- [Person] Bye-bye and say "Thank you."

- Bye-bye.

Thank you.

- [Person] And say, "Merry"- - New Year!

Merry Christmas and Merry New Year.

- [Person] And Happy New Year.

- Happy New Year.

Honestly, I really thought I wasn't gonna make it past 18.

And if I do, I'm gonna be in jail cell.

(light anxious music) - [Narrator] Crystal Sierra is 18 years old and one year sober.

For that she credits Job Corps, a federal government program that provides housing and career training to low income youth.

This program has been around for over 60 years.

This summer, the Trump administration tried to stop it in 30 days.

- It's an important program, what we call these opportunity youth, young people who are disconnected from school and disconnected from the workforce.

We can't give up on 'em.

We have to create opportunities for them to kind of reconnect, find skills, build productive lives, and the Job Corps program nationally, but the sites in Virginia have done this for decades.

- [Narrator] Job Corps has 124 centers nationwide.

Most of them run by contractors.

Three are in Virginia.

Crystal attends the Blue Ridge Job Corps program in Marion, an Appalachian town of 5,700 people.

About 20% of its residents live in poverty and 80% voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

The Blue Ridge campus sits on Main Street in the heart of downtown.

Its dorms are female only.

The program brings in students from across Virginia and the country and trains them for healthcare jobs.

In May, the Trump administration said it would cancel the contracts for Blue Ridge and 98 other Job Corps centers and the program would stop by the end of June.

- To take something that has generated so much goodness and then suddenly say, "Well, that's not needed anymore," it would be beyond an economic hit.

I think it would be a hit to the community in terms of who they are and how they view themselves.

- [Crystal] What led me to Job Corps was my constant incarcerations in the juvenile system.

- To know that your daughter is just on drugs, it was like, I'm like, "How can that be?"

We were in a very dark place.

She was in a very dark place.

We did residential treatments.

I changed schools for Crystal.

I never thought in my life I was dealing so much with the police and I did.

My last option here, I said, "God knows that I was asking for something and this is what he delivered."

- For me, like my biggest thing when I went in there was just like, I just wanna keep my sobriety out of like, sober, sober, sober, sober.

I didn't tell anyone like off the bat, I was like, "Yeah, I just came here from jail."

- [Narrator] The Trump administration's Labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer was honored less than two years ago as a Job Corps champion.

But now her labor department oversees an effort to end the program.

In early May, the Trump administration called Job Corps "a failed experiment to help America's youth."

Later that month, the Labor Department put out its first ever Job Corps Transparency Report.

Based on one year of data, it said the program's costs don't justify its outcomes.

The Labor Secretary said, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency played a part in that report.

- If you're asking me about DOGE is in Department of Labor, yes, they're in every agency.

- And did they participate in writing that report?

- Yeah, we were together in working with that.

- [Narrator] The administration is facing two federal lawsuits that say its efforts to end Job Corps are illegal.

Documents to released through one lawsuit show the administration chose to pursue what it called a high risk strategy to strike immediately on ending the program this summer.

The lawsuits have helped Job Corps stay open for this school year, but damage has already been done.

- The day we found out that we were closing, we had just gotten new students a day before, our director brought us all into the auditorium and he was like making the announcement.

It was like towards the end of the announcement, I was just crying so bad and I just ran upstairs.

I called my mom and I was literally like breaking down like panic attack.

It was really, it was bad.

- We are an underserved community.

We're a small town in southwest Virginia.

We need every business.

We need every institution of education.

We need every citizen.

We need everything that we have.

Losing anything is terrible.

Losing something as major as the Job Corps, that's going to have a major impact.

It's horrific to promise and that just pull the rug out from under 'em.

You can't do that to people.

- You're kind of in this purgatory.

You don't know whether you're gonna close, you're gonna be open.

So what's happened is some of the staff have said, "You know, I've got to have a job.

I've gotta pay my mortgage."

So they've left.

So if you've lost some of the best and brightest and you have some folks that are just hanging on, keeping their fingers crossed because they're so committed to the mission.

And that's a tough situation to put people in.

One of my biggest fears in rural America is a loss of medical care.

By having the students here, you have a base of people that you wouldn't ordinarily have to supply the labor to help keep those offices open.

- If we don't help, you know, if the Job Corps wasn't there, what are they gonna do?

And you know, there's always a thing, the youth of today, well, if we don't support them and we don't educate them and we don't give them opportunities that they're never gonna have, how do we move forward as a country, as a nation?

- I'm 26 and a single mom.

I have a four-year-old at home.

I wanted so much better for him.

So I chose Job Corps.

My mom died in 2019, so I was 20 years old living on my own.

Teen to adult transition had to come faster than what it usually would for most people.

And then I got here and I had so many people here to hold my hand and give me that missing part.

It makes it kind of hard not to get emotional, when things like that aren't, (indistinct) are ready to get taken away from you.

You have that sense of family now, we have somebody rooting for you to do better, and that wants you to do better and that's gonna make you do better.

And that's kind of what a lot of us need.

- [Narrator] The Labor Department's latest budget asked for about 5% of Job Corps's annual funding and then nearly $90 million to phase it out through 2029.

The department now wants to close another 24 Job Corps centers that are run by the agriculture department, including one in Virginia.

It has proposed a Make America Skilled Again program of smaller state block grants that would replace vocational programs like Job Corps.

Congress has considered how much of Job Corps's $1.6 billion annual budget to approve.

Morgan Griffith, the Republican congressman who represents Marion, didn't return requests for comment.

Job Corps's advocates say no amount of funding could be safe for a program the administration wants to end.

- What's to stop Donald Trump from signing the final deal and then in a week saying, "Oh by the way, I'm canceling it all again."

So we have real reason to be suspicious that if we do a budget that adequately funds these programs, he may still choose next year to take the money away.

What Virginia loses is the opportunity to turn young lives around.

- When we tell our kids work hard because there's going to be a reward afterwards, I want to for the government to also help us make that statement true.

Crystal is doing all she's doing right and now the system is the one failing.

My message for the Trump administration will be that this program saves lives.

It saved my daughter's life.

- To see like how I've literally went to point A to point B in such a small amount of time, how could you ever think about like taking away this program?

I want to work with the people that are the lost causes, so they say, 'cause I was once a lost cause.

(gentle pensive music)