Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Elizabeth Caballero, an immigration lawyer, stands outside her office, on July 24, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. While the Trump administration has been rushing to comply with a court deadline to reunify the thousands of migrant families it has separated, Ms. Caballero has been grappling with the sudden deportation of her client without his five-year-old daughter.

After months of separating migrant families at the southern border, the Trump administration was under a federal court order to undo the damage by today. 

But for Elizabeth Caballero, a lawyer in San Antonio, Thursday's deadline came too late. Her client, a Honduran father separated at the border from his five-year-old daughter, has already been deported without her being alerted, she found out last week. That was a shock to her, a first for her immigration practice, and another sign of just how much the ground for immigration rights has shifted under the Trump administration. 

Rafael, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, is one of 463 parents who have been deported from the US without their children. When Ms. Caballero first met him early last month, he said his priority was reuniting with his daughter, even if that meant being sent home. 

At their third meeting early this month Rafael told Caballero his daughter had been released to his sister. Over the next few weeks she would call the detention center where he was being held, but he never called back. Then he was gone – sent back to Honduras.

“To hear nothing from this father who wanted to be with his little girl...and then he’s gone, is just – it’s odd,” she says. “It’s just out of the norm for us, and I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years now.”

"I think we’ve stepped into a new era and I can’t get used to it.”

John Minchillo/AP

Edvin Cazun, of Guatemala, hugs his son Samuel at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in Hebron, Ky., July 23, 2018, as they reunite after being separated about a month ago at the southern border after they crossed the Rio Grande into the United States. Edvin said they were separated at the "detention" and he spent 15 days without knowing anything about his son.

While hundreds of families have been reunited this week, many more are still waiting. The administration has said it needs more time to comply with US District Judge Dana Sabraw’s order to release 2,551 migrant children ages 5 and up to their parents or other guardians. So far, more than 1,000 families have been reunited. 

The administration has said that 130 parents had waived their right to reunification; the American Civil Liberties Union argues some didn’t understand what they agreed to. In other cases, officials said they either couldn't track down parents or had judged it wasn't safe for the child to be returned to their custody. 

Judge Sabraw said the government should be commended for its efforts to reunite families, but added that greater transparency was needed to complete the process, CNN reported. 

"It's the reality of the case, it's the reality of a policy that was in place that resulted in large numbers of families being separated without forethought as to reunification and keeping track of people. And that's the fallout we're seeing. There may be 463, there may be more, it's not certain, but it appears there's a large number of parents who are unaccounted for or who may have been removed without their child," Sabraw said on Tuesday. 

Indeed, the chaos and confusion of the past two months over family separations have only accentuated what immigration attorneys say has been a general increase in hostility from the government in immigration matters. Whether it’s opposing routine court motions, demanding higher bond payments, not complying with court orders, or just a general rudeness in court, there has been a dramatic shift in how immigration cases are being litigated, lawyers say.

“They’re just opposing [more], and there’s not a legal reason, it’s just political,” says Eduardo Flores, another immigration attorney in San Antonio.

Side-room negotiations and agreements with Obama-era federal agencies had been helpful in making a notoriously backlogged immigration court system run a little more smoothly. To free up more court time, participants agreed not to litigate minor issues, such as co-signing a plaintiff’s application for a green card while their removal proceeding was under way.

Since the Trump administration came in, those kinds of negotiations and agreements have been replaced by stone walls; plaintiffs are spending longer in detention as arguments wait for a judge to hold hearings.

“These are people, they’re not inanimate objects,” Mr. Flores says. “They want to go to school, they want to work, support their families.”

'Like we were criminals'

For some families, Thursday's deadline did bring relief. 

A second-floor conference room at the Catholic Charities of San Antonio's office serves as an intake room for reunited migrants. Case workers flip through papers behind rows of chairs and racks of donated clothes; the movie “Trolls” plays silently, with Spanish subtitles, on a screen at the back. 

In two chairs near the back, Sandra Elizabeth Sanchez leans close to Christhel, her 15-year-old daughter. They had been arrested after crossing the Rio Grande and separated on June 18, three days after Christhel’s birthday. It had been her quinceañera, and her mother bought a cake to celebrate. 

Reunited last night, this morning they were both wiping tears from their eyes and recalling their month apart.

“They handcuffed us in chains, like we were criminals,” says Sandra, who wears an ankle monitor. “It was freezing” in one of the several facilities she was detained in, and “they left the lights on, so we didn’t know when it was day or when it was night.”

She says they now plan to travel to Washington state where she has another daughter and three grandchildren.

How things got done before

Caballero remembers when the process was less adversarial, how easy it was to be friends with opposing attorneys, to be on first-name terms with judges, who knew all about her three children. It was how things got done, she thought, not by fighting every point so that judges and federal officials dig in their heels.

“Now it’s not that,” she says. “I’m way more aggressive than ever before, because that’s the only way I think that my client is going to be protected.”

Could she have done more to protect Rafael? Should she had pushed harder to advance his asylum claim? The thought nags at her. “I just feel like maybe we didn’t do enough,” she says.

For now she’s still hoping he calls. 

While the latest reunification deadline was today, the issue of the 463 parents deported without their children is almost certain to be litigated further, says Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. 

“There’s still going to be a set of questions as to where the government goes next after these reunifications,” he says. This could include litigation on behalf of deported parents like Rafael so that they are afforded the same rights to be with their children. 

For Caballero, a silver lining is that Rafael’s daughter has been released and can now pursue her own asylum claim.

“She’s not with him, but she’s not detained, so that’s – I’m OK with that,” she says. “I’m glad that she’s out. That’s what he wanted.”

Davide Coero Borga/INAF/ESA/AP

This image provided by the European Space Agency and Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics shows an artist's rendering of the Mars Express spacecraft probing the southern hemisphere of Mars. At upper right is the planet's southern ice cap. The inset image at lower right shows the area where radar readings were made. The blue triangle indicates an area of very high reflectivity, interpreted as being caused by the presence of a reservoir of water about a mile below the surface.

The Red Planet might not be as parched as scientists thought.

Liquid water, the key ingredient for all known life, has long proven elusive on Mars. In recent years, scientists have been teased by seasonal trickles thought to be evidence of water flowing just below the surface. But there’s been no evidence of large stores of the liquid stuff, until now.

Italian scientists announced Wednesday that they had discovered a surprising signature in radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The only explanation that fit, they said, was that a 12-mile lake lurks beneath a mile of ice at the planet’s south pole.

“This is incredibly exciting news,” says Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “If indeed Mars does harbor liquid water beneath the south polar deposits, then there’s the prospect of not just finding life within those regions, but finding extant life, life that’s alive today.”

Perhaps, scientists say, life was plentiful on a warmer and wetter Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, and it might have found refuge beneath the ice today.

Earth has its own mysterious subglacial lakes. And scientists have found a spectacular array of organisms can dwell in those frigid, dark, alien places – a discovery that has transformed how we view our own world. This discovery could do the same for Mars.

“When we look at a world, we’re looking at it through our perspective as surface-dwellers,” says Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The whole idea of there potentially being an active biosphere below the surface of Mars, that’s like science fiction. It really changes your perspective.”

Before subglacial lakes were discovered on Earth, Antarctica was seen as just a cold, dead block of ice sitting on rock. But that view has shifted in recent decades since the discovery of lakes hidden beneath that sheet of ice.  

John Priscu was among the first to consider life in those forbidding waters in the 1990s, after the discovery of Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake. “When I started, nobody believed me,” says Dr. Priscu, a professor of ecology at Montana State University.

Over the years, the scientific community and funding agencies began taking Priscu and others more seriously. In January 2013, Priscu led a team to get the first direct look at a subglacial lake: Lake Whillans, a subglacial lake 2,600 feet below the ice sheet in western Antarctica. The team stuck a camera down the long bore hole, and pulled up a sample of the water and sediments in the lake.

They didn’t see any subglacial fish, but Lake Whillans was teeming with microbial life. “I think we transformed the way we see that continent – and our planet,” Priscu says.

The team had expected to find life, but its abundance and diversity came as a shock. Single-celled organisms were just as plentiful as in the open ocean.

“We just weren’t walking into this with the expectation that there was going to be a lot of food” for so many microbes to survive on, says Brent Christner, a microbiologist at the University of Florida, who was also on that science team.

The vast majority of organisms derive all their energy from the sun, either directly through photosynthesis or through the food chain. But scientists think the Lake Whillans microbes might be munching on minerals in the water and on the rock below.

Lake Whillans might not be representative of all subglacial lakes. For example, scientists think the more isolated Lake Vostok, which probably hasn’t seen sunlight in 15 million years, might host very unique life.  Ice core samples from just above the lake hold tantalizing clues of life that might exist beneath, but they have yet to reach the liquid water itself.

Subglacial lakes on Earth are seen as good analogues for subglacial bodies of water on other worlds. “Studying those subglacial water systems on Earth can help us understand what are the possibilities and limitations of life in these extreme conditions and then apply that to other planetary bodies,” says Anja Rutishauser, a PhD student at the University of Alberta with expertise in remote sensing.

Ms. Rutishauser discovered the first subglacial lakes in the Canadian Arctic earlier this year by accident while surveying the region using the same technique used to make the latest discovery on Mars. And the lake system she spotted under the Devon Ice Cap could be an ideal analogue to a subglacial lake that might exist on Mars.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

In both places, it should be way too cold for liquid water, but scientists suspect mineral salts from the rock below help keep it liquid by depressing the freezing point of water.

If there’s life in such a harsh system, says Rutishauser, “it could be a really unique ecosystem that we’ve never seen anywhere.”

Scientists think there are about 400 subglacial lakes worldwide, but they’ve only sampled one so far. Priscu is set to lead a team to Antarctica again this coming winter to sample a second subglacial lake, Lake Mercer.

Liquid water has been discovered hiding beneath thick ice sheets across the solar system in recent years, with this new evidence on Mars and detections of subsurface oceans on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa, making frigid subglacial lakes the hot new place in the search for extraterrestrials.

“It now appears that, whether it’s Mars or Europa or Enceladus,” says Hand, “deep liquid water environments out there in the solar system may provide some of the most habitable real estates to be found in our solar system.”

In a narrow beige office at the end of a narrow beige corridor, keyboards frantically click and clack as a team of call center employees scrambles to take down reports of what sounds like an unusual criminal enterprise.

“So they told you that food aid was only for supporters of the ruling party?”

“They said there are cameras in the voting booth so they can see who you vote for?”

“Who exactly was it who threatened you, baba?”

“What happened next?”

Every day, dozens of calls pour into an election complaints hotline in Zimbabwe’s capital, organized by a coalition of civil society groups called “We The People.”

As the country’s July 30 vote approaches, they say the number of complaints is ticking upwards, with most callers saying they’ve been threatened with violence if they don’t toe a certain party line.

In Zimbabwe, of course, there is good reason to take that seriously. Under former strongman President Robert Mugabe, past elections were marred by brutal abductions and killings, and they often began with these same kinds of dangerous rumblings. But We The People says there may be less intuitive reasons for the rising volume of calls as well.

“We have to ask ourselves, are violent incidents growing or are people just feeling emboldened to report more?” says Rumbi Zinyemba, a researcher with We The People. “We really don’t know.”

It’s the kind of contradiction that’s everywhere in Zimbabwe in the lead-up to the polls next week, the first in the country’s history without Mr. Mugabe on the ballot.

On the one hand, many Zimbabweans say the country has become dramatically more open in the eight months since Mugabe was deposed in a bloodless coup. People complain freely about the new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in markets and shared mini-buses and the 12-hour queues to draw cash that snake around many banks here – criticism that would have been unthinkable in Mugabe’s time.

Meanwhile, opposition candidates, led by presidential challenger Nelson Chamisa of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance (MDC), have campaigned widely, and mostly without intimidation. And Mr. Mnangagwa himself has called repeatedly for peace – a brisk 180 from Mugabe’s threats in past elections that his supporters would go to war if he lost the vote.

At the same time, there is still wide skepticism that anything approaching a fair election is possible. The ruling party, ZANU-PF (the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front) has a steely grip on the electoral body, which has drawn ire for an error-riddled voter roll with a 141-year-old voter, and a ballot that places Mnangagwa at the top of the page of 23 candidates, among other things. It has the support of the military – who helped Mnangagwa depose his former boss last year – and the state broadcaster. The station sometimes airs ruling party rallies in their tedious, hours-long glory, breaking only occasionally to show footage of the president opening a school or hospital. “Real change is here,” ads blare chirpily during the commercial breaks. “Vote Emmerson Mnangagwa for President.”

Nearly half of voters think that incorrect results will be announced, and that there will be violence, according to an opinion survey released in mid-July. On Tuesday, the United Nations called for peaceful elections amid increasing reports of intimidation.

“Right now, Mnangagwa is preaching peace, but the default, the factory setting for ZANU-PF, is violence,” says Dewa Mavhinga, the southern Africa director for Human Rights Watch. “So if they are pushed too much, the switch could be sudden and swift. The machinery of violence in Zimbabwe is still very much intact.”

An unfamiliar country

Still, after 37 years under the same leader, any election without him can feel like it is taking place on another planet.

On a recent morning in the upscale Borrowdale suburb of Harare, Phil Collins crooned from the speakers as Mnangagwa addressed a cheering crowd of white farmers. His predecessor authorized violent forced takeovers of many white-owned farms. But now, they turn out in shirts and hats with the president’s face plastered across them.

“If you were born here, you were born here, you are a citizen, you have the same documentation like everybody else,” said Mnangagwa. “There is no distinction.”

Meanwhile, in many rural constituencies once synonymous with election violence, opposition candidates have campaigned with brazen openness.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Looney Nyalugwe, an opposition candidate for local office in Murehwa, a rural area near Harare, does door to door campaigning on a morning in July 2018. She says this is the first election in which opposition candidates have campaigned openly in the area, a ruling party stronghold.

“Before, we campaigned in the dark so we wouldn’t be seen,” says Looney Nyalugwe, an MDC candidate for the local ward council in Murehwa, an area of rolling rural homesteads in the rocky hills about 60 miles outside Harare. “This time the worst that’s happened is that we can’t seem to stop our posters from getting torn down.”

On a recent morning, she and her small campaign team were hiking across the round huts and tiny farms that dot their constituency to visit potential voters. It was a mundane outing, replete with cooing at babies and complimenting people’s gardens.

Even five years ago, however, none of this ordinary politicking would have been possible here. In 2008, several supporters of her party were murdered in this area, and many others were violently intimidated into supporting ZANU-PF. At one house Ms. Nyalugwe visits on her door-to-door blitz, the residents recalled a brutal beating their son received that election year for supporting the opposition.

A few days after they visited him in the hospital, they were asleep in a small outbuilding of their house when they awoke to a wall of light outside. When they flung open the door, their house was on fire. Someone had locked it from the outside, hoping to kill them.

Violence colored the election in 2013, too.

“So people are still afraid sometimes to express their views in this area,” Nyalugwe says. “But this time around, I feel even some ZANU-PF supporters are willing to listen to something new.”

Looking back, and ahead

For Nyalugwe, like many Zimbabweans, her relationship to the ruling party is tangled up in history – both her own and the country’s – in complicated ways.

Decades ago, as a teenager, she joined the other women in her village to covertly prepare huge vats of goat meat and sticky sadza – maize meal – to take to the guerrillas hiding in the hills and forests nearby as they fought white minority rule.

When the chimurenga – or revolutionary struggle – ended with independence in 1980, those who had fought the war became the new country’s rulers. And ZANU-PF’s bookishly charming leader, Robert Mugabe, became the first prime minister.

“But then we waited a long time for development that never came,” she says.

Still, many Zimbabweans say ZANU-PF’s history as the party of liberation is a debt that’s hard to shake.

“At times it’s been hard to keep supporting this party, especially as the economy has gotten bad,” says Lovemore Kayiti, a road-maintenance worker who attended a recent ZANU-PF rally in the fishing town of Norton. “But at the end of the day we look back to before independence and how life was then, and so even though there are not jobs, we think to ourselves – this is the party that brought us this far.”

Plus, many supporters say, that party has reinvented itself since Mugabe’s ousting. It has a new face now. Quite literally.

The crowd milling around Norton that day were, almost to a person, wearing T-shirts sporting Mnangagwa’s warm, gap-toothed smile. The speakers who stood to address the crowd all sported blazers and dresses fashioned from fabric checkered with the president’s face.

“The previous leadership treated the people here badly at times,” said Dexter Nduna, the provincial chair of ZANU-PF. “But we’ve had enough. Our new leadership is ready to return Zimbabwe to its people.”

•Tatenda Kanengoni contributed reporting.

Taylor Luck

Yap Swee Seng, executive director of Bersih 2.0, a coalition of 92 Malaysian civil society organizations, holds a banner reading 'come out to vote and defeat the thief,' alluding to former Prime Minister Najib Razak’s alleged corruption and electoral manipulation.

After a surprise opposition win ended six decades of one-party rule in Malaysian general elections in May, civil-society activists are busy working to expand and protect their democratic spring.

Authoritarians are on the rise in Southeast Asia and beyond, and democracy advocates here are watching the resurgence of far-right groups and populist movements in liberal democracies in the West. But they say they are armed with vital tools that reformist forces in other countries lacked as they work to complete their democratic transition: foreknowledge and urgency.

Malaysia’s civil-society activists helped drive the Pakatan Harapan opposition coalition to a stunning victory May 9 over the ruling National Front coalition and the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) party that dominated it, overcoming gerrymandering, repressive laws, and state-controlled media. Yet despite the new government’s vows to build a democratic Malaysia, the activists say they are not resting on their laurels.

The biggest threat to Malaysia’s democratic spring? Complacency.

“When we look at other countries, progressives didn’t finish the course,” says Jason Wong, an activist with Muda Malaysia, a youth democratic movement. He says liberal movements in Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt, and even the United States now face a backlash from reactionary forces. “They got complacent. They forgot about people’s socio-economic concerns – and then they lost.” Malaysia’s civil society is mounting pressure on the new government to fulfill its pledge to complete institutional and legal reforms in case the window for change closes once again.

The new government is a diverse coalition of opposition parties with different ideologies and bases, currently headed by Mahathir Mohamad, the 93-year-old former prime minister-turned-opposition figure. Pakatan Harapan has a detailed manifesto and a 100-day test to fulfill 10 of its promises, ranging from raising the minimum wage to investigating scandal-plagued institutions.   

The new government has taken steps to curb corruption and investigate the disappearance of more than $4 billion in taxpayer money, this month charging former Prime Minister Najib Razak with corruption and freezing his assets. But Malaysia’s democrats are pushing for a greater focus on prevention of a return to authoritarian rule. Their own ambitious wish list includes an overhaul of security laws, parliamentary reform, separation of the executive and judicial branches, election of the partially appointed upper house, and an increase in Parliament’s oversight over government ministries.

“They are going to expect a lot from this government in terms of tackling corruption, the economy, institutional reform, and freedom of expression, but at the same time it is a very new government and a very young team governing for the first time,” says HuiHui Ooi, a Malaysia analyst and associate director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. “Everyone has to be realistic.... These laws have been in place since the 1980s or longer and are embedded in Malaysia, they cannot be reformed overnight.”

No pass for a ‘friendly’ government

Under the final years of UMNO’s reign, the government would push through bills several-hundred pages long to be put to vote the same day. Activists say simple reforms such as allowing more time for parliamentary discussion and procedure can go a long way toward building their young democracy.

“Just because we have a more friendly government in power does not mean their powers should go unchecked,” says Yap Swee Seng, executive director of Bersih 2.0, or “clean,” a coalition of 92 Malaysian civil-society organizations that has led the opposition and a drive for free and fair elections and human rights.

A top target of civil-society groups is the country’s Sedition Act, a 1948 law dating back to the British colonial government that outlaws any speech deemed by authorities to be sowing “strife.” In practice, it barred any speech critical of the ruling party. Another is reforming the judiciary, which is currently appointed by the chief justice – himself a political appointee and UMNO loyalist.

One key to maintaining their focus, Malaysia’s democrats say, is public education and awareness.

“If you are not vigilant on parties in power, you have abdicated your responsibility and surrendered your power – and your democracy,” says Zaharom Nain, an executive committee member of Malaysia’s oldest human rights organization, Aliran. “Freedom is a long process, it is not one result at the ballot box.”

In the transition away from “Get Out the Vote” campaigns to lobbying and advocacy, activists have drafted a strategy of pressuring the parties of the fragile coalition to ensure they follow through on campaign promises. For the first time in decades, MPs of the ruling parties met with civil society activists late last month to discuss reform priorities.

Lai Seng Sin/Reuters

Supporters of Malaysia's victorious Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), wave party flags in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 10, 2018, the day after the general election. The opposition coalition defeated the ruling party for the first time since Malaysia became an independent nation.

Meanwhile, Muda Malaysia is looking to overturn regulations banning political activity on university campuses. Youth activists believe they can also push for free assembly and mobilization of trade unions and labor, which have also been undermined, marginalized, and managed by the former ruling party.

Colonial legacy

But Malaysian democrats admit they are confronting both a race against time and a legacy from a colonial past: race relations.

Malaysia is composed of a majority of Malays, around 60 percent, and a mix of indigenous groups, ethnic Chinese, and ethnic Indians. As part of a legacy of affirmative-action measures taken by UMNO in the 1970s, Malays and some indigenous peoples receive some “perks.” They include access to zero-interest loans, discounts on housing and land, priority slots in universities, the Army, and security services, and laws requiring companies to be 30 percent owned by Malays.

UMNO often pursued a “divide and rule” strategy to separate citizens along racial and religious lines, depicting Malays as under constant threat – despite their clear majority and disproportionate representation in government.

“The one question we are all facing now is: How do we prevent identity politics from taking center stage again in Malaysia?” says Bersih’s Mr. Yap.

Malaysian democrats are well aware that UMNO and its supporters will attempt to go to the heartland and claim that the new government and liberal elites are “changing our way of life,” and are coming to “take away” their jobs and privileges. Already, opposition parties have attempted to paint the new government as anti-Malay.

Many decried the new government’s appointment of Tommy Thomas, an ethnic Indian, as attorney general as an alleged attempt to upend Islamic sharia, which is applied to Muslim Malays in the country. Another furor erupted after Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng, who is ethnic Chinese, issued a statement in both Mandarin and Malay – with critics claiming that Malays’ “language and heritage” were under attack by the new government, which was no longer “nationalistic.”

Preventing backlash

“We are aware that these dark forces are already regrouping and looking for a way back in – there is no room for mistake,” says Mr. Nain.

The solution, they say, is outreach and patience.

“There is a risk if we push too fast and too hard – there will be a backlash,” says Yap. “And if we have not made the needed institutional reforms before this happens, then we will lose what we have gained.”

Civil-society groups are working to expand their programs and activities beyond liberal urban centers.

“What we really need to do is convince Malays living in rural areas that democratic reforms will benefit everyone,” says Nain. “It must be proved that it is not a zero-sum game; there is room for everyone in Malaysia, and the economy will grow for all citizens.”

Another threat to progressive reforms lurks in Malaysia: a resurgent far-right. The Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), hardliners advocating for an Islamic state, had one of its best turnouts in more than a decade in the May elections, securing a surprising 16.6 percent of the vote and 18 of the House of Representative’s 222 seats.

Activists remain concerned that an under-pressure UMNO may move to the right to compete for PAS supporters, or even merge with them. Such an alliance could further polarize Malaysian politics and bring ethnic divisions further to the fore.

“Even in established democracies such as the US and Europe, the far-right is resurging,” says Wong. “We know what is coming for us, and we have to work fast to prevent them from gathering their forces.”

Steven Senne/AP/File

In this 2007 photo, a piping plover runs along a beach in the Quonochontaug Conservation Area in Westerly, R.I.

Jorge J. Ayub scanned the public beach north of Boston on a hot summer weekend, already crowded with what was predicted to be 1 million people drawn to the annual sand sculpture festival. Traffic on the adjacent road was bumper-to-bumper, amplified bands pounded out hip-hop, and later that night fireworks would boom and sizzle over the beach.

And on the sand were four pairs of tiny, wary shorebirds, brooding over chicks still too young to fly – those chicks a precious addition to the national effort to save a bird once down to 139 breeding pairs in Massachusetts.

It was Mr. Ayub’s job to help protect the piping plovers.

“Everyone made it,” Ayub, a coastal ecologist for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, reported at the end of the long weekend watching over the nests.

Piping plovers are photogenic shorebirds that migrate from the southern US and the Caribbean in the spring. They mate and nest on the Atlantic shore from South Carolina to Newfoundland. Once common, they were hunted and then squeezed out of their habitats by coastal development until, in 1986, the federal government listed the Atlantic Coast birds as threatened. The listing created a web of protectors: multiple agencies, nonprofit groups, and volunteer conservationists.

The bird's recovery has been slow and halting. After three decades, the Atlantic population stands just under the 2,000-pair goal set by federal law.

But the star has been Massachusetts, which has seen plovers increase to a high of 687 pairs from 139 pairs in 1986, busting the goal for the entire New England region. One reason for that: intensive “chick-sitting,” in which conservationists sometimes spend all day watching over the birds, and a growing accommodation between people and plovers.

“There’s still some tension with sharing the beach, but in general the support of beach communities has been phenomenal,” says Kathy Parsons, director of the coastal waterbird program at Mass Audubon. “That’s been the success story in Massachusetts.”

That progress has made Massachusetts the only East Coast state with discretion to relax some Endangered Species restrictions, to reduce the fenced-off areas and vehicle limits that have so annoyed residents.

“Look at this stretch,” Ayub says on a stroll of the 2.6-mile Revere Beach. “We had six nesting pairs between here and that bathhouse 600 yards away. By regulation, each nest should have 100 yards of fencing. We could have put up fencing and closed the beach all the way to the bathhouse.”

Instead, the plovers are surrounded in much smaller areas by “symbolic” fencing – thin fiberglass poles with twine stretched between them and small blue signs. None of the 52 seawall entrances to the beach is closed, and Ayub has used his rare federal permission to deter one pair from nesting too close to another bathhouse containing lifeguard equipment.

“If we put up too much fencing, people will be upset, and they are going to vandalize it or walk right through the nesting areas,” Ayub says. “By opening the beach, people are happier and the species does better.”  Authorities elsewhere are looking at that model; disputes have flared over beach closings in Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and a smattering of towns along the coast.

The concessions have not won over everyone. “We’re at the mercy of the birds,” says Robert Marra Jr., chief of staff in the Revere mayor’s office. “The fenced areas have grown and grown.”

Ayub says the fencing has taken only 14 percent of Revere Beach – even less at low tide – and is removed as soon as the chicks take flight. But conservationists are resigned that there will always be complaints.

“I’ve been called a Nazi a few times,” says Jess McClean, who works for Mass Audubon on a state contract to monitor three beaches. Ms. McClean, a native of Scotland, discovered an affection for bird conservation in Texas, and moved to Massachusetts to help protect the piping plover. She has a small tattoo of a plover on her left wrist.

“They are small and round and adorable. They melt my heart,” she says while patrolling the Sandy Point State Reservation on Plum Island, in Newburyport, Mass., 35 miles north of Boston.

Doug Struck

Jess McClean, a Mass Audubon monitor, watches over piping plovers on Plum Island, in Newburyport, Mass.

Plover chicks lead a risky existence. They rely on perfectly camouflaged coloring, but often freeze when threatened. Vehicles and people running on the beach can inadvertently squash them. Dogs, crows, coyotes, gulls, and storms can wreak havoc with a year’s brood. In Revere, they lost 24 chicks to a hawk last year and 15 nests this year to crows.

Plover adults, while only about six inches tall, have bursts of speed in the air and on the ground, where they race in a comic zig-zag that can avoid most trouble. But chicks cannot fly for about four weeks, and must forage for their own meals immediately after hatching. As they scamper down to the water’s edge to feed on small insects and worms in seaweed washed ashore, they are vulnerable to predators and to children who cannot resist chasing them.

“We’ve rescued them from under kids’ sand pails,” says Ayub.

Usually though, McClean notes, when she explains the plovers’ plight, people become protective.

“When you can point out those fuzz-ball little chicks, people get excited,” she says.

“This is a remarkable conservation story,” says Anne Hecht, the piping plover recovery coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “This is an incredibly lucky little bird. This bird faces huge threats but it has an amazing group of really, really dedicated people helping it.”

Reuters

People in Managua, Nicaragua, take part in a July 22 mass at the Divine Mercy Catholic Church, where student protesters took refuge after coming under gunfire from armed pro-government supporters on July 14.

Across Latin America last Sunday, Roman Catholic churches held a special day of prayer, seeking protection for the faithful in Nicaragua – from their own government. Since April, at least 280 Nicaraguans have been killed by the Ortega regime in response to street protests. When Catholic leaders there condemned the violence this month, the church itself came under violent attack. Many priests are now in hiding and many churches have been defiled by armed gangs.

The church’s regional day of prayer was an attempt to find a spiritual answer to this sudden assault on religious liberty as well as to a deteriorating situation in Nicaragua. The people in that country have risen up against President Daniel Ortega over his economic policies and his authoritarian rule. Now they are angry over his persecution of Catholics.

Nicaraguans are not alone in trying to safeguard religious liberty. Worldwide, 83 percent of people live in countries with high or very high restrictions on religion, according to the latest findings from the Pew Research Center. From China to Turkey to Myanmar, people of faith are struggling against repression – and in how to respond in a religious way.

This week, the State Department convened a global summit of some 350 representatives from 80 countries for the first-ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. The event, which will be repeated next year, may help start a global front against such persecution, as well as support innovative ways to respond.

“We must commit to using all the might, the machinery, and the moral authority we have to stop those nations and actors who trample on free souls,” Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told the conference.

Vice President Mike Pence used the event to criticize Russia for its suppression of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The administration has also put sanctions on military figures in Myanmar for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, a religious minority. And it has threatened Turkey for the arrest of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson.

Mr. Trump has decided to promote religious liberty as a primary and universal human right. While critics say the president is simply playing to evangelical voters, they cannot deny the need for leadership to reverse a global decline in religious freedom. At the conference, the United States announced a special fund to help restore Iraq’s Yazidi population after an attempt by Islamic State to wipe out that religious minority. It will also set up a global fund to support religious liberty.

Such measures require religious motives. It is not enough to simply denounce religious persecution or call for a tolerance of differences. “We must move to a place where people genuinely care and love one another no matter our differences,” says Ambassador Brownback. Religion, he says, helps unlock the “spiritual capital” of a people, helping them to do good works in health and education as well as care for the poor.

In Nicaragua, after the regional day of prayers, church leaders have decided to keep trying to mediate between the government and protest leaders, despite the attacks on the church.

Doing good may be their best answer to the regime’s hatred.