‘Children are bound to die’: Corruption, aid cuts and violence fuel a hunger crisis in South Sudan

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — At 14 months, Adut Duor should be walking. Instead, his spine juts through his skin and his legs dangle like sticks from his mother’s lap in a South Sudan hospital. At half the size of a healthy baby his age, he is unable to walk.

Adut’s mother, Ayan, couldn’t breastfeed her fifth child, a struggle shared by the 1.1 million pregnant and lactating women who are malnourished in the east African country.

“If I had a blessed life and money to feed him, he would get better,” Ayan said at a state hospital in Bor, 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the capital, Juba.

A recent U.N.-backed report projects that about 2.3 million children under 5 in South Sudan now require treatment for acute malnutrition, with over 700,000 of those in severe condition. The report attributes the rising numbers to renewed conflict in the northern counties and reduced humanitarian assistance.

Independent since 2011, South Sudan has been crippled by violence and poor governance. United Nations investigators recently accused authorities of looting billions of dollars in public funds, as 9 million of South Sudan’s almost 12 million people rely on humanitarian assistance. Now, funding cuts, renewed violence, climate change and entrenched corruption are converging to deepen the unfolding hunger crisis.

In the basic ward at the hospital in Bor, dozens of mothers cradle frail children. Malnutrition cases have more than doubled this year, a crisis worsened by recent staff cuts. Funding cuts this spring forced Save the Children to lay off 180 aid staff, including 15 nutrition workers who were withdrawn from Bor in May.

Funding cuts have also hit supplies of ready-to-use therapeutic food, RUTF, the peanut paste that has been a lifeline for millions of children around the world. USAID once covered half global production, but Action Against Hunger’s Country Director Clement Papy Nkubizi warns stocks are now running dangerously low.

“Twenty-two percent of children admitted for malnutrition at Juba’s largest children’s hospital have died of hunger,” Nkubizi said. “Triangulating this to the field… there are many children who are bound to die.”

He explains that families now walk for hours to reach support after the organization closed 28 malnutrition centers. UNICEF says more than 800 (66%) of malnutrition sites nationwide report reduced staffing.

Violence in South Sudan’s northern states has compounded the crisis, blocking humanitarian access and driving hundreds of thousands from their farmland.

Although a 2018 peace deal ended the country’s five-year civil war, renewed clashes between the national army and militia groups raise fears of a return to large-scale conflict. In Upper Nile State, where the violence has resurged, malnutrition levels are the highest.

The U.N. said intensified fighting along the white Nile River meant no supplies reached the area for over a month in May, plunging more than 60,000 already malnourished children into deeper hunger.

In June, the South Sudanese government told The Associated Press it turned to U.S. company Fogbow for airdrops to respond to needs in areas hit by violence. Although the company claims to be a humanitarian force, U.N workers question the departure from the established system.

Global humanitarian group Action Against Hunger had to abandon warehouses and operations in Fangak, Jonglei State, after an aerial bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital left seven dead in May.

“Our sites in these locations are now also flooded, submerged as we speak,” said Nkubizi.

Around 1.6 million people are at risk of displacement from flooding, as submerged farmland and failed harvests compound hunger in the climate-vulnerable country.

“Malnutrition is not just about food insecurity — cholera outbreaks, malaria and poor sanitation compound the problem,” says Shaun Hughes, the World Food Program’s regional emergency coordinator.

With more than 60% of the population defecating in the open, flooding turns contaminated water into a major health threat.

At Maban County Hospital near the northern border with Sudan, 8-month-old Moussa Adil cries with hunger in his mother’s arms.

Moussa’s nutritionist, Butros Khalil, says there’s no supplementary milk for the frail child that evening. The hospital received its last major consignment in March.

U.S. funding cuts forced international aid groups to reduce support to this hospital. Khalil and dozens of colleagues have not been paid for six months. “Now we are just eating leaves from the bush,” he says, describing how the exorbitant cost of living makes it impossible to feed his 20-person family.

The neighboring war in Sudan has disrupted trade and driven up the cost of basic goods. Combined with soaring inflation, the economic pressure means 92% of South Sudanese live below the poverty line — a 12% increase from last year, according to the African Development Bank.

“People pull their kids out of school, they sell their cattle just to make ends meet, then they become the hungry people,” says Hughes.

Action Against Hunger says it had to halt school feeding after U.S. funding was withdrawn, raising fears of children slipping from moderate to dangerous hunger levels.

In Maban’s camps near the Sudan border, refugees say WFP cash and dry food handouts no longer cover basic needs. With rations halved and over half the area’s population removed from the eligibility list, many face hunger — some even consider returning to war-torn Sudan.

Critics say years of aid dependence have exposed South Sudan. The government allocates just 1.3% of its budget to health — far below the 15% target set by the World Health Organization, according to a recent UNICEF report. Meanwhile, 80% of the health care system is funded by foreign donors.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan recently said billions of dollars had been lost to corruption, as public officials diverted revenue. The government called the allegations “absurd.”

Committee member Barney Afako said leaders were “breaching international laws which oblige governments to apply maximum available resources to realize the rights to food, health and education.”

The Commission Chairperson, Yasmin Sooka, said the funds siphoned off by elites could have built schools, staffed hospitals and secured food for the South Sudanese people.

“Corruption is killing South Sudanese. It’s not incidental — it’s the engine of South Sudan’s collapse, hollowing out its economy, gutting institutions, fueling conflict, and condemning its people to hunger and preventable death,” she said.

As the international community warns of a worsening crisis, it has already reached the hospital floors of South Sudan and the frail frames of children like Moussa and Adut.

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Women sell goods at a small market in the Gendrassa Refugee Camp, Maban, South Sudan, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Caitlin Kelly)

Women wait for cash assistance and dry grain from the U.N. World Food Programme in Gendrassa refugee camp, Maban, South Sudan, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Caitlin Kelly)

Mothers sit with their children in the malnutrition ward of Bor State Hospital in Bor, South Sudan, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Caitlin Kelly)

Patients sit outside the malnutrition ward of Bunj Hospital in Maban, South Sudan, Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Caitlin Kelly)

Adut Duor, 14 months old, sits on his mother's lap in the malnutrition ward of Bunj Hospital in Maban, South Sudan, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Caitlin Kelly)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is taking up one of the term’s most consequential cases, President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens, and he arrived at the court Wednesday to attend the arguments.

The justices will hear Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them. They have not taken effect anywhere in the country.

A definitive ruling is expected by early summer.

Trump will be the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court.

Crowds watched from the sidewalks as Trump’s motorcade drove along Constitution and Independence Avenues, passing the Washington Monument and the National Mall on the way to the court building.

The case frames another test of Trump's assertions of executive power that defy long-standing precedent for a court that has largely ruled in the president's favor — but with some notable exceptions that Trump has responded to with starkly personal criticisms of the justices.

The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed the first day of his second term, is part of his Republican administration’s broad immigration crackdown.

Birthright citizenship is the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used that way.

Trump reacted furiously to the late February tariffs decision, saying he was ashamed of the justices who ruled against him and calling them unpatriotic.

He issued a preemptive broadside against the court on Sunday on his Truth Social platform. “Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!,” the president wrote. “Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!”

Trump's order would upend the long-standing view that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and federal law since 1940 confer citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.

The 14th Amendment was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship, though the Citizenship Clause is written more broadly. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it reads.

In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down the executive order as illegal, or likely so, under the Constitution and federal law. The decisions have invoked the high court's 1898 ruling in Wong Kim Ark, which held that the U.S.-born child of Chinese nationals was a citizen.

The Trump administration argues that the common view of citizenship is wrong, asserting that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.

The court should use the case to set straight “long-enduring misconceptions about the Constitution’s meaning,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote.

No court has accepted that argument, and lawyers for pregnant women whose children would be affected by the order said the Supreme Court should not be the first to do so.

“We have the president of the United States trying to radically reinterpret the definition of American citizenship,” said Cecillia Wang, the American Civil Liberties Union legal director who is facing off against Sauer at the Supreme Court.

More than one-quarter of a million babies born in the U.S. each year would be affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.

While Trump has largely focused on illegal immigration in his rhetoric and actions, the birthright restrictions also would apply to people who are legally in the United States, including students and applicants for green cards, or permanent resident status.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

Demonstrators holding opposing views verbally engage ahead of President Donald Trump's arrival at the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)

President Donald Trump's limo exits the White House en route to the Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

President Donald Trump's motorcade arrives at the U.S. Supreme Court, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)

Pro and anti-Trump demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court, before justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

People arrive to walk inside the U.S. Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. The Supreme Court justices will hear oral arguments today on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

People arrive to walk inside the U.S. Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. The Supreme Court justices will hear oral arguments today on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Washington, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick listens. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The U.S. Supreme Court is seen as the moon rises Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)