The latest March of Dimes annual report on preterm births, released in November 2025, contains dire news: Premature infants born to Black mothers in the U.S. increased 14.7%, with a 14% jump in premature babies born in Louisiana alone.
Along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, children have grown up for decades playing beneath flares, smokestacks, and chemical clouds. For many families living near the hundreds of petrochemical plants that dot the riverfront there, toxic air pollution doesn’t just lead to preterm birth and illnesses; it also triggers a persistent fear of what each breath might bring.
There’s a reason the 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, officially called the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, is commonly known as Cancer Alley. Yet despite decades of ample research on the hazards and risk to human health of living close to Cancer Alley’s industrial pollution, President Donald Trump instructed the Environmental Protection Agency in April 2025 to reverse course on regulations that would have—at long last—checked the plants. The move temporarily lifts compliance for two years on a set of critical air-toxicity limits EPA finalized in April 2024, formally known as the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (HON) rule, a.k.a. the chemical manufacturing rule.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry
EPA’s corrupt new mission: Prioritize polluters over people’s health
Human Rights Watch interviewed 37 Cancer Alley residents about living in the shadow of petrochemical plants between 2022 and early 2024. Those conversations paint a stark picture: families described widespread reproductive problems, debilitating respiratory disease, and unusually high rates of cancer as routine features of life in the corridor. Nearly 40% of the community living near Cancer Alley is Black.
In a July proclamation, Trump offered an industry-friendly explanation for rolling back protections meant to help the communities living near petrochemical plants all over the country, not just Louisiana: “The HON Rule imposes substantial burdens on chemical manufacturers already operating under stringent regulations.”
EPA’s role is to protect the health of people in the U.S., not to protect industry profit. But protecting industry over public health is consistent with the actions current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been taking across the board. “They’ve recently removed the costs of human health in regulation, and what they’ve said is that the only cost they’re going to consider is what a regulation costs an industry to implement, and not what we would bear from experiencing that pollution ourselves, which is insane,” explains Dr. Lisa Patel, Executive Director at the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health and a clinical associate professor for Stanford Children’s Health.
Louisiana’s petrochemical legacy
Over 200 petrochemical plants process about 25% of all the petrochemical products in the United States: plastics, fertilizer, and even medical equipment. Louisiana is the second-largest chemicals exporter. Since the plants arrived in the 1980s, Cancer Alley has been inhabited primarily by Black and historically marginalized communities. Discriminatory land-use practices and weak environmental enforcement have exposed neighborhoods bordering hazardous waste facilities to dozens of chemicals that cause cancer and developmental harm. But environmental injustice in the region began long before then.
“We talk about the industry starting 50, 60 years ago, but actually it started 200 plus years ago,” says Joyceia “Joy” Banner, Co-Founder of The Descendants Project, an organization that advocates for the cultural preservation of the descendants of the enslaved and against environmental injustice in the Louisiana river parishes. “Sugarcane as an industry was polluting. It was a sacrifice of Black health in Black communities.”
To this day, Louisiana produces about 16.3 million net tons of sugarcane nationally. Sugarcane companies burn the leaves to expedite processing, creating pollution that residents call “black snow,” which has been linked to respiratory illnesses and cancer.
A mix of toxic air pollutants
“We know that the chemicals there in the air—things like benzene, ethylene oxide, chloroprene—are all carcinogens. They can cause a range of cancers,” says Dr. Patel, specifically mentioning childhood leukemia and nasopharyngeal cancers. “We know from the epidemiological data that looks at what we expect cancer incidence to be, especially for some of these generally rare forms. So when you see more of those episodes of cancer in one area, you have to ask what’s in that area that’s causing higher levels of particular cases there?” she adds.
According to research from Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, people living near Cancer Alley had over seven times the national risk of receiving a cancer diagnosis.
“We can directly link this to all the industries that are there, not just one, but kids are breathing multiple chemicals from the time they take the first breath that places them at higher risk for lots of health harms,” says Dr. Patel.
Poverty as a risk factor
Residents in Reserve, Louisiana—a town along Cancer Alley—earn roughly $18,763 per person annually, falling short of the national average by approximately 40%.
Dr. Leslie Rubin, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at both Morehouse School of Medicine and Emory University School of Medicine, has researched and found that children who grow up experiencing poverty are also exposed to more adverse environmental factors, which negatively affect their health and development.
“This is something that we see, unfortunately. All too frequently children who live in poor neighborhoods and poor environments are more likely to be situated near factories,” Dr. Rubin says.
These are the very children most at risk by an administration that prioritizes petrochemicals over their health. Right now, the protections are paused, but the fear is EPA will officially roll them back sometime this year.
“We need our legislators to protect us, to prioritize us, because certainly these companies are not going to,” says Dr. Patel.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry