to get a generic because the patent on a brand-name medication expired. He and many other Americans worried that a case the U.S. Supreme Court heard April 29 could restrict access to generic drugs more broadly.

“It’s probably going to make a difference in how much we pay,” Bailey said while sightseeing near the court.

The case, Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., will decide whether generic drug manufacturer Hikma infringed on a cardiovascular medication patented by Amarin when it marketed an unpatented use.

That practice, known as “skinny labeling,” is a key pathway that brings cheaper generic drugs to market sooner. The Journal of the American Medical Association found skinny labels were used by 43% of generics from 2015 to 2019. 

Should justices affirm the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s 2024 ruling for Amarin, experts warned it could have a chilling effect on the generic industry writ large, which would seriously hike up drug costs.

“It would mean that the monopoly prices of prescription drugs that are currently being paid right now have no end to them,” Charles Duan, a patent lawyer who wrote a “friend-of-the-court” brief in favor of Hikma, told Medill News Service in an interview ahead of oral arguments.

For consumers, higher prices would be untenable. Six in 10 US adults are already worried about the affordability of their prescription drugs, per a March Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Drug prices fall with an increasing number of generic competitors, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Issue is narrow, drugmaker says

The case deals with an issue that policymakers have debated for decades: whether federal policy should encourage drug companies to develop new products by giving them monopoly control for a certain number of years, or seek to make drugs more affordable by shortening the monopoly window.

Amarin argued to the court  that the case hinges on a narrow regulatory matter that would have neither a bearing on skinny labels, nor on the 1984 law that established a framework for cheaper drug manufacturing.

Tegan Berry, a spokesperson for Amarin, said in an email drugmakers would lose their business purpose for research if the company loses the case.

“The broad safe harbor Hikma seeks for skinny labels will eviscerate financial incentives for research into new uses for existing drug treatments,” Berry wrote. 

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed wary of how a finding for Amarin could impact the industry writ large. Kavanaugh in particular emphasized that the 1984 law balanced innovation with affordability, and ensured the skinny label pathway was codified.

Kavanaugh cited a brief written for Hikma by former U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who was one of that statute’s principal authors, saying the Federal Circuit’s decision threatened to “undermine” the generic pharmaceutical industry.

The brief “points out, you know, generics have saved $3.4 trillion over the past 10 years, but the Federal Circuit’s decision leaves generic drug companies in the dark about what might expose them to liability,” Kavanaugh said while questioning Michael Huston, the attorney representing Amarin. “That’s going to have some serious implications market-wide.”

Generics expand access

The concern for generic manufacturers is the threat of infringement lawsuits will force them to wait until patents expire to bring drugs to market, rather than trying sooner with one unpatented use.

“Generic companies won’t choose that pathway if, at best, it means paying millions in legal fees and, at worst, a massive damages award,” Charles Klein, the attorney representing Hikma, said during arguments.

“The risk of liability and what it could do to a generic, I would think, would be pretty significant,” Jackson said while questioning Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart.

Some experts were concerned that a decision for Amarin could impact other generic products, not just pharmaceuticals.

“Drugs are obviously sort of the poster child here, because they’re so expensive and people are very concerned about drug prices,” Duan said. “But this is not a case that’s specific about drugs. In that sense, it’s really a case about whether or not generic products can exist.”

Generic products can seriously save consumers. Store-brand foods cost up to 40% less than name brand items at Wegman’s and Stop & Shop, a 2022 CNET study found. Any savings go a long way — food prices rose 2.7% from March 2025 to 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor.

Justices are not expected to issue a decision in the case until near the of their term in early July, either to dismiss Amarin’s complaint or send it back to trial court in Delaware. 

Already, Stewart warned the court, generic manufacturers will have a “substantial disincentive” for entering the market and are holding off now pending the court’s decision.

“This is a real test for how we want to balance innovation versus affordability in this country,” John Murphy, CEO of the advocacy group Association for Accessible Medicines, said. “We need to make sure that balance is more appropriately favored for consumers.”

By Jacques Abou-Rizk/Medill News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Some time since President Donald Trump’s second term began, the White House removed a reference to April’s Arab American Heritage Month from its website. 

Former President Joe Biden’s 2024 proclamation now only exists in internet archives. As the month nears a close, Trump has ignored what many Arab Americans see as recognition for their contributions in America. 

Despite that snub, and even as the war in the Middle East continues, communities across the country celebrated the ninth annual National Arab American Heritage Month, including in Alexandria, Virginia, recently.

Amal and Warren David, co-founders of the Arab America Foundation, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to promoting Arab heritage, brought together hundreds of Arab American leaders, professionals, artists and activists in the Washington, D.C., suburb on April 16 for the national commemoration.

“We want to be joyful. We want to say we stand tall,” Amal David said to the couple hundred guests dressed in tuxedos and authentic Arab clothing at the Belle Haven Country Club. “Of course, we feel with our people, but it’s a form of showing resiliency.” 

The night brought together the diversity of the Arab American community. Members have roots in 22 nations in the Middle East and North Africa that speak Arabic and make up the Arab world. 

More than 3 million Arab Americans live in the United States today, approximately 134,000 of them in Virginia, the 10th-highest Arab population in the country. While more than 90% of Arabs worldwide are Muslim, nearly two-thirds of Arab Americans identify as Christian. 

Biden vs. Trump administration

Before Trump took office in 2025, Biden recognized the holiday every year of his term.

For example, in 2022, five years after the Arab America Foundation designated the month and began pushing for federal recognition, the Biden administration, Congress, the State Department and 48 states all recognized April as Arab American Heritage Month. 

But by 2026, the numbers had diminished. More than 30 states and 18 cities or towns, including Alexandria, released their own Arab American Heritage Month proclamations as of April 17. Only five states have permanent statutes for the April celebration. 

Amal David said the Arab America Foundation approached the Trump administration last year in hopes that he would issue a proclamation, but the group did not hear back. On April 15, U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Debbie Dingell, both Michigan Democrats, also re-introduced a resolution to recognize April as National Arab American Heritage Month at the federal level. 

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. 

In attendance at the Alexandria celebration was Arlington Councilman Abdel Elnoubi, an Egyptian American. He said he was not surprised with the lack of federal recognition from the Trump administration, but it’s part of the reason he continues to promote Arab Americans.

“I think especially with what’s happening in the world right now, it’s even more important and critical for us Arab Americans to be present, to be part of the conversation, to show our heritage and to show our contributions to this society more and more,” Elnoubi said. “Because the more people get to know you, the less they fear.” 

Arab Americans have made profound contributions across science, technology and the arts. Dr. Michael DeBakey, a Lebanese American, invented the artificial heart, Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian American, pioneered the use of space photography, and Dr. Mona Hanna, an Iraqi American, helped expose the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. 

This year’s national celebration in Alexandria starred Yasmin Elhady, comedian and host of Hulu’s “Muslim Matchmaker.” The night was emceed by Emmy Award-winning journalist Ameera David, with music by vocalists Usama Baalbaki and Nibal Malshi. The two performed Arab classics alongside Alexandria Poet Laureate Emerita Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American. 

Trump appointments

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee noted in April 2025 that the Trump administration had exceeded previous presidents in the number of Arab Americans in senior positions. 

Notably, Martin Makary, a British American of Lebanese background, leads the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American, is the president’s senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. According to the Arab American Institute, Trump received 43.2% of the Arab American vote in 2024. 

“Having Arab Americans at the table brings needed perspective and strengthens decisions that impact all communities,” a statement from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee last year read. “We look forward to working with current and future appointments of highly-qualified Arab American professionals in the Trump administration, and we encourage the administration to continue this trend.” 

However, some Arab Americans cautioned that the U.S. role in warfare in the Middle East runs counter to their desire for peace in the region. 

Iran is not an Arab nation, but many Arab nations have been brought into the conflict. The U.S. government assists Israel’s military more than any other country, including $3.8 billion allocated annually through 2028. Israel bombed Lebanon, an Arab nation, earlier this month until a ceasefire was announced. 

“We deserve to see a stable, peaceful Middle East, and unfortunately our government continues with involvement over there and has not helped and has not brought us closer to that,” Elnoubi said. “So I really hope to start seeing a shift in our foreign policy.”

Issam Andoni, chairman of the Arab America Foundation board of directors, said Arab Americans have succeeded because they support one another.

“While it (may) look simple, I know very well that every one of you knows how hard it is,” Andoni said. “We come from different countries. We have different backgrounds. We have different beliefs … but as Arab Americans, we decide to come together and unite ourselves.”