Even under the hardline policies of President Donald Trump—which resulted in a 25 percent increase in deportation arrests from 2016 to 2017—ICE officers largely avoid churches, mosques, and synagogues.

• By Krista Langlois
• Member Exclusive

Arbaz, Switzerland: A controlled avalanche, started with dynamite, slides down a mountain in the Swiss canton of Valais.

• By Pacific Standard Staff
• Member Exclusive

Pyarpur, India: In Jharkhand, one of the poorest states in India, gangs recruit young boys for work as robbers across the country.

• By Pacific Standard Staff
• Member Exclusive

Svend Erik had not intended to spend the last 37-odd years of his life permanently in Qaanaaq, stewarding critical data through decades of changes in computing and communications technologies, but he had fallen in love.

• By Elmo Keep

Haji Ali, Iraq: A view of the village—which has been ravaged by battles against ISIS—through one of its destroyed buildings.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

How Stone Mountain—the world's largest and most immovable Confederate monument—could become a battlefield where neo-Confederates from across the country make their last stand.

• By Tony Rehagen

Dhaka, Bangladesh: Momin Mohammad, a leather worker, brushes his teeth by a canal near his home in the city's polluted Hazaribagh neighborhood. Each day, tanneries dump 22,000 liters of toxic waste into the Buriganga, the capital city's main river and key water supply.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

John Mganga walks through a forest at night near his former workplace, the Amani Hill Research Station.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

A 2007 government survey offers a glimpse into the lives of Internet cafe refugees: In Tokyo, 58 percent of them are short-term day laborers, and most of them get just enough part-time work to earn a living.

• By Joshua Hunt

With few passable roads, locals drive cars, jeeps, and even cargo lorries over the frozen Lake Baikal to shorten their journeys.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

A story of mythological birds and a murder near the sacred Shiprock volcano in northwest New Mexico.

• By Craig Childs

Burmese migrant workers peel shrimp at a processing factory in Thailand's Samut Sakhon province.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

To much of the outside world, gambling is a vice not worthy of mercy: It is a symptom of recklessness, of compulsiveness, of greed. But compulsive gambling is also an addiction—one that affects some three to four million people in the United States alone.

• By Max Ufberg

In southern Bangladesh, soil embankments protect rise paddies from the Kapotaksma and Shakbaria rivers during the rainy season, but the heavy storm surges frequently destroy them.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

High above the Arctic Circle, on a slab of sea ice a mile from shore, an Inupiaq whaling crew watches for a passing bowhead whale under the light of the midnight sun.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Despite political unrest during the early months of protest during the Arab Spring, a Yemeni man keeps his shop open, selling nuts and dried fruit.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Will the environmental impact of cannabis balloon as legalization sweeps across the country?

• By Julia Rosen

In central China's Gansu Province, nomads can buy insurance policies for their sheep and yaks.

• By Will Ford

A doctor and nurse stitch a man's finger in Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the largest medical complexes in the Gaza Strip.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Waiting wasn't a misery the Africans expected on Europe's shore. At least a hundred of the migrants felt so desperate that they tried to swim to France.

• By Gosia Wozniacka

In April, children watch a dust devil whip up sand as it travels across the desert landscape near the town of Huth, about 50 miles north of Yemen's capital.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

On the outskirts of the city, a man stands in a government building that was burned by the opposition in February of 2011.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

"There is a TV crew here from Texas called Infowars. They are the good ones—they are for Trump. Be nice to them."

• By Jacob Kushner

Borders are arbitrary, but they can feel transcendent.

• By Sarah Baird