Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded with fury after Corpus Christi officials announced in March that this Gulf Coast region of more than 500,000 people could face unprecedented restrictions as its water supply dried up.

The state had already committed over $750 million in low-interest loans to the city’s plans for a desalination plant, a project that would add 30 million gallons a day to the region’s water supply. But the project had gone nowhere.

“You know what they did? They squandered it, and then they changed their plan and then they were indecisive about what to do,” Abbott said of city officials in a heated response to a reporter’s question at an unrelated March press conference.

“What Corpus Christi leaders have to do is make a decision,” Abbott said. “We can only give them a little time more before the state of Texas has to take over and micromanage that city and run that city to make sure that every resident who goes to the water tap and turns it on, they are going to be getting water out of their faucet, not because of what local leaders are doing but because of what the state of Texas will do.”

Even as Abbott was demanding that Corpus Christi get its act together, another agency, whose entire board Abbott appoints, was also coming undone.

In late June, board members of the Nueces River Authority learned that funding for a desalination plant the agency hopes to build, separate from the city’s, is months from running out. Additionally, the agency was spending more than it was taking in, and other contracts that had kept the authority financially afloat had been canceled.

Although the river authority’s project is a critical part of efforts to expand the region’s water supply, so far, the governor hasn’t threatened to take over the agency’s day-to-day operations. He’s consistently placed the burden of responsibility on the NRA board.

But Abbott has previously demonstrated that he can use his authority to compel other agencies to act: In March, he instructed a different river authority not to reduce Corpus Christi’s water allocation from Lake Texana. He also had the state’s environmental agency waive regulations so the city could move groundwater from Nueces County, which includes Corpus Christi, to its water treatment plant.

As far back as October 2022, while he was campaigning for reelection, Abbott said in an interview with KRIS 6 News that the state was working with the city and Nueces County on a desalination plan. If the city did not pursue the project, “then the state of Texas will do it for them,” the governor said. But the state is not currently involved in the city’s desalination project.

The governor appoints all 21 members of the NRA’s board and designates its president. With a majority vote of the river authority board, Abbott also can remove any board member for inefficiency, neglect of duty or misconduct. He has no such control over the Corpus Christi City Council.

Political scientists and water policy researchers who reviewed the situation told KRIS 6 News that Abbott’s decision to pressure Corpus Christi while leaving the NRA to address its problems largely on its own reflects a selective use of power. While recent rains have helped delay, though not prevent, an immediate water emergency for Corpus Christi, experts say the region still needs to develop new infrastructure projects to secure its long-term water supply.

Should water supplies drop below certain levels, Corpus Christi residents and businesses — including oil refineries and petrochemical plans — would be required to cut water use by 25 % under the city’s current Level 1 water emergency plan. Households would be capped at using 6,000 gallons of water per month, landscape watering would be banned and there would be surcharges imposed on those who exceed their allotments.

“The city of Corpus Christi needs a lot of help, it doesn’t need threats, and the Nueces River Authority is in way over its head,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “The water crisis in Corpus Christi and beyond in Southeast Texas is serious, and it’s not clear that anyone has the breadth of authority and resources to deal with it.”

What Power Does Abbott Have?

The public troubles for the NRA bubbled up as far back as March, when the agency’s then-chief operating officer sent a letter to board members accusing Executive Director John Byrum of making “materially inaccurate” statements about the authority’s finances related to the planned desalination project.

KRIS 6 reached out to the governor’s office in the spring about the accusations.

“Every member of a Texas board or commission should uphold the highest standards of integrity, transparency, and accountability in service of the people of Texas,” Abbott press secretary Andrew Mahaleris wrote in a statement. “Governor Abbott expects a thorough investigation into the allegations brought forth and for the Board to act swiftly once the investigation is complete.”

The board eventually cleared Byrum of “intentional wrongdoing,” but the NRA declined to release a copy of the investigation to KRIS 6 in response to a public information request; the Texas office of the attorney general has not yet ruled on whether the report can be withheld. The news organization asked the governor’s office for his response to the investigation and the board’s decision, but he did not respond.

The river authority’s unstable finances became even more apparent at a board meeting in late June, when the agency’s chief financial officer confirmed the NRA could be out of money for the desalination project by the end of August if certain contracts didn’t materialize. Since then, three of the agency’s desalination contracts, which the authority was depending on to stay afloat, expired and have not yet been renewed. KRIS 6 News asked the governor’s office whether it was aware of the agency’s continuing problems. Mahaleris again referred the news organization back to board members.

“The NRA Board oversees the agency’s operations and finances,” Mahaleris wrote June 27. “The Governor appoints board members to the state’s water authorities but does not manage their day-to-day operations. …The Governor expects accountability from appointed boards.”

While Abbott has no direct legal authority over the NRA’s policy decisions, he can use the power of his office to publicly pressure them, Ron Beal, a retired Baylor University School of Law professor whose work on Texas administrative procedure has been routinely cited by the Texas Supreme Court, wrote in a response to KRIS 6 News.

“He can say that when each member’s term ends, if the water project is not on its way, they will absolutely NOT be re-appointed to the job!” Beal wrote. “In other words, he cannot force them legally to follow his orders, but there is no doubt he has the bully pulpit and if anyone can pressure everyone to work together NOW and get it done ASAP, it is the Governor!!!!”

In a written statement to KRIS 6 News for this story, Abbott again placed responsibility on both the Corpus Christi City Council and the NRA board but did not address most of the specific questions asked.

“Despite the temporary reprieve granted by recent rain, the Governor’s expectations for the region have not changed. … The Corpus Christi City Council created this crisis through repeated failure to act on desalination,” Mahaleris wrote. “The Council remains responsible for securing reliable water for their citizens. The Nueces River Authority Board is responsible for the agency’s finances” and the desalination project.

The governor’s office did not answer questions about whether Abbott has taken steps to coordinate among the city, the NRA and other stakeholders, or about what “accountability from appointed boards” looks like in practice.

Even as the governor’s office has publicly distanced itself from the NRA’s operations, it has fought to keep from releasing its own communications with the river authority’s leadership.

KRIS 6 News filed a public information request on July 2 seeking emails, text messages, meeting notes and correspondence between the governor and members of his staff and Byrum, the NRA executive director, and NRA board President Eric Burnett. The request covered the river authority’s desalination project and any state funding, grants or loan guarantees related to those efforts.

The governor’s office confirmed on July 17 that it had records that met the parameters of the request. It did not release them. Instead, the office asked the attorney general’s office for permission to withhold the documents. The office argued that the records relate to a proposed water facility project for which state funding may be sought and that releasing them would “seriously disadvantage Texas,” but did not explain how. Abbott’s office also said the records reflect policy advice between the governor’s office and representatives of another state agency; this type of communication can sometimes be withheld under the state’s public information law.

The river authority has struggled to keep up with the demands of the desalination project, which is estimated to cost $6.4 billion. Design work on the pipeline that’s supposed to deliver the desalinated water stalled because the river authority hasn’t offered the company building it a new contract. Byrum, the executive director, has claimed President Donald Trump promised funding for the project, but the river authority has never actually made a formal request to the White House.

Jillson pointed to a fundamental mismatch between the NRA and the scale of the desalination project it’s trying to complete. The NRA staff is small, with an annual budget of up to about $5 million. It’s governed by unpaid, part-time board members who historically meet quarterly to provide broad direction.

He said the governor should direct someone in his office to determine whether the NRA has the personnel and expertise to execute a project of this scale and, if it doesn’t, to act on that finding. Without that kind of direct link between the governor’s office and the agency, Jillson said, “what you’re saying is, ‘We expect these guys to oversee themselves.’”

Byrum wrote in a response to KRIS 6 News that the authority “has the experience to oversee” the project and the option to hire additional staff if required.

The river authority did recently secure one large contract for the project: In May, the NRA selected Israel-based IDE Technologies as its development partner for the desalination plant.

Abbott toured a desalination facility in Israel run by IDE in January 2016. At the time, IDE said Abbott “expressed his intention to partner with Israeli technology companies such as IDE to develop and deploy water solutions for Texas,” as reported by Wastewater Digest.

KRIS 6 News asked if the governor, or anyone in his office, was involved in the NRA’s selection of IDE.

Byrum wrote that the “Governor’s office was not involved.” KRIS 6 News asked the governor the same question, but his spokesperson did not respond.

The Takeover Question

Abbott has a record of curbing the power of Texas cities like Corpus Christi to govern themselves. In 2015, he signed a bill that overrode a voter-approved fracking ban in Denton in North Texas and blocked cities from banning or restricting oil and gas drilling. In 2023, he signed the so-called “Death Star” bill, which preempted city authority over eight policy areas, including labor, natural resources, insurance and property.

Republican state Rep. Denise Villalobos, who represents the Corpus Christi region, previously told KRIS 6 that Abbott directed her to draft a bill that would create a state-level water infrastructure authority, something she compared to the state’s highway department.

If adopted by the Legislature when it meets next year, such an authority would take many decisions about future water supplies away from locals.

Villalobos did not comment for this story. Abbott’s office did not answer questions about the proposed legislation.

Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni told KRIS 6 this summer that his office had looked into how a takeover would work and found no examples in Texas of the state stepping in to run a water operation or water corporation. The closest parallel, he said, is the state’s ability to take over ailing school districts.

Abbott’s threat to take over Corpus Christi’s desalination project runs into other unsettled legal territory the governor’s office has not addressed publicly, said Gabriel Collins, a lawyer and research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy who studies water and energy policy.

Under Texas law, surface water, meaning rivers and lakes, is public property, giving the state a clear line of authority. Water pumped from the ground is considered private property, belonging to the person who owns the land above it, and is regulated locally.

Desalinated seawater fits into neither category. Collins said a legal case could theoretically be made that water drawn from within 3 miles of shore falls under state jurisdiction, but he said he isn’t aware of anyone making that argument in this context.

“That would be a massive shift in water policy in the state of Texas,” Collins said.

But the legal question may be less important than a practical one, Collins said. Would a state takeover of Corpus Christi water regulators, even if it could be done, actually make a difference?

“Or would you be better off resolving those fundamental problems by having the state be a catalyst and a facilitator financially that helps the local political authorities solve a problem?” Collins said.

The post Greg Abbott Blasted Corpus Christi for Its Water Crisis. A River Authority He Has Power Over Is Falling Apart. appeared first on ProPublica.

Decades after the last plume of lead-laced smoke rose from a smelting plant in Omaha, Nebraska, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found lead in concentrations that pose a threat to people’s health in soil throughout east Omaha. 

Our investigation began more than two years ago, when Leah Keinama, who previously worked for a food security nonprofit, could not find up-to-date information about lead contamination for gardeners in Omaha. Keinama, now the director of civic journalism at the Nebraska Journalism Trust, and reporters at the Flatwater Free Press knew about the city’s refining history, so they teamed up to find out whether concerns about lead exposure were still warranted all these years later.  

The Environmental Protection Agency declared a 27-square-mile area within the city a hazardous waste zone, known as a Superfund site, after the American Smelting and Refining Company closed in the 1990s. That prompted a lengthy period of testing and remediation. Today, unless Omaha residents pay for private testing, there aren’t many avenues to find out how much lead is in their soil if their property had been tested by the city and EPA in the past.

A Community-Informed Investigation 

Throughout our reporting, we heard from hundreds of Omaha residents who said they didn’t know about the city’s lead history. Some said they believed that because the EPA had already cleaned up thousands of properties that had high concentrations of lead in the soil, there was nothing to worry about. 

Our goal was to reach people in every neighborhood in and around the Superfund site. So we knocked on doors, hung up flyers around town, visited a community health center, attended multiple events, partnered with local libraries, and spoke to a college classroom to invite people to sign up for free soil testing. We also posted our online form in various social media channels and shared the news with other local media. We made our reporting available in Spanish, as roughly 10% of residents living within the Superfund site don’t speak English.

Flatwater Free Press initially partnered with local libraries and a community-based organization to distribute do-it-yourself kits with instructions on how to collect a soil sample. We received fewer than 100 samples using this method before switching to a sign-up system in which residents indicated they wanted our team to collect soil from their yard.

After a resident signed up for testing, a member of the reporting team (usually Keinama or Flatwater Free Press reporter Chris Bowling) went to their home, put on latex gloves, wiped down a stainless steel spoon with an unscented wipe and scooped about 3 to 4 tablespoons of soil from the middle of the yard into a sealable vial. We made sure not to collect samples too close to the house or too close to the road, which the EPA has found can be overly contaminated by paint or the remnants of leaded gasoline, respectively. When demand for testing increased, we hired two part-time soil collectors.

We sent labeled samples to Accurate Analytical Testing, an EPA-accredited lab, for $10 per test. Once we received the results from the lab, we informed residents (unless they had opted out of receiving their result) and put together a guide to answer some of their top questions. 

Our soil collection process differed from the EPA’s method of taking multiple composite samples from five sections of the yard. We chose to take a single sample from one area of each yard to reach more people and keep costs reasonable. In a few cases, we took multiple samples from the same yard and tested each sample individually but used only the highest result for our analysis.

The EPA said sampling a single area “can be strongly biased high or low” compared to composite sampling. However, several of the nine environmental contamination experts we spoke to said single samples can offer broad conclusions about contamination in an area when enough are collected, which several experts felt we had achieved. Some said our sampling would likely underestimate contamination on a property. 

Other experts said our testing method would not accurately depict lead levels across a particular yard because of how variable the contamination can be. At the same time, experts also told us the EPA’s method of gathering multiple composite samples can still miss hot spots or underestimate contamination. 

What We Found

Over the past two years, we used the EPA’s sampling protocol as guidance to collect soil from 620 homes in and just outside of the Omaha Superfund site. (We’re continuing to collect samples from the nearby cities of Bellevue, Nebraska; Carter Lake, Iowa; and Council Bluffs, Iowa.)

We matched each home at which we took a soil sample with Omaha’s lead registry, which includes details like the address’ remediation status and results of the EPA’s testing, and compared our test results with historic data. Some homes that had previously undergone the EPA’s remediation process had high levels of lead contamination, our analysis found.  

• We tested 150 previously remediated yards. One in 10 of those yards’ results came back with a concentration greater than 400 parts per million, the level the EPA used to decide which yards to clean up.
• Nearly all of the previously remediated yards that tested above 400 parts per million are within 100 yards of another property that originally tested above the EPA cleanup threshold but was never remediated. A third had two such neighboring properties. That proximity could mean that the previously cleaned-up yards we tested were recontaminated by properties where the soil was never replaced, one expert said.
• Many of the 241 homes we tested within the Superfund site that had never been remediated also showed high levels of lead. Of those homes, 1 in 20 had a concentration higher than 400 parts per million, according to our test results.
• Across Omaha, 41% of the 620 yards we tested had more than 100 parts per million in their soil sample, a level that an EPA model shows could cause high blood-lead levels in children. Within the Superfund site, more than half of the almost 390 yards we tested had more than 100 parts per million. 

Our testing shows that lead contamination at levels that pose a risk to residents’ health is fairly widespread — even in sites that the EPA previously addressed.

Throughout our reporting, we spoke to nine experts in environmental and lead contamination to make sense of our findings. Several said the EPA should do more testing and possibly cleanup in Omaha.

We asked the EPA about our findings. The agency said it will work with the city of Omaha to “investigate the outcomes you have noted” and work with the city and property owners to take corrective action if needed in accordance with 2009 cleanup guidelines.

The post The EPA Doesn’t Typically Retest Homes in the Country’s Largest Residential Lead Superfund Site. So We Did. appeared first on ProPublica.

Shortly after buying her house in 2022, Mary Royers learned from a man across the street that her Omaha, Nebraska, neighborhood was contaminated with lead. But her yard, like thousands of others, had been cleaned up, the neighbor said.

Royers wanted to be sure. So the 36-year-old educator checked a website where the city tracks the soil test results of every home in a 27-square-mile area surrounding the site of an old lead smelter. She saw “remediated” written in bright green letters. The federal government had completed the work two decades ago. An expert must have tested the dirt and determined the problem was solved, she thought.

Relieved, Royers set about sowing the garden of her dreams. Hours disappeared as she thrust her hands into the soil, tearing up the grass and planting purple coneflower for bees to harvest and prairie grass to sway in the breeze.

“You have the green light from the city. That means everything’s safe,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about that.’”

But a soil test conducted last fall by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found otherwise: Royers’ yard still has more than 1.5 times the level of lead that the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup was supposed to have eliminated.

Reading the emailed results, she felt “gut-wrenching disbelief,” she said.

“All I could think about was the dirt under my nails and all over my face,” said Royers, who has largely given up gardening for now. She explained later, “It felt like a betrayal of that trust.”

Since 1999, the EPA has spent $273 million digging up and backfilling nearly 14,000 yards across east Omaha to address contamination left from the smelter and other factories downtown. It’s the largest residential lead cleanup in the country. And the agency’s Superfund program has repeatedly heralded it as a success.

But, it turns out, Omaha’s soil might not be as safe as officials have advertised. The news organizations tested soil from more than 600 properties, including 150 that the EPA said had been cleaned up. In those tests, 1 in 10 yards marked as remediated still had enough lead to qualify for cleanup under the original guidelines. And nearly a quarter of the properties we tested in east Omaha could qualify for further study under new guidance released by the Trump administration last fall.

The results suggest the EPA has more work to do, said Howard Mielke, a longtime researcher of lead-contaminated soil who’s considered one of the field’s foremost experts. Not only should the agency clean up the areas that tested above the remediation level, he said, but it also should test other homes.

“If you find a couple of high results, chances are many high results will be nearby,” said Mielke, an adjunct professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine.

Some experts and environmental advocates said our findings reflect weaknesses in the EPA’s approach to cleaning up residential lead sites, which can leave a lot of lead behind.

Jeff Tittel, former director of the Sierra Club in New Jersey, the state with the most Superfund sites, said he repeatedly watched the EPA declare its work done after wrongly assuming everything had been cleaned up.

“On paper, everything’s wonderful,” he said, “but at the sites, there’s still chaos.”

The EPA declined an interview request with senior officials overseeing the Omaha cleanup.

In an emailed response, spokesperson Kellen Ashford said the EPA is committed to cleaning up contaminated sites to protect residents and the environment. “The diligent cleanup efforts have led to a dramatic decrease in elevated blood lead levels” in Omaha, he said. (While the percentage of kids testing high for lead has dropped significantly, as it has nationally, kids in the Omaha site still test high for lead at rates above the national average.)

Ashford said the EPA could not assess the news organizations’ results without further investigation, but property owners can reach out to the EPA or the city of Omaha, which now manages the site for the federal government, if they have concerns.

“Because it would not be possible to completely remove all lead,” Ashford said, the EPA and the city also try to educate the community about lead risks and precautions.

The city is already responding to the news organization’s findings.

The day after receiving her results, Royers forwarded them to the city’s lead office, asking if anything could be done. An employee tested her dirt and found even higher levels than the news organizations did. The city plans to clean the yard up again in August, Royers said.

But the EPA and the city have refused to clean up or test properties of others who have reached out about their high lead results.

The agency has also not said what it plans to do about properties that are below the current cleanup level but above President Donald Trump’s new screening level, which could prompt further action. Any update would come after a new site study the agency plans to release in October 2027, Ashford said.

Royers and her partner, Stephen Matthews, are thankful for the new cleanup, but they wonder: How many other Omahans may be misled or unaware about lead contamination in their yards?

“We’re one house out of thousands,” Matthews said.

What Might Have Gone Wrong

It’s difficult to identify why some cleaned-up properties still test high for lead.

That’s in part because Omaha’s lead problem is almost as old as the city itself. The American Smelting and Refining Company produced lead to make batteries, cover cables and enrich gasoline for more than a century. After the smelter closed in 1997, the EPA estimated the plant and other factories had dumped 200,000 tons of lead dust — enough to fill at least 1,600 rail cars — across Omaha’s east side.

At the time, the Superfund program, which had started only a decade before, was still trying to figure out how to clean up residential sites like Omaha’s, then home to 125,000 people. Old factory sites could be bulldozed and excavated, the contaminated material carted away. But the Omaha site involved people’s homes and yards.

The agency tested nearly every yard in east Omaha and came up with a plan: It would dig up and replace parts of yards that had a concentration of more than 400 parts per million of lead — the equivalent of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt.

But that meant that some properties were cleaned up while neighboring ones that had only slightly lower levels of lead were not.

Hewing to that kind of strict standard doesn’t make sense, said Gabriel Filippelli, an Indiana University earth sciences professor and longtime lead researcher.

“From a scientific standpoint, a 390 is the same as a 410,” Filippelli said. “It’s the same as a 400. They’re all about the same value.”

Failing to clean up neighboring properties can also lead to recontamination over time. When it’s windy and the ground is dry, tiny lead particles in the dirt — generally about one-hundredth the width of a human hair — become airborne and spread, Filippelli said.

When the Superfund program started, the agency cleaned an entire yard if its average lead level among multiple samples was over the limit.

But by the time the Omaha cleanup started, the method had changed. In Omaha, it divided yards into five sections: two in the backyard, two in the front yard and a thin ring around the home’s perimeter called the dripline, which often contains the most contaminated dirt but can also contain remnants of lead paint.

The agency took multiple samples per section of yard and replaced a section’s soil only if the average was over 400 parts per million. This approach could lead them to miss hot spots or leave behind areas that have high lead levels but are just under the cleanup threshold. Contractors also did not dig up the driplines if another part of the yard wasn’t over the limit.

This could explain why the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica’s testing found that about 1 in 20 homes that didn’t qualify for cleanup originally now tested above the cleanup threshold. In addition, the news outlets found several properties outside the Superfund site that were over the limit.

In the early days of the cleanup, Don Preister, a longtime Omaha lead advocate and former state senator, argued for the EPA to clean up entire yards and to lower the level of lead that would qualify for remediation, calling the agency’s solution a half-measure.

But the EPA decided that its approach made the most of limited money and prioritized the highest-risk areas. One EPA manager told Omahans in 2004 that the choice to remove only sections of yards was “economical,” according to meeting records.

“It brought out feelings of hurt,” Preister said of the EPA’s choice. “Children are likely to still be impacted, and their health affected.”

The EPA’s national guidelines did advise against “‘patchwork clean-up’ patterns which are prone to recontamination” when adjacent sections are high. But the agency didn’t give clear guidance on how to implement that, several former site managers said, and some felt they had to follow the rules strictly or risk violating federal law or agreements with companies paying to clean up their pollution.

Ashford acknowledged that the agency has to adhere strictly to its cleanup plans but said in some cases, like an industrial site near a residential area, the EPA may clean up to a lower level to prevent recontamination.

Another problem was that east Omaha was full of older homes that contained lead paint that could recontaminate cleaned soil over time. Following local pressure, the EPA agreed to test homes’ paint. If it contained lead, the agency repainted the outside. But the EPA did not repaint houses whose soil did not also qualify for cleanup. Studies in urban areas have found homes with deteriorating paint have contaminated nearby gardens.

Ashford said an EPA study found most lead-based paint contamination in Omaha was within 6 feet of the house.

Brenda González Rocha, who has lived in her south Omaha home since 2020, thinks both soil and paint are to blame for the lead that doctors found in her 4-year-old daughter’s blood. Her basement had lead paint, which she hired a company to fix.

But although the EPA cleaned up her yard in 2012, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tests found levels of lead that are higher than before the agency remediated it. González is surrounded by properties with lingering lead. A yard down the street that had high lead levels was never remediated. The banks of the nearby highway were never dug up and replaced. The house next door has lead paint on it, according to the city lead website.

Ashford said it’s unlikely that wind-blown dust from one house to another would recontaminate cleaned areas with enough lead to surpass the cleanup level.

But nearly all the remediated properties the newsrooms tested that were over the cleanup threshold are within 100 yards of a property that originally qualified for remediation but wasn’t cleaned up. A third had two such neighboring properties.

González’s eight kids, between 8 months and 22 years old, love to play outside. They jump on the trampoline, ride bikes and play soccer. Now González is anxious whenever they’re in the yard.

“I worry that this could affect their quality of life,” she said. “I would feel bad if something happened to them during their development. I would feel responsible.”

“Benign Neglect”

Once the EPA chooses a fix for a Superfund site, it is generally required to review the site every five years to update the public on the progress of the cleanup. But the ways those reviews are done leave unanswered questions about whether the solution is working and how much lead is in Omaha today, said experts who examined the reports for the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica.

In their reviews, government officials in Omaha track how intact the grass is on top of the new soil. If it is exposed or has been disturbed, it could be a sign that any remaining lead is no longer safely underground and could blow around.

But they don’t retest a representative sample of properties.

Cleanups often take several tries to get right, said Tittel, the former New Jersey Sierra Club director, and recontamination or missed contamination can be a huge problem.

Tittel said he has seen similar patterns in New Jersey. In 1979, Tittel helped show EPA employees where the Ford Motor Company dumped industrial waste into abandoned mine pits. Since then, he has seen the mess declared a Superfund site, marked safe, become a Superfund site again and spawn a lawsuit that Ford settled in 2009 as locals continued discovering more hazards.

“It’s sort of a benign neglect when it comes to these sites,” Tittel said. “Government just wants to get it over with because it’s taking so long. They end up cutting corners or looking the other way.”

A Ford spokesperson said the company takes its environmental responsibility seriously and has been working with state and federal officials to clean up the site.

Retesting soil does not appear to be standard at other sites, according to reviews examined by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. But it should be, said Debbie Chizewer, a managing attorney with the environmental law group Earthjustice. Without ongoing testing, the EPA can’t really know if its solution is working, she said, and residents won’t know how toxins in the environment are impacting their health.

“I think for the five-year review to be meaningful, you need to do testing,” she said.

Ashford said the EPA retests properties on a case-by-case basis, such as when construction disturbs the soil. The periodic reviews, which in Omaha have led to an ongoing reevaluation of the site’s cleanup level, allow the EPA to ensure these unique, complex sites protect people and the environment over time, he said.

Steve Zivny, who leads Omaha’s Lead Information Office, also said new testing and cleanup decisions depend on factors such as whether kids live at the home and whether they have tested for a high lead exposure.

The EPA’s reviews of the Omaha site do point to some potential problems. In 2024, inspectors found 98% of the lawns had been disturbed, indicating a risk that buried lead could be exposed. That includes having weeds, bare soil or demolished buildings. But the EPA tested only 32 sites where homes had been demolished and found six exceeded the cleanup level. To them, that indicated the solution was “generally protective; however, more data should be collected to support this conclusion,” according to the report.

Those figures, however, trouble Ian von Lindern, who oversaw lead cleanup at an Idaho Superfund site for more than 30 years. He doesn’t doubt the federal government did a good job hauling away tons of toxins in Omaha. But he’s sure they couldn’t get all of it.

At the Idaho site, the EPA requires people to request permits from a local health district before digging in their yards. Local health employees can also test residents’ dirt, and, if it’s above the cleanup level, it may qualify for further remediation.

Without someone keeping a close eye on the fixes, recontamination can occur as people dig up lead-contaminated soil or unremediated soil is allowed to blow around.

“Those remedies are, I don’t want to use the word failing, but they’re becoming less effective,” he said.

Royers worries many homes in Omaha fit that description.

This summer, the educator is letting the weeds grow freely in her garden. Pretty soon, the city is going to replace it anyway.

The thought makes her feel guilty. More people should know about potential lead in their yard and have access to tests and cleanups. But that would require acknowledging that after decades and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, there are cracks in the cleanup. Royers isn’t sure that will happen.

“The priority is pretending like things are OK,” she said. “Clearly it’s not.”

The post The EPA Heralds Its Omaha Cleanup as a Success. But We Found Many Yards Still Have Toxic Levels of Lead. appeared first on ProPublica.

Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The complaints filed by Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cite a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how CBS or its parent company, now Paramount, have for years given FCC commissioners tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, which the television network sponsors. The commissioners accepted the gifts even as the FCC was reviewing or about to review major Paramount business decisions, including two megamergers.

Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance.

ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts.

Carr, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats. 

The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22. 

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

“The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”

Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”

The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger.

The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office.

The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities.

Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval.

“The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts.

“The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated.

CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden.

“Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.”

The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition.

California, New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks.

Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.

The post FCC Commissioners Face Ethics Complaints for Taking Luxury Gifts From Paramount appeared first on ProPublica.

A renewable energy developer has pulled its controversial permit application to build an industrial-scale solar facility on an Eastern Washington mountain sacred to Indigenous nations.

Avangrid, a powerful player in the Northwest’s push for green energy development, sought for at least five years to build a solar plant on Badger Mountain. The project site straddled private as well as public lands. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation have protected rights to practice cultural traditions, such as food gathering and ceremonies, on Badger Mountain and other ancestral public lands.

A 2024 investigation by High Country News and ProPublica found that Avangrid and a consultant it retained, Tetra Tech, had omitted key archaeological and cultural information from a state-mandated review of the site, which would have been used for a solar farm. Avangrid continued pushing the project despite a state archaeologist’s warning that the planned development would threaten significant historic sites and current ceremonial activity. An elected member of the Colville Tribal Business Council told the newsrooms at the time that the project would destroy roughly half the root vegetable harvest in the area.

An Avangrid spokesperson said then that the company had followed “all relevant law and regulation” with regard to the Badger Mountain solar project and had “taken additional steps to accommodate stakeholder feedback where possible.”

It’s unclear whether the company’s decision to cancel the project had anything to do with Indigenous rights. Avangrid declined to clarify its reasoning to HCN.

The Colville Tribes chair, Cindy Marchand, praised the decision in a statement last week. “While the Colville Tribes certainly appreciates the value of renewable energy such as solar power, sacred sites must remain pristine to pass down to future generations.”

After the publication of HCN and ProPublica’s investigation, some members of the Wenatchi-P’squosa, one of the 12 Confederated Colville Tribes, held a demonstration on Badger Mountain, saying that while they support renewable energy, they’re against facilities being built on important cultural sites. Following the demonstration, Avangrid announced that it would pause development to reconsider tribal input and public response. The public comment process is one of the only avenues available for tribal nations to advocate for their rights regarding land development.

At a meeting of the state’s permitting authority council in July, an Avangrid senior director sought a continued pause of the permitting work, pointing to anticipated construction delays affecting the power grid. At the same meeting, the council chair, Kurt Beckett, characterized concerns over the project’s environmental and cultural impacts as “noise,” but he also said tribal objections should be considered in the state’s permitting decision.

Five days later, Avangrid filed a request to completely withdraw its proposal. And last week, the permitting council formally announced the withdrawal and said it was “closing out existing financial arrangements and notifying interested and agency partners.” It did not provide further comment, referring questions to the developer. The state Department of Natural Resources, which owns the public parcel on Badger Mountain, said it had not received any other requests to develop it for clean energy projects at this time, and a spokesperson did not have additional information about future plans for the site.

No matter the reason for the project’s cancellation at Badger Mountain, the outcome is a good one, said Steven Wynecoop, vice chair of the Wenatchi Advisory Group, an independent body that advises the Colville Tribal Business Council and that organized the 2024 Badger Mountain demonstration.

The mountain is a “very sacred site to us,” said Wynecoop, grandson of the Wenatchi Advisory Group founder Matthew Dick. “Generations, we’ve been going to that mountain for plenty of reasons: medicines, foods like roots and berries.”

The post Solar Developer Cancels Washington State Project on Sacred Indigenous Land appeared first on ProPublica.

A last-ditch legislative attempt to help California school districts keep problematic teachers out of the classroom has collapsed following opposition from unions and the state teacher licensing agency that a proposed searchable database would violate privacy and subject educators to unfair treatment. 

The proposed database, introduced by a Democratic member of the State Assembly in June, would have allowed schools to see if applicants for public school teaching positions had been reported to the state after they were fired or resigned over claims of misconduct. 

The California Federation of Teachers pushed back, warning that teachers could land in the database even if schools had not determined they committed serious misconduct. 

“We would support legislation that targets substantiated reports of egregious misconduct,” said Tristan Brown, a lobbyist with the California Federation of Teachers. “We live in a state with Silicon Valley. The state should be able to support a system that is up to date and tracking substantiated reports of misconduct.” 

Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi had proposed to make it easier for schools to screen teacher applicants after a KQED-ProPublica investigation published in May. The news outlets revealed how delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, allowed educators to get new jobs after school districts reported them to the state teacher licensing agency for sexual harassment or other misconduct.  

A similar effort by Republican lawmakers to address the issue also hit roadblocks earlier this year. 

“When the safety of a child does not meet a legislative priority, that’s a head-scratcher for me,” said Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, who co-authored the first attempt to create the teacher database. “I think being sympathetic to the offender is on the wrong side of this issue.”

Both bills were modeled on a law the Legislature passed in 2025 mandating the creation of a database by next summer that will allow employers to search the names of school support staff, such as bus drivers, custodians and teaching assistants, who are under investigation by their schools or have substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct. 

The database for school support staff passed after months of tense negotiations. Under that system, employees’ names would be removed from the database if school investigations fail to substantiate claims of egregious misconduct. The bill passed despite opposition from unions, but the system that will be put in place is still being refined. 

But that law explicitly does not apply to public school teachers. 

The system currently in place for public school educators is a patchwork with a fair number of gaps. School districts have long been required to report to the state any teacher who is fired or who resigns due to misconduct. But the state’s teacher licensing agency, which collects all of those reports, is restricted by state law in what information the agency can share while it investigates. The state’s disciplinary process typically takes one year, and teachers could be hired during the investigation period without schools knowing about the claims against them.

California’s publicly accessible online database of credentialed educators does indicate, with a red-flag icon, whether those public school teachers have been disciplined by the state. But it does not explain the reason for the sanction or provide a link to any documents. It is only after the state licensing agency recommends an educator be disciplined that prospective employers can request a summary of the case and the agency’s findings.

Without such details, California school administrators must rely on teachers themselves or their previous employers to provide key information. A law passed in 2024 requires teacher candidates to share their complete job history in education and mandates that school districts ask every previous employer whether a candidate had been reported to the credentialing agency for credible or substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct. If so, previous schools must share the relevant information. But that law keeps bad actors out of schools only if teachers and schools keep — and provide — accurate records.

For more than a year, California school administrators have lobbied lawmakers for a better way to protect students from those with a history of misconduct. “A database is needed to provide more complete, timely information so that schools can fulfill their responsibility to put trusted adults in positions that work with students,” said Dorothy Johnson, a lobbyist with the Association of California School Administrators, whose members include superintendents, principals and human resources officials. 

Under the original bill authored by Muratsuchi and sponsored by the school administrators association, teachers would be added to a new database if their school districts have reported them to the state for misconduct. Before making job offers, schools would be required to check the database, accessible only to employers, for names of teachers with substantiated and credible complaints of egregious misconduct. Then, schools would be required to request records about misconduct from the districts that reported them.

Muratsuchi said his office was “immediately confronted with a lot of resistance,” with teachers unions raising concerns over fair treatment of the accused. 

Brown, the lobbyist for the California Federation of Teachers, said the language in the measure was too broad. He said the union would not object to a database that identifies only teachers with substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct, but the bill also states that reports of “possible misconduct” would be included. 

“Our opposition is really focused on making sure we’re looking at dangerous conduct that we can definitively say happened,” Brown said.

Muratsuchi, who pulled language for his bill directly from the previous effort by Republican Assemblymember Kate Sanchez, said his intent was for the database to focus on egregious misconduct reports that were substantiated and credible. Had he had more time, he said, he would have clarified the language through the legislative process and addressed the unions’ concerns. 

But he introduced the bill with just weeks left in the legislative session. 

Seth Bramble, a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, the state’s most powerful teachers union, wrote in a statement that the proposed database would lead to “employment consequences for innocent teachers based on allegations later determined to be unfounded.” 

“CTA unequivocally supports protecting students, ensuring that credible misconduct information is shared with prospective school employers, and preventing individuals who commit egregious misconduct from moving from school to school,” Bramble wrote.

The Trump administration singled out teachers unions as obstructions to legislative reforms to protect children when it announced a national crackdown in July on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers.

“Teachers’ unions’ demonstrated commitment to shield their members from disciplinary action for gross misconduct cannot trump basic moral and legal responsibilities to students and families,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote in the open letter to state school chiefs. 

McMahon cited KQED and ProPublica’s finding that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools. That included San Francisco Bay Area math teacher Jason Agan, who was hired by two schools despite having been fired after an independent panel determined he sexually harassed female students and massaged their shoulders after he’d been warned to stop. Agan was removed from the classroom the day after the story was published. He was replaced by a substitute for the remainder of the school year. 

Agan has denied any sexual motivation in touching students and said during his dismissal hearing at his first school that he touched students only to offer them support.

The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, joined the unions in objecting to the bill to add teachers to the misconduct database. Jonathon Howard, the government relations manager for the credentialing agency, told Muratsuchi in a June 19 email obtained by KQED and ProPublica that complying with the proposed legislation would “require Commission staff to commit crimes.” Howard cited state laws restricting what information the teacher licensing agency is allowed to share. 

Muratsuchi’s bill, Howard warned, would expose the agency to “significant liability.” “The Commission does not oppose the goal of ensuring that credentialed educators with substantiated histories of serious misconduct cannot move undetected between schools,” Howard wrote. “However, achieving that goal requires legislation that is legally sound, operationally workable, and fair to the educators whose livelihoods and professional reputations are at stake.”  

Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, previously told KQED and ProPublica that the agency “stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes.” 

Within weeks of introducing the bill and following opposition, Muratsuchi scrapped the idea of adding teachers reported to the state for egregious misconduct to the database and instead amended the bill to clarify that the teacher licensing agency may penalize administrators who don’t thoroughly vet applicants. The school administrators association withdrew its sponsorship.

Muratsuchi, whose term expires in December, said he still supports more access to information about educators disciplined for serious misconduct. But with the legislative session ending Aug. 31, time is running out.

“I tried,” Muratsuchi said. “I hope future Legislatures pick up the ball.”

The post For the Second Time, Lawmakers Failed to Fix California’s Warning System for Teacher Misconduct appeared first on ProPublica.

On the northeast edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly 1,100 people gathered in late June for the International Bridge Walk across the long span that links two cities with the same name: Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Both the sun and the sentiments were bright.

“We don’t like to say there’s a border there, because we’re twin cities. We’re one family, the countries of Canada and the United States,” Don Gerrie, mayor of the Michigan Sault (pronounced “Soo”), told the crowd ahead of the annual walk.

He sported a black ballcap that he said was given to him by his counterpart in the Ontario Sault. It featured flags from both nations with the words “Stronger Together” and “Allies and Friends.”

Canadians in cheerful patriotic attire joined the bridge walk, with maple leaves tagging their scarves and socks, shirts and shorts. Americans came out in star-spangled T-shirts heralding the nation’s 250th birthday. But this lively tradition is clouded by an increasingly hostile relationship between the U.S. and Canada.

Traffic over the bridge is way down. And, in recent weeks, President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs in retaliation for thick wildfire smoke wafting into the U.S. When his administration announced an additional 50% tariff on an array of Canadian products, the White House cited “Canada’s discriminatory treatment of American products.” Then, using a separate mechanism, it hit Canada with a further 10% in tariffs.

Following pressure from the Trump administration that delayed it, a new publicly owned bridge, the Gordie Howe, opened Monday between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Canada hosted a Canada-only opening ceremony.

Trump wasn’t present for the bridge’s ribbon-cutting, even though he used to cheer the project. Up at the Sault bridge, there was no sign of the region’s congressional representative at the celebration of international friendship, even though, during Trump’s first term, Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican, hailed relations with Canada.

In 2020, when Bergman was appointed to an interparliamentary group that provides a forum for exchange between Canadian and American legislators, he boasted of the Sault bridge as a point where “millions” cross every year “to conduct business, shop, work and enjoy what each country has to offer.”

Yet Bergman, who is endorsed by Trump in an upcoming contested primary, has been virtually silent on the new tariffs and their blowback in local communities, even as he’s prodded to speak out by many of his constituents. The only references to Sault Ste. Marie in the news items on his website during Trump’s second term are a mention of an infrastructure project and a February 2025 letter to the president about a purported member of a Venezuelan gang crossing the border.

As Canada responds to Trump’s moves with emergency interventions and “buy local” boosterism, significantly fewer Canadians are crossing the border for once-ordinary activities: shopping, eating, fueling vehicles, vacationing or visiting family and friends.

The Sault area lost at least $82.9 million last year in local spending because of decreased crossings, according to an estimate from the International Bridge Administration, which manages the span: $62.7 million on the Michigan side and $20.2 million on the Ontario side.

There were 270,000 fewer total crossings last year at the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge — nearly a 24% drop from 2024, exceeding similar declines at Michigan’s other border crossings. Based on the currency used to pay bridge fares and information from the Canadian prime minister’s office, the drop is largely due to the loss of Canadian travelers. Halfway into 2026, auto traffic has lingered at the same lower volume, according to the bridge director, while commercial traffic has fallen nearly 15% further. 

Nationwide, the total number of Canadians returning from the United States last year dropped by more than 25%, according to data from the Canadian government.

“What Canadians have done, of course, is they’re boycotting the U.S.,” said Michael Broadway, a geographer and professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University who has researched the travel trends (and joined the bridge walk). Ordinary people can only do so much about federal politics, he said, “but what they can do is they can vote with their feet.”

The Sault bridge spans the St. Mary’s River, just west of the historic Soo Locks that serve as a hinge between two of the largest Great Lakes, Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soaring high above the water to clear the thousand-foot freighters, it’s a critical gateway for commerce. And it’s the only vehicular border crossing for hundreds of miles in either direction.

The drop in traffic reversed a post-pandemic uptick, said Peter Petainen, bridge director and an Ontario Sault native. Just as the numbers were recovering, he told ProPublica, “the federal tariff dispute occurred and we’ve fallen off.”

Others noted that the turn in how the U.S. approaches noncitizens may have also chilled travel. Stories of Canadians detained in the U.S. are recurring headlines up north. And the Canadian dollar also doesn’t go as far as it once did in the U.S.

Altogether, it’s a problem for Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula — and also for the publicly owned bridge, which depends on tolls for maintenance and operations. As the bridge authority put it in its five-year plan, issued in December: “Border challenges negatively affecting bridge traffic, trade and tourism may significantly reduce bridge revenue or increase expenditures beyond operational sustainability.”

Wilda Hopper, co-owner of Bird’s Eye Outfitters in the Michigan Sault, feels the change. She said that the drop-off in Canadian visitors was most noticeable in the off-season, when her gear shop and cafe relies on the local community — including those from the Ontario Sault — to carry it through the snowy months.

Between fewer Canadian customers and rising costs, Hopper said, business is down about 27% compared with what it was last summer.

“I can tell you that I’ve spoken to business after business up in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and in the eastern Upper Peninsula, and they’re all feeling the pressure from this,” said Michigan state Sen. John Damoose, a Republican who represents the community in Lansing. “Mackinac Island’s feeling the pressure, everybody is feeling the heat from this deterioration in our relationship with Canada.”

It’s a bewildering fallout, he said. After a brutal ice storm last year, he remembered Canadians crossing the Sault bridge to help Michiganders repair the electrical grid. “This is our best friend in the entire world,” Damoose said.

Only so much can be done about it from the statehouse, though, when it’s Republicans in Washington in the power position. Two of Michigan’s voices in Washington are the Democratic Sens. Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin. They don’t flatly oppose tariffs, but they have challenged Trump’s approach, calling it, respectively, “chaotic” and “sloppy.” Slotkin has said that, constitutionally, only Congress can levy tariffs or raise taxes. Peters introduced bipartisan legislation that seeks more tariff transparency.

Bergman, who has represented a district that encompasses the Upper Peninsula and an additional northern swath of the state’s “mitten” since 2017, once stressed the critical role Canada plays in Michigan’s economy. He vowed to work with the Canadian Parliament to “expand market access between both our nations” during Trump’s first term. And he championed the president’s new North American trade deal with Canada and Mexico, citing the benefits for Michigan’s farmers, small businesses and consumers.

But Trump’s trade policies have made it hard on many Republicans who once touted free trade. Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada and a former Michigan congressman, pivoted dramatically on trade in the Trump era, as ProPublica reported.

Since Trump started his second term, there’s been no mention of tariffs in the press releases, articles and op-eds on Bergman’s website. Along with three of his colleagues in Congress, he criticized Canada’s handling of wildfires that sent thick smoke into Michigan in a recent letter to the prime minister.

ProPublica reached out to Bergman, his office and his campaign multiple times for comment on what’s happening in his district and received no response. Besides Trump’s endorsement, his reelection is supported by the Michigan and U.S. chambers of commerce.

He’s facing two challengers in the Republican primary on Aug. 4. Both of them told ProPublica that the district benefits from sustainable trading relationships.

They also echoed what many of Bergman’s constituents told ProPublica: that residents have had scarce opportunities to connect with the congressman in person. Bergman doesn’t appear to have hosted a public town hall in the district since his first year in office.

Bergman, who has a house in Louisiana, has faced long-standing allegations that he doesn’t even make Michigan his true home. Julie Hoffmeyer, a former member of Bergman’s staff who supports one of his primary challengers, told ProPublica that the congressman refers to his property in the western Upper Peninsula as a “cabin” or a “camp.”

Bergman, responding to past challenges to his Michigan residency, has called his home there his primary residence and noted that he’s a registered voter in the state.

Trump’s quick-shifting trade policies are especially difficult for Michigan’s agriculture industry, the state’s second-largest sector, according to a recent report from the state’s agriculture department. The report, which hasn’t yet been publicly released, said that exports to Canada fell 12.3% last year, “signalling severe strain with a country that is our strongest trading partner.”

Meanwhile, the relationship between the U.S. and Canada is fraying ever further. A White House fact sheet on the new 50% tariff acknowledged the ways that Canadians have changed how they do business.

The White House said that Canadian imports of U.S. motor vehicles dropped by about 22% between April 2025 and March 2026, compared with the same period the year before. And, it said, due to provincial restrictions, Canadian imports of U.S. alcoholic beverages have plummeted.

Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said in a letter posted on social media that the series of tariffs imposed by the U.S. began with ones that were “in direct violation” of the standing North American trade deal — the deal from Trump’s first term that he once celebrated, and that Bergman described as a great economic victory for Michigan.

With the deal up for review this year, the Trump administration declined a long-term extension of the pact. Carney has also widely signaled that Canada is looking beyond its near neighbor for trading partners.

Carney said, in an April video posted on his YouTube channel: “Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses — weaknesses that we must correct.”

The post As Trump’s Tariff War With Canada Drags On, This Border Community Suffers Without a Voice appeared first on ProPublica.

By the end of 2020, Kentucky’s newly elected Gov. Andy Beshear had one goal above all others: Keep people alive. The state was battling two merciless threats. COVID-19 was killing hundreds of people each month, and deadly drug overdoses were among the highest in the nation. Calling addiction a disease that breeds in isolation, Beshear worried people would stop seeking treatment for fear of contracting COVID-19. 

So Beshear set out to make drug treatment easier to access. Kentucky joined more than 40 other states in lifting some restrictions on Medicaid, which served most of the Kentuckians enrolled in substance abuse programs: Recovery centers were allowed to offer expensive treatment to clients without seeking approval from state Medicaid insurers.  

By 2023, as the pandemic waned, other states restored Medicaid requirements that treatment centers gain prior approval before providing addiction treatment. Kentucky stayed the course. That year, providers offered more than 1,100 spots for people seeking long-term treatment that allows them to live in a facility, a state record and more slots per capita than any other state.

But as the Medicaid bills for all that treatment started piling up, so did the warnings. 

In 2024 letters to Beshear’s administration and in at least three public meetings, experts across the health industry said that as a result of the 2020 changes, drug treatment providers were billing too much for subpar care that was leading to worse outcomes. By December 2025, the Kentucky attorney general’s office said Medicaid fraud in drug treatment had become a primary “area of concern.”

Despite the warnings, the Beshear administration did little to rein in the skyrocketing state spending. 

Almost all those warnings came true.

In a February 2025 meeting about soaring Medicaid costs, Kentucky Medicaid Commissioner Lisa Lee said the previous year’s spending on behavioral health and addiction treatment had reached an unprecedented $2.3 billion. Stuart Owen, who works for a Kentucky Medicaid insurer, told a state advisory committee months earlier that much of that spending was driven by the drug treatment industry, including “unscrupulous providers who are exploiting the heck out of that for money.” 

The payout was especially lucrative for one company, Addiction Recovery Care. ARC was Kentucky’s largest drug treatment provider and the largest recipient of state funds between 2019 and 2025. This spring, the Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported on how ARC exploited Kentucky’s loosened spending controls and may have falsified billing.

Beshear has been unapologetic about state spending on drug treatment. In an interview in early June with ProPublica and the Lexington Herald-Leader, he pointed to the continued decline in drug overdose deaths as proof that he made the right choice when he did not force treatment centers to show that costly drug recovery services were medically necessary before treating people for addiction.

“If we’d gone back in time too early and changed things too drastically, how many more people would have died that we’ve saved? With four straight years of drug overdose decreases, they can throw blame at me,” Beshear said. “We’ll talk about dollars, but there are people’s kids that are still alive today because they were able to get addiction treatment services and get them quickly.”

While Kentucky’s overdose deaths declined significantly between 2020 and 2025, experts said the drop was not unique. Other states hit hard by the opioid epidemic also saw year-over-year decreases in fatal overdoses, including states that didn’t loosen Medicaid billing rules, like Tennessee and West Virginia. 

Academic studies mostly agree that the drop in the death rate around the country had more to do with declining opioid prescriptions, an increase in the use of the drug naloxone to reverse overdoses, and less fentanyl in the drug supply. Medicaid and behavioral health experts in Kentucky have said in state hearings that some of the services drug treatment companies billed the most for were not directly associated with a decline in overdose deaths.

Nonetheless, Kentucky’s policies allowed ARC and other companies to bill more and more for services like peer support groups rather than those led by a licensed doctor or therapist. At one time ARC treated about one-third of the Kentuckians seeking drug treatment in the state; more than half of the services it billed for were the same lower-level services that Medicaid experts warned were being abused, according to state data. 

The FBI has been investigating ARC for two years, and more recently, the company’s troubles have intensified. This week the Department of Justice announced it had reached a $16 million settlement with ARC over Medicaid fraud allegations. The company directed employees to falsely bill Medicaid for services like peer support, according to the allegations, which stem from a 2023 whistleblower lawsuit filed by three former ARC employees. 

The settlement resolved the allegations, the Department of Justice said, and there has been no determination of liability. In another investigation, the DOJ last month indicted ARC’s leader, Tim Robinson, for wire fraud and money laundering for a separate alleged scheme to defraud multiple lenders. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges.

The company said in April it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.” 

ARC has over the last two years been forced to close most of its facilities, resulting in a 56% decrease in long-term residential treatment beds statewide, according to the most recent data available.

By 2025, Republicans had seen enough and passed a bill requiring treatment centers to seek approval from insurers before providing treatment services. Beshear vetoed the bill, saying it “will put up barriers to and delay healthcare for Kentuckians.” Republicans overrode the veto, citing waste, fraud and abuse. 

A Raft of Warnings

At public meetings and in letters throughout 2023 and 2024, Medicaid insurers and actuaries warned that Beshear’s decision not to reinstate the spending guardrails sooner had allowed billing abuse by drug treatment providers to proliferate. 

Some of those Medicaid insurers sent warning letters to providers, some who were suspected of  overbilling, on how to appropriately bill. At least one also tried to limit excessive billing by setting its own guidelines for services deemed “intensive, high cost and/or have the potential for overutilization,” according to a memo from Passport by Molina Healthcare, one of Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers, referring to peer support services. Peer support is similar to a 12-step program. 

In August 2024, the Kentucky Association of Health Plans, which represents the state’s Medicaid insurers, sent a letter telling the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services that weak oversight had allowed “unnecessary” spending on treatment and that the services treatment centers were billing the most for weren’t leading to better health outcomes for patients.

The letter warned that addiction treatment providers were overbilling for services that weren’t based on evidence or provided by a licensed doctor or therapist. 

Part of the solution, the association said in subsequent public hearings, was to reinstate the spending guardrails, known as prior authorization, that Beshear had removed during the pandemic. The prior authorization process is supposed to prevent providers from billing fraudulently or excessively for medically unnecessary services by forcing providers to get permission from insurance companies before administering care.

Tom Stephens, president of the group representing Kentucky’s five Medicaid insurers and the letter’s author, said in an interview that it was not the first time Medicaid insurers had shared concerns with the Beshear administration; it was “simply one example of concerns that had been raised over time.” 

Asked about this letter, Beshear spokesperson Scottie Ellis wrote that the governor “monitored the concerns expressed publicly and those shared with his administration” and that the state health agency worked with Medicaid insurers to address them. Ellis declined to answer follow-up questions about what specific measures the administration took during that time. 

More warnings followed. The next month, Somerset Mayor Alan Keck also wrote to the Beshear administration asking it to reinstate Medicaid spending controls.

Keck, whose rural southeastern Kentucky county was hit hard by opioids, told the state health secretary  that treatment centers across his region were recruiting patients from out of state and using company addresses to establish residency for them in order to bill Kentucky Medicaid. He also said some companies were fraudulently billing Medicaid by misrepresenting the services they provided.

“Our communities are seeing an influx of sober living facilities that are taking advantage of Kentucky’s Medicaid system and the lax requirements that linger from the Covid-19 pandemic,” Keck wrote to then-health Secretary Eric Friedlander.

Keck, who lost a Republican primary for governor in 2023, said recently that Friedlander never responded to his letter. He believes Beshear’s administration should’ve done more to rein in the drug treatment industry’s “explosive growth.”

Beshear’s spokesperson didn’t address questions about whether the administration responded to Keck. 

In November and December 2024, officials from Anthem and WellCare, two Medicaid insurers, reinforced their concerns in meetings with legislators and Medicaid officials.

The state’s own data from that period supports the insurers’ claim that the state was paying heavily for services that required little or no time from licensed doctors and therapists: Kentucky behavioral health providers were paid more than $147 million for peer support services in 2023 and 2024, Lee, the state Medicaid commissioner, told lawmakers in February 2025. During that time, Medicaid payments for psychoeducation jumped from $40.4 million to more than $168 million. 

Psychoeducation is normally a part of regular appointment when a clinician explains a diagnosis and treatment plan to a patient. Most of the money spent in Kentucky on psychoeducation went to ARC. Medicaid insurers warned Kentucky was one of the only states that allowed this service to be billed for separately, and providers were abusing it.

At the heart of all of this was the suspension of prior authorization, which had served as the only check on the overuse and overbilling for low-quality care. Without it, Kentucky’s treatment landscape became a Medicaid free-for-all, said Shelby Steuart, a professor who studies health policy at the University of Maryland. 

“It just became an opportunity for people to make money,” she said.  

When asked about these warnings and the reasons Beshear didn’t reinstate Medicaid spending guardrails sooner, the governor’s office said his decision “helped save lives.”

Ellis, the spokesperson for Beshear, said in an email that amid the public warnings, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, the state’s health agency, met with Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers “to discuss concerns” about the spike in spending on drug treatment. 

She said that the administration sent a letter in November 2024 to clarify when and how to bill for certain services Medicaid insurers had flagged, which resulted in a more than $100 million decline in billing from 2025 to 2026. But, as the attorney general’s Office of Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control told lawmakers in December 2025, billing increased by $40 million for other services that experts warned were being abused.

Ellis said the policies should be measured by lives saved. “In the end, actions taken by Gov. Beshear and his administration have decreased overdose deaths for four straight years,” she said.

“Willfully Ignorant, Derelict in Their Duties”

In 2024, ARC disclosed what it called billing errors that resulted in overpayments from the state, according to emails obtained through Kentucky’s open records laws. 

About that time, Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers began to raise questions about excessive billing and started to sever contracts with the company. ARC turned to the state’s health agency for help, asking the health secretary to delay reinstating spending controls and to enact a system that would force Medicaid insurers to continue working with ARC.

“Time is of the essence,” ARC founder Robinson wrote in a September 2024 email to Friedlander.

Beshear’s administration balked at forcing insurers to work with the company, but ultimately declined to reinstate tighter spending controls. That year ARC was paid a record $103 million by Kentucky Medicaid, mostly for services Medicaid insurers warned were being abused.

In a June interview, Beshear defended that decision and denied that his 2020 order led to a rise in Medicaid fraud or abuse.

Beshear said that by the time Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature reinstated spending controls in July 2025, he was in the process of coordinating with the state’s health agency to enact some spending guardrails, but acknowledged that “admittedly, the Cabinet was probably taking too long,” he said.

Republicans have accused Beshear of mismanaging the state’s Medicaid program. During the 2025 legislative session, they revoked the governor’s power to make changes to Kentucky Medicaid without their permission. Beshear vetoed that bill, which included a provision to reinstate tighter spending controls, but the legislature overrode his veto. 

Republican Sen. Chris McDaniel, who championed the bill, said in March 2025 that Beshear’s administration “had to be one of three things: willfully ignorant, derelict in their duties, or complicit. It was just too much money in one space for them not to have known better.”

Beshear in June said he’ll take the hit; at the end of the day, he said, the tide of addiction in Kentucky has receded, and it was worth it. 

“If we continue at this pace, there’s a chance we end an epidemic that started in our lifetime,” Beshear said. “Opening up services through Medicaid in general to more people has been one of, if not the, most important things we’ve done to get people back on track.”

The post Andy Beshear Set Out to Make Drug Treatment Widely Available in Kentucky. Fraud and Abuse Followed. appeared first on ProPublica.

Two leading Democrats on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees transportation safety pressed the nation’s regulator of buses on Wednesday to provide proof it can detect troubled private companies that provide services to schools and municipalities. 

The letter, from Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, adds weight to concerns voiced by elected officials about federal regulations and Transdev. A WBUR and ProPublica investigation found that dozens of deadly collisions were missing from the safety record of the company, which is one of the nation’s largest operators of public transit. 

The letter was sent to the head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The lawmakers asked the agency for documents showing how they ensure school bus safety data is accurate, what guidance it provides to law enforcement on how to report which organizations or companies are involved in a crash, and why FMCSA data shows the number of “enforcement actions” against companies has dropped dramatically under the Trump administration.

The senators also asked FMCSA, which is part of the Department of Transportation, for records specific to the company Transdev, the focus of WBUR and ProPublica’s investigation. The newsrooms began their reporting after the April 2025 death of a Boston kindergartner who was run over by his own school bus; the publications found no sign in federal safety records that Transdev, which operated the bus, was involved in the crash. 

The Department of Transportation did not answer WBUR and ProPublica’s questions about the letter or its reporting, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement Wednesday that the agency “shares the Senators’ commitment to the safe transportation of America’s children.” 

“We have received the Senators’ letter, take the safety concerns raised very seriously, and are currently investigating the matter to provide a comprehensive response,” the statement continued.

Transdev said in a statement responding to the senators’ letter that the company takes safety seriously and that “all incidents are thoroughly investigated.” 

“Transdev complies with all applicable laws and regulatory requirements in every jurisdiction in which we operate, including federally mandated reporting standards,” the statement said. “It is important to emphasize that we have always followed federal regulations, as prescribed, and will continue to adhere to all requirements for reporting incidents.”

The news investigation uncovered dozens of other deadly crashes associated with Transdev that were not part of its record. Lens Joseph’s death and at least two others resulted in criminal charges against the bus drivers.

The driver in Lens’ case has pleaded not guilty in an ongoing felony involuntary manslaughter case. In a 2017 crash in Taunton, Massachusetts, that left a woman dead, the bus driver pleaded guilty to misdemeanor negligent operation of a motor vehicle. And another Transdev bus driver pleaded guilty to misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter after the bus she was driving struck and killed a man in Las Vegas in 2023.  

The two senators seek by Aug. 12 a list of all the inspections and crashes related to the French company and records explaining why the federal agency’s records did not include at least 42 fatal crashes connected to the company over the past decade.

“Without accurate and complete data, it is impossible for FMCSA to properly target enforcement on unsafe companies, because the agency lacks the critical data needed to conclude they are unsafe,” the senators said in the letter. 

“It’s clear U.S. DOT failed in its responsibility to hold unsafe truck and bus companies accountable,” Markey said. “That’s why Senator Cantwell and I are demanding answers from Trump’s DOT about its lack of oversight of truck and bus companies with dangerous, alarming, and unknown track records.”

WBUR and ProPublica sought comment from the Republican leadership of both the House and Senate committees responsible for transportation safety after the June story was published, but did not receive responses.

U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, the top Democrat on the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has said accurate data is key to making good policy.  

“We can’t save lives if we don’t have accurate data — which is why the recent reporting from ProPublica and WBUR about the gaps in our database was so disturbing,” Larsen said.

On July 17, Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy sent a written request to the state’s schools regulator for an independent review of Boston Public Schools’ transportation safety. She said she was concerned that Boston Public Schools may not have revealed the full extent of Transdev’s crash problems.  

U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat who represents the Boston neighborhood where 5-year-old Lens was killed, has also called for FMCSA to investigate Transdev. 

“We should not have any company or contractor operating without a full accounting of their safety record,” Pressley said in a written statement. “The safety of our children must be the top priority.”

The post Senators Push Federal Regulator to Prove School Bus Safety Data Is Accurate appeared first on ProPublica.

On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing.

The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access to select organizations that make software used by regular people, companies and governments across the world. The goal was to find and fix the vulnerabilities before hackers and adversarial governments like China began using similar tools to find and exploit them for espionage and sabotage.

As the group settled in, one engineer asked the question that loomed over the meeting: Did Mythos “live up to the hype that Anthropic claimed it would have had?”

“Yes,” a manager responded, according to a recording of the meeting viewed by ProPublica.

The version being used by Microsoft, Claude Mythos Preview, was surfacing bugs faster than the tech giant could patch them, and engineers, the manager said, were now in “a mad dash” to close the gap.

One slide in that day’s presentation showed that in April alone, Mythos had uncovered 90 “critical” bugs and 141 “important” ones in SharePoint, Microsoft’s widely used collaboration software. In the first half of May it found even more.

“Please, please, please if your org has any April bugs, drive those down,” engineering manager Hans Andersen implored the group. They had roughly two weeks “to find as many things and do as much good as we can with this access.”

May 31, he explained, “is considered the day when the rest of the world will have caught up.”

The engineers on the call poked at that assertion, with one of them summing up the predicament: “So basically you’re saying if it’s released on June 1, then on June 2 the adversaries will have our bugs?”

Yep, one person responded. Yep, another echoed.

Ever since Anthropic kick-started a national conversation about the bug-hunting power of AI in April, when Project Glasswing was made public, national security experts predicted that the U.S. would have a window of opportunity to fix flaws before adversaries would have similar models capable of discovering the same weaknesses. In late June, the international alliance of intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes — whose members are the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. — warned in an unusual joint statement that in a matter of months, that window would be closing. But the recording of the Microsoft meeting, along with internal documents reviewed by ProPublica, suggest the day of cyber reckoning may already be here.

Given the deluge of flaws Mythos has identified, Microsoft so far has focused on patching those it considers most dangerous, which are classified critical or important, according to the presentation as well as the company’s own public patch updates. The internal records indicate that Microsoft plans to eventually address “moderate”-severity flaws uncovered by Mythos. The documents made no mention of “low”-severity bugs.

The company’s approach reflects the triage system that is typical in the industry. Just as the sickest patients are the first to be treated in the emergency room, vulnerability triage prioritizes issues that are likely to cause the most damage if exploited by hackers.

But that strategy carries its own risk in this AI-powered bug-finding era, in which new tools are unearthing a record-breaking volume of weaknesses in the products we use every day. Mythos, for example, is able to chain together a string of bugs that build on one another, meaning that the low- and moderate-severity vulnerabilities that remain unpatched could create an opening to carry out devastating attacks.

“The problem now is that you can chain four low-level flaws, and that can equal a high severity,” said Vinh Nguyen, a senior technical adviser to Anthropic and a senior fellow for AI at the Council on Foreign Relations who formerly served as chief AI officer and chief data scientist at the National Security Agency. “If you’re Microsoft, the current triage strategy may be underpricing risks.”

In emailed responses to ProPublica’s questions, Microsoft stood by its approach, saying its triaging decisions are based on a number of factors, including exploitability and the impact on customers. The company presentation did not mention chaining, but a spokesperson told ProPublica that the technique “has long been considered as part of vulnerability assessment and risk analysis.”

Asked about the internal presentation and the then-looming May 31 deadline, the spokesperson downplayed its significance, saying that “accelerated targeting and exploitation of new vulnerabilities is not a new phenomenon.” That said, he added, the comments made during the meeting reflect how the company “feels a sense of urgency to help our customers at this time.”

“What was heard on that call and is true today is that security is Microsoft’s most important priority and teams across the company are prioritizing using AI to discover and remediate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.”

Microsoft declined to answer questions about how many bugs engineers had patched since the presentation.

Anthropic declined to comment.

The internal Microsoft presentation and accompanying slides predicted that the group of staffers working on SharePoint, which is used by governments and businesses worldwide to manage data and documents, “will be busy for months,” first working through the highest-priority critical bugs then tackling the important ones in August. Microsoft says vulnerabilities it categorizes as critical include so-called worms that can crash systems and spread malware as they race across computer networks. Important ones could result in “compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data” as well as the “availability of processing resources.” After those categories were cleared, the group would begin work on roughly 300 “moderate” bugs, according to the presentation.

While the internal documents reviewed by ProPublica do not include updates on the entire breadth of Microsoft’s offerings, they do give a sense of the scale of the problem. One document noted that, since the company started using Mythos earlier this year, it had collectively found hundreds of bugs that Microsoft categorized as either critical or important in popular products such as Microsoft 365, the Teams conferencing platform and the Copilot AI tool. As of mid-May, most of them had yet to be patched.

“They’re not profound and exotic, but they’re real,” Andersen, the engineering manager, said during the meeting. “And a lot of them are exploitable.”

It’s unclear whether hackers have exploited any specific bug identified by Mythos, but some  have tapped AI to automate attacks and appear to be using Mythos-like tech to find and exploit weaknesses.

There have been outward signs of Microsoft’s internal struggle to deal with the growing list of bugs to be patched. Each month, the company publicly releases fixes for its software vulnerabilities in what’s known as “Patch Tuesday.” In June, it released patches for more than 200 bugs, which industry experts then said was an all-time high. But on July 14, the company blew through that record and released patches for more than 600 bugs. Only seven were categorized as low- or moderate-severity, one of which hackers were actively exploiting, according to Dustin Childs, leader of the Zero Day Initiative bug bounty program, which is part of cybersecurity company TrendAI. The rest were important or critical.

“Well folks. Here we are. The bug apocalypse has fully descended upon us,” Childs wrote in a blog post on July 14.

Microsoft told ProPublica that the overall volume of bugs “will not be plateauing for a bit,” but a spokesperson said the company has “invested heavily in both people as well as AI-powered triage solutions that scale quickly to handle the growing number of vulnerabilities.”

Given the new realities of the AI age, including the chaining capabilities, companies like Microsoft might need to rethink their entire approach to triage, said Nguyen, the NSA’s former AI chief. Rather than shunting what are now considered low-risk flaws aside, companies should be dedicating staff to developing and testing patches for the entire spectrum of vulnerabilities, he said. In other words, the cyber ER needs more doctors and nurses treating illnesses that are life-threatening as well as the minor wounds that could later turn deadly.

“There’s no alternative,” Nguyen said. “The patients are coming in fast and furious.”

Microsoft told ProPublica it’s “always going to be reevaluating and considering whether things that were previously lows or moderates be upgraded or thought about differently. With these AI systems, it makes us rethink some of these things. Across the industry, we’re all looking to see how drastic of a change it will be.”

“The bug apocalypse has fully descended upon us.”

Dustin Childs, leader of the Zero Day Initiative bug bounty program

Microsoft’s users may be particularly vulnerable. The popularity of its offerings, used the world over, makes it a frequent and lucrative target for hackers. In addition, many of its products contain “legacy” code. Developed decades ago using now-outdated technology, this code contains unaddressed flaws and contributes to what is known in the industry as “technical debt.”

But the challenge of fixing the flood of newly found bugs also extends to the rest of the software industry, and to open-source software code that is typically free to use and largely maintained by volunteers. Open-source software underpins internet infrastructure and is incorporated into much of the world’s modern technology, including products offered by major tech companies such as Microsoft.

“Nobody has really figured out how to deal with this, and everybody is casting around for what they need to do,” said J. Michael Daniel, a former cybersecurity adviser to President Barack Obama and the president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on cybersecurity. “Our tech debt is coming due.”

Ben Edwards, a data scientist who specializes in managing software vulnerabilities, said the software industry was handling an “intense volume even before AI.”

“It was like drinking from a garden hose on the jet setting before, and now it’s like drinking from a fire hose,” Edwards said. “They might have had the teams that could handle that garden hose. Whether they can handle the fire hose is something else.”

Although the volume of vulnerabilities has grown over the years, Microsoft’s internal group responsible for fielding them, the Microsoft Security Response Center, has been perennially understaffed. Even before the crush of AI-identified bugs, the center fielded hundreds or even thousands of reports a month, pushing the group to its limits, ProPublica has reported.

The size of the center reflects Microsoft’s corporate philosophy: Plugging security holes is a cost center, while making new products is a profit center, former employees said. The company is loath to tie up its best engineers with making security patches — a cost center — instead of developing new products and features that will generate profits, ProPublica has reported.

Microsoft told ProPublica that it does not discuss internal staffing decisions but has made investments in recent years to “focus our teams on keeping our customers secure.” The company “continuously evaluates the staffing, processes, and technologies required to support security response and vulnerability management,” a spokesperson said.

According to the slides that accompanied the May internal presentation, Anthropic provided Mythos access to roughly 50 full-time Microsoft employees, with a goal to “harden critical services before publicly available models catch up.” A slide titled “What’s Next” predicted that the Microsoft Security Response Center would see continued case volume “as public tools catch up” to Mythos.

During the May meeting, one staffer appeared to take comfort in the belief that adversaries “don’t have the source code” that such an AI tool would scan for weaknesses. His colleagues, however, quickly corrected him. Portions of Microsoft’s code have, in fact, fallen into hackers’ hands over the years.

“It might not be this week’s source code,” one person said. “But they’ve got source code. It’s out there.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Microsoft downplayed the comment, saying engineers “design our security processes on the expectation that determined adversaries may gain access to code.”

The post Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough. appeared first on ProPublica.

In a private ceremony on Sept. 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and praised a Florida nonprofit for what he called a singular achievement in American education. The attendees were celebrating the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, which announced that it had reached 2 million children with civics education since its founding in 2016.

“I hope you understand how important this is,” Hegseth told the room. “What we pour into the next generation will determine whether we keep our republic or not.”

FLAG’s founder, Nick Adams, had spent nearly a decade building toward this moment. An Australian-born conservative commentator and MAGA influencer, Adams had created the nonprofit, raised $7.7 million for it over 10 years, and garnered repeated praise from President Donald Trump. In March, Trump appointed Adams as the special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values — a position created for him after his nomination as ambassador to Malaysia stalled the previous year.

But a review of FLAG’s finances, donor operations and online donation network reveals a less celebratory picture. There is little evidence that the nonprofit has provided the civics education it claims. And Adams and his nonprofit have engaged in a pattern of questionable financial arrangements, including paying Adams and his mother more than half its recent annual revenue, while raising much of its money through a sweepstakes operation that has promised donors a chance to win $1,000,000 — a prize FLAG’s records show no evidence of ever paying.

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Adams moved to the United States from Australia in 2012 and has since become an outspoken champion of the American political and economic system. Now 41, he has built a following as a conservative commentator and self-described “alpha male” influencer, making frequent media appearances and amassing roughly 2.1 million followers on Facebook and 640,000 followers on X on his personal pages. Adams authored books including “Retaking America: Crushing Political Correctness” and “Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization.” 

In 2016, Adams founded FLAG, registering it as a nonprofit with the mission to bring high-quality civics education to K-12 students across America. FLAG has produced civics materials like the Student’s Constitution, the Student’s Declaration of Independence and the Student’s Federalist Papers — kid-friendly editions of the country’s founding documents. By 2023, FLAG was reporting annual revenue of nearly $1.5 million, consisting of donations and merchandise sales. “Thanks to the support of 40,000+ grassroots patriots,” the organization’s website states, “over 1 million FLAG resources have been distributed in classrooms all across America.”

To give FLAG credibility in conservative circles, Adams assembled an advisory council of movement leaders including Hegseth, then a Fox News host; the late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA; the late Edwin J. Feulner, founder of the Heritage Foundation; and Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host and co-founder of PragerU, a nonprofit that produces conservative educational materials. (The council has since been replaced with a board of directors.) 

Adams did not respond to a detailed list of questions about FLAG’s financial practices, sweepstakes operation and educational programming. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to respond to questions but reiterated Hegseth’s support for FLAG.

Civics education has become a rallying cause across the Make America Great Again movement, whose slogan invokes a return to a specific vision of the country’s founding principles. PragerU is an approved curriculum provider in at least eight states. Turning Point USA pursued a similar goal through Turning Point Academy, a network of private schools. Along with those organizations, FLAG is now part of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, a partnership of the U.S. Department of Education formed with over 40 conservative groups.

Trump’s return to office has been a boon for Adams. The president has called Adams one of his favorite authors, and a foreword in Adams’ 2024 book, “Alpha Kings,” credited to Trump calls Adams someone whose “work ethic equals his moral responsibility and faith in God.” Although Trump wasn’t able to attend FLAG’s 2023 annual gala, he sent a video praising the nonprofit and Adams, telling attendees that “tens of thousands of teachers are being trained and hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents are now standing up for our kids.”

“It takes Nick from Australia to come and teach us about American greatness and to help us fight for our country,” Trump added. “He’s an American now, and we’re very lucky to have him.”

The White House press office declined to comment.

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FLAG’s website invites teachers to request free classroom presentations, delivered by “certified FLAG Ambassadors,” including Adams himself, alongside guest speakers described as entrepreneurs, business leaders and immigrants. In 2016 and early 2017, FLAG regularly posted photos documenting visits to schools. After that period, however, ProPublica could not find similar documentation of FLAG representatives visiting schools. 

Since 2016, as FLAG’s annual revenues grew from $68,000 to $1.1 million in 2024, there is almost no indication in the organization’s annual federal tax filings that it was spending money on its stated mission. No line item in FLAG’s federal tax filing identifies a payment to a school, a teacher or an educational distributor. Only two lines, in a 2017 federal filing, indicate $26,925 for “Student’s Constitutions, Printing” and $5,670 for “Book Donations, Shipping & Supplies.” In the last six years, while FLAG operated under Adams, the only documented instance of FLAG activity that appears to fit the definition of “educational” is a 2020 video showing Adams speaking at what is described as a teachers’ conference. 

But the nonprofit has been lucrative for the Adams family. In 2024, Adams, who was born Nicholas Adamopoulos, and his mother, Angelika Adamopoulos, collected a combined $587,279 in compensation and benefits from FLAG — 53% of the organization’s revenue that year, according to the nonprofit’s federal filing. 

Adamopoulos was paid $201,861, including benefits, as FLAG’s secretary. In the same filing, FLAG answered no when asked by the IRS whether any officer or director shared a family relationship with another director or officer. Adamopoulos did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts were troubled that the organization spent so much on Adams and his mother. “The amount being paid, both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of the organization’s revenues and expenses, is very high,” said Lloyd Mayer, a nonprofit law professor at Notre Dame Law School and a leading authority on tax-exempt organizations.

Mayer said Adams’ salary increases since FLAG’s founding are more of “a yellow flag,” than a clear violation. For FLAG’s first three years, Adams received no salary. He first took compensation in 2019 of just $20,400. Then his annual pay rose steadily to reach $411,209, or about 30% of the group’s total revenue, in 2023. Adamopoulos was the first employee outside of Adams to be paid a significant salary, in 2024. No other employee was paid more than $5,000 from 2016 to 2024, according to FLAG’s federal filings, obtained through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

The legal test, Mayer said, is whether the board was clear that it was making up for early years of low or no pay: “Were they explicit in saying, ‘We’re not just paying you for this year; we’re paying you for your past service, which you were not fairly compensated for’?”

The IRS asks nonprofits whether their executive compensation was reviewed by independent people and if they used comparisons to other similar organizations — a standard safeguard against self-dealing. In all filings from 2017 to 2024, FLAG answered no to both questions.

Philip Hackney, a nonprofit law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former IRS official, said the absence of an independent review creates its own legal exposure. “Technically, that can be an excess benefit transaction on its own,” Hackney said, referring to the IRS category that triggers taxes on compensation paid to nonprofit insiders above fair market value.

FLAG claims that 66% of revenue goes toward program service expenses, according to a separate financial report filed with the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Florida, where the organization is now based. But the salaries of Adams and his mother, social media spending and travel expenses account for $755,541, or 86%, of the $878,208 allocated to program services. 

Mayer said the classification is not automatically improper under federal law. “Education as a charitable purpose is a very broad category,” he said. “Spending money on staff, online communications and even fundraising appeals that have informational content can all be considered programmatic.” 

“What [the IRS is] looking for is not inflated spending,” Mayer said. “They’re looking for disguised personal spending.”

In Australia, Adams was accused of spending taxpayer dollars on personal expenses. In 2006, when Adams was 22 years old, he served as a councillor in Ashfield, Australia. He was formally condemned by fellow councillors for running up thousands of dollars in phone calls and taxi charges for personal use while claiming them as council expenses. He repaid the charges after a formal investigation, according to a 2006 article in the Inner-West Weekly, an Australian newspaper.

FLAG’s online store sells Adams’ personal books — including “Alpha Kings” and “From Mar-a-Lago to Mars,” several marketed as signed copies for as much as $40 — alongside its own educational materials. One of Adams’ personal books, “Trump and Churchill,” is on the front page of FLAG’s online store, accompanied with language that says, “Proceeds from all sales go directly to promoting our mission and providing students and teachers with high-quality educational resources.” It is the only book with language that distinguishes which purchases fund FLAG’s mission or pay Adams directly.

In September, FLAG posted a photo from a conservative women’s convention showing Adams standing behind a table stacked with copies of his personal books displayed alongside FLAG-branded resources with the organization’s banner behind him. Adams’ books have also been advertised for sale on FLAG’s Facebook page, with links going directly to Adams’ personal website for the books rather than FLAG’s shopify page.

“He’s free to market his books,” Mayer said, “but if he has a charity do it, that means it’s not really a charity anymore, in that respect. It’s not about public benefit — the private benefit to him overrides the public benefit.”

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In addition to the disclosure discrepancies, FLAG appears to have violated rules for conducting sweepstakes. Nearly all of FLAG’s revenue originates from individual donors, and most of that money is raised through a direct-mail sweepstakes operation that offers the chance to win prizes, in one case $1,000,000.

For years, FLAG has run a direct-mail sweepstakes campaign under names like “Payout Decision” and “Winner Search Swps.” Sweepstakes are regulated primarily at the state level, and organizations that run them are often required to register and report to state officials. Not every state requires this, but Florida, where FLAG is registered as a charity, does. FLAG does not disclose a sweepstakes program in its federal filings, and ProPublica could not locate any official sweepstakes registration for the organization in any state.

Nine years of FLAG’s federal filings contain no transaction consistent with a $1,000,000 payment. Hackney said any such payout would be expected to appear on the organization’s tax filings. “It should be an amount paid out at some point, and that would show up in a 990,” he said, referencing the name of the tax return filed by nonprofits, which is public. At its financial peak in 2023, FLAG held roughly $512,000 in total assets — about half the value of the prize it has offered to donors.

Mayer said the absence of a documented prize payment raises further legal questions. “If the promise is that someone will win $1,000,000 and no one ever does, that’s fraud,” he said. “That’s lying to induce people to support you.”

Internal records from a mailing list exchange database, which details how often and for what purpose organizations use mailing lists of potential donors, shows a shift in FLAG’s emphasis. Notes in FLAG’s record state that as of July 2020, FLAG was “not mailing much” through conventional fundraising channels and was “focusing on the sweeps side.”

In April 2024, someone filed a Better Business Bureau complaint against FLAG, alleging that its sweepstakes drawing deadlines had been repeatedly postponed — along with those of more than a dozen other charities the complainant said used the same practice. In a follow-up filing, the complainant cited FLAG’s timeline: a drawing originally set to run from January 2022 through December 2024 that had, by then, been pushed to run from December 2023 through January 2025. 

“I just want them to pay me back my hard earned money,” the complainant wrote, “since I am a retired senior citizen who happened to love this country.”

FLAG told the BBB on May 6, 2024, that it had responded to the complainant.

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FLAG marks its 10th anniversary on Wednesday, and is throwing itself a gala with tickets for the occasion priced at $1,000; $5,000; and $10,000. Adams is still listed on the website as FLAG’s founder but ceded the role of CEO in March to Cooper Rodenburg, a recent graduate of Stetson University, around the time he accepted his State Department role to promote tourism to the United States. 

Reached by phone, Rodenburg requested that questions be sent by email but did not respond to them.

Rodenburg has since increased FLAG’s public activity, launching a TikTok account and a Substack newsletter, meeting with educational representatives and speaking to groups like the Shelby County Republican Women’s Club in Tennessee. A Substack post in April described FLAG, represented by Rodenburg and Adamopoulos, delivering founding documents to schools in Mississippi. This was one of the only specific program activities the organization has documented in recent years. 

The post This MAGA Influencer Runs a Charity to Teach Kids Civics. Much of the Money Goes to Him Instead. appeared first on ProPublica.

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.

“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

Former federal Judge John E. Jones, a George W. Bush appointee

Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”

“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.

In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.

“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.

In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.

Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.

“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote.

“Breakdown” of a Presumption

The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard.

It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers.

About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.

Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.

“This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.

Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added.

But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.

In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.

In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.

News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.”

Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.

“The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.

In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.”

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.

“It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.”

Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.

“We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief.

Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries

The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.

Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.”

That dynamic is gone, he said.

“I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”

The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.”

“There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council

Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.

Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.

This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.

The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment.

In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.

“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”

The post Federal Judges Chastise Trump’s Justice Department for “Unlawful,” “Unethical” and “Unseemly” Conduct appeared first on ProPublica.

For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe.

They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself.

The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove it existed.

Doing so would require one of the most ambitious international collaborations in scientific history. Starting decades ago, thousands of scientists from dozens of countries worked side by side, even though some of their nations considered one another adversaries. The United States contributed a quarter of the workforce and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

The investment paid off in 2012, when the team detected the so-called “God particle” or Higgs boson, confirming the half-century-old Higgs field theory. The achievement was so significant that two of the physicists behind the theory won the Nobel Prize.

Under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, American scientists might be forced to watch similar discoveries from the sidelines. The proposal would restrict international collaboration and give political appointees the ability to decide the most important research to fund, and the power to pull the plug at any time, for any reason.

As soon as he learned about the proposal, one of the U.S. scientists who took part in the landmark project rushed to file his objection with the federal government.

“These experiments take decades to build and require sustained, cooperative international investment,” University of Chicago physics professor David W. Miller wrote in a public comment. “The experiments will continue, without American leadership. … The United States will not just fall behind. It will step aside.”

The rule’s implications reach far beyond physics. Proposed by the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known but powerful part of the White House that guides federal spending, it would give the administration’s political appointees across dozens of federal agencies significant discretion over how grants are awarded and terminated. The appointees don’t have to know anything about science or the subjects of the grants they’re reviewing.

Russell Vought, who runs the office and has made expanding presidential control over federal spending one of his signature goals, has put the philosophy into practice over the past two years, helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and, in another controversial move, blocking funds already allocated by Congress. Vought’s decision last year to cancel 284 Department of Energy grants drew renewed criticism after an agency lawyer recently admitted in court records that the terminations were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — in other words, blue states.

The rule would cover at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants, touching everything from food stamp benefits and housing assistance to small business loans and funding for the arts. Many cities, states and nonprofits rely on federal grants in their annual budgets. Representatives of domestic violence organizations and museums and the attorneys general of 22 states are among those who have objected to the rule.

Vought’s office wants the final version of the rule to take effect on Oct. 1. Before that happens, the OMB must consider the nearly 500,000 public comments that have flooded in since the rule was announced in late May and address or respond to substantive critiques.

An OMB spokesperson told ProPublica that the “proposed rule will ensure spending is aligned with current law, Executive Orders, and agency priorities.” This is “fundamentally about accountability to the American people and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. It will not disrupt major scientific research or supplant the peer review process — any claims to the contrary are based on spurious assumptions.”

But thousands of public comments come from scientists, who warn that the rule, as written, would severely curtail their work treating pediatric cancers, improving maternal health and advancing fundamental research.

The United States’ world-renowned system of funding science entrusts decisions to subject-matter experts who choose grantees based on a rigorous, merit-based peer-review process, with minimum political interference. Physicists vet proposals from other physicists; oncologists, those of other oncologists. Larger projects get steady funding through multiple years, so that researchers can hire staff, design and purchase equipment, and make commitments to other involved institutions or people, such as patients undergoing treatments.

Few discoveries better illustrate what that system made possible than that of the Higgs boson, considered one of the most significant scientific triumphs of the 21st century.

Miller took ProPublica inside the endeavor, highlighting ways the new rule could imperil similar projects in the future.

“The United States built the greatest scientific enterprise in human history on a simple idea: fund the best ideas, chosen by the best experts, and get out of the way,” he said in his public comment. “This proposed rule dismantles that principle entirely, and it does so in ways that will cause immediate, concrete, and in many cases irreversible harm to American science.”

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Miller, 43, said he owes his entire career to government investments in research and education.

He grew up in Chicago and went to public schools. Neither of his parents went to college. His mother was the first female paramedic hired by the Chicago Fire Department. His father, a firefighter, did construction work on his days off. Miller liked building stuff in his dad’s workroom. He made shelves for his bunk bed and etched his own circuit board in high school.

At the University of Chicago, where Miller enrolled after winning a full-ride scholarship for students whose parents worked as police officers or firefighters, he chose to study physics and soon became interested in questions such as: Why do things with mass behave differently from light? Why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe? Miller said his dad used to sit in his firehouse, clipping newspaper stories on dark matter and black holes to send to his son.

As an undergrad, Miller began doing research at CERN, an international physics laboratory near Geneva that was founded after World War II to facilitate ambitious experiments and build bridges between countries that had recently been adversaries. He took a job there after graduation as a research technician.

Working in a cavern 300 feet underground, he crawled through tunnels, connecting power cables and screwing pieces of steel together. He was helping build the machinery needed to test a theory scientists had been chasing since the 1960s.

Physicists had long theorized that an invisible field of energy gives mass to particles like protons while leaving particles of light — photons — massless. To test the theory, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, would smash hundreds of billions of protons together at nearly the speed of light. Miller had been building one of the massive, intricate cameras needed to detect the Higgs boson created by colliding protons. Later, he worked to disentangle the messy data.

Miller was one of nearly 2,000 scientists from the U.S. who worked on the initiative. Three U.S. national labs built components for the collider in-house before shipping them to CERN. Federal agencies invested $531 million into construction and other services. Additional grants went to individual scientists. Miller’s technician role and support for his research when he earned a doctorate in physics from Stanford University were both funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the main government agencies that supports basic scientific research.

Federal grants can’t be canceled without cause, and the reliability of that funding was crucial, Miller said. But the new OMB rule would allow termination with minimal explanation or opportunities for appeal.

That threat “is a tool for political coercion,” Miller wrote in his opposition to the rule. “It tells every scientist in America: your funding is safe only as long as your work, your institution, or your public statements remain acceptable to the current administration.”

An additional threat comes from the rule’s prohibition of researchers using federal funds to “support certain foreign collaborations involving covered foreign countries or covered foreign entities.” The rule accounts for limited exceptions, including collaborations allowed by federal statute and those in which an agency head “determines that the activity does not pose a risk to national security.” An OMB spokesperson did not provide a list of covered countries or respond to ProPublica’s questions about how the provision would be enforced.

More than 60 nations contributed to the Higgs boson discovery. Engineers from India tested superconducting magnets used in the collider. Russian scientists collected spent artillery shells from World War II to source the huge amounts of brass needed for one of the particle detectors. Various countries are contributing to ongoing upgrades for the collider, including special magnets from China, crystals from Italy and cast-iron shielding from Pakistan.

Some of the scientists working at CERN come from countries like China that the Trump administration has already restricted researchers from collaborating with. And it’s unclear how easily others might find themselves listed as adversaries. Since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has picked public fights with a long list of leaders from U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and Canada.

Strict limits on international partnerships fly in the face of how science has worked for centuries, said Chris Llewellyn Smith, a former CERN director who is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford. The Royal Society of London, a scientific academy founded in the 1600s, appointed a foreign secretary to correspond with scientists from other countries nearly 60 years before the British government appointed a foreign secretary to oversee international relations, he noted.

Global conflict has already degraded the collaborative atmosphere at CERN, Llewellyn Smith said. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, CERN’s governing body voted to ban scientists affiliated with Russian labs — a move that has harmed the careers of Russian scientists and deprived CERN of the hardware and labor Russia could contribute to future experiments, he said.

If the U.S. also retreats due to limits on working with foreign scientists, Llewellyn Smith warned, it “could jeopardize the whole future of high-energy physics.”

That may feel abstract to many Americans. But the technological developments required to study particle physics lead to unexpected discoveries.

A CERN engineer pioneered a touch screen in the 1970s while building research instrumentation. The World World Web was invented by a scientist at CERN who was trying to share data between different institutions. Smaller particle accelerators are used for manufacturing and cancer therapies.

The practical applications may take generations to surface. Take the GPS technology that powers the maps on our phones, Miller said. It depends on century-old equations formulated by Albert Einstein. “I guarantee you that Einstein wasn’t thinking about your ability to find Starbucks this morning when he wrote down the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity.”

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The OMB says the rule is necessary to prevent waste, fraud and ideological bias.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose work the OMB cites, praised the proposed changes in a recent column. Empowering political appointees establishes the “kind of adult supervision” that ensures “the taxpayer is funding the activity that he votes for at election time,” the columnist wrote.

But critics say the changes aim to solve problems that either don’t exist or don’t require such a blunt-force tool.

The rule repeatedly cites “woke” funding decisions under President Joe Biden’s tenure as a reason for reform. “Federal grants were politicized by the last administration to promote a far-left DEI agenda,” an agency spokesperson told ProPublica in an email, referring to initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

The rule links to a 2024 report from Senate Republicans that summarized — based on a keyword search of terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture” — $2 billion in National Science Foundation grants they said were supporting “radical political perspectives.” ProPublica’s reporting found that many of the projects simply referenced existing social inequities or involved unrelated terms flagged by the committee’s crude methodology. One was a study of the evolution of mint plants.

Fraud in federal science funding does exist, but it’s relatively rare. Investigators at the National Science Foundation have recovered about $54 million from fraud cases involving universities, nonprofits and small businesses over the past 10 years, according to a spokesperson from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. That’s an average of $5.4 million a year — a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars the NSF gives out in grants every year.

Even if the administration believes those problems warrant reform, legal experts question whether the OMB has the authority to impose this solution. The final rule will almost certainly be subject to litigation, they say.

Lawsuits will challenge the OMB’s ability to prescribe the content of individual grants, said Kali Murray, a law professor at Marquette University who specializes in the intersection of administrative and intellectual property law. “This is a hall of famer move by Russ Vought” to expand the power of that office, as the proposal allows the OMB to override existing congressional statutes that govern agency spending, she said.

For instance, the proposed rule’s prohibition of DEI appears to conflict with a statute that directs the National Science Foundation to broaden “participation of underrepresented populations,” especially women, Black and Hispanic researchers, in science, technology, engineering and math, Murray said. Federal physics funding has been less of a political target than grants related to health disparities, racial inequities and LGBTQ+ communities — areas the administration derides as “woke” or “illegal DEI.” But at least several grants designed to support early-career physicists from underrepresented backgrounds have been terminated.

Any change through litigation could take time; lawsuits can’t be filed until the final text of the rule is published.

The next presidential administration could undo it through a formal rulemaking process. That process, too, could take years.

Pressure from congressional leaders, particularly Republicans, might be the only way to compel the OMB to make serious revisions before it releases the final version of the rule this fall. Democrats in Congress have registered their opposition. So has Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who sent a letter to Vought asking the OMB to withdraw parts of the rule “that would unduly burden scientific and biomedical research and small communities.”

Collins took particular issue with the provision that would allow political appointees to review grant proposals, noting that it would undermine the goal of awarding funds “based on scientific merit and value, rather than political ideology.”

The post How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery appeared first on ProPublica.

The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas is trying to turn a key talking point of his Republican opponent against him — alleging Attorney General Ken Paxton is guilty of the same type of voter fraud he has spent years trying to eliminate.

“As our state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton has gone on a voter fraud witch hunt,” state Rep. James Talarico, who is challenging Paxton in the race to replace U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, said during a campaign event in Houston. “Turns out, he was committing voter fraud the whole time, voting illegally in six elections in a row from the wrong address.”

Talarico’s comments come after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that Paxton moved out of the home he shared with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, in 2024 but continued to vote using that address, including during the March Republican primary in which he beat Cornyn. Three election experts told the news organizations that Paxton may have broken state law. 

Last week, the Collin County Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Texas secretary of state, urging that office to investigate Paxton for election fraud.

Paxton has repeatedly declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions about his voter registration and residency. On Tuesday, he held a rare news conference to tout the endorsement of nearly two dozen sheriffs and attacked Talarico as soft on crime. Talarico denied the charge at his own news conference Wednesday, saying he’d voted for billions of dollars in law enforcement funding as a member of the Legislature. 

When a Dallas Morning News political writer asked Paxton why he voted in Collin County, the attorney general shook his head as a campaign aide interceded. 

“We’re just going to answer questions on law enforcement today,” the aide said.

Paxton’s office and campaign did not respond to similar questions on Thursday from ProPublica and the Tribune. They also did not answer questions about Talarico’s comments.

The fact that Paxton voted in six elections from an address at which he appears not to live may resonate with voters because it reinforces longstanding accusations by critics that he has used his office for personal gain, said Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson. That was the central theme of the Texas Legislature’s impeachment of Paxton in 2023 on charges of bribery and corruption. The state Senate voted to acquit Paxton.

“There’s been a whole series of legal challenges he’s been able to slip out of, but voters are at least vaguely aware of them,” Jillson said. The latest reporting about his voting practices “is just another example of playing fast and loose with a law you must be familiar with as attorney general,” Jillson said.

Texas law permits voters to temporarily cast ballots using an address where they do not reside, so long as they intend to return. Election lawyers told the newsrooms that it is unlikely Paxton could make such an argument given his ongoing public and acrimonious divorce. (Examples of reasons considered valid include attending an out-of-area college or serving in the military.)

It is unclear what will happen with the complaint filed against Paxton.  

State law requires the secretary to “promptly” refer complaints to the attorney general if “there is reasonable cause to suspect that criminal conduct occurred.” 

Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s last day in office was Friday, three days after the complaint was filed. Gov. Greg Abbott appointed one of his senior advisers, Robert Howden, to replace her. The office continues to decline to answer questions from reporters, but Collin County Democratic Party Vice Chair Mary Higbe said the secretary of state told her in an email Thursday that the complaint “remains under review by one of our staff attorneys.” 

The attorney general’s office has not responded to questions about whether it received the complaint or whether it would hire a special prosecutor to investigate it, given that it involves the attorney general himself.

The silence from the Republican-led state government suggests an effort to slow-walk investigating Paxton, said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He said that’s difficult to square with rhetoric by Paxton and the secretary of state’s office that securing Texas elections is a top priority.

“You push the idea that you’re going to be really tough on election wrongdoing, and yet here you are with allegations in which you seem to be uninterested in pursuing,” Taylor said. “That smacks of rank hypocrisy.”

The post Ken Paxton Touts His Efforts to Fight Voter Fraud. His Senate Opponent Is Now Accusing Him of Committing It. appeared first on ProPublica.

The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain was set back off a country road in a white colonial house — such an atypical location that I first drove right by it, unsure that it was a school. I turned around, went to the door, introduced myself as a reporter and asked for a tour.

I knew a student had been assaulted in this Arkansas school a year earlier because of some news reports based on a detective’s description. Once inside, I noted the preteens tucked into hammock chairs or sitting on the floor. I noted the cameras mounted in the foyer and classrooms, a reminder that, in order to fully understand what had happened, I’d need to see the video that had captured the assault. 

But since this happened at the Delta Institute, a private school, I didn’t have access to the types of public records — incident reports, emails and video — that might have existed at a public school. The only reason we knew that something awful had happened here was that law enforcement got involved. I would have to keep reporting for weeks until the criminal case was closed. Then I could start pursuing the video evidence.

I had come to Northeast Arkansas, just outside of Jonesboro, to report on private schools that have been opening in response to state legislatures increasingly setting aside public money for parents to spend on private education. Our reporting shows that more public money doesn’t necessarily translate to more transparency. In most of the states that ProPublica studied, private schools operate with little oversight. Unlike public schools, where everything from test scores to school lunches and staff credentials is regulated, most of what happens in private schools is not open to public scrutiny.

In Arkansas, the focus of my recent story with Jodi S. Cohen, there are no rules about who can open a private school, and they can operate just about anywhere. The state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators.

There are no records showing that the Arkansas Department of Education investigated the Delta Institute or visited the school, even after police arrested its founder. When asked if the department had gone to the school, officials did not answer, but said when the department is made aware of issues, that “often results in a site visit.”

Eventually, I was able to obtain video evidence recorded from inside the school. With the help of Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for video footage to the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office and to the prosecutor who brought the charges on behalf of the state. 

Now I want to share some of that footage with you. It’s sourced mostly from my open records requests, plus one video that was shared with me by a parent who consented to its publication. While the videos are difficult to watch, they are important in that they show not only the mistreatment of students at one particular private school but also the systemic lack of oversight that allows private schools to operate with few regulations and little monitoring.

Early in my reporting about the Delta Institute, a parent showed me a video of her son’s experience at the school. It was taken by the school’s owner, Mary “Tracy” Morrison. She had texted the video to Renee Johns, whose 10-year-old son with autism was a student, as an explanation for why he was being kept after school that day.

That video shows three boys scrubbing the floor and walls of a room in the school with rags as Morrison shouts commands and admonishments. You can see the boys startle and react as she raises her voice to them. It’s clear they’re being punished.

Morrison was an occupational therapist and had never run a school before. But she sold herself to parents as an expert on autism and neurodivergence.

Johns filed a report about the floor-scrubbing video with the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office. She saw it as child abuse. About three weeks later, in April 2025, a second parent came to the sheriff’s office to report another incident at the Delta Institute — this one also captured on video.

A detective went to the school in April 2025 with a warrant and retrieved a roughly 40-minute clip of footage recorded by a camera in the classroom. I obtained that through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it’s really the only unfiltered view we have into the methods Morrison was using at her school.

The video shows Morrison directing a boy to sit in the middle of a circle of 12- and 13-year-old students on the floor. Morrison then told the students to put their hands on the boy in the center however they wanted.

One boy loops his arm around the student’s neck and chokes him. Afterward, Morrison gives the boy a high-five.

Other students join in by hitting, punching and pinching the boy. Morrison encourages one, who strikes the boy hard enough that you can hear another student say, “That had to hurt!”

A few moments later, Morrison thwacks the boy in the center with a footlong plastic cylinder. She’s trying to get him to admit to being unkind to another student.

Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. She took a deal pleading guilty to one count of permitting child abuse and four counts of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. The deal allowed her to avoid a trial, which means the video was never played in open court. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

I’ve been writing about schools for the better part of 25 years, often extensively about discipline and how schools react to student behavior.

But what I saw in the video looked nothing like anything I’d seen before. I’d never seen a school administrator — the owner of the school, no less — shout at a child that he’s a liar or invite other students to put their hands on him.

Morrison declined to speak to the detective who investigated the case or to the prosecutor. She didn’t respond to our requests for interviews and comments. Our only real insight into her perspective came in other videos we obtained: recordings of calls with her family, friends and school employees made while she was in jail.

We got recordings of more than 500 phone and video calls that Morrison made or received while she was incarcerated in May. In a call with a filmmaker who has produced true crime documentaries and who spoke with Morrison about telling her story, we hear her explanation of what happened.

Morrison describes leading a “sophisticated” intervention method in which she guides students at risk of becoming criminals in a “restorative” group discussion. “It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?” she said to the filmmaker, referring to the 13-year-old boy she’d had sit in the center of the circle. 

Morrison was released from jail June 1. The school’s new administrator said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.

“I think she should be prevented from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children around if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” David Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?”

The incidents at the Delta Institute show how one publicly funded private school has operated with little scrutiny, even after a criminal investigation into student abuse. But our reporting has uncovered several other such schools, and I encourage you to sign up for updates as we publish more about what we’ve discovered across the country. 

The school is still operating and is still eligible to get public funding from the state. This spring, though, it changed its name. It’s now called North Star Academy.

The post How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School appeared first on ProPublica.

I never thought I’d spend six months of my life investigating raw milk. But I did. 

In early June, ProPublica published a story I reported that features Mark McAfee, who runs America’s largest raw-milk dairy. The story came about after months of reporting on how the Trump administration’s policies were reshaping federal health agencies. My colleagues and I spoke with dozens of civil servants, many of whom described a climate of fear in which routine science had suddenly become politicized. 

One notable example they shared with me was raw milk, which most scientists and health experts agree has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its pasteurized counterpart and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness. 

But under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., current and former government workers told me, the federal approach to raw milk was shifting to align with his priorities. In his new role, Kennedy said he was “advocating” for it and celebrated the release of a federal report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House.

McAfee, who counts Kennedy as a customer, has advocated for raw dairy for more than two decades. But only in recent years has raw milk, which once drew a fringe crowd, been thrust into the mainstream. More than 10 million Americans now drink it; national weekly sales rose by 65% from 2023 to 2024 alone.

McAfee’s farm is pulling in about $30 million a year. It has also attracted significant scrutiny: Federal and state regulators have linked his business to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that had left hundreds of people ill.

Raw milk’s success had confounded me: How had it gained such a foothold in this country, despite regular outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli? 

Speaking with McAfee seemed like a good place to start. The story I reported takes you through my extended tour of his farm, and I encourage you to read it. Below, I’ll take you through some of the highlights of my conversations and interactions with McAfee and contextualize them with my reporting. 

“I’m begging you to say: ‘This is not anti-science, this is extremely pro-science. … It’s using science that is not conveniently accepted yet.”

Dairy owner Mark McAfee, on the claimed benefits of raw milk

If you trust 150 years of bedrock science, there is little reason to consume raw milk. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill off harmful bacteria. Before the practice was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy. 

Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease, and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children. Despite stringent hygiene efforts, contamination from deadly bacteria remains an inherent, unavoidable risk in unpasteurized dairy.

Exhaustive reviews of the published science on raw milk have broadly been unable to substantiate claims of its benefits, and most experts agree that it is neither healthy nor safe to consume. But McAfee said his customers know better. To him, the stories of families who believe raw milk has transformed their health are their own form of evidence, revealing truths that institutions have failed to capture. “If raw milk was a fad or a lie, then why would people repeatedly buy raw milk and then tell the world how they love it,” he said. “Our consumers read their gut and watch their kids thrive.”

He also said the government hasn’t invested enough in research to assess its benefits.

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered. … But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

McAfee, on his experience as a raw-milk producer

In 2006, six people contracted E. coli during the first outbreak connected to McAfee’s farm, according to federal regulators; their median age was 8. While the outbreak’s specific strain of E. coli was not found in the products, some samples taken by investigators had high bacterial counts, indicating contamination. 

One of the children affected was 7-year-old Chris Martin. After about a month of drinking raw milk, he fell gravely ill with a dangerous strain of E. coli, known as O157:H7. Chris suffered permanent kidney damage. Now 27, he can’t drink alcohol and will spend the rest of his life under a nephrologist’s care because of his elevated risk of chronic kidney disease.

McAfee said the 2006 outbreak opened his eyes to the risk of his product and was part of the reason he developed standards for unpasteurized dairies. But more awareness and better practices didn’t stop McAfee’s customers from continuing to get sick — in 2007, 2011, 2012 and 2016 — and the farm had to issue recalls more than half a dozen times after pathogens were found in its products.

And then between 2023 and 2024, regulators linked the farm to one of the largest publicly known raw-dairy outbreaks in decades, with more than 170 people falling ill from salmonella. McAfee disputed his farm’s connection to many of the outbreaks, including this one. He maintained that regulators’ practices for tracking illnesses were not smoking-gun proof that his farm directly caused outbreaks.

At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized. The tally is almost certainly an undercount, experts and regulators told me. Many recover at home from foodborne illness and do not seek out testing.

“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese. … Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”

McAfee, on his cheesemaking practices

Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process. 

So, when McAfee told me about his cheesemaking practice, it took me by surprise: The farm did what with that milk? I asked him about it again.

McAfee confirmed that milk with pathogens was used to make cheese, except for batches with salmonella, which he said were dumped or sent out for pasteurization.

I would later find out that the federal government knew that his farm was doing this. In 2024, the Food and Drug Administration discovered his farm had a “standard practice” of producing cheese from milk suspected or known to contain pathogens, according to court documents. It had told the farm to stop and destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk. That was two years ago.

The farm pushed back. It said it followed federal regulations by aging its cheese and said it tested all of it before sale. To force the farm to follow its orders and stop this practice, the government needed a judge’s ruling. But a backlog in the courts delayed the case well into 2025.

By then, political winds had shifted. The Trump administration had come in, with Kennedy at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services. (McAfee said the farm no longer diverted problematic milk to cheesemaking.)

“They have the guns and the money. I got the truth and the moms.”

McAfee, on the federal government

While federal officials were gathering evidence against the farm, McAfee focused on the “education” of consumers. Online influencers were spreading his message to audiences of millions. 

In January, the government dropped its efforts to take action against the farm. A former federal employee with knowledge of the suit told me that cases involving raw milk were deprioritized in the new administration because of Kennedy’s stance on it. 

A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond to my questions about the decision, but said in an email that the administration will “always be concerned about risks to public health and will continue to take enforcement action as appropriate to protect American consumers.” 

The health department and the FDA did not respond to my attempts to seek comment. Kennedy, through his department, also did not respond to my questions.

McAfee called the withdrawal a “big win.” Drawing on ancient Chinese military leader and philosopher Sun Tzu’s teachings, he told me that he had learned to engage not in “their war,” but his own.

“Our sales are highest they’ve ever been, and feedback online with influencers is: If the FDA says something, do the opposite. It’s safer. They don’t trust them at all.”

McAfee, after regulators linked another outbreak to his farm

Just weeks after my visit to Raw Farm, federal regulators publicly linked its cheese to yet another E. coli outbreak. Nine people were infected across three states; more than half were younger than 5. It took 18 days for the farm to issue a recall, and when it did, it said it was doing so “under protest.” Raw Farm had tested its products, found no pathogens and wasn’t at fault, McAfee told me.

I asked McAfee whether the illnesses might be connected to his practice of using problematic milk to make cheese. But now, he told me a different story. “We would in the past divert to cheesemaking,” he said. “We no longer do.”

I brought up the fact that he’d made similar disclosures in podcasts in the last year and to me just weeks earlier. But he doubled down. 

“I think you have caught me in something where there’s an issue between practice and what I’m saying,” he said. “If I said it, I believed that at the time to be true, but I do know that now we do not use any questionable milk.” 

On April 30, the FDA closed its investigation into the recent E. coli outbreak in cheese without taking any enforcement action. McAfee told me his raw-cheese products were back in stores. Sprouts and H-E-B, two major retail chains that have carried his cheese, did not respond to my emailed questions about the outbreak.

The post 5 Raw Quotes From America’s Largest Raw-Milk Dairy Owner appeared first on ProPublica.

It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors — despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government. 

During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business. 

Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, “It has felt like every policy that pertained to the H2A program was made focusing solely on the benefit of the migrant worker.” 

All of that brings to mind a freezing cold weekend in January 2025, early on in my reporting, when I showed up at a farmers’ conference in Savannah, Georgia. What the farmers sought at that gathering — and what happened in the months that followed — exemplifies the tension between keeping workers safe and keeping farms solvent. 

After I made my way through a brightly lit convention hall — past the tractor salesman’s stall, the labor regulator’s booth, and tables of peach preserves and dried blueberries — I arrived in a room full of farmers eager to know what President Donald Trump’s second term would mean for an industry dependent on foreign labor and facing a rising number of bankruptcies. 

A small group of lawyers and lobbyists gave several presentations to the farmers. One of them vowed that Trump could “profoundly” change the program, in part by making it easier to hire H-2A workers and pay them less. And if the lobbyists’ plans were successful, farmers would save even more money by facing fewer labor protections for workers. 

“Everything is on the table,” said Braden Boucek, an attorney who has represented the farm industry in challenges to the H-2A program’s requirements. 

In the year to come, Trump’s immigration policies would drastically reduce the number of immigrants crossing the border and accelerate deportations of people without legal status living in the country. But one important pathway — the H-2A visa program — would remain wide open. And the administration, under pressure from the farm industry, would be quick to embrace the types of changes the lobbyists told the farmers about on that frigid January weekend.

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To get the financial relief that farmers were seeking, three key things had to change with the H-2A program, the lawyers and lobbyists told the farmers at the conference.

The first was to overturn parts of a rule enacted by the Biden administration. The rule granted workers the right to pursue certain union protections, including ones that would shield them from unfair treatment by their employers. Farmers opposed the rule because they felt it would make it harder to run their businesses.  

At the conference, I listened as former U.S. Labor Department assistant secretary Leon Sequeira told farmers how several ongoing lawsuits could help “invalidate” parts of the rule. The previous June, a Georgia blueberry farm, along with 17 states, had sued the administration, alleging that the rule went beyond what Congress allowed. That lawsuit, along with two others, had led to injunctions that temporarily halted part of the rule. 

Sequeira, who is a lawyer in one of the three cases, later told me that the legal effort “isn’t about denying more protection for workers.” Rather, it’s intended to protect farmers from overreach by the U.S. Labor Department. 

“People can certainly differ on whether or not workers should receive more protection under the law,” he told me. “But as multiple courts have said, that is a decision for Congress to make in passing laws, not the agency.” 

Five months after Trump took office, his administration suspended enforcement of President Joe Biden’s rule. It then proposed to rescind parts of it. That proposal is pending.

The second change was to slow or stop wage increases for H-2A workers that had soared during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. After months of industry pressure, the Trump administration last year reduced the hourly pay rate, which it expects will save farmers more than $2 billion a year. Those savings are projected to cost H-2A workers up to 32% of their annual wages, according to the think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

The last thing I heard at the conference was an ambitious legal strategy to advance the interests of farmers even further.

One of the lawyers, Ann Margaret Pointer, explained that three recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings had together diminished the powers of the federal government. One decision limits the ability of federal agencies to create new regulations. Another makes it harder for agencies to fine companies that violate some federal laws. And a third makes it easier for employers to challenge federal regulations that had been on the books for many years.

Pointer said those decisions could pave the way for future lawsuits challenging the visa program — and could strengthen the odds of farmers winning those lawsuits. 

All three of those efforts were vital, she explained to the farmers at the conference, to “prevent some of the costs to comply with the H-2A program from falling on your shoulders.” 

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I recently reached out to the lawyers and lobbyists who spoke at that conference to ask how they felt about their progress on the plan they’d described. 

Boucek, who is now a U.S. attorney in Tennessee, declined to comment for this story. 

Pointer and Sequeira both said that the Trump administration’s initial changes to the program improved the way it works for farmers. Sequeira also said that the changes are just the beginning of the wish list for the agriculture industry. 

Pointer and Sequeira said the larger changes the industry is seeking to the H-2A program will require action from Congress. They pointed to a recently filed bill that proposes to limit wage hikes, cut red tape for farmers and allow additional sectors of the farming industry to participate in H-2A. (Labor and immigrant advocacy organizations oppose the bill, saying it would harm farmworkers and would amount to executive overreach.)

Until Congress changes the statute, Sequeira said, the Labor Department “can only fiddle around the edges.”

The post How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat appeared first on ProPublica.

Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America. 

I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.

As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented.

I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked these abuses. During the long drives back and forth between my home in Atlanta and my reporting trips in the rural South, I had a lot of time to consider how little we know about the farms that feed us.

I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most American households. I felt that disconnect in my own kitchen, every time I reached for the berries in my fridge.

I wanted to know: With enough digging, would it be possible to determine if the blueberries I’m buying come from farms with a record of mistreating workers?

Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. So I had to spend time — a lot of time — trying to figure that out.

I started by looking at labels on the blueberry pints in my grocery stores.

I snapped photos. I researched the brands. I read government records.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the pints often list the state where the berries are grown or the city they’re distributed from. But not the farm itself.

As it turns out, the pints sold by a specific brand aren’t always sourced to a single farm. To keep up with demand, and to help keep prices low, brands buy berries from a whole bunch of farms and sell them under a single label.

That makes it even harder to know if the berries you’re buying come from farms where workers were harmed.

I was able to trace one brand’s berries back from my grocery stores to an individual farm. I’m not going to name that brand, though, because its practices are hardly unique. 

Sure enough, I found that the brand did buy berries from a farm that had hired a labor contractor, and that contractor was responsible for some of the abuses in one of America’s largest labor trafficking prosecutions.

That case, which I wrote about at length, revealed that thousands of foreign farmworkers had been illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery. 

This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. And there have been no substantial reforms to address the abuses, either.

The reason contractors exist in the first place is because farmers struggle to find workers in the U.S.

Many farmers speak only English. So they end up hiring contractors to bring foreign laborers to the U.S. and oversee their work.

That outsourcing can shield farmers from responsibility for — or even awareness of — harm against their workers.

Labor regulators have repeatedly failed to make sure that contractors do what the government requires them to do: keep workers safe and pay them what they’re promised.

Many farmers, brands and grocers were reluctant to talk to me about these abuses. 

I spoke with experts to see if there are ways for consumers to know if the people picking their blueberries are being mistreated.

Those experts, who study farm labor conditions and food supply chains, said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program. Under the program, supermarkets and other corporate buyers commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, at a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices. 

For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. The stickers give consumers like me a clear indication that the workers who picked that produce were treated fairly. 

When I’ve found these tomatoes in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Dozens of farms have signed on to the Fair Food Program, and participation in it has been shown to prevent abuse in the fields.

But only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program.

Until that or something else changes, consumers will know virtually nothing about the farms their blueberries come from. And they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them.

The post My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed appeared first on ProPublica.

For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church.

It came from their brothers in the next bedroom.

Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually abused, though by a neighbor.

Katherine, the family’s second-youngest child, said she was about 2 when it started for her. She was abused by a different brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.

Before long, the two sisters started to repeat the pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother out behind a shed and pulled his pants down. She’s blocked the memory of what she did next, but she remembers him running away. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4.

Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine — whom ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are abuse victims — are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence — minimized, forgiven and swept away. (Their mother and the brother who Lynn said abused her did not respond to a request for comment. Their father has died. One of the sisters who Lynn said witnessed the alleged abuse declined to comment, and the other is dead. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)

The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to address their trauma through therapy. They have chosen to raise their children outside the faith, hoping to break with a community that has shaped their family for generations and to protect them from repeating the same cycle.

“I can’t have my girls thinking that this kind of behavior is OK,” Lynn said.

Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Reporters interviewed 20 former members who said they were sexually abused, along with parents of child victims, and examined police and court records. Collectively, they described a culture of normalized sexual abuse that spans across North America and multiple generations of church members.

Some child victims were encouraged to forgive their abusers, while church leaders who were told of the alleged abuse failed to report it to authorities — part of a religious doctrine some current and former members say has allowed that behavior to continue unchecked.

In many interviews, reporters found a common theme: Children who were victims of sexual misconduct went on to repeat the behavior. In remarkably similar terms, women from opposite sides of the country described being touched inappropriately by an older relative or acquaintance and then repeating the sexual conduct with their peers.

“This went way beyond just normal children’s curiosity,” said a woman who grew up in a church in Minnesota, and who said that she was first sexually abused by an older cousin as a young child.

In other cases, children who were preyed upon grew into adults who committed abuse. Both kinds of misconduct blur the line between a victim and perpetrator, experts in child protection said.

“If you’ve got a culture of child sexual abuse and looking the other way and brushing it off and forgiving quickly and not truly engaging in repentence, it certainly can contribute to sexual behavior problems of children, including kids sexually assaulting others,” said Victor Vieth, a former prosecutor who now trains child-abuse investigators nationwide.

Katherine said that since leaving the church she’s struggled with what to do with unresolved anger over what happened to her.

“This is in me; it has to come out,” she said. “But you’re just taught that that’s a sin, and so then as soon as you start to feel that anger coming up, you feel like shit, because you’re like, ‘I’m sinning, and this is the devil.’”

Even though they’ve tried to end the cycle of abuse, they worry they bear some responsibility for helping extend it.

Lynn said that, until recently, she’d never talked to her brother about what she did to him, worried that doing so years later could traumatize him.

“If he does remember, I really do want to take responsibility,” she said. “If I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail, because what we’re all doing here is not working.”

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Not everyone has broken the cycle.

Some people who were sexually abused as children went on to abuse others as adults. One was Clint Massie, who pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual conduct with victims under 13 in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2024, and is currently serving nearly eight years in prison. The police investigation into Massie offered a glimpse into his upbringing. Raised in an OALC family in western South Dakota, Massie told investigators in a videotaped interview that, by the time he was a teenager, he had already been touched in a sexual manner by relatives. He described it as a routine part of childhood.

“Kids our age, playing around, you know, being stupid,” he said in the videotape.

When investigators asked for more details, Massie described the conduct with other children as “stroking, getting stroked, sucking, getting sucked.” As officers pressed him about those experiences, he became visibly shaken, raising his voice.

“It does bother me,” Massie said. “It’s disgusting. It’s not fun to talk about.”

“Do you think that had an imprint on your brain?” asked one of the investigators.

“I imagine it probably did, yeah,” he said softly.

In another case in Minnesota, a church member went to police in January 2023 and confessed that he had inappropriately touched his daughter and fondled his young son in his bed, and forced them to perform sexual acts on him. The man told police he sought out the investigators because “he does not want it to happen anymore,” according to documents in his criminal case.

ProPublica is not naming the perpetrator to protect the identities of his victims.

The man pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. At his sentencing, the judge noted that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of sexual abuse when they were children. The judge said it was “almost incomprehensible” that no adult knew what they were going through, adding that “faith didn’t help stop that.”

If he hadn’t turned himself in, the judge said, the pattern could have continued. “The kids would have just kept a secret, until it caused problems for them in their lives as adults.”

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The accounts of Massie and the father in Duluth help explain the world Lynn and Katherine have spent years trying to make sense of. But the sisters’ lives took a different course. After leaving the church, they spent years confronting what had happened to them.

“Rather than teaching life skills and tools and coping mechanisms, it was always forgive and forget,” Lynn said. “So that forgive and forget thing was just like an umbrella forgiveness. Like it doesn’t matter what happens, if you forgive it.”

The use of Scripture is a common method to assert authority and prolong abusive relationships in religious communities, and it can also be a form of spiritual abuse, said Sandy Stevens, executive director of North East Wyoming Advocacy Resource Center, a nonprofit located near an OALC community. Far from being a resolution to moving past trauma, Stevens said, the forgive-and-forget doctrine likely harms victims more.

“Forgiveness without accountability is not healing,” she said. “And you can’t pray away a crime.”

Lynn has tried to warn people about the older brother who abused her. She said he teaches Sunday school at an OALC congregation. Eight years ago, another family member accused him of abusing her when he was an adult and she was a child. Lynn learned about the accusation from both her brother’s ex-wife and from the victim herself.

Lynn decided to help support that family member. She wrote a letter to the sheriff’s department in the county in Washington state where her brother lives. Copies went to two OALC churches where his family had been members and to the authorities in another jurisdiction where the abuse of both Lynn and the other family member occurred.

She said the letter was an attempt to force an intervention where the church had failed them as kids. The abuse she suffered at his hands, she wrote, had “greatly affected my life, my relationships, my physical and mental health.”

She wrote that she wanted to “make sure that you are aware of what has happened and try to do what I can to protect others from having to live this hell.”

She said she immediately got a call back from an investigator to acknowledge her letter. But the other family member withdrew her claim, the investigation stalled and she has not heard anything since. Lynn said it has been several years since she has spoken to the older brother.

Officials with the OALC church in the U.S. and Canada have said they do not believe sexual abuse is more prevalent within the church than in society at large, describing it as a serious and persistent problem that exists everywhere. They said they were not familiar with Lynn’s claims but said they were confident that local authorities would have “looked into this matter and that the local congregation will comply with their recommendations.”

Days before this story was published, Lynn called the younger brother whose flight years earlier to escape her abuse had haunted her ever since. He’s still a member of an OALC church; she asked if she could visit him at his home in another state.

“I told him that I had done something inappropriate to him when I was young,” she said. She told him, “‘I don’t know if you remember or not. I feel really bad, and I’m so sorry. It’s been been a heavy burden for me to carry.’”

When she arrived, she said, he hugged her and told her that her sins were forgiven.

“Par for the course,” she said. (Through Lynn, the brother declined to comment.)

Forgiveness wasn’t what she had come for. She wanted to acknowledge what had happened and say that if he ever wanted to talk about it — with her or with anyone else — she would support him.

“I don’t think we should forget,” she said. “That’s part of the problem. Forgetting is perpetuating the cycle.”

The post Children in This Church Were Sexually Abused. Then They Began Abusing Other Kids. Some Continued as Adults. appeared first on ProPublica.

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.  

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use. 

The money being wasted is yours. 

It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it. 

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

Yet few places make the federal government’s failure to safeguard this money more obvious than Adak. 

Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to two dozen — meaning the federal internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person. And, it turns out, there’s zero indication any of these people are benefiting from it. 

We know this because we flew to the island in June and visited every building the company itself told regulators it serves. We knocked on every door. Talked to every person we could find. 

Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.

Residents get online through Starlink, the Elon Musk satellite service that arrived in 2023 without any subsidy from the FCC. People here say it’s up to 40 times faster and costs $90 to $140 per month, compared with the hundreds of dollars a month that Adak Eagle, the local telecom, once collected from customers on top of its subsidy checks. (Adak Eagle’s website currently advertises internet plans for $99 to $550 per month.)

But the subsidies remain.

Like many Alaska telecoms, Adak Eagle was built on public money. It began in the early 2000s with FCC subsidies and federal loans to upgrade old telephone wires for fiber-optic lines that could support both voice and internet service. By 2011, the company was collecting $2.68 million a year from the Universal Service Fund.

A 2013 federal order determined company president Larry Mayes spent telecom subsidy money on a fleet of vehicles and a fishing boat that weren’t necessary for his business, and that the $237,455 salary Mayes paid himself one year was “unreasonable” and “disproportionate” given the size of the company and what’s typical for Anchorage, where he lives. 

(The company filed letters with the FCC at the time stating its salaries “should be evaluated in the context of a small company where each employee wears multiple hats” and citing the island’s “remoteness and harsh climate conditions.”) 

On top of the $3.6 million his company has received from the federal broadband subsidy since 2016, he also received $3.54 million from the FCC through a program that replaces revenue phone companies once earned connecting long-distance calls. The state kicked in an additional $3.75 million through its own subsidy program, the Alaska Universal Service Fund. (Some Adak residents said they continue to pay the company for landlines that they use as cellphone backup.)

When we first asked Mayes about the federal internet money, he hung up on us. He did not respond to questions emailed in May, a written interview request delivered to his Adak office in June or detailed questions emailed and hand-delivered to his Anchorage office in July. Reached again by phone on July 13, he declined to comment and ended the call.  

The one thing Mayes did say before hanging up on the first call: that he is playing by the rules of the FCC’s subsidy program, and if we had questions about it, we should ask the agency. 

We did. Repeatedly. About the publicly funded connections to demolished homes on Adak and other uses of internet subsidies in Alaska.

The FCC never responded.

Internet for Vacant Homes

Step outside Adak’s tiny airport terminal, and the scene is straight out of “The Walking Dead.” You can spend hours walking the city streets without seeing another human, the only sounds the dry scrape of tall grass and warbling seabirds. Stiffened copies of People magazine declare George Clooney the 2006 Sexiest Man Alive. A shuttered McDonald’s drive-thru still advertises 99-cent hamburgers. 

Subdivisions outside the city core sprawl like any in America, with neatly arranged ranch-style homes, powder-blue roofs, wide driveways and generous garages. After the Navy shipped out, hurricane-force Aleutian winds pried homes apart. The worst of it is in a beachfront neighborhood called “Officer’s Country” on old city maps. Bathroom mirrors and toilets and kitchen tables stand exposed to the rain in homes cleaved in half like dollhouses. 

Even in newer neighborhoods, we found rotted exterior walls with holes so wide you could drive a truck inside. Grass grew on living room floors. Bedrooms were filled with bird nests.

In the few homes the FCC paid Adak Eagle to connect that are habitable, the occupants have abandoned Adak Eagle.  

Henry Collins, 61, lives in one of those homes. He was partially blinded in a chemical accident years ago while cleaning a boat at the island docks. Now he and his wife spend their days caring for their newborn. Sometimes they FaceTime with his wife’s family in the Philippines and hold the baby up to the screen.

He accidentally cut Adak Eagle’s internet cable with a string trimmer. No matter. He never could afford the subsidized service anyway, and his rooftop Starlink receiver was untouched in the landscaping incident. 

One street over, 26-year-old Steven Ivanoff pays close attention to internet speeds because he plays Overwatch and Fortnite competitively online.

Before Starlink, residents said, Ivanoff’s former roommate and fellow gamer was notorious for using up the scant bandwidth Adak Eagle provided every time he went online to play. Neighbors hollered at him to get off the damn computer. Adak Eagle’s subsidized fiber offers download speeds of 1 to 10 megabits per second, according to the FCC National Broadband Map — far short of the FCC’s 100-megabit standard for broadband and, at the low end, barely fast enough to load a modern webpage. 

All that has changed. At our request, Ivanoff tested the speed of his Starlink connection using an online service called speedtest.net. He clocked it at a screaming (by Alaska standards) 447 megabits per second.

At another house, four dachshunds stood guard in a fenced yard while inside, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration who moved from Arkansas was playing a reality TV show on her widescreen — Starlink-powered, like everyone else’s internet.

Elizabeth Pryor has leaned into the isolation by starting a mini farm. In her solarium, a cardboard box trembled with teenage chicks, peeping under a heat lamp. No bears on the island, she said. So that’s nice. No foxes either. “But the rats ate my jalapeno peppers down to the stalk! Chomp chomp chomp.”

Her house rises across the street from a pile of rubble, the remains of a house fire. 

Both properties — the rubble pile and Pryor’s home, alive with puppies and chickens — are on the list of houses for which Adak Eagle received subsidies to connect to the internet. She doesn’t use it. 

Wiring an Empty Island

Adak was already a ghost town when Mayes’ company started wiring the island.

According to the U.S. Navy’s own Record of Decision on the base closure, published in 2000, “there was no established community on Adak” after the military’s departure. The Navy’s ongoing assessments documented houses being condemned and boarded up. 

Andilea Weaver, the company’s former vice president, said Adak Eagle began replacing rat-gnawed copper landline wires to Adak buildings in 2006 — nine years after the base closure. 

In 2016, Adak Eagle proposed a 10-year plan to receive new subsidies in exchange for connecting or maintaining lines to 346 locations, nearly every building left standing. The FCC agreed. The agency formally declared the new spending plan to be in the public interest.

The FCC in 2022 reduced the number of locations Adak Eagle was obligated to serve to 306 after the company reported some buildings were unlivable, but the agency left the subsidy amount unchanged. 

According to federal data published by the Universal Service Administrative Co., the most locations that Adak Eagle reported having broadband available was 283.

The buildings the FCC says Adak Eagle keeps wired for internet include duplexes, fourplexes and ranches where we found no sign of life. The agency shows connections at places where we found doors yawning open in the wind, hinges screaming with rust — no furniture inside, no appliances, yet in many cases, a single telephone still plugged into a wall.

Whether the abandoned structures Adak Eagle has prepped for low-speed internet can beckon new occupants is an open question.

Adak is so far west of the Alaska mainland that it’s in a different time zone. So far west that it’s almost in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The last vestige of industry departed with the closure of the island’s fish processing plant in 2020. Now the economy consists of a bit of hunting and bird-watching that lures a few hardy tourists aboard the two flights a week that serve the island. (Warning: Pack canned goods. The  grocery store and restaurant were closed our entire visit.)

Alaska’s Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has argued the U.S. should open a new military base on Adak because of its strategic proximity to waters cruised by the Chinese and Russian navies. With $115 million set aside by Congress last year for “exploration and development of existing Arctic infrastructure,” a Pentagon-led task force is developing recommendations on how to proceed, a Sullivan spokesperson said.

After knocking on hundreds of doors and canvassing every subdivision, we spent our last hours in Adak checking to see if anyone was using the subsidized internet in the old commercial buildings and offices scattered around the center of the city. 

At one of the last addresses on the list crouched a cinder block building surrounded by pickup trucks and wide spools of orange piping — the same piping we’d seen leading up to demolished houses the day before. A rotary phone hung on the wall. 

This was the local office of the company we’d been examining. Even the people who work there have stopped relying on the internet service that you pay for. Above the front door, above the sign for Adak Eagle Enterprises, stood two Starlink dishes.

The post On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet appeared first on ProPublica.

Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in libel damages after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic TV channel a “convicted terrorist.”

Westrop eventually admitted the underlying evidence for the claim was not reliable, according to court filings, and corrected the story on his website.

“There simply was no evidence to support the allegation of terrorism,” the judge in the case wrote.

Years after that ruling, Westrop made similar claims about a group of Islamic private schools in Texas that had applied to the state’s new voucher program. He alleged the school leaders had connections to Islamic extremist or terrorist groups, such as Hamas. Westrop shared his research as early as last fall with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which oversees the voucher program that awards eligible families taxpayer dollars for private education or homeschooling.

In December, acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock asked the state’s top lawyer if the agency could exclude from the voucher program an unnamed number of schools with supposed ties to the Chinese Communist government or that had hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights group. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that it could.

Westrop’s allegations, along with claims made by several others, were among the primary reasons the comptroller’s office investigated the schools and delayed their admittance in the voucher program, according to new legal filings.

The scope of the investigations was also far broader than what was previously known, the filings show. The state used taxpayer money to contract with two investigators to dig into the histories of nearly 50 private schools across the state with alleged ties to radical Islamic organizations and the Chinese government — a number that far exceeds what has been reported.

The extent of the state’s probe and Westrop’s involvement are detailed as part of a new trove of legal filings in a lawsuit four Islamic private school campuses filed against the state comptroller in March after the agency initially kept them out of the program. It draws heavily on an eight-hour deposition of Murl Miller, the comptroller’s chief counsel for general litigation, taken in May as part of the lawsuit.

While the comptroller has since accepted all of the investigated schools into the voucher program, the schools that pursued the legal action are still asking the judge to certify a class-action lawsuit to ensure the comptroller can’t discriminate against certain private schools in the future.

“Religious liberty is not a temporary pass issued after a lawsuit,” said Eric Hudson, an attorney representing the Islamic schools. “We’re pressing on so equal treatment is the rule — not an exception granted under pressure.”

The comptroller’s office, which declined to comment for this story, has objected to certifying the lawsuit as a class action, saying it shouldn’t be allowed to continue since the four Islamic campuses were ultimately allowed into the voucher program. The state’s lawyers also maintain that a class-action claim is outside the jurisdiction of the current court and case.

“Plaintiffs received not only the initial approval they sought, but also the continuing ability to participate in the Program on the same footing as all other approved providers and families,” the state’s June 26 filing said.

The debate over whether to allow the schools into the voucher program has come amid a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric among some elected officials and prominent political candidates in Texas and across the country. At the state Republican Party convention last month, members tried to remove Muslims as delegates. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, told a Muslim attendee he wanted him to leave the event. (Scarborough later clarified to The Texas Tribune he wanted him to leave the country and admitted he had some regrets about the interaction.) In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization. Florida’s governor soon followed with his own accusations. CAIR is part of a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton challenging the enforcement of the governor’s designation, saying he issued it “without due process and in violation of federal law.” The case is ongoing.

In the months since the Islamic schools’ lawsuit was filed, the comptroller’s office has maintained that its leaders did not purposefully single out certain schools. Instead, agency officials said that the Islamic schools were swept up in a wider review of some 700 private schools that were accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit that vets tens of thousands of schools worldwide. The agency has said it did not know which schools had Islamic connections but instead set aside the entire group after discovering not all had up-to-date accreditations, which are mandated to qualify for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Miller’s deposition, however, contradicts the state’s claim.

In the deposition, Miller said the agency began receiving information as far back as last summer that identified almost 50 schools with alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist groups. He also confirmed that the third-party researchers hired by the comptroller only examined those particular campuses out of the more than 2,600 private schools now approved for the voucher program.

The filing also said the comptroller initially approved at least one of the Islamic schools represented in the lawsuit for the voucher program, Bayaan Academy, then later removed it two hours after Westrop shared some of his research in January via email.

Miller’s deposition cited a range of sources that prompted the comptroller’s investigations into the schools, including Westrop, a regional Homeland Security Task Force launched last summer to “combat emerging threats from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas,” congressional hearings probing potential terrorist activities in Texas and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism organization combating “the threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.”

Miller spoke with Westrop on the phone at one point this year. He told lawyers Westrop appeared credible.

“Did you Google Mr. Westrop?” Hudson asked during the May deposition.

“I did not Google, no,” said Miller, who added that the investigators the state hired confirmed his credentials.

“Did they make you aware of a defamation judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist?” Hudson asked.

“No, they did not,” Miller replied.

Westrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. He has continued raising allegations on at least one podcast that extremist groups will take advantage of the school voucher program funding.

Westrop later published his research, which he had shared with the comptroller, on Middle East Forum, a website founded in 1994 that “promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the West from Middle Eastern threats.”

Miller said in his deposition that the comptroller’s office is “not readily prepared to do investigations and to do deep research into foreign terrorist organizations or any other accusation.”

The comptroller, instead, handed over the list of accused schools provided by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Reuben Katz and Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent who now works with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Katz and Burns, who could not immediately be reached for comment, provided the agency with dossiers on each school. Their research included cross-referencing accused school leaders against government terrorism and extremist group databases.

The comptroller ultimately allowed in all of the schools alleged to have Islamic terrorist or Chinese Communist Party ties.

The Islamic school plaintiffs have said their inclusion in the program is still not guaranteed long term and they hope a class-action suit could help change the comptroller’s processes that allowed the agency to delay their admission in the first place.

The filing pointed to a March 24 letter Hancock sent the state attorney general, in which he continued pushing claims linking the Houston Quran Academy’s principal to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the letter, he says the school had been “temporarily” approved for the voucher program but called for its removal. (The school could not be immediately reached for comment; the Houston Chronicle previously reported that Principal Hamed Ghazali said the school has no ties to CAIR and is “purely academic.”) Hancock asked Paxton, whom the comptroller had been feuding with over the attorney general’s legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight what he called the school’s “terror ties.” He urged the attorney general to strip the school, “and any other school with documented ties to terrorism,” of its corporate charter. (Hancock has since announced he will step down from his position as acting comptroller at the end of this month.)

Of Hancock’s comments, Miller said in his deposition, “There’s a lot of mistakes and misstatements in this particular letter, but again, I’m not the acting comptroller.”

“We,” Miller said, had determined the accusations of terrorist ties were not accurate. “This letter came completely out of the blue, and — and so this was a surprise to all of us.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs asked whether the comptroller has the authority to remove a school from the approved list, overriding the agency’s own internal research. Miller opposed the notion multiple times before conceding at one point.

“It’s possible, yes,” Miller said.

The post How a Man Once Ordered to Pay Libel Damages Helped Launch an Investigation Into Islamic Private Schools appeared first on ProPublica.

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. 

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. 

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa. 

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.

Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.

None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications. 

“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.

Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required. 

The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries. 

During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them. 

In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. 

Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”

“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.” 

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Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. 

On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants. 

Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.

One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico. 

Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.

The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.

The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule. 

The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award. 

Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.

The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.

The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. 

In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”  

The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.” 

Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. 

The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.

Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research. 

Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.

Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.

One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.

878 did not respond to questions.

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Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. Its awards have sought to support documenting and investigating rapes committed during political violence in Burma; preventing torture in Tunisia and rehabilitating torture survivors in Syria; and combating pervasive sexual violence in Mauritania. 

Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year. 

But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”

Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.

Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.

The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.

“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.

The post Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe appeared first on ProPublica.

The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the DA’s support, the conviction was thrown out. Today, the same county government and that of its main city, Syracuse, continue to fight a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks financial damages for the years he lost behind bars.

The conflicts, it seems, aren’t simply between criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. A key expert for the city and county seems to be experiencing an internal conflict of his own — or, at minimum, a dramatic change in opinion.

Syracuse’s paid expert, a veteran Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025 asserting that the city’s prosecutors “did not engage in misconduct” in the Broadwater case. But a little over a year before that, Gershman told me that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” against Broadwater, calling it “the most heinous kind of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor is creating guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misconduct’ is kind of glib in this case. … It’s so much worse than plain misconduct. This is tyranny.”

In an interview for this article, Gershman said he changed his mind after delving deeper into the case. “The facts,” he said, are more “complex” and “nuanced” than how he initially understood them.

Lawyers on both sides of the Broadwater litigation declined to comment for this article.

Certainly, lawyers retain paid experts of every stripe for all sorts of actions. But it’s rare to see an expert take a position in court after expressing a different one to a reporter. “It’s not unethical to change your mind,” said Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor and ethics expert at New York University School of Law. But, he added, Gershman’s reversal is “an embarrassment and it’s going to undermine his credibility going forward.” A potential jury in the case might wonder what he truly believes.

Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, who specializes in criminal law and ethics, offered a similar view. She called it “odd” that Gershman would “be willing to give such a strongly worded comment and then take a position as an expert on behalf of one of the parties. That in itself is problematic. It raises concerns.” She said she views the role of being a commentator for a news story as different from being an expert in a legal case. Commentators should approach the task from a starting point of neutrality, she said. Being an expert, by contrast, has an inherently partisan aspect. “I think it gets confused if you do both,” Roiphe said.

ProPublica recently published an in-depth narrative investigation of the original criminal case that examined multiple lapses in the prosecution of Broadwater and uncovered a broader failure in the criminal justice system in Syracuse at the time, which allowed one or more serial rapists to continue their assaults — many of which bore similarities to the one that Broadwater had been convicted of — for years.

The original case dates back to the early hours of May 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a Syracuse University freshman, was brutally raped in a park near campus. Initially, the police did not believe her, even though a medical examination and physical evidence supported her account. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed him to be her rapist. She reported the sighting to police, and Broadwater was arrested.

From the beginning, the case hinged on Sebold’s testimony. But at a lineup, she identified a man other than Broadwater as her rapist. What happened right after that misindentification is at the heart of the current litigation.

In the view of the current DA, Fitzpatrick, the prosecution should have halted the moment Sebold picked somebody else: “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy,” Fitzpatrick told me for the earlier article. “She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. Case is over. Stop.”

But the prosecution continued. Sebold identified him as her rapist at trial. Broadwater was convicted and ultimately served 16 years in state prison, and lived as a registered sex offender for nearly 23 more.

How Sebold described what happened after the failed lineup identification has remained broadly consistent over the years. But there have been different shadings in the account presented in her 1999 memoir about the case and in her 2025 deposition testimony in the civil suit. Her memoir suggests she was influenced by police officers and a prosecutor. In “Lucky,” she wrote that after the lineup she “searched the eyes of the uniformed man for whether I had chosen the right one.” After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced she had “chosen the wrong man.”

In her June 2025 deposition, Sebold testified that she knew before she spoke to officers or the prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer, that she had gotten the lineup selection wrong. But she also testified that “there was no way for me to be sure at that time, and then certain things happened that kept reinforcing” that she had picked the wrong man, she said, including a look of disappointment from a detective and Uebelhoer’s remarks to her.

These distinctions matter because if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it could constitute misconduct. And what happened in those moments is particularly relevant because the prosecution made no attempt to pause the case or investigate further after the failed identification.

Uebelhoer had Sebold write an affidavit in which she explained that she picked the man who had been standing next to Broadwater because he was looking at her. They looked “almost identical,” she stated in the affidavit. Uebelhoer then told her, according to “Lucky,” that she had been duped by Broadwater, who had requested that another prisoner be included in the lineup because all the others differed from him noticeably in height or weight. “He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Uebelhoer said. (Both men maintain they had never been in a lineup before. Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she had little memory of the Broadwater case.)

Sebold’s memoir later became a bestseller, and through a tangled series of events that began when producers decided to make a film version of the memoir, the book ultimately helped lead to Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.

After his conviction was vacated, Broadwater sued the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment. The state agreed to pay $5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. The city of Syracuse and its surrounding county, by contrast, have so far resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit alleging that they violated his constitutional rights through a malicious prosecution.

Broadwater’s attorneys contend that the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and highly suggestive statements to [Sebold] that led her to identify Mr. Broadwater in court,” and then kept those statements to themselves, which further undermined his defense.

That’s where Gershman comes in. As author of a textbook called “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject. The textbook catalogs the ways prosecutors can abuse their powers. He has also warned prosecutors to be wary of eyewitness identifications, citing them as “the largest single source of wrongful convictions.”

I had previously interviewed Gershman for a series I wrote on prosecutors who suffered no consequences when they withheld evidence or committed other transgressions. It seemed natural that he’d have insights on the Broadwater case.

When I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the transcript of the original trial and the motions to vacate Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help me identify whether there were any elements of prosecutorial misconduct.

After he reviewed the materials (and also read a lengthy New Yorker story about the case), Gershman seemed beside himself. He told me that he had never seen anything quite like it in his 60-year legal career. “I can’t think of a case where a prosecutor has so clearly manipulated the witness into testifying against the person accused of a crime,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything so blatant; so grotesque as what I see here.”

That was 2024. Then came his assignment for the city and county and his 2025 report. (Gershman said he notified them at the outset that he had spoken to me.)

In his 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” about the lineup and was under no obligation to disclose what she said to the defense. She “behaved properly and professionally, and there is nothing in the record that could remotely be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism.”

When I called Gershman recently to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “absolutely nothing about the case” when we first talked and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He noted that he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir at the time of our conversation.

His thinking, he said, had evolved as he studied the case more closely. Most important, he said, Sebold hadn’t yet testified in a deposition for Broadwater’s suit. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I may have made contradictions between what we talked about way back then and what I later learned,” he said.

His new opinion fixates on the portion of Sebold’s 2025 testimony where she said she recognized her erroneous lineup pick on her own. In our most recent conversation, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the parts of her testimony that were more ambiguous.

In Gershman’s view today, Uebelhoer’s remarks had no impact on Sebold or the verdict. Anything that the prosecutor or officers said after the lineup was “totally, almost, gratuitous. It didn’t have any bearing on her identification,” Gershman said. He noted that Sebold was asked at trial about her botched identification.

A few hours after our interview last week, Gershman called me again, unprompted. He offered what seemed like another zigzag. This time, he told me that Uebelhoer did, in fact, commit misconduct, but that it hadn’t affected the outcome.

When I pointed out that his report explicitly stated that the “prosecution engaged in no misconduct,” he said he now wanted to qualify that: “The prosecutors did not engage in misconduct, as I see it, which prejudiced the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I intended to say.” As he summarized it, “She shouldn’t have said what she said, but it didn’t matter.” (Deeper in his report, he also referred to the statements from the detective and prosecutor as “irrelevant and incompetent.”)

Gershman emphasized that he had been asked to assess legality, not ethics. His assignment, he said, was to ascertain whether Uebelhoer should’ve disclosed her remarks to Broadwater’s lawyers before trial, not to render a judgment on whether it was appropriate to make them.

“I took a legal position that they didn’t have to be disclosed because they didn’t constitute Brady evidence,” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose favorable evidence to the accused.

“I don’t do this for the money,” Gershman testified in his deposition, explaining that he was paid $10,000 for the assignment. “I do this because I’m interested in this kind of work. I’m an educator.”

Should Broadwater’s civil suit ever reach trial, Gershman will likely be questioned about his evolving positions. If that happens, one challenge will be to convince a jury that his current view is more believable than his previous one.

The post How a Paid Expert Reversed His View of a Notoriously Flawed Prosecution in the Rape of a Bestselling Author appeared first on ProPublica.

Dallas-area Democrats are demanding that Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton be investigated for illegal voting after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that he has repeatedly voted while registered at an address where he appears to no longer live.

In a complaint filed Tuesday, the Collin County Democratic Party asked the Texas secretary of state to investigate whether Paxton committed election fraud by voting in the May primary runoff. Paxton beat longtime incumbent John Cornyn in that race, securing the Republican Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.

Mary Higbe, vice chair of the Collin County Democratic Party, noted in the complaint that Paxton’s office, as recently as February, warned voters that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.”

“For someone who’s made a stand against voter fraud, it’s unconscionable (yet not surprising) that Paxton engages in this behavior,” Higbe wrote. She added, “I ask that he be held to the same standards he wishes to hold others to.”

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported last week that Paxton has voted six times in the past two years while registered at an address in Collin County where he previously lived with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton.

Paxton moved out of the Collin County home in June 2024 and has not returned, according to a divorce filing by his wife and a source close to the Paxton family. It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election officials told ProPublica and the Tribune that Paxton may have broken state election law, which requires voters to be registered where they live. Voters may temporarily cast ballots using an address where they do not reside, so long as they intend to return. The experts said it is unclear whether Paxton could make such an argument given his ongoing public and contentious divorce.

The day after Collin County Democrats filed the complaint, the Texas Democratic Party issued a news release that accused Paxton of ignoring “bombshell voter fraud accusations.”

It’s unclear what will happen with the complaint. Under the current system, the secretary of state conducts an “initial review and, if appropriate, refers it to the Office of the Attorney General,” said Alicia Pierce, spokesperson for Secretary of State Jane Nelson, whose last day in the position is Friday. Pierce did not respond to a question about whether the office would handle a complaint against Paxton differently. She instead pointed to the state law that requires the secretary of state to “promptly” refer complaints to the attorney general if “there is reasonable cause to suspect that criminal conduct occurred.”

Paxton’s situation seems to meet that threshold, and the attorney general should seek outside help, given the conflict of interest in investigating himself, said San Antonio election lawyer Joaquin Gonzalez, who previously led the voting rights program at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

“The ethical and sort of best practice would be for the attorney general’s office to hire an independent special investigator to look into the complaint,” Gonzalez said.

Paxton did not answer questions from the newsrooms in early July about his voter registration and residency.

Neither he nor the attorney general’s office responded to questions about the complaint or how they would handle the case should the secretary of state refer it to his office.

Paxton campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy sent the newsrooms a broad statement unrelated to Paxton’s voter registration that accused the “political elite” and reporters of digging through the attorney general’s private life to “draw the most damning conclusion.” The campaign did not answer a question about Cercy’s previous statements to other news outlets that Paxton “is a lawful, registered Texas voter in full compliance with the law.”

Higbe said in an interview that the complaint tests Texas’ system of checks and balances, adding that this is “an opportunity to see if that system still works.” Still, she said she doubts the attorney general would permit a fair investigation of his own conduct.

“But pointing out hypocrisy from the state’s top cop is necessary,” Higbe said.

The post Texas Democrats Ask for Investigation Into Ken Paxton After Our Reporting Found He May Have Violated Election Law appeared first on ProPublica.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating a sophisticated network of scammers who target people caught in immigration proceedings, bilking them of their savings and causing some to be deported, following a ProPublica report that complaints of such fraud doubled under the second administration of President Donald Trump.

Homeland Security Investigations, the subagency known for tracking international crimes such as human trafficking, has asked about specific cases detailed in the story, including the tale of a woman who, fearful of Trump’s nationwide immigration sweeps, enlisted someone she thought would help her keep her legal status. After the scammers got her money and caused her to miss a court date, she was deported to Nicaragua.

That was one of thousands of cases in which scammers lured their marks through social media posts and sent them through fake court hearings and other official-looking steps, charging large sums along the way. Now, the federal government is ramping up its efforts to track the scams, according to sources involved in the investigation.

A DHS statement said the agency was “declaring an all-out war” on the scammers.

“Immigration scammers contribute to a lawless environment, undermining our immigration system and posing risks to national security and public safety,” the statement said.

DHS is looking for URLs, WhatsApp numbers and identifying information on the payment app Zelle that might trace back to scammers, said sources knowledgeable about the inquiry. The department’s investigation is ramping up as such scams skyrocket.

ProPublica analyzed Federal Trade Commission data and found that victims and advocates reported at least $94.4 million was stolen over five years. The more than 6,200 complaints included everything from fake Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents demanding personal details and threatening deportation to fraudsters asking international students for money by exploiting their visa status.

Scammers often pretend to be lawyers offering ways to avoid in-person court hearings, taking advantage of anxieties among even lawful residents after ICE officers began rounding up people during immigration proceedings.

Experts say the scammers often advertise on places such as Facebook and TikTok before shifting the conversation to the encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp, asking for money in exchange for real-looking immigration filings. Sometimes known as “notario fraud,” these scams often rely on a mistranslation of the word “notary,” which implies legal credentials in many Latin American countries.

In recent weeks, agencies including the New York Department of State, Florida Bar and local police departments issued warnings about these scams. The American Bar Association, which has also warned about impersonators, has recently been in contact with DHS investigators.

In South Florida, immigration attorney Angel Leal encountered hundreds of AI-generated videos of his likeness offering aid on WhatsApp. His office had to hire an anti-piracy agency to remove the content and over 6,000 fake profiles, according to local news reports.

The videos, hundreds across Instagram, are strikingly realistic. “Leal” sits on an office chair, his facial hair and expressions matching that of the real attorney. The AI-generated figure speaks fluent Spanish with enthusiastic hand gestures, a potted plant or mug in the foreground and a law degree behind him. Slight details betray the ruse: some mouth movements don’t match the words, gibberish text appears on documents and objects meld together.

Advocates and law enforcement say people targeted should document all ads, text conversations and payment information. And DHS warns consumers to be wary of lawyers advertising directly on social media, operating on WhatsApp and taking payments over Zelle.

In April, ProPublica spoke to several victims who attended fake court hearings via WhatsApp, recounting their stories to “agents” wearing phony government uniforms. Spanish speakers are the primary targets, experts say, and the scammers often pretend to be affiliated with prominent advocacy groups such as Catholic Charities USA, which has been inundated with reports of fraudsters using their brand to find potential marks.

“Directly reaching out to people via an ad or via WhatsApp and asking for money over Zelle, that is not something Catholic Charities agencies would ever do,” said Kevin Brennan, vice president for media relations at Catholic Charities USA.

Such groups have found it difficult to get imposter ads and accounts removed. Even when they do, it’s cheap and easy for scammers to create new websites and accounts.

“It’s Whac-a-Mole,” said Charity Anastasio of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, another group whose staff and image have been impersonated.

The post DHS Plans “All-Out War” on Immigration Scammers as Fraud Complaints Double appeared first on ProPublica.

If you’re considering sending a child to private school, you’ve likely seen some glossy photos and lofty mission statements. But marketing brochures and admissions websites rarely tell you the bad stuff — like a principal with a concerning history, lawsuits filed by families, or financial instability that could shutter a school in the middle of the school year.

Parents have told us they assume authorities conduct safety and quality checks of private schools like they would for public ones. Our reporting shows that is often not the case. Many states take a hands-off approach, essentially leaving it to you to figure out if a school has problems. Advocates for systems that send public money to private schools have said the best accountability check on private schools is that families can leave if they are dissatisfied.

This is why our team at ProPublica — a nonprofit newsroom focused on investigative journalism in the public interest — has spent months digging into the expanding private school landscape. We’ve used data, public records, court cases and countless interviews to investigate hundreds of schools, and we’ve uncovered some with serious issues. These include a school in Arkansas that’s still operating after its founder was accused of running a “makeshift ‘Fight Club,’” and a former superintendent fired for mismanaging charter school money in the Midwest who was able to receive public funds in Florida. 

(The Arkansas school founder did not respond to interview requests and questions from ProPublica, and the school’s new education director said the founder is no longer involved in school operations. The former charter school superintendent told a reporter she had acted with board approval and spent money on kids and to develop and retain staff, saying auditors created a “false narrative” of her actions.)

We’ve learned from experience that it’s difficult to piece together a complete picture of any school, even if you’re an investigative reporter. Some states have stronger laws and provide better information than others. But we’ve also found that no matter where you live, there are free public records, databases and verification techniques that can prove useful. We’ve written this guide to pass on a few lessons we’ve learned. We hope it will help you spot red flags and make informed decisions for your family.

If you end up finding something interesting in your research, please let us know. We’re still reporting!

How do I begin?

Where you live will determine what private school records are available. Before starting to examine a specific school, it’s good to get a sense of local regulations. 

• Check your state’s education agency website. You can find a link through the U.S. Department of Education. Note that states may refer to private schools as “nonpublic” or “independent” schools, and some state education agencies have no authority over private schools. If your state has a page on private schools — like these ones from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Florida — give it a read. Look for school lists, the types of schools available in your state, and any relevant regulations mentioned.  
• Take a look at what information schools need to report. EdChoice, a group that advocates for voucher systems and other programs that make public money available for private education, has a useful guide to some of the requirements schools must meet to open in each state. This can give you an initial sense of what your state is and is not asking schools to report. 
• Look at voucher rules. If your state offers public money to private school attendees through vouchers, savings accounts or tax credits, check to see if those programs set additional rules for schools. EdChoice has a list of program names. Here’s an example of a voucher-specific state website for Indiana. 

Who runs this private school?

It’s important for you to know who makes the decisions about a school’s operations. This could be the principal, or it might be a different person or a board. The school could also be run by a larger organization. To find out:

• See if your state education department has a directory. Some places, including North Carolina, Texas and Florida, maintain directories of private schools that name each school’s main contact. Not all states collect or provide such information. 
• Look up the business registration. This can show when a school was founded and by whom, and whether it has changed its name. You can locate registrations by visiting OpenCorporates, which gathers this information on many businesses across states.
  
  In some cases, the school may not register as an independent entity because it operates as part of a larger organization, such as a church. Be aware that the school may also have a legal name that differs from the name it is known by, or it may use a company to help manage its paperwork, in which case you may see that company’s name listed rather than the school administrator’s.  
• Look for employee reviews. Some schools have a profile on an employment website like Glassdoor, where workers can post reviews. It’s worth searching there to try to get a sense of school culture, but keep in mind that anonymous reviews should not be considered verified information.
• Search for news articles. Once you have names of some administrators, Google them to find news articles or references to their history, being mindful that if someone has a common name, you might get results about other people. Basic as it may seem, this type of search has been one of the most powerful tools behind our investigations. In 2024, we reported on a private school founder whose prior charter school had its charter revoked — a fact that had been previously reported in the news. 

Who will be teaching my student?

The requirements — if any exist — for becoming a private school teacher vary by state. ProPublica recently reported on an example of a woman who pled no contest to felony child abuse in Florida and lost her teaching license, but was still able to then open a private school. Community members called attention to her history, which was findable online. 

• Identify names. Look for teachers listed on the school’s website or its social media accounts, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s also good to directly ask the school for teachers’ names, as online information could be outdated. 
• Examine certifications. Check your state’s teacher licensure database to see whether someone is certified and what subjects or areas they are qualified to teach, including special education and gifted endorsements. International Schools Services has a list of these databases, but check your state’s education agency website to see if they offer anything more up to date.
  
  Some state voucher programs require at least some school employees to be certified. For instance, Ohio requires principals of schools participating in its scholarship program to be licensed. In other states, there are no such private school certification requirements. Further, private schools in some places, like Utah and Arizona, are not legally required to fingerprint teachers or run criminal background checks before hiring them. 
• Find employment histories. You may be able to find teachers’ resumes on LinkedIn or through their own personal sites. If you can find names of schools they previously worked at, search for their names in conjunction with those schools. The social media accounts for prior schools might also help you learn more about them. 
  
  You’ll also want to Google for news articles that mention them, bearing in mind that common names might mean you get results for other people. Consider putting quotation marks around names to search for them as exact phrases, and use city or state names and the subjects the person teaches to help narrow your search results. 
• Check for past discipline. If an employee does have a license to teach, you may be able to determine whether they have ever been disciplined by the state. In some cases, this information is listed in the same database as their license information, but in other states, you’ll need to look for a separate disciplinary database, like this one in Arizona, to get full details on disciplinary actions. Texas also maintains a list of teachers who are ineligible to be hired at public schools. Not all states make disciplinary information accessible to the public, and it can be challenging to get details on cases, as ProPublica and KQED have reported on in California. 

Is the private school financially stable?

If a school has money trouble and closes, it could leave you in the lurch midyear. Some states require private schools participating in voucher programs to demonstrate some form of financial soundness. If a state doesn’t require such information, it can be difficult for families to gain visibility into a school’s financial situation. 

• Locate nonprofit filings. Many private schools operate as nonprofits. Depending on their size, they may need to file annual financial information with the IRS. ProPublica maintains a database of such filings called the Nonprofit Explorer. These can be daunting to review, but they can offer some basic information: For example, in prior years, was the school generally bringing in enough money to cover its costs? You can assess this at a high level by comparing whether its revenue was greater than its expenses. Schools operating at a loss for multiple years could be at risk of closure.
  
  Additionally, such filings show how much some of the highest-paid employees of an organization are making. Is most of the school’s income going toward one person’s salary? Does the school cover its costs through tuition, or is it reliant on donations? Does the school have debt from investments like purchasing a building? Does it spend substantial chunks of revenue on outside vendors?
  
  ProPublica and The Texas Tribune used nonprofit filings to report on conflicts of interest at private schools in Texas. For example, the newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.

How can I assess the quality of the education?

• Look for accreditation. Accreditation is meant to provide an outside assessment of whether a school is meeting certain educational standards. It can affect college applications and whether a school is eligible to receive public money through vouchers. If a school does not name an accreditor on its website or it isn’t reported in your state’s directory (such as Florida’s), you may need to ask directly whether it is accredited and by which organization.
  
  Not all private schools are accredited and not all accrediting agencies are equally rigorous. Some accreditors may visit the school in person, while others only use virtual site visits. If a school claims to be accredited by an agency, check the website for the accreditor to confirm the school is listed and in good standing. Here are examples of such directories. Where possible, ask the school if you can see any accreditation review reports, which assess the learning environment. Here’s an example from a Catholic school in Nebraska. 
• Consider enrollment and staffing. Some state education departments, like California’s, collect and report this information for certain schools. 
• Look for retention data. One indicator of whether families are happy with a school is whether they choose to stay from year to year. This information is not readily available in most places, but you can ask a school whether voucher users who were eligible chose to return. 

How will my student’s learning be assessed?

Under federal law, public schools are required to assess student performance in reading, math and science and must inform parents about the results. There’s no such federal law for private schools.

• Identify testing requirements. In 2024, the Education Commission of the States logged testing requirements for states’ voucher programs. Voucher advocacy group EdChoice has also collected such information for each state. Note that legislatures are actively shaping state programs and these requirements may change over time. 
• Check for posted test results. While some voucher programs, like North Carolina’s, require participating private schools to administer nationally standardized tests (meaning you can compare your student to other test-takers), the results of such tests are not usually posted online for prospective families.
  
  There are a few exceptions. For example, in Ohio and Indiana, you can look up a private school and see whether test-takers demonstrated proficiency in core subjects. In Arkansas, you can see how students performed on tests on average for each school. Wisconsin posts annual report cards for private schools participating in the state’s voucher program, using test scores and other measures to gauge whether the school is meeting expectations.
• Contact the school. If this information is not readily available where you live, you can ask a school about any tests it administers. 

Has this school been sued?

If something goes wrong at a private school, families may turn to the courts. The existence of a lawsuit or complaint does not confirm wrongdoing, but suits can help you learn more about other people’s experiences and potential concerns. We’ve found examples of court cases showing criminal history, broken financial contracts and complaints from prior employees. 

You might also find lawsuits where schools are the ones pursuing families, which can give you a lens into how they handle enrollment contracts. For instance, The Washington Post reported on cases of schools suing families over tuition disputes. 

• Locate cases and documents. Lawsuits might be filed in state, local or federal courts. If you navigate to your state and then county on the website BRB, you can see what records may be searchable in your location. Some states like Texas, Kansas and Georgia have court databases that let you search for free across multiple jurisdictions. CourtListener provides another avenue for checking federal court cases. Depending on where you live, there may be a way to search court cases from home, or you might need to call the local clerk or visit a courthouse. Look for judges’ orders and jury verdicts, which can be useful to see how a court weighed claims.
  
  Lawsuits are notoriously difficult to track down, as cases might be filed under multiple relevant names or locations. Try searching the school’s name, the name of the school’s leaders and teachers and any other names you can find.
• Keep context in mind. On the flip side, the lack of lawsuits doesn’t mean things are operating perfectly. Lawsuits usually cost money to file, and some private school contracts may prevent families from suing. You can ask the school if they have any such clause in the agreements that families sign. 

How does the school’s student body compare to the community? 

If you are trying to get a sense of the student body of a school, check ProPublica’s Private School Demographics database. This data is based on the federal Private School Universe Survey, which is voluntary, so not all schools have participated. Note that the survey is only conducted every two years, so the information may not be current. Our database also compares private schools’ demographics to those of their local public school districts. 

Some state departments of education, like Louisiana’s, also maintain demographic data by school. 

School handbooks may also provide information on whether a school serves all students or may exclude some groups, like those with disabilities or LGBTQ+ parents from admissions.

What have other families said about this school?

In investigative reporting, there is no substitute for talking to people. As you try to vet a private school, one of the best resources will be past and current families or alumni. 

• Check for online reviews. It’s always worth checking for reviews from past families on Google or on the school’s Facebook page. Also check Niche and GreatSchools. Use a critical eye when reading. People posting may not need to confirm their identity, might have no connection to the school or could even be school employees. 
• Look at social media. Check your community’s local social media pages, such as Facebook and Nextdoor, for additional comments. Search for the school’s name in WhatsApp groups and on Reddit. 
• Understand what families are and aren’t allowed to say. Some schools put their handbooks and admissions policies online. Read through these and see if they have rules about how enrolled families are allowed to speak about the school on social media. You’ll want to know if a school bars parents and guardians from sharing criticism. 
• Ask people who work with families. If your child has a disability and you work with advocates, therapists or other specialists, you could see what they’ve heard about the schools you’re considering.

Could government agencies have records available to the public? 

Even in states that do not regulate private schools, families may turn to the government when things go wrong, creating records you might be able to locate. 

• Look for federal documents. It’s worth checking with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which fields discrimination-related claims from across the country, to see if there have been any complaints (though the agency has stopped posting them online). This would only pertain to certain private schools that have received federal dollars. You might also find inspection information from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 
• Ask the state to see complaints. You could reach out to your state’s education agency and request any documented complaints it has received regarding a school by making a public records request. Arkansas, for example, maintains a hotline and an email address where people can report concerns about suspected financial misconduct.
  
  Or there may be another department that would take complaints. For example, Colorado directs people to the Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud Unit.
  
  Records requests can take some time to process, and there may be a cost associated with asking for such documents. You can learn more about asking for public records from MuckRock.
• Consider unique state records. Your state may also provide additional procedural documents. For example, in Georgia, you can see if a school is regularly conducting and reporting fire drills. Or if Florida tries to remove a school from scholarship eligibility and an owner appeals the decision, you might find records through the state’s Division of Administrative Hearings.

The post How to Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter appeared first on ProPublica.

A decade ago, the state of Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease. 

Her name and photo were on her new school’s website and details of her case were easy to find with an online search.

The state also knew that a transplanted Midwesterner had been fired from her Cincinnati charter school, following felony charges related to misuse of public funds, and had been banned from teaching or running schools in Ohio. Yet Florida did not stop her from starting a private school and collecting public money.

As private schools proliferate in Florida and across the country, fueled by taxpayer dollars, states are choosing not to closely regulate who is operating them or to oversee student safety and achievement, a ProPublica investigation found.

The backgrounds of school founders and employees often simply don’t matter. In Arizona, for example, “state law prohibits our department from a role overseeing private schools,” a spokesperson for the state Department of Education told ProPublica.

In 2024, Arizona’s top education official lauded Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxer who served time in prison for rape, for his involvement in launching a private school that bore his name, calling Tyson “a champion of education.”

Some states, including Arizona, cannot say how many private schools exist or where they operate despite spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on voucher-style programs. The federal government also does not keep a comprehensive accounting. 

ProPublica analyzed data from 13 states of varying sizes that do publish private school directories and offer public funding to these types of schools, and found that at least 1,500 more are listed today than were five years ago — bringing the total to more than 9,600. The numbers provide a rare look into the growth catalyzed by friendly legislatures and government money, while public school districts are losing students and closing schools. 

When public money is available, most private schools take advantage of that funding. In several states, all or nearly all students at some private schools pay tuition with public dollars. For instance, public funds subsidized 99% of all private school students in Iowa this past school year, the third year the program was available. 

An average of 100 new private schools have launched in Florida each of the last five school years. West Virginia, a state with fewer school-age students than are enrolled in Chicago Public Schools, has gained about 40 new private schools. 

And in the three years since Arkansas began allowing students to get about $7,000 annually toward tuition, about 120 new private schools opened. ProPublica detailed the consequences of the rapid growth and meager oversight in Arkansas in a previous story, spotlighting a school where students were subjected to menial labor and violence. The owner there was convicted of permitting child abuse, a felony. The state has said student safety is its top priority, but the school remains eligible to receive state money after a temporary stop.

It has been a conservative goal for decades to diminish the role of public schools and privatize American education. A surge in private-school funding programs since the pandemic represents significant progress toward that goal. Now about 30 states have some version of a program that allows families to spend public money on private school tuition. 

EdChoice, a group that advocates for these plans, estimated that more than 1.5 million students are taking advantage of them. And that number is expected to rise further as a federal tax-credit program signed into law by President Donald Trump provides the first-ever federal plan to fund K-12 private schools.

The vouchers have allowed some students to access private or religious schools they previously could not afford. But others — often students with disabilities — are finding that they’re excluded from private schools, which, unlike public schools, do not have to admit them. So they’re unable to exercise the educational freedom politicians have touted. 

Even when every single student in a private school pays tuition with public money, that school still operates without the same accountability applied to public schools, where everything from finances to curriculum to student achievement is open to public inspection. The contrasting standards vex those worried for the future of public education. 

“I’ve got the West Virginia codebook, which governs public education, which is over 1,300 pages long,” said Paul Hardesty, the president of the West Virginia Board of Education and a critic of the state’s permissive private school regulations. 

“It’s thicker than two Sears catalogs. Rules that govern home school and private school in West Virginia — those will fit on an index card.”

So when things go badly inside the opaque world of many private schools, it can be left to parents, police, journalists and amateur sleuths to find and expose wrongdoing. With state officials lacking oversight authority in Florida, for instance, concerned parents and citizens in Citrus County began posting online about the prior sexual misconduct of the founder of Crystal River Learning Academy. 

Even the police chief of the public school system weighed in. Her post included a mug shot of the now-leader of the Crystal River school in an orange jumpsuit. 

She exhorted: “Please do your research!” 

Barns, Go-Karts and Mike Tyson

For many, private school evokes images of elite academies, manicured campuses and plaid Catholic-school uniforms.

“But that’s not the vast majority of private schools,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University economist who studies voucher programs and has expressed skepticism that a free-market approach works well for schools. “They’re all over the place and sometimes in places you don’t even realize — they’re not even advertised. It’s important to understanding the potential of where this is and where it is going.”

In this recent expansion, private schools have opened in farms and barns, addiction treatment centers, co-working spaces, people’s homes and parks, ProPublica’s review of 13 states found. A West Virginia family opened a school at the family fun center they operate. It’s next to the waterpark, mini golf course and go-kart track. 

Tiny new Christian schools, often operating in Sunday school spaces in churches, are proliferating. At the same time, small fly-by-night schools have been opened by profiteers and people with problematic pasts or no educational experience. 

And while the majority of American students still attend public schools and the largest share of funding goes to public districts, EdChoice estimated that last year alone, states allocated $10.6 billion to programs that can be used to pay for private schools — a 29% increase over the previous year.

One Michigan-based company that launched last year to encourage churches to tap into public funds refers to these programs in its promotional videos as “God’s new gold mine.”

In Phoenix, the Mike Tyson-branded Tyson Transformational Technologies Academy, operating in a strip mall, was opened as part of a chain of schools for foster children, unhoused or expelled students created by former MMA fighter and WWE wrestler Daniel Puder. 

Tyson lent his name to the academy for $1 a year, has appeared at ceremonies for the school and given motivational speeches to students. “This visionary project reflects Tyson’s commitment to providing quality education and opportunities,” a 2024 news release for the school stated. He was described as a co-founder of the school.

Tuition is free to families: The state of Arizona paid the school $231,973 in fiscal year 2025, according to the state education department.

Puder explained in a podcast interview that his own journey from fighter to motivational speaker to private-school operator began when he and a friend were musing about Puder’s efforts to help address bullying at a local school district.

“My buddy looks at me and I’m like, ‘Dude, the turnover in public schools is crazy,’” Puder said.

“And he’s like, ‘Start a school.’ And I’m like, ‘Jamie, what are you talking about? I’m a special ed kid.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t graduate college.’ … He’s like, ‘No, start a school.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’” 

In addition to the Tyson academy, Puder now has eight schools in Florida and one in West Virginia, according to the website for ELEV8 School, the umbrella company under which the academies operate. 

After a recent rebranding, the Phoenix school Tyson helped launch is now simply called ELEV8. Puder told ProPublica that Tyson is never left alone with students. ProPublica reached out to Tyson through ELEV8 and his Florida publicist but did not get a response.

In West Virginia, ELEV8’s school advertises that tuition is “completely covered” by the Hope Scholarship, the state’s Education Savings Account program that provides each family with about $5,400 a year in public funds that can be spent on tuition, tutoring or homeschooling supplies. 

Puder’s schools provide tutoring, mentoring and flexible scheduling for teens who may have jobs or are parents themselves. He told ProPublica that he wants to transform lives and guide students to college, trade school or the military. 

Puder has ambitious plans to expand the enterprise, with more schools and related components in real estate, school security, artificial intelligence and school health clinics. He’s sought investors in a variety of forums, including a webinar called “Discover the Investment Model Behind Our State-Funded Private Schools — with Mike Tyson.”

Up until five years ago, states provided an opportunity for only a small segment of students — such as those who have disabilities, come from low-income families or would otherwise attend poorly performing public schools — to tap into public money for private school tuition. West Virginia adopted the nation’s first program to make those funds universally available in 2021 and today, 18 states are inviting any student to partake, regardless of family income or existing private school enrollment.

Once schools are open and accepting tax funds, few states then regulate what is taught, what qualifications employees should have or what funds may be spent on. But it’s not just the oversight that private schools get to avoid. They also are free to adopt policies — such as discriminatory admissions — that public schools cannot.

Several private schools in Ohio and Virginia permit paddling as discipline even though those states outlaw corporal punishment in public schools. As a condition of being tax-exempt, nonprofit private schools must attest that they won’t discriminate based on race, color, or national or ethnic origin. But they’re free to refuse admission to students for a range of other reasons. 

It’s common, for example, for both new and established religious schools to refuse to admit (or to expel) students who say they’re gay, who condone homosexuality or whose parents are gay. One school noted on its website that it is “permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion in accordance with our Statement of Faith.” Many schools decline to enroll students with disabilities. An Alabama school that opened this past fall says it will expel students who have HIV, gonorrhea or syphilis.

Advocates of private-school voucher programs argue against restrictions on how the schools operate and push back against the type of oversight enforced on public schools. They fear that any strings attached to the public money will make many private schools balk at taking it.

“You try to not take the private school system and make it the public school system. Parents are looking for an alternative. They’re looking for something that operates differently and, they hope, serves their child better,” said Patrick Wolf, who studies vouchers and similar funding models at the University of Arkansas. His research often highlights the benefits of the systems.

Earlier this year, a handful of West Virginia legislators pushed to add some “bumpers” to the program to safeguard public funds. One provision would’ve required private schools accepting public money to give a common standardized test and report results to the county superintendent, allowing more insight into the schools’ educational quality. 

The proposals didn’t pass. And then legislators who had supported them were ousted in the state’s May primaries, rebuked by the pro-voucher governor and then by voters who sided with candidates the governor had backed.

A Conviction, Then a Fresh Start 

The lack of private-school oversight is built straight into the law in most of the states ProPublica studied.

Florida, for example, advertises: “The Florida Department of Education does not have jurisdiction over private schools. Legislative intent not to regulate, control, approve, or accredit private educational institutions, churches, their ministries, religious instruction, freedoms, or rites, is explicit.”

As a result, the state takes few steps to protect students from private school educators with troubled pasts.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been a passionate proponent of “educational freedom” in the state, endorsing an aggressive push to catalyze the growth of private schools. But contacted for this story and asked about the state’s oversight of those schools, his office offered no comment while referring reporters to the Florida Department of Education.

The department responded to questions about the state’s record on regulation with a statement that emphasized it requires schools to conduct background screening for owners and employees who have direct contact with students.  

In addition, ProPublica reached out to four leading lawmakers who were key to Florida’s 2023 bill that extended public money to all families opting for private education. None commented.  

In conducting background research on private schools in Florida, ProPublica discovered that a woman named Lisa Helton running a private school in Tampa was once named Lisa Hamm — the former superintendent of Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy charter school in Ohio.

State audits alleged that Hamm misspent public funds in Ohio for years, using school funds for extravagant staff development trips, arena suites for students to attend Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber concerts and a Cirque du Soleil show, Nutrisystem weight loss meals for staff lunches, theater tickets and dry cleaning.

She and the school’s treasurer were fired in 2013 after being indicted on 26 felony counts of theft in office, unauthorized use of property, tampering with evidence and tampering with records. Hamm entered into an arrangement where she would accept conviction on three counts of unauthorized use of property while maintaining her innocence and avoiding prison.

After she was sentenced in 2014, then-Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, whose office had investigated Hamm’s spending practices, issued a statement: “This was a looting that would make even a pirate blush, with children and taxpayers as victims. I suppose walking the plank was out of the question. However, the court’s decision will prevent her from ever stealing from students again.”

The state permanently revoked her educator license. Hamm moved to Tampa, Florida, changed her name to Helton — taking a relative’s name — and tried to get a Florida educator license. The state, aware of the misconduct findings in Ohio, granted a temporary one that has since expired.

Helton founded American Education International in 2022 and registered it as a private school with Florida. She said she planned to enroll international students who want to learn English online and earn an American high school diploma. But then Florida homeschoolers tried to enroll, so Helton transformed the business to also offer in-person teaching two days a week for homeschool students out of a sleek coworking space. 

She applied for her school to participate in Florida’s voucher-like program as a tutoring service and was approved.

Step Up For Students, a nonprofit that manages scholarship money distribution for the state, did not know about Helton’s trouble in Ohio, according to a spokesperson. But “we are not aware of any determination by Florida authorities that would have prohibited her from founding or operating the school” and there have been no complaints in Florida about Helton, the spokesperson said. Step Up said it follows statutory requirements in administering funds and reports “any complaints or reports of fraud” to the state education department. 

Over three years, Helton’s business has collected $291,165 in public scholarship funds, Step Up said.

Helton was working on her computer on her back porch when visited by a ProPublica reporter. She said auditors in Ohio created a “false narrative” about her charter school and her actions, and that she took a plea deal only after being exhausted emotionally and financially by a drawn-out investigation. She said she acted with board approval and spent school money on kids and for staff development and incentives to retain valued personnel in a challenging inner-city environment. 

“I have no background issues at all, criminally,” she said, saying her case was “erased after so many years.” There is no longer any public trace of Helton’s criminal case in the Ohio county court system; certain nonviolent cases are allowed to be sealed or expunged after a set amount of time has passed. Helton, who has a doctorate in education, said she is highly skilled and trustworthy.

“The concern is not me,” she said. “It’s people running schools with no educational background.”

The Teacher, the Teen and the Detective

About 80 miles north in Crystal River, Florida, the stir over the local educator who’d lost her license over sexual abuse began in March after a retired detective named Kat Powers posted online — at first, just to her Facebook friends. She used the pseudonym “Petera Falk,” a reference to the actor who played TV detective Columbo. 

She had recognized the name of a woman who’d just opened her own private school in the fall of 2025: Tara Salute. 

“I don’t do a lot of social media, it’s all about grandbabies and recipes for me,” Powers said. But she couldn’t let this go; her colleagues had handled Salute’s case, and she remembered it well. A 40-year-old vice president of the local Little League at the time, Salute in 2012 had been charged with unlawful sexual activity with a minor after a drunken night at her home with her son’s friend, a sophomore in the district where she recently had taught elementary school. After intercourse, the teenager had snapped photos of her naked body on a futon as evidence.

Salute pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of felony child abuse, the state took her educator license, and she served about a year and a half of probation. The judge “withheld” a formal conviction, a form of leniency in Florida. Salute did not respond to repeated outreach by ProPublica for comment. 

When Powers — posting as Falk — came upon the Crystal River Learning Academy’s Facebook page and saw people from the community liking the page and supporting Salute, she was stunned.

“I’m like, how do people forget the background of this woman?” Powers said. “If she’d have gone to Lowe’s or Home Depot, it wouldn’t bother me. But you’re opening a school? That bothered me.”

The detective’s Facebook friends urged her to make her post public, so she did — screenshots of Salute’s court records, her mug shot and her new school photo. The Facebook post tagged news outlets, and soon the Citrus County Chronicle, the local newspaper, wrote a story. 

Following the revelation, the state took action to protect state money. 

The Florida Department of Education found that Crystal River had qualified for scholarship money despite not registering with the state as a private school and after Salute had uploaded someone else’s teaching certificate for her application. It called the use of the license “fraud.”

Crystal River had received a total of $150 at that point for a curriculum packet it sold. Florida’s education commissioner then revoked the school’s eligibility for state funds. 

Opening a school without registering is a misdemeanor under Florida law. Asked how Salute is able to run a school in Florida despite her past and not registering, the state Education Department did not provide a direct answer. Instead, it pointed to the scholarship revocation action as evidence of its oversight. 

On its website, however, Crystal River still is providing information on the Step Up scholarship for parents while inviting students to enroll for next school year. Tuition for middle and high school students will be $12,000.

In May, Crystal River’s Facebook page posted a photo of Salute posing between two teens at a local high school graduation ceremony. 

“CRLA is incredibly proud to have been part of your journey,” the congratulatory message read.

The post Barns, Go-Karts and Strip Malls: The Wild West of Private Schools That Collect Taxpayer Dollars appeared first on ProPublica.

The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess the validity of signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes seized from Fulton County, Georgia, the latest push in the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote.

The effort, according to internal communications reviewed by ProPublica and an agency tech specialist familiar with the work, focuses on comparing signatures on ballot envelopes with signatures on other election documents, such as registration forms. President Donald Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

In particular, he has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in Georgia, where he lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, collecting about 700 boxes of election materials, including about 150,000 mail-in ballots, of which roughly 116,000 went for Biden. Trump is set to deliver a speech Thursday about national election security and voting machine vulnerabilities, but it is unclear whether he will address the Fulton County investigation.

The signature-matching initiative was under discussion as recently as late June, but its current status is uncertain. A White House spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica, referring them to the FBI. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

The effort comes at the same time as the FBI has mandated that 260 analysts be redirected from field offices nationwide to focus on the Fulton County probe, according to an agency memo reviewed by ProPublica. The New York Times and MS Now previously reported the memo. MS Now has reported that some FBI analysts have been fired rather than work on the effort. Their work also includes comparing a spreadsheet of 175,000 voters with a commercial database to see, among other things, if they are still alive.

Whether done by people or technology, the accuracy of signature matching remains controversial. 

Experts have raised serious concerns in legal cases and after analyzing recent election results about how accurately signature matching can identify voter fraud through practices like examining the size and slant of letters made in different circumstances. 

The FBI technology specialist told ProPublica that the bureau has technology to compare images and that if it starts with a large enough dataset, then a signature-matching analysis could be “somewhat accurate.” 

Ultimately, the tech specialist said, its results would turn on the threshold set for evidence of fraud: “It’s up to the builder of the system to define the guidelines.”

Some FBI staffers developing that strategy are trying to mitigate the political pressure to prove fraud in Fulton County by highlighting the limitations of broad signature analysis, arguing that though signature comparisons have been used in individual voter fraud investigations, they haven’t been done on this scale, according to the source. But agency leaders have continued to push forward. 

There are grave concerns within the FBI that the results of the examination will reflect political influence, building on previous efforts by the administration to break longstanding guardrails meant to keep the federal government from interfering with elections. “Everyone is of the opinion that, whether they find anything or not, they are going to continue” to pursue proof of fraud, the source said. 

Signature matching attracted controversy during and after the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic when more Democrats than Republicans used mail-in ballots. Trump promoted false claims that Georgia officials’ failure to match signatures on mail-in ballots had led to his loss by allowing fraud. “Must have signature check on envelopes now,” he wrote in late November 2020 on the social media platform Twitter, now X. “Far more votes than needed for flip” of the election to him. 

Conservative lawmakers then pushed strict signature-matching laws across America, including Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021, which they justified by pointing to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” including “subjective signature-matching requirements.” The bill replaced signature matching with stricter forms of verification, such as requiring mail-in voters to provide their driver’s license number or copies of licenses. 

While signature-matching procedures vary by jurisdiction, officials typically have only seconds to make a determination about whether a signature on a mail-in ballot envelope is the same as in other government records, sometimes relying on nothing more than comparing the shape or proportions of letters. Research shows that signatures can change over time, as people age or experience health events such as a stroke, and signatures made in differing circumstances can vary, such as one performed carefully in a government office versus one dispatched quickly on a mail-in ballot envelope at home. 

Investigations by journalism organizations and research have shown that signature matching leads to disproportionately high levels of rejected ballots for voters of color, as well as those who are new, young, old, politically unaffiliated or disabled, for varied reasons. Signature-matching efforts sometimes disqualify more legitimate than illegitimate ballots. A political scientist testifying as an expert witness in 2020 for a lawsuit challenging an Ohio signature-matching law said his analysis suggested that 32 legitimate ballots were blocked for every illegitimate one. 

“Signatures are one of the most difficult forensic sciences, and I don’t think AI is going to be able to do this,” said Linton Mohammed, a former president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, a professional association for forensic document examiners. “Signatures vary — unlike DNA or fingerprints.” 

A 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences examining the state of forensic sciences found, “The scientific basis for handwriting comparisons needs to be strengthened.” 

Defenders of signature matching say that computer analysis has become increasingly accurate and provides a practical and necessary check against fraud. However, even they caution that the technique is only as good as the people using it.

Signature-matching technology is now good enough to “make your head explode,” said David Gerber, the senior vice president at ParaScript, a company that sells such technology to banks and numerous entities conducting elections. But he still suggests that trained human specialists should be prepared to review about 10% of the cases as a check on the machines. He said signature matching in elections needs “the right technology with the right people managing the process. Both of those pieces are equally important. If you have bad people running a bad process, I don’t care how good the technology is.” 

Using AI to examine signatures on ballot envelopes is a relatively new frontier, according to most experts consulted by ProPublica and the FBI tech specialist. The tech specialist said the bureau had discussed how to employ it with experts across the government and weighed whether to use commercial products such as those sold by OpenAI or Anthropic. “This is a new and novel approach” for the bureau, the source said, one reason “they are shopping it around.” 

Gerber, Mohammed and other experts on signature-matching technology said nonspecialized AI software was unlikely to be able to perform accurately enough to do such work. 

Experts said that while an AI system could conceivably offer some advantages over humans, its accuracy would ultimately depend on the quality and quantity of signatures available for comparison. Internal communications reviewed by ProPublica suggest the FBI analysis would compare only the signature on a voter’s registration form with the one on the ballot envelope — a limited sample that experts said would significantly increase the likelihood of discrepancies. The source said, however, the analysis could also incorporate additional records, such as driver’s license signatures. Certified specialists and high-confidence computer systems for industries like banking typically compare numerous signatures. 

“There’s a high degree of noise” in the materials the FBI has, said Max Palmer, a professor at Boston University who has studied mail-in ballot signature matching. “I’m not sure there’s enough information, enough signal, to do better.”  

Conservative activists have long lobbied for a closer examination of 2020 mail-in ballots from Fulton County, claiming in a report that local election officials “willfully” ignored signature verification procedures. Their claims were instrumental in leading to the FBI’s ballot seizure in January, ProPublica has reported. 

Reports by an independent monitor and the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit organization working to protect the integrity of elections, concluded the activists’ claims about signature matching and other irregularities were false.

The post FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots appeared first on ProPublica.

At her private school just beyond the city limits of Jonesboro, Arkansas, Mary “Tracy” Morrison demanded the attention of the 19 students seated on the floor in a circle. She then directed a skinny 13-year-old boy wearing a cartoon Mario shirt to sit in the center.

“Raise your hand if he’s ever been mean to you — ever,” Morrison, the owner, prompted the other middle schoolers, and some hands shot up.

“Most people don’t think you’re a nice kid. You lie. You lie all the time,” she told the boy. She encouraged his classmates to name things they don’t like about him.

Morrison’s voice got louder. She knelt inside the circle just inches from the boy and swatted him. On the head. On the neck. At first he flinched and started to raise his hands to block her. But she snapped at him to keep his arms down: “You don’t have the right!”

“Come over here and put your hands on him, however you want,” Morrison told the students. 

A boy volunteered. “I’ll do it,” he said, and the other students cheered and clapped.

That student entered the circle, looped his arm around the boy’s neck and choked him. Morrison gave him a high-five. The boy in the center cowered. Then other students took turns slapping, pinching and punching the boy. Morrison picked up a footlong plastic cylinder — it resembled a pipe — and thwacked him over and over, calling him a liar.

The attack went on for nearly 40 minutes. At the end, Morrison made the boy apologize to his classmates for mistreating them. Three other school employees were in the room that day in April 2025 but didn’t intervene. The whole thing was captured on video.

Morrison had founded her school, The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, the year before, soon after Arkansas legislators decided to allow families to use public money for private school tuition through its Education Freedom Account program. 

Delta Institute joined a surge of new private schools in Arkansas, mirroring a national proliferation. New schools are opening at a fast clip as state legislatures set aside more public money for parents to spend at private schools, without meaningful oversight. 

There were about 100 private schools in Arkansas in 2023, state records show. Now there are about 220. That doesn’t count the 100 or so microschools in the mix — a version of the one-room schoolhouse that wasn’t tracked or publicly funded previously.

But even with that boom, Arkansas largely has chosen not to regulate private or microschools or monitor what’s happening inside them. Arkansas is so hands-off that the state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators. Anyone is free to open one, including Morrison.

Known to parents and students as Dr. Tracy, she wasn’t a licensed educator and had never run a school before. Her resume says she has a doctorate in occupational therapy and cognitive neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. The university said that degree is only in occupational therapy.

The Delta Institute didn’t look much like a school — it operated in a white colonial house set down a gravel driveway off a country road, its bedrooms transformed into classrooms. But it had seemed like the answer that parents of students with disabilities, including autism, were desperately seeking. Families said they put their faith in Morrison, who presented herself as an expert in autism and ADHD. “I am the best,” she texted one parent. 

Morrison did not respond to interview requests and questions from ProPublica. 

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has said she wants to be known as the education governor, and state education officials didn’t respond to specific questions from ProPublica about the state’s oversight of private schools or how it responded to revelations about the Delta Institute. Her spokesperson said the governor championed the state’s Education Freedom Accounts because they give students more and different educational opportunities.

Both the governor’s office and the Arkansas Department of Education emphasized that the state intervenes to ensure students are safe and taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly. “Student safety is ADE’s number one priority,” Education Department spokesperson Kaelin Clay wrote in an email.

The day after Morrison and the children assaulted her son, the boy’s mother walked into the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office to write out a report in neat, looping cursive. It was not the first report about Morrison’s treatment of children at the Delta Institute that the sheriff’s office took.

Another mother had reported abuse about three weeks earlier.

More Money Fuels Growth 

Before Arkansas’ LEARNS Act passed in 2023, creating its voucher-style program, state schools secretary Jacob Oliva promised that “there is going to be accountability for the schools that participate.”  

But the oversight role his department gave itself was related primarily to finances. The department has the power to conduct random financial audits of private schools, mandate that the schools report their tuition and fees and require schools to measure student achievement with tests of their choosing, but little else.

Under pressure to tweak the rules this spring, the department again declined to monitor school quality and tinkered only with how parents can use the funds on items other than tuition, banning them from paying for travel sports teams, for instance. Even that was controversial; some lawmakers argued there should be less government interference. They argue the onus is on parents to decide whether their children are safe and learning, and if they’re not, the families can go somewhere else.

This upcoming school year, Arkansas expects that nearly 55,000 students will use their Education Freedom Accounts for tuition and other expenses. 

With most students getting about $7,000 each, the program cost about $310 million in taxpayer funds this past school year. Most of the students who used EFA money in Arkansas the prior year were already attending private school or being homeschooled, or were just starting kindergarten. Only 12% of participants reported that they’d previously attended a public school. 

When the program began, the department set up a hotline and an email address for people to report suspected fraud or misuse of the EFA funds. About a dozen emails raised concerns about student well-being.

But several complainants told ProPublica that they did not hear from state officials after sharing their concerns. One teacher said she got no response after she emailed in April that students who transferred to her school had been deprived of a “basic education” at the microschool they previously attended, according to state records. She said first and second graders reported that they had spent the majority of their time playing.

Contacted by a ProPublica reporter, she said: “I don’t mind that you are reaching out but it is very concerning and in a way aggravating that I have an investigative reporter reaching out instead of my own state.” She requested that her name not be made public because she works at a different microschool. 

Jazzmin Little said she hasn’t heard back from state officials either, after telling them in February that the school where she sent her two children might be misusing state funds. The department told her it would review the information, according to emails, but she said she heard nothing more. 

“All kinds of red flags I sent to them and they never got back to me,” Little said. “I don’t even know if anyone has looked at it.” The school’s founder confirmed that the Education Department did not reach out to her after receiving the parent’s complaint, which she described as a billing discrepancy. She said the issue would have been resolved sooner if the state had intervened.

In order to accept EFA money, private schools have to agree to meet some requirements, including that they have or are seeking accreditation, have operated for a year and promise to perform background checks and fingerprinting on all employees. (There’s no requirement that employees have no criminal history.) Schools affirm they’ll teach English, math, science and social studies and administer a standardized test of their choosing once a year. There’s no requirement to report students’ individual test scores to the state or to parents.

The bar is lower for microschools, some of which operate like smaller versions of private schools while others provide programs for homeschoolers. They don’t need to be accredited or wait until they’ve been open for a year to get funding.

The contrast with what is required for public schools is striking. Arkansas’ Education Department monitors public schools, and state law regulates nearly every aspect of them, from teacher qualifications to what’s on district websites. Every district is required to post a tranche of “state-required information” online that must include breakdowns of monthly expenses and even a list of every dyslexia intervention program used. 

State Sen. Bryan King, a Republican, said he supports school choice but said he voted against the LEARNS Act because there wasn’t enough accountability given the amount of public spending. He proposed legislation this spring that would have required all schools receiving EFA funds to administer the same standardized test — and for funding to be tied to student performance on that exam.  

“We can’t afford this and my concerns were about financial responsibility, accountability, transparency, everything about it,” he said. 

The proposal did not advance. King was attacked in the primary this year for being against “education freedom,” and Sanders backed his opponent. King still prevailed.

None of the legislators who were the lead sponsors of the LEARNS Act responded to questions from ProPublica about how the state is overseeing student achievement and safety.

Several Arkansas groups recently tried to get an amendment on the November ballot that would require all schools that accept EFA funds to follow the same rules and minimum academic requirements as public schools. The groups, however, failed to gather enough signatures.

“If you are going to take public money, then you should meet public standards and be publicly accountable for how that money is spent,” said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a nonprofit that was formed in the 1960s and focuses on social justice.

He said the state’s recent voucher expansion has led to “this whole new industry of pop-up, subprime private schools that have almost no regulation. They go into shopping malls or the basements of churches,” he said. 

In the three years of the EFA program, the state has only intervened at two schools, records show. And it’s never permanently blocked a school from taking public money, including at the Delta Institute — even after it became clear that terrible things had happened there.

“You Are in the Biggest Trouble”

Craighead County Sheriff’s Detective David Bailey, a Jonesboro native who patrolled the area often, didn’t even know there was a school set back off the country road.

He discovered the Delta Institute in the winter of 2025 after a student ran off and the school asked for help finding him. He didn’t know it at the time, but police and child-welfare records show the boy had allegedly fled after Morrison sprayed him in the face with water and held his legs down. He jumped out a window, barefoot, to get away.

The Craighead County Sheriff’s Office encountered the school again in March 2025 when Renee Johns, whose children Jacob and Addison went to the Delta Institute, reported abuse there. 

Johns had moved her family to Jonesboro from about an hour away to attend the school. But things had unraveled. Jacob wasn’t getting the therapy he needed, and he and his sister were falling behind academically. But Johns said she was most troubled by a video Morrison had texted her one day to explain why Jacob was being kept after school.

It showed Jacob, a 10-year-old with autism, and two other boys scrubbing the floor and walls inside the school with rags. Morrison berated them: “This doesn’t get to be about fun. Go!”

“Both hands, cleaning!” she barked like a drill sergeant to one boy on his hands and knees. “You’re working like a slug! Get at it! Get at it! You are in the biggest trouble.”

The sheriff’s office alerted child-welfare authorities. Then, three weeks later, a second mother walked in to report her son’s assault within the circle at school. Bailey got a warrant for that video.

Teacher and counselor Ashley Williams was standing by while another employee copied the footage of Morrison berating, hitting and directing other students to assault the 13-year-old boy. Horrified, she excused herself, hustled down the stairs of the house, out to the gravel parking area, and vomited.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Williams had filed a detailed report with welfare authorities based on what some students had told her about Morrison’s “circle time.” She had written, “This is not the first time abuse like this has happened.” Months earlier, she continued, Morrison had taped two children together by their arms.

More came out in Bailey’s interviews with parents and current and former employees and in interviews that child advocates conducted with the students, documents show: allegations of “waterboarding” a child and cutting another’s hair as punishment. Slapping a student. A wooden paddle named Fred.

Some parents, meanwhile, defended Morrison and praised her “unorthodox methods,” according to interviews and police records. 

Morrison worked to keep parents on her side. She texted a large group of staff members, some whose children attended the school, to say she had made a mistake during the “group discussion” but blamed the violence on the students.

She warned that the floor-scrubbing video she had sent Johns would likely be made public and that she and the other employees would be arrested. “You can expect our mug shots on social media,” Morrison said, and apologized for letting everyone down. But she also called it a “witch hunt.”

“My mug shot will have me with a middle finger,” she wrote. 

Flimsy Investigations

Within days of the April 2025 incident that the prosecutor called a “makeshift ‘Fight Club,’” Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. Three other employees were charged with permitting child abuse and failure to report child maltreatment.

The day news broke about Morrison’s arrest, the state Education Department stopped EFA payments to the Delta Institute. Nearly half the students there were using the EFA program to pay tuition, and the school had collected more than $300,000 so far.  

There are no records of a visit to the school or an investigation by the state Department of Education. When asked if the department had gone to The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, officials did not answer. Instead, a spokesperson said that complaints or suspicious activity triggers a review and “often results in a site visit,” though they declined to say how often that has happened.

Reporters again asked the department directly if it had visited the school. The spokesperson responded: “We have addressed the Developing Brain’s suspension from the EFA program multiple times, including in statements sent to your outlet.”

At Delta, public money flowed again two days after it was stopped. An assistant education commissioner who oversees the EFA program told a colleague he was convinced that the school had implemented “appropriate safeguards,” according to an email. He wrote that Morrison had resigned as the head of the school and a new school board had been formed.

In the three school years of the EFA program, records show, state education officials have temporarily suspended funding to one other school, a Christian-based microschool called Homestead Academy that focuses on outdoor and individualized education. It rents space from a church near Hot Springs. Outside, there’s a playground and hammocks, as well as a red-and-white striped shed painted with “In God we trust” where fireworks are sold in the summer.

Over a month last fall, the state got a series of concerning calls and emails from parents and at least one former teacher, records show.

Some shared safety concerns or described children playing unsupervised in a wooded area. Others shared concerns about insufficient academic instruction. One caller said Homestead felt more like a daycare than an organized school. In the first few months of the school year, 13 of the 46 students withdrew, state records show.

“Please stop” funding the school, one parent pleaded.

Oliva, the state education secretary, heard directly from a Homestead parent who said the school did not follow a curriculum and had not adhered to the education plan for her daughter.

“Why are there not stronger regulations and accountability measures for EFA-funded programs?” she wrote in bold letters. (The parent asked that her name not be used because she works in education and fears retaliation.)

“This sounds like a serious and dire situation,” Oliva wrote back to her. “We will review immediately.” 

A state education employee reached out to Homestead’s owner in late October and told her that the department would be stopping by the next day for a “brief visit.” 

While there, Education Department employees watched students say the Pledge of Allegiance and then observed 10 to 15 minutes of instruction before meeting with owner Lindsey McCollum.  

When asked for student work, progress reports and discipline policies, McCollum said she would send them later. “In hindsight, we should have said we were happy to wait while they made copies for us, but we did not,” according to an employee’s written report about the visit.   

Afterward, the state suspended EFA funding to the school. Oliva told McCollum in a letter: “Your actions have jeopardized the welfare of students and the responsible use of public funds.”

It took 10 weeks for EFA funds to flow again. The state required that McCollum provide certain documentation and was satisfied by her response: a financial review of the school, policies on student supervision, curriculum plans and student worksheets. Several parents also sent letters in support of the school, describing it as a nurturing environment where their students enjoyed learning.

“We were compliant and transparent,” McCollum said in an interview. She noted that both she and the other teacher at the school are certified educators and stressed that “student safety is of utmost importance and our school has procedures in place.” 

The school, she said, is almost entirely funded through the EFA program, with about 30 students from kindergarten to ninth grade. She said almost all students have returned year after year. “Families have the option to choose and still are choosing us,” she said. 

“We have families who know that their kids who hated learning are now loving to read and write and loving to learn,” McCollum said. “That is our heartbeat.” 

The state Education Department said it “wastes no time” in suspending private schools from receiving public money, and that both Homestead and Delta convinced the state that they were worthy of being reinstated. “In both instances, we worked vigorously to ensure operations were flipped in the right direction before families were allowed to spend taxpayer dollars on either school,” according to the department’s statement to ProPublica.

The parent who emailed Oliva said that she had enrolled her 10-year-old daughter at Homestead hoping for something different than the public school. But she said her daughter fell behind academically. Last fall, she pulled her from the school and reenrolled her in public school. 

She didn’t know that the state had restored funding to Homestead until told by a reporter. 

“No way,” she said. “This has to be happening with other microschools. That upsets me for the children of Arkansas.”

Still Open for Business

Enrollment at the Delta school dropped to about 60 students for last school year, about half the size it was the year before. 

“There was a lot of loss because of the negative media,” Adrian Sportsman, who has worked closely with Morrison at the school, said when a ProPublica reporter visited this spring. “I feel like it was blown way out of proportion.”

Some students came back, she said: “They’d say, ‘There’s no school like this school.’”

In March, the mother of the boy who was assaulted in the circle at school sued Morrison, her school, her therapy business and her insurance companies seeking compensatory and punitive damages for what happened to her son. In court filings, Morrison’s attorney denied the allegations and said “the video speaks for itself.”  

The criminal cases were set to go to trial in May and June. None did. Charges were dismissed for two employees who authorities felt were less culpable as they’d been in the classroom only briefly. The two employees did not respond to a reporter’s outreach.

A third staffer, Kathrine Lipscomb, who is an Arkansas-licensed teacher, interjected at times to direct the children to listen to Morrison and raise their hands to speak. In response to a reporter’s question about her role in the incident, she explained in an email: “For part of the time, I was off behind the teachers desk planning for another class and not paying attention to the circle.” 

The prosecutor and Lipscomb agreed to a pre-trial diversion program in which Lipscomb would serve six months of probation. She must do 40 hours of community service with disabled children and complete anger management classes to avoid a conviction. 

She is now director of education at the school.

Morrison pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 120 days on house arrest and five years of probation. She had to surrender her Arkansas occupational therapy license. And she agreed to not work with kids in any professional capacity during her probation.

Nobody seemed happy with Morrison’s punishment. But the prosecutor said the state decided the plea deal was the best option to make sure Morrison was held accountable. Under Arkansas law, the state would have to prove substantial physical harm to the victim in order to convict on a charge of permitting abuse to a minor, and juries can judge that differently, said Sonia Hagood, who prosecuted the case for the state. For instance, she said, a recent jury decided not to convict a defendant because the victim did not suffer serious physical injury.

As part of her deal, Morrison got to pick where she served her time — the Greene County Detention Center, which is newer than Craighead County’s jail and gave her a private cell. And she’s serving house arrest on her boyfriend’s Missouri ranch, where she can ride horses.

She passed the time while incarcerated on the phone and on video calls from a personal tablet. It’s standard for all communication from jail to be recorded, and ProPublica obtained more than 500 recordings. They show she was still involved with the administration of the school while jailed. 

She spoke frequently to Sportsman about school finances, including telling her to make sure the EFA money still was coming in. Sportsman, who owns Delta Therapy Group, the occupational therapy practice that works with Delta Institute students, said that the jail conversations were “informal conversations between friends” and disputed the idea that Morrison was running the school while incarcerated.

Morrison chatted for hours with her new board members and school employees and gave them to-do lists. She asked how some kids were doing. In a call with the teacher who also entered a plea deal, she called the victim’s mother “evil” for going to the police.

She also spoke with a documentary filmmaker who is interested in the school’s story and plans to pitch a project to a big streamer, like Netflix or HBO. In one call with the documentarian, Morrison described the abuse she’d been jailed for as a “restorative” technique to try to help the children treat one another more respectfully.

“It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?’’ she said. “And the concept is so sophisticated that it’s like, if the prosecuting attorney wanted to know my story, if the detective — they would’ve interviewed me. They would have couched it like, ‘Oh, this is an intervention of individuals who are high risk, who will end up in prison themselves if they behave this way.’ They didn’t do that.”

Both the prosecutor and detective tried to interview Morrison during the investigation but she refused to speak with them.

Morrison was released from jail June 1.

“I think she should be prevented from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children around if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?

The Latest Complaint

There’s nothing in state law that prevents Morrison from still owning Delta or another private school and benefiting from public funding. 

Records still list Morrison’s family business as the owner of the Delta Institute property. State business records also show that she still is the registered agent for a private school at the same address. The school recently took a new name: North Star Academy. 

Lipscomb said the school’s board changed the name “as part of the process of healing for our community of families and students that are here and still trying to make sense of the world as we know it now.” Lipscomb said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.

She said she expects as many as 35 students to attend this upcoming school year. 

Renee Johns said Jacob has never recovered from his traumatic time at the Delta school. He has grown increasingly aggressive. He’s used martial arts moves that the school taught children in lieu of P.E. to punch holes in the wall of her home and lash out at her. 

Her daughter, Addison, returned to public school. She loves her new school, but was so far behind that she needed to repeat third grade. “School is for helping, not for hurting,” the 10-year-old recently told a ProPublica reporter.

Johns said parents who chose Morrison’s school and went along with her methods were sold lies. “We honestly thought we were doing the best for our children.”

The public keeps filing complaints about private and microschools with the Education Department. In late March it received a new request to investigate The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain. It came from a woman who had heard concerning reports from a family with a child at the school.

“Given the population served by this program, ensuring a safe, structured, and educationally appropriate environment is especially important. I would greatly appreciate your office’s attention to reviewing these concerns,” the woman wrote to the state’s hotline.

Lipscomb said she’s not aware of any active complaints. The state won’t comment on whether it’s investigating. 

The post This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It. appeared first on ProPublica.

At her private school just beyond the city limits of Jonesboro, Arkansas, Mary “Tracy” Morrison demanded the attention of the 19 students seated on the floor in a circle. She then directed a skinny 13-year-old boy wearing a cartoon Mario shirt to sit in the center.

“Raise your hand if he’s ever been mean to you — ever,” Morrison, the owner, prompted the other middle schoolers, and some hands shot up.

“Most people don’t think you’re a nice kid. You lie. You lie all the time,” she told the boy. She encouraged his classmates to name things they don’t like about him.

Morrison’s voice got louder. She knelt inside the circle just inches from the boy and swatted him. On the head. On the neck. At first he flinched and started to raise his hands to block her. But she snapped at him to keep his arms down: “You don’t have the right!”

“Come over here and put your hands on him, however you want,” Morrison told the students. 

A boy volunteered. “I’ll do it,” he said, and the other students cheered and clapped.

That student entered the circle, looped his arm around the boy’s neck and choked him. Morrison gave him a high-five. The boy in the center cowered. Then other students took turns slapping, pinching and punching the boy. Morrison picked up a footlong plastic cylinder — it resembled a pipe — and thwacked him over and over, calling him a liar.

The attack went on for nearly 40 minutes. At the end, Morrison made the boy apologize to his classmates for mistreating them. Three other school employees were in the room that day in April 2025 but didn’t intervene. The whole thing was captured on video.

Morrison had founded her school, The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, the year before, soon after Arkansas legislators decided to allow families to use public money for private school tuition through its Education Freedom Account program. 

Delta Institute joined a surge of new private schools in Arkansas, mirroring a national proliferation. New schools are opening at a fast clip as state legislatures set aside more public money for parents to spend at private schools, without meaningful oversight. 

There were about 100 private schools in Arkansas in 2023, state records show. Now there are about 220. That doesn’t count the 100 or so microschools in the mix — a version of the one-room schoolhouse that wasn’t tracked or publicly funded previously.

But even with that boom, Arkansas largely has chosen not to regulate private or microschools or monitor what’s happening inside them. Arkansas is so hands-off that the state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators. Anyone is free to open one, including Morrison.

Known to parents and students as Dr. Tracy, she wasn’t a licensed educator and had never run a school before. Her resume says she has a doctorate in occupational therapy and cognitive neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. The university said that degree is only in occupational therapy.

The Delta Institute didn’t look much like a school — it operated in a white colonial house set down a gravel driveway off a country road, its bedrooms transformed into classrooms. But it had seemed like the answer that parents of students with disabilities, including autism, were desperately seeking. Families said they put their faith in Morrison, who presented herself as an expert in autism and ADHD. “I am the best,” she texted one parent. 

Morrison did not respond to interview requests and questions from ProPublica. 

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has said she wants to be known as the education governor, and state education officials didn’t respond to specific questions from ProPublica about the state’s oversight of private schools or how it responded to revelations about the Delta Institute. Her spokesperson said the governor championed the state’s Education Freedom Accounts because they give students more and different educational opportunities.

Both the governor’s office and the Arkansas Department of Education emphasized that the state intervenes to ensure students are safe and taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly. “Student safety is ADE’s number one priority,” Education Department spokesperson Kaelin Clay wrote in an email.

The day after Morrison and the children assaulted her son, the boy’s mother walked into the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office to write out a report in neat, looping cursive. It was not the first report about Morrison’s treatment of children at the Delta Institute that the sheriff’s office took.

Another mother had reported abuse about three weeks earlier.

More Money Fuels Growth 

Before Arkansas’ LEARNS Act passed in 2023, creating its voucher-style program, state schools secretary Jacob Oliva promised that “there is going to be accountability for the schools that participate.”  

But the oversight role his department gave itself was related primarily to finances. The department has the power to conduct random financial audits of private schools, mandate that the schools report their tuition and fees and require schools to measure student achievement with tests of their choosing, but little else.

Under pressure to tweak the rules this spring, the department again declined to monitor school quality and tinkered only with how parents can use the funds on items other than tuition, banning them from paying for travel sports teams, for instance. Even that was controversial; some lawmakers argued there should be less government interference. They argue the onus is on parents to decide whether their children are safe and learning, and if they’re not, the families can go somewhere else.

This upcoming school year, Arkansas expects that nearly 55,000 students will use their Education Freedom Accounts for tuition and other expenses. 

With most students getting about $7,000 each, the program cost about $310 million in taxpayer funds this past school year. Most of the students who used EFA money in Arkansas the prior year were already attending private school or being homeschooled, or were just starting kindergarten. Only 12% of participants reported that they’d previously attended a public school. 

When the program began, the department set up a hotline and an email address for people to report suspected fraud or misuse of the EFA funds. About a dozen emails raised concerns about student well-being.

But several complainants told ProPublica that they did not hear from state officials after sharing their concerns. One teacher said she got no response after she emailed in April that students who transferred to her school had been deprived of a “basic education” at the microschool they previously attended, according to state records. She said first and second graders reported that they had spent the majority of their time playing.

Contacted by a ProPublica reporter, she said: “I don’t mind that you are reaching out but it is very concerning and in a way aggravating that I have an investigative reporter reaching out instead of my own state.” She requested that her name not be made public because she works at a different microschool. 

Jazzmin Little said she hasn’t heard back from state officials either, after telling them in February that the school where she sent her two children might be misusing state funds. The department told her it would review the information, according to emails, but she said she heard nothing more. 

“All kinds of red flags I sent to them and they never got back to me,” Little said. “I don’t even know if anyone has looked at it.” The school’s founder confirmed that the Education Department did not reach out to her after receiving the parent’s complaint, which she described as a billing discrepancy. She said the issue would have been resolved sooner if the state had intervened.

In order to accept EFA money, private schools have to agree to meet some requirements, including that they have or are seeking accreditation, have operated for a year and promise to perform background checks and fingerprinting on all employees. (There’s no requirement that employees have no criminal history.) Schools affirm they’ll teach English, math, science and social studies and administer a standardized test of their choosing once a year. There’s no requirement to report students’ individual test scores to the state or to parents.

The bar is lower for microschools, some of which operate like smaller versions of private schools while others provide programs for homeschoolers. They don’t need to be accredited or wait until they’ve been open for a year to get funding. 

The contrast with what is required for public schools is striking. Arkansas’ Education Department monitors public schools, and state law regulates nearly every aspect of them, from teacher qualifications to what’s on district websites. Every district is required to post a tranche of “state-required information” online that must include breakdowns of monthly expenses and even a list of every dyslexia intervention program used. 

State Sen. Bryan King, a Republican, said he supports school choice but said he voted against the LEARNS Act because there wasn’t enough accountability given the amount of public spending. He proposed legislation this spring that would have required all schools receiving EFA funds to administer the same standardized test — and for funding to be tied to student performance on that exam.  

“We can’t afford this and my concerns were about financial responsibility, accountability, transparency, everything about it,” he said. 

The proposal did not advance. King was attacked in the primary this year for being against “education freedom,” and Sanders backed his opponent. King still prevailed.

None of the legislators who were the lead sponsors of the LEARNS Act responded to questions from ProPublica about how the state is overseeing student achievement and safety.

Several Arkansas groups recently tried to get an amendment on the November ballot that would require all schools that accept EFA funds to follow the same rules and minimum academic requirements as public schools. The groups, however, failed to gather enough signatures.

“If you are going to take public money, then you should meet public standards and be publicly accountable for how that money is spent,” said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a nonprofit that was formed in the 1960s and focuses on social justice.

He said the state’s recent voucher expansion has led to “this whole new industry of pop-up, subprime private schools that have almost no regulation. They go into shopping malls or the basements of churches,” he said. 

In the three years of the EFA program, the state has only intervened at two schools, records show. And it’s never permanently blocked a school from taking public money, including at the Delta Institute — even after it became clear that terrible things had happened there.

“You Are in the Biggest Trouble”

Craighead County Sheriff’s Detective David Bailey, a Jonesboro native who patrolled the area often, didn’t even know there was a school set back off the country road.

He discovered the Delta Institute in the winter of 2025 after a student ran off and the school asked for help finding him. He didn’t know it at the time, but police and child-welfare records show the boy had allegedly fled after Morrison sprayed him in the face with water and held his legs down. He jumped out a window, barefoot, to get away.

The Craighead County Sheriff’s Office encountered the school again in March 2025 when Renee Johns, whose children Jacob and Addison went to the Delta Institute, reported abuse there. 

Johns had moved her family to Jonesboro from about an hour away to attend the school. But things had unraveled. Jacob wasn’t getting the therapy he needed, and he and his sister were falling behind academically. But Johns said she was most troubled by a video Morrison had texted her one day to explain why Jacob was being kept after school.

It showed Jacob, a 10-year-old with autism, and two other boys scrubbing the floor and walls inside the school with rags. Morrison berated them: “This doesn’t get to be about fun. Go!”

“Both hands, cleaning!” she barked like a drill sergeant to one boy on his hands and knees. “You’re working like a slug! Get at it! Get at it! You are in the biggest trouble.”

The sheriff’s office alerted child-welfare authorities. Then, three weeks later, a second mother walked in to report her son’s assault within the circle at school. Bailey got a warrant for that video.

Teacher and counselor Ashley Williams was standing by while another employee copied the footage of Morrison berating, hitting and directing other students to assault the 13-year-old boy. Horrified, she excused herself, hustled down the stairs of the house, out to the gravel parking area, and vomited.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Williams had filed a detailed report with welfare authorities based on what some students had told her about Morrison’s “circle time.” She had written, “This is not the first time abuse like this has happened.” Months earlier, she continued, Morrison had taped two children together by their arms.

More came out in Bailey’s interviews with parents and current and former employees and in interviews that child advocates conducted with the students, documents show: allegations of “waterboarding” a child and cutting another’s hair as punishment. Slapping a student. A wooden paddle named Fred.

Some parents, meanwhile, defended Morrison and praised her “unorthodox methods,” according to interviews and police records. 

Morrison worked to keep parents on her side. She texted a large group of staff members, some whose children attended the school, to say she had made a mistake during the “group discussion” but blamed the violence on the students.

She warned that the floor-scrubbing video she had sent Johns would likely be made public and that she and the other employees would be arrested. “You can expect our mug shots on social media,” Morrison said, and apologized for letting everyone down. But she also called it a “witch hunt.”

“My mug shot will have me with a middle finger,” she wrote. 

Flimsy Investigations

Within days of the April 2025 incident that the prosecutor called a “makeshift ‘Fight Club,’” Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. Three other employees were charged with permitting child abuse and failure to report child maltreatment.

The day news broke about Morrison’s arrest, the state Education Department stopped EFA payments to the Delta Institute. Nearly half the students there were using the EFA program to pay tuition, and the school had collected more than $300,000 so far.  

There are no records of a visit to the school or an investigation by the state Department of Education. When asked if the department had gone to The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, officials did not answer. Instead, a spokesperson said that complaints or suspicious activity triggers a review and “often results in a site visit,” though they declined to say how often that has happened.

Reporters again asked the department directly if it had visited the school. The spokesperson responded: “We have addressed the Developing Brain’s suspension from the EFA program multiple times, including in statements sent to your outlet.”

At Delta, public money flowed again two days after it was stopped. An assistant education commissioner who oversees the EFA program told a colleague he was convinced that the school had implemented “appropriate safeguards,” according to an email. He wrote that Morrison had resigned as the head of the school and a new school board had been formed.

In the three school years of the EFA program, records show, state education officials have temporarily suspended funding to one other school, a Christian-based microschool called Homestead Academy that focuses on outdoor and individualized education. It rents space from a church near Hot Springs. Outside, there’s a playground and hammocks, as well as a red-and-white striped shed painted with “In God we trust” where fireworks are sold in the summer.

Over a month last fall, the state got a series of concerning calls and emails from parents and at least one former teacher, records show.

Some shared safety concerns or described children playing unsupervised in a wooded area. Others shared concerns about insufficient academic instruction. One caller said Homestead felt more like a daycare than an organized school. In the first few months of the school year, 13 of the 46 students withdrew, state records show.

“Please stop” funding the school, one parent pleaded.

Oliva, the state education secretary, heard directly from a Homestead parent who said the school did not follow a curriculum and had not adhered to the education plan for her daughter.

“Why are there not stronger regulations and accountability measures for EFA-funded programs?” she wrote in bold letters. (The parent asked that her name not be used because she works in education and fears retaliation.)

“This sounds like a serious and dire situation,” Oliva wrote back to her. “We will review immediately.” 

A state education employee reached out to Homestead’s owner in late October and told her that the department would be stopping by the next day for a “brief visit.” 

While there, Education Department employees watched students say the Pledge of Allegiance and then observed 10 to 15 minutes of instruction before meeting with owner Lindsey McCollum.  

When asked for student work, progress reports and discipline policies, McCollum said she would send them later. “In hindsight, we should have said we were happy to wait while they made copies for us, but we did not,” according to an employee’s written report about the visit.   

Afterward, the state suspended EFA funding to the school. Oliva told McCollum in a letter: “Your actions have jeopardized the welfare of students and the responsible use of public funds.”

It took 10 weeks for EFA funds to flow again. The state required that McCollum provide certain documentation and was satisfied by her response: a financial review of the school, policies on student supervision, curriculum plans and student worksheets. Several parents also sent letters in support of the school, describing it as a nurturing environment where their students enjoyed learning.

“We were compliant and transparent,” McCollum said in an interview. She noted that both she and the other teacher at the school are certified educators and stressed that “student safety is of utmost importance and our school has procedures in place.” 

The school, she said, is almost entirely funded through the EFA program, with about 30 students from kindergarten to ninth grade. She said almost all students have returned year after year. “Families have the option to choose and still are choosing us,” she said. 

“We have families who know that their kids who hated learning are now loving to read and write and loving to learn,” McCollum said. “That is our heartbeat.” 

The state Education Department said it “wastes no time” in suspending private schools from receiving public money, and that both Homestead and Delta convinced the state that they were worthy of being reinstated. “In both instances, we worked vigorously to ensure operations were flipped in the right direction before families were allowed to spend taxpayer dollars on either school,” according to the department’s statement to ProPublica.

The parent who emailed Oliva said that she had enrolled her 10-year-old daughter at Homestead hoping for something different than the public school. But she said her daughter fell behind academically. Last fall, she pulled her from the school and reenrolled her in public school. 

She didn’t know that the state had restored funding to Homestead until told by a reporter. 

“No way,” she said. “This has to be happening with other microschools. That upsets me for the children of Arkansas.”

Still Open for Business

Enrollment at the Delta school dropped to about 60 students for last school year, about half the size it was the year before. 

“There was a lot of loss because of the negative media,” Adrian Sportsman, who has worked closely with Morrison at the school, said when a ProPublica reporter visited this spring. “I feel like it was blown way out of proportion.”

Some students came back, she said: “They’d say, ‘There’s no school like this school.’”

In March, the mother of the boy who was assaulted in the circle at school sued Morrison, her school, her therapy business and her insurance companies seeking compensatory and punitive damages for what happened to her son. In court filings, Morrison’s attorney denied the allegations and said “the video speaks for itself.”  

The criminal cases were set to go to trial in May and June. None did. Charges were dismissed for two employees who authorities felt were less culpable as they’d been in the classroom only briefly. The two employees did not respond to a reporter’s outreach.

A third staffer, Kathrine Lipscomb, who is an Arkansas-licensed teacher, interjected at times to direct the children to listen to Morrison and raise their hands to speak. In response to a reporter’s question about her role in the incident, she explained in an email: “For part of the time, I was off behind the teachers desk planning for another class and not paying attention to the circle.” 

The prosecutor and Lipscomb agreed to a pre-trial diversion program in which Lipscomb would serve six months of probation. She must do 40 hours of community service with disabled children and complete anger management classes to avoid a conviction. 

She is now director of education at the school.

Morrison pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 120 days on house arrest and five years of probation. She had to surrender her Arkansas occupational therapy license. And she agreed to not work with kids in any professional capacity during her probation.

Nobody seemed happy with Morrison’s punishment. But the prosecutor said the state decided the plea deal was the best option to make sure Morrison was held accountable. Under Arkansas law, the state would have to prove substantial physical harm to the victim in order to convict on a charge of permitting abuse to a minor, and juries can judge that differently, said Sonia Hagood, who prosecuted the case for the state. For instance, she said, a recent jury decided not to convict a defendant because the victim did not suffer serious physical injury.

As part of her deal, Morrison got to pick where she served her time — the Greene County Detention Center, which is newer than Craighead County’s jail and gave her a private cell. And she’s serving house arrest on her boyfriend’s Missouri ranch, where she can ride horses.

She passed the time while incarcerated on the phone and on video calls from a personal tablet. It’s standard for all communication from jail to be recorded, and ProPublica obtained more than 500 recordings. They show she was still involved with the administration of the school while jailed. 

She spoke frequently to Sportsman about school finances, including telling her to make sure the EFA money still was coming in. Sportsman, who owns Delta Therapy Group, the occupational therapy practice that works with Delta Institute students, said that the jail conversations were “informal conversations between friends” and disputed the idea that Morrison was running the school while incarcerated.

Morrison chatted for hours with her new board members and school employees and gave them to-do lists. She asked how some kids were doing. In a call with the teacher who also entered a plea deal, she called the victim’s mother “evil” for going to the police.

She also spoke with a documentary filmmaker who is interested in the school’s story and plans to pitch a project to a big streamer, like Netflix or HBO. In one call with the documentarian, Morrison described the abuse she’d been jailed for as a “restorative” technique to try to help the children treat one another more respectfully.

“It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?’’ she said. “And the concept is so sophisticated that it’s like, if the prosecuting attorney wanted to know my story, if the detective — they would’ve interviewed me. They would have couched it like, ‘Oh, this is an intervention of individuals who are high risk, who will end up in prison themselves if they behave this way.’ They didn’t do that.”

Both the prosecutor and detective tried to interview Morrison during the investigation but she refused to speak with them.

Morrison was released from jail June 1.

“I think she should be prevented from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children around if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?

The Latest Complaint

There’s nothing in state law that prevents Morrison from still owning Delta or another private school and benefiting from public funding. 

Records still list Morrison’s family business as the owner of the Delta Institute property. State business records also show that she still is the registered agent for a private school at the same address. The school recently took a new name: North Star Academy. 

Lipscomb said the school’s board changed the name “as part of the process of healing for our community of families and students that are here and still trying to make sense of the world as we know it now.” Lipscomb said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.

She said she expects as many as 35 students to attend this upcoming school year. 

Renee Johns said Jacob has never recovered from his traumatic time at the Delta school. He has grown increasingly aggressive. He’s used martial arts moves that the school taught children in lieu of P.E. to punch holes in the wall of her home and lash out at her. 

Her daughter, Addison, returned to public school. She loves her new school, but was so far behind that she needed to repeat third grade. “School is for helping, not for hurting,” the 10-year-old recently told a ProPublica reporter.

Johns said parents who chose Morrison’s school and went along with her methods were sold lies. “We honestly thought we were doing the best for our children.”

The public keeps filing complaints about private and microschools with the Education Department. In late March it received a new request to investigate The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain. It came from a woman who had heard concerning reports from a family with a child at the school.

“Given the population served by this program, ensuring a safe, structured, and educationally appropriate environment is especially important. I would greatly appreciate your office’s attention to reviewing these concerns,” the woman wrote to the state’s hotline.

Lipscomb said she’s not aware of any active complaints. The state won’t comment on whether it’s investigating. 

The post This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It. appeared first on ProPublica.

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.

“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”

On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

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Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed FCC chair by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January 2025, attended regularly.

Rosenworcel and several other former commissioners who accepted the tickets did not respond to requests for comment. The one commissioner who didn’t accept a single gift, Nathan Simington, said he received the Kennedy Center invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it “wasn’t my cup of tea.”

A review of 10 years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and speak at conferences. Some of those gifts came from other media companies regulated by the FCC. NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents’ Association dinners, records show. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000. But the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company.

Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. She didn’t address why the practice continued after new ownership took over last year, the purpose of the gifts or whether the tickets posed a conflict of interest.

Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to become the agency’s general counsel, was appointed to serve as a commissioner by Trump during his first term. Since then, Carr has accepted tickets annually, except when the 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his public disclosures.

Carr did not respond to an email request from ProPublica for his latest ethics report, which would indicate whether Paramount also paid for him to attend last December’s gala. The FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.

A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly said officials cannot accept free attendance “offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees.” In 2016, the ethics office tightened its gift requirements, warning officials to avoid any appearance “of loss of impartiality.”

There is an exemption to the gift rules that allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met.

The event must “further agency programs or operations,” and the agency’s interest in an official attending must outweigh “concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties,” according to the federal rules.

As an example, the Office of Government Ethics said an industry-wide seminar attended by more than 100 people could be allowed if the employee’s participation would be in the agency’s interest. But those attending should “represent a range of persons interested in a given matter” and the event must provide a “structured opportunity” to exchange ideas and views among invitees.

The office clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not count even if they, like the honors gala, have a reception before or afterward at which officials can mingle with other attendees.

Canter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said it would be a “stretch” for the FCC to argue the exemptions apply to the Kennedy Center’s annual show, where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud those who are being honored. “It’s not what we would consider a widely attended gathering,” she said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted that federal rules also require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment.

“The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation,” he said, adding that it is an “obvious conflict of interest” for an official to “accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests.”

An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance given to the commissioners said they were told the event met the criteria for the “widely attended gathering” exception. (The source was not authorized to talk publicly about agency legal discussions.)

Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics head, disagreed, saying it would be “hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners” attend the gala.

“What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?” he asked.

Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering. The FCC did not respond to our requests to provide the authorizations for the Paramount tickets or say who authorized them. Two senior ethics officials at the agency, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.

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While December’s event came at a particularly sensitive time for Paramount and the FCC, it wasn’t the first.

More than a year earlier, in September 2024, Paramount had filed paperwork seeking the commission’s approval for its merger with Skydance Media. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump later filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited the interview — an accusation CBS denied.

Then in November, less than two weeks after his election victory, Trump declared he would appoint Carr as FCC chair. Almost immediately, Carr accused CBS of biased election coverage and said it would be an obstacle to approving the Paramount-Skydance merger.

That December, Carr and three other commissioners — Rosenworcel, Gomez and Geoffrey Starks — accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.

On Jan. 16, 2025, just days before Rosenworcel stepped down from the commission, she announced the agency was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. She and Gomez called the outcome a victory for the First Amendment.

But days later, Carr, the incoming FCC chair, reopened the investigation.

To resolve Trump’s lawsuit, CBS agreed to pay the president $16 million, a decision criticized by legal experts who decried Trump’s claims as baseless.

Two days after Trump posted on social media that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Paramount-Skydance merger. To meet Carr’s demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson who would evaluate claims of bias. The company also pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

By then, Starks and Simington had unexpectedly stepped down from the commission. Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed by the Senate the previous month.

Trusty and Carr voted in favor of the merger. Gomez voted against, blasting the approval for requiring “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment.”

Experts said that while Trusty had no conflict yet, Carr and Gomez did. The fact that Gomez voted against Paramount did not mean she didn’t face a conflict under the rules, Shaub said.

Federal rules only require those who accept improper gifts to make a prompt reimbursement, but Shaub and the other experts said Carr and Gomez should have abstained from the vote.

“If you repay the face value of the ticket, the gift rules don’t require you to recuse — though common sense and any kind of conscience might lead you to recuse voluntarily for the good of the country,” Shaub said. “But if you refuse to repay the donor, I don’t see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem.”

With the Paramount-Skydance merger greenlit by the FCC, Ellison, the new company’s CEO, then set his sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner at first rebuffed Paramount’s overtures and on Dec. 5 — two days before the Kennedy Center gala — accepted a bid from Netflix to buy its studio and streaming assets. Ellison responded by making numerous calls to administration officials and had a long talk with Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal “could be a problem” and that he planned to get directly involved with the regulatory approval. Inside the Kennedy Center, Carr and his wife sat with Ellison in an exclusive skybox, Bloomberg reported. (Gomez said in her statement to ProPublica that she declined Paramount’s “invitation because of serious concerns about press independence connected to conditions Paramount agreed to as part of its merger transaction before the FCC.”)

Hours after the gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.

About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed Paramount over Netflix on CNBC, promising swift approval.

If one or more commissioners choose to abstain from a merger vote because of ethical concerns, what would happen next is unclear. Under federal conflict of interest rules, an agency designee could theoretically permit commissioners to vote after considering several factors, including “the difficulty of reassigning the matter,” the nature of the relationship between the commissioners and Paramount, and the “effect that resolution of the matter would have upon the financial interests” of the firm.

Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely, as he did with the recent acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group. In that case, Carr delegated authority to FCC staff to approve the takeover.

But any decision on the Paramount deal — whether by the full commission or by staff at the direction of the chair — is likely to be challenged.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.

“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.

The post FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount as the Company Needed Approval for Billion-Dollar Deals appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration has launched a national crackdown on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers, following a KQED-ProPublica investigation into California’s teacher disciplinary system.

In guidance issued last week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon cited the news outlets’ reporting in May that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools.

McMahon threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools that fail to protect children from teacher sexual misconduct. She called on states and school districts to scrutinize their laws and regulations to prevent educators who have engaged in sexual misconduct involving students from obtaining new positions elsewhere. Citing previous reports by the Government Accountability Office and other studies, McMahon said the Department of Education has observed a “troubling and recurring pattern” of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by school employees going uninvestigated. 

“Unfortunately, many administrators and State educational regulators have apparently preferred to sweep these incidents under the rug and have ‘pass[ed] the trash’ to another school,” McMahon wrote in an open letter to state schools chiefs on Friday, referring to teachers who go on to work in different schools after findings of sexual misconduct.

McMahon said the Department of Education intends to increase its monitoring of school systems to ensure that they comply with federal law. The Trump administration will also examine states’ laws and regulations to determine their effectiveness in protecting students, she said. 

The department is investigating 20 school districts over their data collection practices and handling of allegations of staff sexual harassment of students, McMahon announced. Two of the districts — Tulare City and Wilsona — are in central and Southern California, according to a list the department provided to KQED and ProPublica. The Tulare City superintendent has not responded to a request for comment. Wilsona Superintendent Steve Doyle said the district will cooperate fully with the federal review and “is committed to providing a safe and inclusive learning environment for every student.” 

The list, which the Trump administration said was built on 2023-24 civil rights data, also includes districts in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Connecticut, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington. 

A spokesperson for Tony Thurmond, California state superintendent of public instruction, said he was not available to comment on the Trump administration’s letter.

California law requires public school teachers who resign or are fired for misconduct to be reported to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the state’s educator licensing agency. That agency then decides whether teachers will be disciplined further, including by losing their professional credentials. 

Our look at California’s teacher disciplinary process revealed a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that has allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other sexual misconduct.

That disciplinary process, which is hidden from public view, stands out compared with how California oversees other professionals. The fact that a teacher has been disciplined is noted — along with a red flag icon next to their name — on a state website of credentialed educators, but the database does not explain why. California law prohibits the teacher licensing agency from sharing that information publicly. In contrast, the licensing bodies governing dozens of other professions in California, including doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers, make the reasons behind disciplinary actions easily accessible on their websites. And at least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers.

California’s system also makes it difficult for school districts to learn the details of prospective employees’ disciplinary histories. Only after the state licensing agency recommends educators be disciplined can prospective employers request a summary of the case and the agency’s findings — if the request is made within five years.

California law does require teaching candidates to provide prospective employers with their complete educational job history and mandates that school districts ask previous employers whether candidates have ever been reported to the state for egregious misconduct. But no state agency is enforcing whether teachers are sharing their full employment records, whether districts are checking for previous misconduct or whether schools are providing the records. 

“Prospective employers have the tools at their disposal to assess whether an individual is fit to be in the classroom,” Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, previously told KQED and ProPublica. “However, the Commission has no legal authority to compel employers to use these tools.” 

Fitzhugh said Monday that state law prevents the agency from formally reviewing allegations of sexual misconduct that districts report to the state unless it also receives an affidavit from alleged victims. “The Commission stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes,” she said.

A new California law mandates the creation of a database by next summer that will allow employers to search the names of school support staff, such as bus drivers, custodians and teaching assistants, who are under investigation for or have substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct. But the law does not apply to public school teachers. 

Some critics characterized McMahon’s latest guidance as political rhetoric and grandstanding, given the Trump administration’s gutting of the Education Department and routine dismissal of civil rights cases.

“Staff-on-student predation occurs less frequently than student-on-student harassment and assault. This letter is silent on that,” said Heidi Goldstein, a personnel commissioner of the Berkeley Unified School District and advisory board member of Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, a national nonprofit. “I look at something like this as a wedge issue you’re going to take to schools to weaken union power overall.”

In her letter, McMahon singled out teachers unions as obstructions to legislative reforms to protect children.

“This is yet another example of the Trump administration weaponizing and distorting an issue for political purposes while also systematically dismantling the very offices of the Department of Education that were established to protect the safety and civil rights of students across the nation,” said Maggie Sisco, a spokesperson for the California Teachers Association. 

McMahon also noted that the Trump administration recently opened an investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District for an agreement it made with the teachers union to reassign educators accused of sexual misconduct instead of removing them while district officials investigate. But Christy Hagen, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified, said “reassignment means an employee is assigned away from students and schools during an investigation.” 

The district “takes all allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment with the utmost seriousness,” Hagen said, and reported allegations are reviewed promptly through a “thorough and impartial process.” 

Los Angeles Unified, California’s largest school district, has yet to release public records requested by KQED reporter Holly McDede two years ago. The First Amendment Coalition, a California nonprofit that advocates for free speech and government transparency, filed a lawsuit on behalf of McDede in May. Hagen said Monday that the district “has responded to requests in accordance with the California Public Records Act.”   

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for California governor, said if elected, he would “end the loopholes that let dangerous teachers move from one school district to another.” 

“Agencies will share information, act quickly and put student safety first, not the system,” Hilton said. “If you abuse a child, your teaching career is over.”

Jonathan Underland, spokesperson for Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. health and human services secretary, former California attorney general and the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said Becerra “will make sure this state has a system that acts swiftly and keeps educators who harm students out of the classroom.”

“Protecting students from predators demands real action — but this president is demanding it from the very office he’s spent years tearing down,” Underland said. “California won’t wait on Washington.”

The post Trump Administration Launches Crackdown on Teacher Sexual Misconduct Following KQED-ProPublica Investigation appeared first on ProPublica.

There’s one indisputable fact about the events of the night of May 8, 1981: Alice Sebold, who had earlier that day just completed her freshman year at Syracuse University, was brutally raped while walking home through a park.

Anthony Broadwater was arrested several months later and subsequently convicted of the assault. He’d spend 16 years in prison, repeatedly being denied parole because he refused to admit guilt. Upon his release in 1998, he was required to register as a sex offender.

Sebold would go on to write and speak about the attack, culminating in the publication of “Lucky,” a memoir about the rape. The book would become a bestseller after the success of Sebold’s first novel, “The Lovely Bones.”

But 40 years after the assault, a court vacated Broadwater’s conviction after the Syracuse district attorney joined a motion to clear him and said in court that Broadwater should never have been prosecuted. While the exoneration made headlines around the world, we wondered how many other victims in Syracuse had been left behind and what else the police might have missed.

What we discovered: No part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And Syracuse University seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it.

Here are some of the key findings from our yearslong investigation into what went wrong after that night in May 1981. You can read the full story of how ProPublica reporter Joaquin Sapien reinvestigated the notorious case — and rapes surrounding it — decades after the fact here.

As Rape Cases Piled Up in Syracuse, Police Failed to Investigate

At the time of Sebold’s rape in the spring of 1981, Syracuse was experiencing a rash of sexual assaults. Hers was the third such attack in the city’s Thornden Park in about seven months. A fourth had occurred a block away. Like the police report in Sebold’s assault, those cases had also been quickly consigned to the inactive file.

Beyond the park, women in Syracuse were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and homes. A nursing student was later attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators, many of whom carried a knife, were often eerily similar; several were roughly the same height, weight and race.

And yet there were no apparent signs of urgency from law enforcement.

Syracuse University Quashed Media Coverage of Rape and Other Crimes

In addition to Syracuse police appearing to deprioritize rape cases in the early 1980s — a time when few survivors reported their assaults — documents and testimony indicate that the city’s namesake university actively quashed media coverage of these attacks.

If a police report was labeled “NO PRESS,” a former detective in the Sebold case explained in a 2025 deposition, it meant that the university “put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.” He testified that seeing this designation on police reports at the time was not unusual.

A spokesperson for Syracuse University said in an email that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions or decisions of prior administrations,” but the university is now equipped with “comprehensive policies, a steadfast commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence and robust support structures to help every survivor that comes forward.”

Police and Prosecutors Botched the Lineup and Rushed the Case to Indictment

It was not police work or media coverage that led authorities to Broadwater. His arrest only occurred after Sebold saw him on the street months after the assault and believed he was her rapist. Police arrested the 20-year-old, and he agreed to appear in a lineup.

But at the lineup, Sebold did not identify Broadwater as her attacker. Instead, she selected a man standing to his left.

Police had no other evidence linking Broadwater to the assault aside from a pubic hair sample he had volunteered for comparison to one found on Sebold, which, in a world before DNA testing, could essentially tell investigators only that both Broadwater and the rapist were Black.

The current DA says the case should have ended then and there. “Case is over,” he told ProPublica. “Stop.”

But rather than release Broadwater and continue gathering evidence, an assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, asked Sebold to draft an affidavit on the spot, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she had picked the man in the No. 5 position because he had been looking at her.

In “Lucky,” her bestselling memoir about the rape, Sebold said Uebelhoer tried to allay concerns about picking the wrong man by claiming that the man she picked and Broadwater were “dead ringers” for each other and implied that the two men coordinated their appearance in the lineup to confuse Sebold. Both men have adamantly denied ever appearing in another lineup together.

Hours after the lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. In a 2025 deposition, she said she could not remember many of the key details in Sebold’s case but asserted that she had done her job by presenting it to a grand jury without hiding its flaws.

Broadwater’s Decision to Forgo a Jury Trial Backfired

When his case moved forward, Broadwater and his lawyer hoped he’d be better off by opting for a bench trial, in which a judge, not a jury, would decide his fate.

But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. In her memoir, she recalls how the judge spoke privately to her during a break in the proceedings, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. If a juror had asked such questions of a witness, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared.

The judge also allowed Uebelhoer — then visibly pregnant and no longer handling the case — to take the stand as a witness for the prosecution, where she appeared to imply that Broadwater was responsible for Sebold’s botched identification at the lineup.

Immediately after the prosecutor finished his closing argument, the judge found Broadwater guilty without leaving the bench to deliberate.

The Rapes Continued After Broadwater’s Conviction and a Possible Suspect Emerged

Broadwater’s conviction did not end the rash of sexual assaults in Syracuse. Only four months after the trial, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women, four of them within a mile of Thornden Park. He told police his spree had begun in late 1981.

While there’s no evidence that Weakfall attacked Sebold, he did match key elements of the description she gave of her rapist: Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20, stood 5’6” and weighed about 175 pounds.

But the rape case against Weakfall collapsed because his confession was deemed inadmissible. Officers had taken his statement without a defense attorney present, unaware that Weakfall was already represented by an attorney on an unrelated burglary charge. He ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary, got five years probation and was released.

Weakfall Confesses Again, but Not to the Sebold Rape

Records show police arrested Weakfall for an attempted rape of a woman inside her car in October 1983. He was released from custody for four months, before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of attempted sexual misconduct. He received a sentence of one year.

During those same four months, Sebold’s roommate was raped in their apartment. She was one of five women attacked in the same cluster of blocks over a five-month period, according to contemporary news accounts. Police suspected that one man had committed the crimes.

While police reports in these assaults suggest an older, taller attacker, elements of the crimes — burglarized homes; women raped at knifepoint and beaten; some bound and gagged — matched Weakfall’s methods.

Sebold’s roommate also told police that, after the assault, she tried to get her assailant to leave by yelling out that her roommate was coming home. He replied: “I know her, we had a thing, we had a deal in the past.”

In 1985, after being spotted using a stolen ATM card, Weakfall confessed to additional rapes, saying he’d assaulted at least three women in the previous few months. This time, his confession stuck and he ultimately served 12 years of an 18-year sentence.

While Weakfall did confess to committing rapes that occurred indoors, he has denied assaulting anyone outdoors. In interviews with ProPublica, he admitted “violating” women but also said he did not commit all the assaults he’d confessed to.

Producers Trying to Make a Film About “Lucky” Sparked the Unraveling of Broadwater’s Conviction

In 2013, a movie producer tasked with writing a screenplay based on “Lucky” contacted Paul Clapper, a retired detective who had played a tangential but important role in the Sebold case. According to the producer, he replied, noting that there were a number of questions in the case: Was the right person arrested? Was Sebold a good witness? If DNA testing had been available, would there have been the same outcome? However, the producer said Clapper never elaborated on this list, and ultimately this attempt to film “Lucky” fell by the wayside.

Years later, a second producer endeavored to make a movie of Sebold’s memoir. His concerns about the story were such that he hired a private investigator to dig deeper. The investigator, Dan Myers, met with Clapper and came away with the impression that Clapper believed Broadwater was innocent of the crime and Weakfall was guilty. Myers brought his concerns to a pair of Syracuse lawyers, who filed a motion to vacate Broadwater’s conviction in 2021. More than 40 years after the rape, and after more than two decades of living as a registered sex offender, Broadwater was exonerated.

The Aftermath: “I’ll Never Write Anything Good Enough”

Five years after the court vacated Broadwater’s conviction, Sebold has no doubt he is innocent and told ProPublica she now questions her decision to report her rape to the police: “None of this would have happened.”

Despite his exoneration, Broadwater said the stigma of being a convicted rapist was still hard to shake, even with his record cleared and a multimillion-dollar settlement from New York state. “I’m still embarrassed that I was convicted and sent to prison for rape for 16 and a half years,” he said. The city of Syracuse and county of Onondaga are contesting Broadwater’s claims. He explained that his life “still ain’t normal. Ain’t never gonna be normal. How could it be normal?”

Sebold and Broadwater have discussed through intermediaries the possibility of meeting in person. But their shared reluctance to travel has made plans difficult.

Sebold said she did recently write a letter to Broadwater in which she takes responsibility for her role in his wrongful conviction. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sorrow I hold for what happened.”

“I’ll never write anything good enough,” Sebold said about the three pages that took four years to compose. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I’ll ever write.”

The post What We Uncovered About the Sexual Assault of Alice Sebold and a City’s Buried Rape Crisis appeared first on ProPublica.

Indigenous and Hispanic students are suspended more often and for longer periods than their white classmates who commit similar infractions at Gallup-McKinley County Schools — a pattern of “substantial racial disparities,” an investigation by the New Mexico attorney general’s office found.

Indigenous students lose eight to 10 times more classroom days to suspensions than white students, while Hispanic students lose three to four times as many, according to the 47-page report released by the state’s Department of Justice last week.

Gallup-McKinley, a sprawling district twice the size of Delaware, straddles part of the Navajo Nation and has the largest Native American student population of any public school district in the country.

The investigation was ordered by state Attorney General Raúl Torrez in 2023, after reporting by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica exposed the district’s high rates of harsh punishment for Native and Hispanic children. The news organizations found Native students in New Mexico are expelled far more often than any other group. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions during the four school years ending in 2020.

That disparity was evident even in kindergarten and elementary grades, often for ambiguous infractions such as “disorderly conduct.”

At the time, former district Superintendent Mike Hyatt called the news organizations’ reporting “completely false” and suggested the findings were a result of the district’s own data entry errors and its broad definition of expulsion.

But, state Department of Justice investigators said in last week’s report that neither explanation accounted for the racial disparities. Hyatt has retired and could not be reached for comment.

Their report calls on Gallup-McKinley officials to “acknowledge the facts” and work with the community “in remedying its excessive reliance on exclusionary and discriminatory discipline.”

Among the report’s recommendations: District officials should clearly define infractions and penalty ranges, make punishments proportional and limit suspensions. The report also called for Gallup-McKinley to adopt restorative justice alternatives such as talking circles, in which students discuss how their misbehavior impacted others, why they broke a school rule and other choices they could have made instead. The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission called for similar reforms in its own March 2026 report on discrimination at Gallup-McKinley schools. Wendy Greyeyes, the commission chair, noted that neighboring districts already use such alternatives, but she said in an interview that the district might have difficulty building trust with its students and their families.

Until the district fixes its discipline policies, investigators wrote, “children in and around Gallup, along with their families and communities, will remain negatively affected by educational, social, and emotional challenges that stem from the District’s current practices.”

That harm goes beyond the academic, investigators wrote, saying that out-of-school suspensions also deny students access to free meals and participation in extracurricular clubs and volunteer activities.

National research links suspension and expulsion to lower academic achievement, a higher risk of contact with the criminal justice system, isolation, poor health and lower wages, the report said.

Investigators also called on the district to create a clear and accessible complaint process for students and families, and to publish regular audits of discipline data.

In 2023, after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica published their reporting, the district provided a contract auditor with discipline data that was “inexplicably different” from what it reported to state and U.S. departments of Education, with thousands of disciplinary records missing, the state Department of Justice investigators said. The news organizations’ own reporting on the audit could not verify the district’s assertions that it had dramatically reduced out-of-school suspensions.

“Instead of taking steps to rectify these problems, leadership denied that they exist and pushed a misleading and flawed counter-analysis,” the new AG report said.

In addition to district reforms, the new report also called on state lawmakers and the New Mexico Public Education Department to strengthen oversight of student discipline statewide. Audits at the state level should be conducted at least once a year and be made public, it said.

Such audits are needed to prevent disparities from becoming as “extreme and systemic as in Gallup-McKinley,” said Anjana Samant, one of the report’s authors and a deputy director in the state Department of Justice.

The state Department of Education should also require that students who are suspended or expelled receive instruction and other educational services while they are out of school. The department is reviewing the report, spokesperson Janelle Garcia said.

In addition to specific disciplinary policy changes, the new report urged state lawmakers to revisit legislation that would have given the AG’s office stronger investigative tools to “identify and root out” civil rights violations. That legislation passed in 2023, but Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, let the bill die without her signature in what’s called a pocket veto.

The governor, a spokesperson said in an email on Wednesday, stands by her decision, saying it’s unclear whether the new powers in the legislation “would have trumped federal student privacy protections and allowed the AG to access confidential student records.”

What matters now is ensuring the report’s findings are addressed quickly, wrote Michael Coleman, Lujan Grisham’s communications director.

The district is reviewing the report’s recommendations, Gallup-McKinley Superintendent Jvanna Hanks II told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica.

“I am leading a period of transition that prioritizes community voices and renews our focus on every student,” Hanks wrote in an email provided by a public relations firm the district has hired. “The School District will be using this report and current student data as part of our review. Our focus is that students should be in school, supported in school, and treated fairly in school.”

The post New Mexico AG Calls for Reform After Report Finds “Substantial Racial Disparities” in One School District appeared first on ProPublica.

After months of U.S.-Mexico tensions sparked by the Trump administration’s threats to strike unilaterally at Mexican drug traffickers, the two governments are heading for a potentially more serious confrontation over President Claudia Sheinbaum’s refusal to arrest Mexican officials charged in the United States with drug corruption.

U.S. Justice Department officials have yet to present a full picture of their evidence against 10 current and former Mexican officials, whose indictments were announced on April 29. They include the governor of Sinaloa state, Rubén Rocha Moya, an ally of the president and a prominent figure in her leftist political party.

But as the Trump administration steps up its efforts to target Mexican government figures who are accused of protecting the drug trade, Sheinbaum is taking a hard-line stand against extraditing Rocha and the others charged in a New York federal court, Mexican officials said.

“She is very clear about this,” a senior Mexican official said of the U.S. request for Rocha’s extradition. “She has decided no.”

The impasse presents the Trump administration with a potentially critical test of its aims in Mexico, raising questions about how far it will go to challenge the corruption that has long sustained Mexico’s trade in illegal drugs.

By elevating the importance of the drug issue and threatening harsh economic penalties if Sheinbaum did not join forces to combat it, the administration has pushed Mexico to dramatically escalate its fight against organized crime.

After years in which Sheinbaum’s political mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, withdrew from confrontation with the drug mafias, her security forces have worked with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to destroy clandestine drug labs, seize large caches of drugs, and kill or capture ranking crime bosses.

Sheinbaum also circumvented the two countries’ extradition treaty to hand over at least 92 accused traffickers sought by the United States — voicing none of the concerns about U.S. evidence that she has cited in refusing to arrest the Sinaloa officials.

Still, U.S. officials acknowledge privately, the two countries’ intensified counter-drug campaign has emphasized tactical strikes and short-term gains rather than a coherent, longer-term strategy to undermine organized crime groups, confront endemic corruption or strengthen Mexico’s criminal justice system.

To many senior Trump administration officials, particularly in the Justice Department and the White House, attacking the high-level corruption that sustains the drug trade represents a crucial next step. They have argued it is a step that U.S. prosecutors should take aggressively if Mexico will not do so, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Some diplomatic and intelligence officials, however, are wary of pushing Sheinbaum too hard, seeing her position as precarious. They fear that demanding she take on her own party’s old guard might prompt her to pull back on Mexico’s cooperation with U.S. drug enforcement and immigration policies, the officials said.

The U.S. policy debate also turns on a question that continues to obsess Mexico’s political class nearly two years into her presidency: How much independence does Sheinbaum really have from her political patron López Obrador, who remains a commanding figure within their National Regeneration Movement?

After keeping largely silent on Mexico’s changing relationship with Washington, López Obrador thrust himself back into the public debate on June 3 with a blistering attack on the New York indictments. U.S. officials were simply using drug corruption as a pretext, he claimed, to undermine Morena, as the leftist party he founded is known.

“To be clear,” the former president wrote, “some U.S. officials are plotting to weaken Morena and strengthen the rightist opposition in Mexico with the idea of once again having a submissive, corrupt, mafioso and cruel government.” Such a regime, he added, would be more amenable to Washington’s “interventionist designs.”

Sheinbaum did her best to respectfully downplay the significance of the former president’s screed. But current and former Mexican officials noted that López Obrador’s missive, while supportive of her, did nothing to dispel suspicions that he continues to pull strings in her administration.

To many analysts of Mexican politics, the source of Sheinbaum’s unyielding response to the Rocha indictment seems plain: her fear that if some accused officials cooperate with the U.S. authorities in the Sinaloa case and possibly other investigations, the Trump administration could target other Morena leaders, including key allies of López Obrador.

“I think the message from Andrés Manuel was, ‘Claudia, you have to stop this or they are going to destroy us,’” a Mexican security expert, Eduardo Guerrero, said in an interview. “But the longer she waits to turn Rocha over, the tougher the punishment from the United States is going to be.”

Trump administration officials have done little to assuage such concerns.

Asked two weeks after the Sinaloa indictment about the administration’s plans for dealing with Mexican corruption, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance C. Cole, told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “I can assure you this is just the start about what’s to come in Mexico.”

Turning Themselves In

When Rocha was elected in 2021 as governor of Sinaloa, a stronghold of Mexico’s drug trade for almost a century, the former teachers’ union organizer was known as a skilled political operator and a close friend of then-President López Obrador. But his campaign was assailed for what opposition parties and civic groups called the blatant role that criminal gangs played on Rocha’s behalf — intimidating voters, stuffing ballot boxes, and kidnapping and threatening numerous opposition candidates.

Despite detailed complaints to Mexico’s elections authorities, López Obrador and Sheinbaum strongly defended Rocha. Rocha insisted he had nothing to do with the mafias but suggested that it would be impossible to govern the state without somehow coordinating with them. “You have to find a way to do it,” he said in a television interview during the campaign.

Questions about Rocha’s links to the traffickers exploded again in July 2024, after a son of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the imprisoned drug boss known as El Chapo, kidnapped his father’s longtime partner in the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael Zambada García. The son, Joaquín Guzmán López, then flew Zambada across the U.S. border, delivering him to U.S. agents on an airstrip in New Mexico and surrendering himself.

In a statement released by his lawyer, Zambada said he was kidnapped outside Culiacán, the state capital, when he went to meet Rocha and a Sinaloa congressman, Héctor Cuén, who supposedly wanted the drug boss to mediate a dispute between them. Instead, Zambada claimed, he was betrayed by Guzmán while Cuén, whom he described as “a longtime friend,” was murdered.

Rocha at the time denied any involvement in the episode, saying he was traveling in Los Angeles. A spokesperson for the state government, from which Rocha has taken a leave of absence, said it would not comment on the accusations against him. Rocha could not be reached for comment.

Both Guzmán and his brother Ovidio, who was extradited to the United States in 2023, have since provided federal prosecutors with extensive accounts of their relationships with Mexican government figures, as has at least one of their former lieutenants, law enforcement officials said. Investigators in New York also obtained detailed ledgers of the gang’s bribe payments, which were referenced extensively in the Rocha indictment.

After Zambada’s kidnapping, three U.S. officials said López Obrador’s government made repeated requests for information on what Zambada and the Chapitos, as Guzmán’s sons are known, might have been telling U.S. investigators. But the prosecutors answered those queries only when they finally laid out their case: “As he had promised, since he was elected governor, and in exchange for the Chapitos’ support in his election, Rocha Moya has allowed the Chapitos to operate with impunity in Sinaloa,” the indictment stated.

It also said Rocha had met personally with the Chapitos’ leaders and allowed them to name corrupt law enforcement officials to his government. Rocha’s aides took the traffickers’ bribes, allowed them to operate with impunity, arrested their rivals, freed them from jail when they were arrested themselves and warned them of law enforcement operations supported by the United States, the prosecutors said. Rocha has denied the allegations.

Barely a day after a federal court in New York unsealed the indictment of the 10 men, Sheinbaum dismissed that evidence as insufficient. She said the suspects could be investigated in Mexico but that she would not act without “overwhelming and irrefutable proof” of their guilt.

Such provisional arrest requests are often granted as a matter of course; by treaty, the country asking for extradition has 60 days to present more detailed evidence after the initial arrest is made. But Sheinbaum has argued that the indictment and various other Justice Department documents given to Mexico did not come close to justifying the U.S. request.

Some U.S. diplomats were initially skeptical of the New York prosecutors’ apparent reliance on imprisoned traffickers as primary witnesses in such a politically sensitive case, officials familiar with the matter said.

More recently, though, at least one of the accused Mexicans has changed that calculus. The former Sinaloa secretary of public safety, Gerardo Mérida, turned himself in to U.S. marshals at the Arizona border on May 11. Mérida — a retired army general accused of taking more than $100,000 a month from the cartel while in office — pleaded not guilty in New York. But he later indicated to the prosecutors that he might be willing to cooperate with their investigation in return for leniency, one official familiar with the matter said. Mérida’s court-appointed attorney, Sarah Krissoff, did not respond to calls and emails asking for comment on his status.

A second suspect in the case, former Sinaloa finance secretary Enrique Díaz Vega, is also believed to have turned himself in to the U.S. authorities, but the Justice Department has not confirmed that. Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment on the status of either suspect, and Vega could not be reached for comment.

Months ago, current and former U.S. officials said, Sheinbaum’s powerful security chief, Omar García Harfuch, told American diplomats privately that the Mexican president was determined to take on the country’s corruption problem and would prove her bona fides by prosecuting officials of her own party. Since the Rocha indictment, however, she has taken a very different tone, accusing Washington of egregious meddling in Mexico’s affairs.

“An action of this magnitude has no precedent in the history of our bilateral relationship,” Sheinbaum said at a political rally in late May. “When they dictate from abroad who is guilty and who is not, that is no longer cooperation. We are talking about interference!”

Aides to Sheinbaum have begun to suggest that she could indeed scale back anti-narcotics cooperation if Washington pushes too hard on the Rocha case, two U.S. officials said.

Whether she has the wherewithal to follow through remains to be seen. But such threats have worked for Mexico in the past. When U.S. agents arrested Mexico’s former defense minister, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, in Los Angeles in late 2020, former Attorney General William Barr abruptly dropped the case after López Obrador threatened to limit Mexico’s counter-drug cooperation.

Despite the American concession, López Obrador still seized on the arrest to shut down several joint counter-drug programs and push through a new national security law curtailing the work of U.S. agents in Mexico. With the Biden administration focused on preserving Mexico’s cooperation on immigration, López Obrador later abandoned the so-called Mérida Plan, the two countries’ 14-year campaign to jointly fight drug trafficking and strengthen the Mexican criminal justice system.

“But these guys are not Biden,” a former Mexican foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, said of the Trump administration in an interview. While Sheinbaum’s predecessors could almost always rely on U.S. leaders to prioritize Mexico’s stability above other interests, he added, “Trump just doesn’t care.”

The post A U.S.-Mexico Impasse Will Test How Far the Trump Administration Will Go to Fight Drug Trade appeared first on ProPublica.

When Rafael Enrique Gámez Salas crossed the Mexican border in late 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents first thought he was like hundreds of thousands of other Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s devastating economic and political crises.

But today the 40-year-old sits in a federal jail in Los Angeles awaiting extradition to Chile, where prosecutors accuse him of being a boss of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan street gang. Chilean authorities say Gámez organized a kidnapping that resulted in the killing of an exiled Venezuelan dissident there. Even more troubling, they believe he acted at the behest of Venezuela’s authoritarian government.

And for the past six months, the Trump administration has been working directly with the powerful Venezuelan official under investigation for allegedly ordering the crime: Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

The unlikely alliance with Cabello began in January, when U.S. special operations forces swooped into Caracas, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. While critics called the operation a blatant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, the Trump administration declared it was restoring law and order in a strife-torn region and began to restructure Venezuela’s ruined economy and exert control over its massive oil industry.

Yet the Trump administration has left Cabello in place — despite longtime U.S. accusations that he has led the repression of political opponents and enriched himself in illicit partnerships with criminal groups. Cabello has had a seat at the table during visits to Caracas by senior U.S. officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for negotiations over issues such as Venezuela’s lucrative mining sector. Before Maduro’s capture, U.S. authorities had charged Cabello and a top leader of Tren de Aragua in the same drug trafficking indictment as Maduro and offered a $25 million reward for him.

Cabello and other U.S.-backed Venezuelan leaders have come under fire in recent days for their response to the devastating earthquakes on June 24 that killed more than 3,600 people, injured more than 16,000 and left thousands more missing. In an internationally televised confrontation, Cabello exchanged tense words with members of a U.S. search-and-rescue team en route to aid victims in a heavily damaged area. Critics of the sluggish Venezuelan response to the disaster, including U.S. congressional representatives in Miami, accused Cabello of interfering with rescue operations and repeated their calls for his arrest on the pending U.S. charges. But a State Department spokesperson downplayed the incident as “an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

Early this week, Cabello participated in a meeting with Gen. Francis Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, which leads U.S. military operations in Latin America. Donovan visited Venezuela to discuss relief operations, according to press reports and Venezuelan officials.

In Chile, authorities are investigating Cabello as the alleged mastermind behind the killing of a former Venezuelan military officer, Lt. Ronald Ojeda, who had unsuccessfully attempted an uprising against Maduro. Chile’s attorney general and other senior officials have said that Cabello became an investigative target based on testimony of captured suspects.

The 32-year-old Ojeda had been granted asylum in Chile. Authorities say they suspect that Cabello paid Tren de Aragua’s top leadership and that they, in turn, commissioned gang members in Chile, led by Gámez, to kidnap the former soldier. Chilean prosecutors believe Ojeda died while his captors were torturing him to get information about the Venezuelan political opposition.

After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials asserted that the killing in Chile demonstrated Tren de Aragua’s ties to the highest levels of the Venezuelan government and the gang’s reach across the Americas. The president designated the gang as a terrorist group and said Maduro had sent it to invade the United States, although some law enforcement officials say the administration exaggerated the threat to justify mass deportations.

As Chile seeks the return of Gámez and prosecutors prepare to bring 20 suspects to trial, the Trump administration has been silent on the alleged role of the regime and Cabello in Ojeda’s death. U.S officials have aided Chilean counterparts with the extradition process, but they have not used the case to press Venezuelan authorities to oust, arrest or hand over Cabello, current and former U.S. officials said.

Asked at a press conference in May if the U.S. still considers Cabello a narcoterrorist, Rubio gave a brief answer. “The policy of the United States on that topic has not changed, and when it changes we will let you know,” he said.

Todd Robinson, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served as ambassador in Caracas, said Cabello’s continuing power raises questions about whether the stated U.S. commitments to advancing the rule of law in the hemisphere are real or a cover for its interests in exploiting Venezuela’s oil.

“It’s just a horrible, horrible idea to leave him in place,” said Robinson, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2018 after criticizing human rights abuses. “I don’t know what their aim is in doing that, unless it really is about oil, not democratic transition.”

Another retired U.S. diplomat, Brian Naranjo, who served three tours in Venezuela, said the administration seems more interested in appeasing corrupt actors than uprooting them. In addition to controlling the security forces as minister of the interior and justice, Cabello maintains alliances with guerrillas in neighboring Colombia and other criminal groups that make him a danger to political stability, according to Naranjo, other officials, dissidents, and U.S. and Chilean court documents. As a result, critics say, Washington sees Cabello as a necessary evil.

“As long as he figures out a way to keep handing over things the Trump administration wants, I think he endures,” Naranjo said.

In response to a list of questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment on any ongoing investigations. The White House referred questions to the Department of Justice. The State Department and Venezuelan government officials did not respond to requests for comment. 

Although Cabello could not be reached for comment, he has publicly denied allegations of involvement in the killing of Ojeda. Responding on his television show in 2024, he said: “Venezuela has nothing to do with this kidnapping. Nothing. Resolve your problems there, in Chile.”

As for Gámez, ProPublica found no information indicating that the Venezuelan ex-convict had been charged with a violent offense during the nearly two years he lived in the United States. Interviewed by telephone and email from the federal jail in Los Angeles, he said he worked hard at a restaurant and as a deliveryman to support his family in Utah. He denied any role in Ojeda’s death or being a member of Tren de Aragua. He also said he has no connections to Cabello.

Gámez said that, like the dissident whose kidnapping he’s accused of organizing, he left Venezuela in part because he was an opponent of the former regime. He said the governments of Chile and the United States are making him a scapegoat.

“If only I was everything they say I am,” he said. “Obviously any leader boss has money to burn and I don’t have a penny to my name.”

Hundreds of pages of Chilean and U.S. court records paint a much darker portrait of his activities and detail his alleged role in the Ojeda case and other crimes. Interviews with current and former officials from the United States, Chile, Venezuela and Spain; Ojeda’s friends and family; Gámez; and others, along with the court records, provide one of the fullest accounts of the case.

The Crime

On Feb. 21, 2024, a stolen Nissan sedan arrived at an apartment tower in Santiago, the capital of Chile, one of the safest and most prosperous nations in Latin America. It was 3:05 a.m.

Four masked men disguised as Chilean police officers got out. On the 14th floor, three of them broke into Ojeda’s apartment, handcuffed him in front of his terrified wife and son, and dragged him out, according to court documents and security video. He was barefoot and wearing only underpants.

The kidnappers rushed Ojeda to a slum hideout, where they tortured him to death, court documents say. Then they buried his partially dismembered remains in a suitcase beneath a newly laid cement floor, documents say.

Weeks earlier, the Maduro regime had publicly declared Ojeda a traitor.

In 2017, Ojeda and other young dissident officers had been jailed and tortured in Venezuela. Ojeda alleged in a posthumously published memoir that his ordeal had been ordered by Cabello.

Ojeda took refuge in Chile. But in late 2023, he went to Colombia’s border with Venezuela to try to instigate a military rebellion and narrowly escaped capture. During his final days, Ojeda feared the regime was coming for him, according to his friends and family.

“Ronald and his wife had thought about what would happen if there was a knock on the door,” said his family’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Manríquez. “They had even rehearsed for it. They had agreed to protect their son at all costs by not offering any resistance.”

A tip led Chilean police to Ojeda’s buried remains nine days after his abduction. Fingerprints recovered from the abandoned Nissan had already been traced to a member of Tren de Aragua, authorities say.

In addition to the evidence of the gang’s involvement, Chilean investigators quickly came to suspect a political crime orchestrated by the Maduro regime, which had openly declared the victim an enemy of the state.

“Ojeda had already escaped from them at least once before,” said Héctor Barros, the chief prosecutor in the case. “The regime took that personally. He was a high-priority target.”

Delivering for DoorDash

Before his odyssey across the Americas, Gámez grew up in the Caribbean port city of Maracaibo, Venezuela.

After high school, he fell into petty crime and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison for robbery and other charges in a home invasion, according to Venezuelan court records and his own account.

Nonetheless, there is no indication that he became a member of Tren de Aragua until years later, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. It is not clear when and how he joined the gang, Chilean investigators say.

About a decade ago, Gámez left Venezuela as part of what has become the largest mass exodus in the hemisphere. Maduro had been elected after the death of populist President Hugo Chávez. In 2014, the price of oil had plummeted, causing inflation, unemployment and food shortages. In addition to economic necessity, Gámez said he migrated because he belonged to a political party that opposed the increasingly repressive regime.

Gámez spent years in Chile, where he worked in bread and clothing factories and as a barber. There are no indications that he had a criminal record during that period, according to interviews and court documents.

In 2021, Gámez and his family joined a record number of immigrants who headed north to the United States during the Biden administration. They surrendered to U.S. border agents in Arizona and were released pending the outcome of immigration proceedings.

“All the people who came here said there was more work and better quality of life,” Gámez said. “I also thought about the future of my children and their security because I thought this was a safe country.”

The family settled in Salt Lake City. Gámez said he found jobs in a restaurant kitchen and delivering for DoorDash, sometimes working as many as 15 hours a day.

“The whole time I was here I worked,” he said. “I never had a problem.”

Until December 2022, when a Texas state trooper patrolling near the Mexican border pulled him over for driving with expired plates and discovered that his Venezuelan passengers were undocumented. Gámez admitted that he had agreed to take the family of three to Utah, court records say. He told ProPublica he was doing a favor for a friend who is related to the family. But state prosecutors charged him with smuggling of persons and smuggling of a minor, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him back to Venezuela in August 2023.

It’s from that period when Chilean police say they recovered an early clue about Gámez’s links to Tren de Aragua. The Venezuelan government sent some 11,000 troops to Aragua state to take back control of the notorious Tocorón prison, the center of operations of Tren de Aragua. Gang bosses had enjoyed surreal luxuries inside — a zoo, a discotheque, a cockfight arena — while directing rackets that had spread across the hemisphere as Tren de Aragua took control of smuggling routes and victimized Venezuelan immigrants.

Although the government declared victory, critics said the authorities had tipped off the top gang bosses, including Hector Rusthenford “Niño” Guerrero, who managed to flee the raid.

Gámez was not involved, and Chilean authorities believe he had already left Venezuela en route back to Chile. But investigators say their later search of his communications found a post after the raid in which he appeared to celebrate Guerrero’s escape.

“They toppled the castle, but not the king,” read his WhatsApp status, according to court documents. “So the game continues.”

Authorities said the message suggests that Gámez may have had contact with the gang during his first stay in Chile or in Utah.

Citing communications and witness testimony, investigators say he was back in Chile about two months after the raid on the prison. The Venezuelan gang rapidly put him in charge of its offshoot in Santiago, called the Pirates of Aragua, according to court documents and interviews.

“There is no way he moves up that quickly when he returns to Chile unless he’s already connected,” said a former U.S. federal law enforcement official.

In early 2024, Chilean investigators say they started hearing chatter about a new gang boss, known as el Turko, who was overseeing a wave of extortion and kidnappings of immigrants.

Angered by public attention to the Ojeda case, senior Tren de Aragua leaders ordered the kidnappers to leave Chile, according to court documents and interviews. Investigators say Gámez also left, spending time in Peru and Colombia as he used his phone to oversee crimes by members of the crew still in Santiago, according to court documents and interviews.

Six weeks after Ojeda’s killing, Gámez was communicating by text with them when they attempted a carjacking that led to a gunfight with an off-duty Chilean police officer, court documents say. The officer and one of the suspected gang members were killed. Recovered text exchanges reveal that an agitated Gámez gave real-time instructions to the accused killers as they fled the scene, according to court records and interviews.

“The clothes you had,” he wrote, according to court records. “Dump them…right away the shoes…everything.”

Police arrested three suspects for killing the police officer and found data in their phones that identified Gámez as el Turko, according to documents. It included a trove of telltale communications in which Gámez, acting on instructions from senior gang bosses outside Chile, allegedly directed the plot to kidnap Ojeda, according to interviews and court documents.

“The order comes from above and they are putting their trust in me,” Gámez told his crew in a text, according to court documents.

By mid-2024, the police knew who they were looking for. But they didn’t know where he was.

End of an Odyssey

On Dec. 30, 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested Gámez after he crossed near Brownsville, Texas.

He was carrying a Colombian passport with an alias to hide his previous deportation and hoping to rejoin his wife and children in Utah, according to officials and his account. But fingerprint checks revealed his true identity.

Gámez pleaded guilty to a charge of being illegally in the country after deportation and received a sentence of 13 months in prison. He also pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in the 2022 smuggling case and was sentenced to 120 days, according to court records.

In Chile, the sprawling investigation had gathered momentum. Chilean police tracked down other fugitives abroad with the aid of U.S. and Latin American law enforcement agencies. And a number of witnesses, including accused kidnappers, implicated Gámez and the Venezuelan regime, court documents show. Three of them pointed the finger at Cabello, according to sources close to the case.

“Diosdado Cabello, who is a Venezuelan politician, gave the instruction to do the kidnapping,” said an admitted kidnapper. Cabello allegedly paid Guerrero, the top boss of Tren de Aragua, according to that testimony.

Another alleged gang member testified that one of Ojeda’s kidnappers told him the crime was “ordered by the Government of Venezuela, planned by the leaders of Tren de Aragua, and executed by the members of the gang who were in Chile,” court documents say.

“The money was paid by the government,” the alleged gang member said.

So far, authorities said they do not have other evidence that directly connects Cabello to the crime — like communications between the Venezuelan leader and gang bosses. But last year, Chile took the extraordinary step of going to the International Criminal Court to accuse the Maduro regime of being involved in Ojeda’s death. That case is in the preliminary investigation stage as part of the court’s probe of human rights abuses in Venezuela.

Gabriel Boric, who was Chile’s president at the time, said, “Dictatorships and authoritarian leaders cross borders to impose fear when they think they can do it with impunity.”

The Venezuelan government responded to Chile’s charges with a statement that the case “doesn’t just lack a legal basis, but is sustained by a vicious hate towards Venezuela, showing the desperation to please the agendas ordered by the United States.”

The U.S. agenda in Venezuela has come under increasing scrutiny. Venezuela’s opposition, which has long counted on the United States for support, continues to call for Cabello’s ouster and democratic reforms. But an unspoken bargain between Cabello and the Trump administration prevails, according to dissidents and current and former U.S. officials. The administration exploits the leverage of the U.S. indictment to ensure Cabello’s cooperation, while Cabello shields himself with his power to upend Venezuela’s stability, critics said.

Naranjo, the former diplomat, said Cabello’s willingness to accommodate Washington suggests that he is “going to be around far longer than anybody wants. He’s always demonstrated his ability to react and adapt, operationally and tactically, to the circumstances in front of him.”

In a recent and dramatic sign of the evolving partnership with the United States, Trump announced June 13 that a U.S. missile strike had killed Guerrero, Tren de Aragua’s leader, in Venezuela’s lawless mining region. Trump said the strike had been “coordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we are working very well.” 

Guerrero’s death will make it more difficult for Chilean investigators to pursue the allegations that Cabello hired the gang to target Ojeda, former officials said. But Ojeda’s family and other dissidents hope that the trial in Santiago will show that the Venezuelan regime, like other authoritarian governments, enlisted organized crime to send a terroristic message to its foes at home and abroad.

“Diosdado Cabello is the person we want punished,” said Javier Ojeda, the victim’s brother.

Chilean authorities say Gámez and other suspected gang chiefs who have been captured could provide further evidence about the alleged links to Cabello. Gámez has consented to extradition, according to court documents, but the process could still take weeks. Gámez told ProPublica he decided to return voluntarily to Chile because he wants to fight the charges against him in the Chilean courts. 

Gámez questioned the credibility of witnesses against him, saying one of the admitted gang members “is looking for an escape … by any means, like lying and inventing things.” He didn’t respond to some questions about the voluminous court file against him, including his alleged communications.

Gámez asserted that he’s being set up as a fall guy for political reasons. Both the Chilean and U.S. governments, he said, have exploited the Ojeda case in their persecution of Venezuelans.

Chilean authorities have arrested many Venezuelans “to use that as a strategy so they leave Chile,” he said. “The same as the president here did…everyone they caught they connected to Tren de Aragua to arrest them and throw them out of the country.”

The post He’s Suspected of Hiring a Venezuelan Gang for a Political Killing. Trump Officials Still Work With Him. appeared first on ProPublica.

Two members of Congress have called on federal officials to address what they described as “a growing and preventable public health crisis” of families refusing the long-standard vitamin K shot for their newborns, which has led to some of those babies suffering uncontrollable bleeding and even dying. 

“We write to urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to take immediate action,” two Democrats, Rep. Kim Schrier, from Washington, and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, from Maryland, wrote in a letter last week to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is acting as director of the CDC. 

The letter followed a ProPublica investigation that found babies were dying after families refused the vitamin K shot, a critical and inexpensive injection given at birth to help the blood clot, and that federal and state agencies were not tracking vital data. 

“Recent reporting from ProPublica has highlighted a major problem: the federal government does not currently track vitamin K shot refusal, vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or the preventable deaths related to vitamin K deficiency,” Schrier and Alsobrooks wrote in the letter. 

The vitamin K shot has been routine in the U.S. since the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended it for all newborns in 1961, but some families in recent years have declined the shot — which is not a vaccine — amid a rising mistrust of medical institutions and false information online. 

No federal or state agencies track refusal rates or subsequent bleeding.

“It was ProPublica’s reporting that gave us this additional information and led to us writing this important letter, and asking, of course, that CDC take action,” Alsobrooks said in an interview. 

She called on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to publicly voice his support for the shot. He has previously refused to do so and instead stated that he has never said anything about the injection.

“There are so many who are hanging on the word and advice of a person in his position,” said Alsobrooks, who has called for Kennedy’s resignation. “I think he has a moral obligation to state in clear and no uncertain terms that this is safe and effective, and that families should be giving this shot to their babies.”

An HHS spokesperson, reiterating a previous comment, said that the CDC recommends that parents allow newborns to get the vitamin K shot within six hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She also said that uptake of the shot has declined in recent years “as public trust in health care institutions has fallen, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates and inconsistent messaging during the Biden administration.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics applauded the lawmakers and ProPublica for bringing attention to the issue, which Dr. Andrew Racine, AAP’s president, said the organization has been concerned about for some time. 

One function of government, he said, is to provide clinicians and the public with data that will allow them to make informed decisions. If a sick baby comes into a hospital, doctors should know if they are in an area with a high vitamin K refusal rate so they can quickly diagnose and treat them. He likened it to tracking measles cases. 

“We depend upon the CDC to let us know about that,” Racine said. “And this is essentially a medical condition that is affecting newborn babies that pediatricians or people who look after children need to be aware of.”

He said, too, that HHS leadership should be vocal in their support for the shot and in communicating what could happen if a baby who did not receive the shot starts bleeding. 

“It’s not simply to track it,” Racine said. “It’s to message it.”

Research shows babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can lead to bleeding in the brain. According to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.

A national study of more than 5 million births found a rise in the rate of babies not receiving vitamin K at birth, which topped 5% in 2024. Some hospitals have told ProPublica that their refusal rates have more than doubled in recent years.

Schrier and Alsobrooks wrote in their letter that historically there wasn’t a need for robust monitoring systems to track cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding. But now, without a solid understanding of the scope, experts can’t determine the extent of the problem or develop a public health campaign. The CDC, they wrote, has the tools needed to understand and address the crisis and should use them.

“I believe that the best way to set the record straight for parents is to be able to provide modern-day, accurate information,” Schrier said. “Once you stop doing these things that are preventative, cases rise.”

The post Lawmakers Call for CDC to Track Vitamin K Shot Refusals, Cite ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

President Donald Trump has pushed out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the bipartisan agency in limbo as he rushes to remake how elections are run before this year’s midterms.

Trump fired Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks, the Democrats on the commission, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ProPublica, which was the first to report the actions on its social media accounts. Christy McCormick, the Republican, was allowed to resign, the sources said.

The commission’s unprecedented dismantling alarmed voter advocacy groups and Democratic state election officials, who called the move “reckless and irresponsible.”

“The EAC plays a critical role in supporting state and local election officials,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement, “and it will again fall on Secretaries of State and other election administrators to fill the gap.”

A White House official wouldn’t confirm the specific actions taken but said in a statement to ProPublica that the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”

“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the official said.

Hicks and McCormick did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Hovland, who had been a commissioner since 2019, said in an interview that it was a privilege to serve in the role, and he is hopeful that staff will continue the good work being done at the agency.

In response to the White House’s comments, he said the commission had been working in a bipartisan way “to find constructive solutions to support election officials in maintaining the security and integrity of our elections.”

Hovland was in Missouri on Thursday visiting a local election office and an early voting location when he got an email from the White House telling him that he had been fired. He was visiting the office to learn about new measures put in place to protect election workers.

He said he is proud of the new resources the EAC has created for election workers recently, such as social media templates to communicate with voters and decks of cards that help train workers on how to respond to Election Day scenarios.

The commission was established in 2003 to set standards for state voting systems and to provide funding for upgrades.

Its four-member board is designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, all nominated by the president at the recommendation of congressional leadership and confirmed by the Senate. The fourth commissioner, Don Palmer, a Republican, resigned in April. By dismissing the commission’s remaining members, Trump can try to put forward replacements who may be more amenable to his demands.

In March 2025, Trump issued a sweeping executive order that directed the EAC to change the national voter registration form — which serves as the template for the forms in each state — to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Currently, voters in almost all states attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, but they are not required to provide proof.

The Trump-aligned law firm America First Legal had petitioned the EAC to change the form. The EAC posted a notice seeking comments, receiving hundreds of thousands of them in response, but had not yet held a vote.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that advocates on election issues, said the departures are a “significant loss for one of the federal government’s few institutions explicitly designed around bipartisan governance.”

The commission has been plagued by partisan infighting and ineffectiveness, as well as chronic vacancies and a lack of funding. It’s made some progress in recent years, however, passing new standards for voting machines and creating new resources and recommendations for election officials. Often, the commission’s decisions were unanimous despite its partisan split.

The post Trump Pushes Out Remaining Members of Bipartisan Election Commission Ahead of Midterms appeared first on ProPublica.

New York makes an unusual promise to its residents: Its constitution says the state must provide “aid, care and support for the needy.”

But for at least the fourth time in almost 40 years, the state is being sued for failing to live up to this commitment by putting impoverished families at risk of homelessness.

A new lawsuit filed last month argues New York is failing for the same reason it has in the past: The welfare allowance it provides for housing, known as a shelter allowance, doesn’t come close to the cost of the state’s rents, which are among the highest in the country. The Legal Aid Society and Empire Justice Center, both nonprofits, are demanding that the state increase the allowance and provide enough financial assistance to keep families and individuals housed.

“I don’t want to sleep in the street. I don’t want to go to the shelter,” said 54-year-old Minerva Pacumio, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who is facing eviction. “I don’t want to lose everything.”

New York’s shelter allowance doesn’t cover rent for modest private housing anywhere in the state, according to the lawsuit and an independent analysis performed by New York Focus and ProPublica. The state hasn’t raised the monthly allowance for families with children since 2003 — when it was set at $450 for a family of four in New York City. And the amount has barely budged for adult-only households since 1988.

Pacumio receives a $250 monthly allowance to cover the one-bedroom apartment she rents in Queens for $1,900. She lives with her two adult daughters, one of whom is disabled; Pacumio handles her care herself five days out of the week. The other, Pacumio said, has mental health issues and has been unable to find work.

Pacumio said she owes thousands in back rent.

“When you don’t change your shelter allowance amounts for 40 years for single people and 20 years for families, I think there’s a reasonable argument that could be made that you’re not even really trying to meet your constitutional obligations to provide aid and care to the needy in New York State,” said Pavita Krishnaswamy, a supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Civil Practice Law Reform Unit.

The lack of aid pushes people toward an emergency shelter system that cannot meet the demand of rising homelessness: New York Focus and ProPublica last year found that nearly half of the state’s unhoused families and individuals outside of New York City are placed in hotels with minimal support to help them return to permanent housing. The state regularly pays more to put someone up in a hotel than it would have cost to cover rent for modest housing, the news organizations found.

The Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the agency responsible for setting shelter allowances, has responded to past calls for an allowance increase by saying the Legislature would have to allocate more funding in the state budget. The budget is already projected to run multibillion-dollar deficits in coming years.

Over the past several legislative sessions, state lawmakers sponsored bills that would have pinned the allowance to fair market rent, the federal government’s estimate of how much it costs to rent modest private housing. Those bills have repeatedly failed, and their sponsors say little will change without the governor’s backing.

“The governor controls — any governor of New York state controls — the budget process. We can’t just fund things that the governor would not agree to,” said Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat who chairs the housing committee and repeatedly sponsored the failed legislation in the state Assembly.

The office of Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to written questions. An Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance spokesperson did not respond to questions from New York Focus and ProPublica about whether the agency had ever requested additional funding for shelter allowances. He declined to comment for this story, citing the pending litigation.

In past litigation, the state has argued that the constitution doesn’t command the state to meet all of poor families’ needs.

A “Kafka-esque Situation”

For Legal Aid, this is familiar ground. This is at least the fourth lawsuit it has filed against the state accusing New York of failing to provide enough welfare assistance for rent. In the late ’80s, the nonprofit filed a landmark case on behalf of Barbara Jiggetts, a single mother of three who was renting an apartment in Queens. Jiggetts was receiving $270 a month to help cover $381 in rent — about 70% of what she owed each month. Legal Aid argued that the state was shirking its obligation to keep her and her children safely housed.

In the Jiggetts case, the court ordered the state to temporarily cover rent for New York City families with children facing eviction until the establishment of “a lawful” shelter allowance that would keep them housed together.

But the state waited until 2003 to raise the shelter allowance, blowing past the court’s original deadline by five years.

The state has also created a permanent supplement to fill the gap between the allowance and rent. But the supplement offered in the city is only available to families with children. So, when Pacumio’s youngest turned 18, she lost the supplement, which constituted the majority of her housing assistance. Outside New York City, that supplement is optional, and just 15 of 57 counties choose to offer it to families with children, according to the Empire Justice Center.

The new lawsuit seeks either an increase in the shelter allowance or a mandatory expansion of the supplement statewide, regardless of household composition — or both.

Since 2003, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has reviewed the allowance four times — every five years, as required. During its last review in 2023, more than 100 comments poured in, many imploring the agency to increase the benefit. Some shared personal stories from unhoused New Yorkers who said the shelter allowances weren’t enough to prevent homelessness, according to the state register.

Pleas also came from the counties themselves. Michael Iapoce, the social services commissioner for Ulster County, wrote at the time that there wasn’t a single habitable apartment available for rent that would be covered by the shelter allowance.

“The shelter allowance is totally irrational and arbitrary,” he said. “There is no reasoned justification to keep the shelter allowance and supplements so low.” His comments on the regulations were attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit.

As it stands, people poor enough to qualify for public assistance and looking for a place to rent find themselves in a “cruel Dickensian or Kafka-esque situation,” said Susan Antos, the managing attorney for public benefits at Empire Justice Center. The shelter allowance is too low to allow them to afford even a modest place, but under the rules, recipients may have their benefits cut if they stop looking.

State Sen. Brian Kavanagh, the Democratic chair of the Senate’s housing committee, said it’s hard to tease out how much it would cost to increase the shelter allowance because of how public assistance caseloads may change over time. As of June 2025, the most recent month for which figures are available, nearly three-quarters of a million people were receiving public assistance.

Kimberly Maldonado is one of the recipients. She has lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn since she was 22. Now 55 and living alone, she said that she was forced to stop working in June of last year because of ongoing health issues and relies on her daughter to cover her rent. Maldonado receives $215 a month to help cover $1,114 in rent, doesn’t qualify for a state supplement because she doesn’t have minor children, and receives no other financial assistance for housing from the state.

Maldonado, a plaintiff in the new lawsuit, told New York Focus and ProPublica she was afraid that the state would never provide the help financially desperate New Yorkers need.

“As long as people are quiet and we don’t try to speak up and get help and get them to change the laws, the rules, or whatever it may be, we’re never going to get help, we’re never going to get nothing changed.”

The post New York Hasn’t Raised Housing Allowances for Needy Residents in Decades. That’s Unconstitutional, a Lawsuit Says. appeared first on ProPublica.

The government agency that collects property taxes in Puerto Rico inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of approximately 1 million people, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and ProPublica learned.

It was the latest cybersecurity lapse for the Puerto Rico government, which in the past three years has seen technology breaches interrupt government services, take websites offline and lead to citizens’ personal information being published on the dark web.

CPI and ProPublica became aware of the vulnerability related to the Municipal Revenue Collection Center’s interactive property map, known as the Catastro Digital, and notified the agency in mid-June.

The online tool provides information, such as size, boundaries, tax assessment, sale price and owner’s name, for every registered property on the island.

While a simple search of the map wouldn’t reveal sensitive information, anyone who understands how websites request data could download unprotected personal information such as Social Security numbers without a username or password.

The news organizations were able to verify the security hole and provided the agency, known by its Spanish initials, CRIM, with a detailed description of the issue that included the specific server and folders that contained the compromised data.

Despite the notification, CRIM has repeatedly denied there were any problems with its system.

“Following a review of the Catastro Digital platform, it was determined that there was NO breach of confidential personal taxpayer information, as the Catastro Digital does NOT contain or display the type of information alluded to,” CRIM Executive Director Javier García Cintrón said.

But a few days after CPI and ProPublica contacted CRIM, the news organizations were able to see that the security holes had been patched.

García denied that, saying there was no need to fix any problem. A Puerto Rico law requires any entity, including government agencies, to promptly notify users if their personal information has been breached. But García said the agency would not reach out to users to tell them that their Social Security numbers were potentially exposed, as “no protected information was at risk.”

CRIM also did not notify the Puerto Rico Innovation & Technology Service, known as PRITS, which oversees all government information technology systems. The government’s cybersecurity protocol requires informing PRITS of “any suspected security incident.”

A PRITS spokesperson declined to answer questions and said they had to be submitted under Puerto Rico’s public information law, which is meant to allow citizens to get government records and not to answer press questions.

So far this year, more than 2 million attempted cyberattacks have been recorded within the Puerto Rico government, PRITS data shows. Half of these were deemed critical incidents, which involve “severe impact on critical operations, the compromise of sensitive data, or an imminent threat to agency security or government data,” according to the agency.

In March, citizens saw their driver’s license and registration appointments postponed after an attempted cyberattack on Transportation Department systems. Last year, Puerto Rico residents could not verify their criminal record status, which they need for employment, for almost a week because of an “unauthorized access” to the local Justice Department’s criminal records database. In 2023, Puerto Rico water utility clients and employees saw their personal information published on the dark web after a ransomware attack.

An increase in attacks prompted Puerto Rico lawmakers in 2024 to approve a comprehensive cybersecurity law, Act 40, which mandated all government agencies implement minimum cybersecurity standards and principles. It also established penalties for noncompliance and required all government agencies to conduct a risk assessment at least once annually.

But three cybersecurity experts said agencies have failed to fully implement the security standards set out under the law, even as attacks become more frequent and sophisticated. Instead of periodically assessing and tackling vulnerabilities that prevent these attacks, agencies are reactive, they said.

A Puerto Rico Inspector General Office report released late last year found deficiencies across 90 local government agencies, with 60% of them failing to conduct vulnerability assessments of their IT systems.

The government would be in “much better shape” if it focused on employee training and implemented tools like multifactor authentication on the front end, said Carlos Pérez, a cybersecurity expert in Puerto Rico who is director of security intelligence at TrustedSec, a company that consults with governments and private companies.

“We are addressing the symptom but not the disease,” he said.

In most cases, the cybersecurity law falls short of requiring unified standards across the government, said a former government IT employee, who asked not be named because he feared professional repercussions. That lack of a single set of standards has allowed agencies to decide on their own how they protect personal data.

García explained that, as part of CRIM’s security measures, the agency uses passwords, usernames and text messages to validate identity. He denied that anyone could access the Catastro Digital database without a password except to conduct individual searches through the public website.

The ability to access Social Security numbers through CRIM’s property map raises concerns given the proliferation of private companies that sell Puerto Rico real estate information, obtained from public databases such as Catastro Digital. Any of those companies could have accessed the data, including personal information.

At least three property listings companies contacted by CPI and ProPublica said they were not aware of any vulnerability and did not access the sensitive data.

The post A Puerto Rico Government Agency Exposed 1 Million Social Security Numbers appeared first on ProPublica.

The senior legal counsel to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the principal military adviser to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — is stepping down nearly a year before his term is over, the latest in an exodus of the military’s top leaders and lawyers over the last 18 months. 

Brig. Gen. Eric Widmar told ProPublica he did not take his decision to retire lightly and that he did so “for personal reasons.” 

“Earlier this year, my wife and I reflected on the demands of this role, which have required me to live apart from my wife for the past two years and created additional challenges for me and my family,” Widmar said in an emailed statement. “After careful consideration, I decided it was time to place my family at the center of my life and focus on our next chapter together.”

Widmar’s departure follows those of Gen. Chris “C.D.” Donahue, head of Army forces in Europe and Africa, earlier this month, about halfway through the typical term; Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April, about a year and a half short of the customary four-year term; and Admiral Alvin Holsey, who retired with two years remaining in his term late last year as the leader of Southern Command, which is overseeing the controversial drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean. Widmar’s exit also follows Hegseth’s firings of top lawyers for the Army, Air Force and Navy last year. 

“A person in that position is a rising star,” said one senior ranking former judge advocate, a military attorney, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisal. “He’s certainly high-ranking in the legal community and well-thought-of and trusted. It’s a pretty important job.”

Military experts and current and former senior ranking military officials called Widmar’s early retirement from such a vaunted post a marked departure from military precedent and said it was especially concerning as part of a pattern of well-respected senior leadership exiting under Hegseth with little explanation. Uniformed military leadership, particularly legal advisers, generally remain in place across administrations to preserve the military’s commitment to nonpartisan professionalism. 

“That is centuries of high-priced talent that are being cashiered without any explanation for why their service was untenable,” said Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It creates a command climate in which people are hesitant to take initiative. And that’s how countries lose wars.” 

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, said in a statement that Widmar “is deeply respected and admired by all” and thanked him for his “remarkable” service. “We will miss his legal counsel, incredible expertise and experience, and his understanding of our responsibility to always speak truth to power.” 

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment from Hegseth.

Experts on military personnel matters as well as current and former senior ranking officers say the departures raise serious questions that Congress ought to be asking of all key leaders leaving in the current environment. 

“What is striking is how far Congress has let Hegseth go in shaping the force without demanding a clear explanation of what he’s doing,” said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who has long taught senior ranking officers the importance of not using retirement or resignation to stir public controversy.   

A West Point graduate who advised operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Widmar departs after more than 28 years in the service. Prior to his most recent role, he was staff judge advocate for Central Command in support of U.S. interests across the Middle East and Asia. 

The Senate confirmed Widmar as legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2024. In an announcement at the time, the Army’s then-top lawyer, Lt. Gen. Joseph Berger III, praised his “strategic vision and moral courage.” 

Berger has since been fired by Hegseth.

The post Top Legal Adviser to Joint Chiefs Is Stepping Down Nearly a Year Before Completing Term appeared first on ProPublica.

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. But the Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. 

To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan.

Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments.

“What they have done is lower the standard for everything,” said Ali Khawar, a former senior official at the Department of Labor, which is charged with enforcing the federal law that governs retirement savings.

Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by.

When the 401(k) replaced pensions as the main way Americans fund their retirement, the investment risk shifted from employers to employees. Instead of the promise of a monthly check, the 401(k) participant gets a tax-sheltered account, usually with an employer matching their contributions, but with no guarantees of how that nest egg will grow. Traces of the old system remain, however. Employers are responsible for overseeing the company’s plan. They choose all the financial service providers and have the final say on what investment options are available to employees. But it’s typically workers who pay for those services out of their 401(k) savings. And it’s workers who suffer from diminished savings if the plan has poor options.

There are plenty of pitfalls for 401(k) savers. The “recordkeepers” that administer 401(k)s may attempt to steer workers to their own in-house funds, whether they are the best options or not. They may sell advisory services of questionable value. And then there are the investment fees, which are the main cost to participants. These are charged as a percentage of each investment. Roughly, a 1% fee for a $10,000 investment would result in a $100 yearly charge. Recordkeepers — companies like Fidelity, Principal, Vanguard and Empower —  and other service providers often receive a cut of these fees. This means that they have the incentive to recommend more-expensive options. 

If employers are lax in their oversight, workers might find themselves overpaying to invest in funds that underperform. Even modest differences in fees or performance can, when compounded over time, make a huge difference in how much someone is able to save for retirement, potentially tens of thousands of dollars at the end of someone’s career. By the Labor Department’s own math, 1% in additional fees can shrink someone’s nest egg at retirement by 28%.

When overseeing retirement accounts, employers have a fiduciary duty to make prudent decisions and put their workers’ interests first. If they allow financial firms to fleece plan participants, they can be held responsible under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, a pension-era law that now governs 401(k)s.

Over the last 15 years, employees have increasingly sued large employers over unnecessarily high fees or inferior investment options. Companies like UnitedHealth, Boeing, Verizon and General Electric, without admitting wrongdoing, chose to settle suits for tens of millions. Aronowitz has called the increased litigation a “con game” that misleads judges, argued that such cases should go before a specialized court and labeled the whole enterprise a “scam.” 

Over 90 of these class-action lawsuits against large employers were filed in 2025. To Aronowitz, that’s a big number — his former firm tracked and publicized the rise of these suits as part of its business underwriting liability coverage to employers — but it’s a tiny fraction of the more than 700,000 401(k) plans nationwide. 

ERISA says nothing about which types of investments are prudent; it sets a standard of care, not a list of approved options. It’s up to employers to use their judgment, and employers have generally been wary of allowing cryptocurrency, private equity or hedge funds onto their plans because they are more complex than the usual stocks and bonds, often untested and much more expensive. Nevertheless, Trump issued an executive order last year blaming the limited uptake on “regulatory overreach” and “lawsuits filed by opportunistic trial lawyers” and calling for new rules. 

Aronowitz, as head of the Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Department of Labor office that enforces ERISA, is responsible for following through. His most significant move is a rule to make it far harder for workers to sue. The proposal, which will likely be finalized later this year, outlines a set of factors for employers to consider before approving investments. Just following this process would entitle employers’ decisions to “significant deference” from the courts — a “safe harbor,” or legal shield, meant to guard those decisions from challenge. A company could load a plan with a high-fee private equity fund and be protected from suit as long as it showed it had followed the rule and considered the fees.

To opponents of the change, like Khawar, who was second-in-command of EBSA under President Joe Biden, this is a mere “check-the-box approach,” akin to a teacher awarding a math student an automatic A — even if the answer is wrong — because the student showed their work.

Aronowitz has bristled at this sort of criticism. “Absolutely not,” he said in April at an industry event. “Read the proposed rule. We require a rigorous, objective, thorough and analytical fiduciary process that must be documented.” 

At the same time, Aronowitz is also pulling back on policing plans’ investment choices. In April, EBSA released a bulletin updating its enforcement priorities. In addition to announcing that agency staff must now get Aronowitz’s sign-off before any major enforcement action, it set a new guideline for investigators. “EBSA must avoid cases that unfairly second-guess process-based fiduciary judgments,” the bulletin said, meaning investigators should not challenge an employer’s investment choices if the employer can show it followed the proper steps, regardless of the outcome for workers. 

Tim Hauser, a 34-year-veteran of EBSA who was the highest-ranking career staffer there before retiring last year, said such ideas undermine the heart of ERISA. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, EBSA was “dedicated to protecting plan participants,” he said, but that has changed under Aronowitz. The ability of courts and regulators to hold employers accountable for using bad judgment when choosing 401(k) investments is “fundamental to this whole system,” Hauser said. “They are proposing to deprioritize it at the same time that they are encouraging plans to invest in more complicated, opaque investments. It’s infuriating.”

The shift at EBSA has also been evident in court. Over the last year, the Labor Department has filed amicus briefs — friend-of-the-court filings that lay out legal arguments for judges — in several class-action lawsuits on the side of the defendant company. In the past, the Labor Department’s briefs had generally sided with the employees. These amicus briefs can be influential. Recently, the agency interceded on Home Depot’s behalf in a case pending before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs then dropped it.

A Labor Department spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica that EBSA would prioritize “the highest-risk matters” in order to protect participants. 

In pushing for looser rules and easing enforcement, the Trump administration and Wall Street are aiming for much more than giving workers the option of investing in so-called alternative assets. They predict it will become common, part of a new normal.

In recent years, the typical 401(k) plan has settled into a pattern, one that’s proven popular with investors but less lucrative for the recordkeepers and asset managers that serve plans. Decades ago, actively managed mutual funds, where professionals pick investments and charge for doing so, were dominant. They carried higher fees, often above 1% of the amount in the fund each year. But over time, passive funds, which often track an index of stocks or bonds like the S&P 500, attracted investors with their promise to deliver the same or better results for fees often below 0.1%. 

Investment and administrative fees in 401(k) plans have, on average, steadily decreased. One main reason is the rise of passive funds, but another, experts say, is the threat of litigation. With cheap options broadly available, large companies might have a hard time explaining to a judge why they forced their employees to choose funds that cost 10 times more.

This decline has pinched profit margins in the 401(k) world, said Kai Richter, an attorney with Cohen Milstein who has long specialized in ERISA class-action cases. “So the financial industry is looking for other ways to make money.” 

Nonpublic investments like private equity are, as a rule, actively managed. That means higher fees. If 401(k) plans began to commonly include these investments, the long-term trend of lower fees would halt and perhaps reverse. 

Broad adoption of alternative assets is indeed the administration’s goal. One of the most consequential parts of a 401(k) plan is the default option, since most workers simply leave their money there. Usually, the default is a target date fund, which, based on the investor’s target date of retirement, gradually shifts its composition as that date approaches from mostly publicly traded stocks to mostly bonds, becoming more conservative and less risky as the person gets closer to needing the money. Target date funds haven’t changed much over the past two decades as they’ve soared in popularity. They offer all-in-one simplicity and, since they are often passive, low cost. Adding complex investments like private equity or hedge funds as a standard part of the mix would be a sea change. 

The proposed rule professes to be “neutral” as to what effect the new, lax standard will have on investments, but it confidently predicts that companies will include more alternative assets over time in 401(k)s. That, after all, is the point of the rule, to broaden access to “the potential growth and diversification opportunities associated with alternative asset investments,” as Trump’s executive order put it. After the rule is finalized, plans covering about 5 million participants will add new or modified target date funds that include alternative investments, according to the proposal, and the number will continue to grow every year. 

Over the past year, there’s been a wave of product announcements in the 401(k) industry as financial companies, taking their cues from the administration, have prepared to offer new options to plans. Major firms that manage private investments, such as BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs, have announced funds for 401(k)s that include private assets. 

Ahead of the proposed rule’s adoption, Empower, the second-largest recordkeeper, has been expanding alternative options through managed accounts where participants opt to have advisers shape their 401(k) portfolios. About 1,000 companies have agreed to offer these investments to their workers, Empower’s CEO said recently. 

But the ultimate effects of the administration’s efforts won’t be limited to alternative assets, and the outcome is far from certain. The proposed rule seems sure to meet legal challenges, and employers, even with Aronowitz’s assurances, might remain reluctant to overhaul their plans. Short of lawsuits, employers may fear blowback from their workers, who surveys show are content with traditional investment options. 

The post Wall Street Wants to Change the Rules for Your 401(k). It Could Put Your Retirement at Risk. appeared first on ProPublica.

For some employees, the 401(k) system works great: They have easy access to low-cost funds with high returns. But many participants are stuck in investments with bloated fees and pay for costly advisory services on top — and may never know it because they’ve never scrutinized their plans’ disclosures. (If you’re worried this is you, our questionnaire below explains how you can check.)

As we’ve reported, the Trump administration wants employers to include less-regulated “alternative” investments like private equity and cryptocurrency in 401(k) plans. To make that happen, the administration is changing regulations and pulling back on enforcement of the law that protects participants.

ProPublica is taking this opportunity to investigate these changes and the broader 401(k) system. To do this reporting, we need detailed insight into what’s happening inside plans: what products financial services companies are pushing and what fees they are charging. Many of these details are not made public, but they are disclosed to plan participants. That’s why we need to hear from participants in these plans, employers (particularly small-business owners) and those with expertise in the industry. The more people we hear from, the better informed our reporting will be. Find our questionnaire below, or at this link. 

Note: We are not asking for anything that shows your account balances or personal information. (We take privacy very seriously. Only ProPublica reporters working on this project have access, and we take other precautions to protect the data.) If you have a 403(b) plan and work for a private, tax-exempt organization, we’d also like to hear from you.

Our team may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but we will read everything you submit.

If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips.

Before you begin: You’ll need to find the name of the company that handles your 401(k) or 403(b) plan and then log into its website to find a disclosure form. We have instructions for how to find the disclosure form below. 

The post Have a 401(k)? Help ProPublica Investigate What’s Really Happening to Your Money. appeared first on ProPublica.

Experts on laws protecting patient safety give Washington state high marks for the types of information it is willing to disclose about doctors accused of wrongdoing.

Like other states, Washington lets patients look up doctors by name online to read any state allegations against them. But decades ago, Washington lawmakers created a separate pathway that doesn’t leave the homework to patients, mandating that regulators issue a press release whenever an investigation results in formal allegations being filed against a doctor. Washington is alone in legally requiring such proactive outreach to the news media, the Federation of State Medical Boards says.

Yet an examination of Washington discipline records by KUOW and ProPublica found that regardless of what the law calls for, Washington fails to reliably call the public’s attention to serious misconduct allegations against doctors who have been allowed to keep practicing while their cases proceed. 

Announcements can take months to go out — and may not go out at all until after the case is resolved.

Take the case of Brooks Watson, a Richland, Washington, doctor who the state medical board accused of making nonconsensual sexual contact, unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate sexual remarks to five of his coworkers over the course of five years.

During one encounter in 2023, Washington Medical Commission records allege, Watson isolated a subordinate in his office and, without her consent, kissed her, touched her breasts, put his hands down her pants, groped her vagina and exposed his penis. 

The commission sent Watson a “statement of charges” alleging sexual misconduct and unprofessional conduct on Aug. 19, 2025, and it amended the charges in June to include an allegation that Watson had assaulted someone at his home. 

Yet the commission issued no public announcement about Watson’s case for more than nine months after first filing allegations. 

Watson remains licensed to practice, and an online provider database run by the state shows no final decision on his case has been made as of July 6. 

The attorney defending him in the criminal case stemming from the incident at his home said that Watson disputes the allegations and that he pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor assault charge against him. The attorney referred further questions to another lawyer who he said represented Watson in workplace matters; that person acknowledged a request for comment sent by email but did not answer emailed questions or respond to voicemails. 

Watson did not answer emails or phone messages seeking his response to the medical commission’s claims. Meeting materials on the commission’s website say Watson had a hearing scheduled in April.

KUOW and ProPublica began examining how and when Washington tells the public about doctors facing discipline following the case of Mark Mulholland, an eastern Washington OB-GYN accused last year of conducting irregular pelvic exams and making inappropriate remarks. 

He initially kept seeing patients, and at least one has accused Mulholland in court of abuse and negligence that she says occurred during the time between when the commission filed formal charges and when it announced them. The woman alleges Mulholland “shoved his fingers into her rectum” and “said to her with confidence that she had a nice-looking and tight vagina.” 

More than 80 lawsuits related to Mulholland’s alleged misconduct have been filed against the doctor himself, his former employer Kadlec or its affiliate, the Providence hospital chain.

(Mulholland has not responded to requests for comment, but the doctor or his attorney told the commission previously that he strives to be gentle and respectful with cervical exams and denied conducting them in ways that patients described. In the civil litigation, which remains ongoing, the doctor, Providence and Kadlec all deny wrongdoing. In the state disciplinary case, which remains open, Mulholland signed an interim order agreeing to restrictions on his license.)

As with many announcements of charges against doctors whose licenses remained unrestricted, the commission did not first publish a notice about Mulholland on the press release section of its website, but rather in a subscribers-only email that said nothing about what he was accused of. It came six weeks after charges were filed.

The list is supposed to go out quarterly, a schedule that guarantees many charges stay off the radar for months — or even longer when the board fails to keep to its publication schedule. At least 269 days passed recently without subscribers receiving an email announcing charges being filed against a doctor and without the commission announcing charges in an online press release.

Some cases still have not been publicized.

Presented by KUOW and ProPublica with questions about how it notifies the public, the commission issued a written statement saying it plans to alter its practices to make allegations against doctors more visible.

Although the commission believes its current practices meet the law’s notification requirement, the statement said, the agency “is always looking for ways to grow.”

“Technology and public accessibility standards continue to evolve since the statute was written,” the statement said. The medical commission “recognizes the value in refining our processes and establishing new best practices to enhance transparency.”

On May 29, the same day the commission sent its statement, it sent four email notices announcing initial or updated allegations against licensees who were not immediately suspended — the first such emails subscribers received since June 2025. 

Washington state Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat and outspoken advocate for disclosure and accountability, said the medical commission was “absolutely not complying with the law.”

“The Legislature clearly said, ‘You have to inform the public quickly, and you should do that through a news release,'” Pollet said. “That’s one of the mechanisms. And the implication of a news release is you have to put it out while it’s still news. And waiting months to put something on a limited listserv doesn’t meet the spirit, much less the letter, of the law.” 

Pollet said he plans to ask other legislators to join him in contacting the medical commission and asking for more prompt and public notifications.

And if that doesn’t work, he said, “ What we might need is direction in the budget to demand that they follow the law.”

The Letter of the Law

The Washington Medical Commission has a well established process for looking into the roughly 2,000 allegations of provider misconduct it receives each year.

If an investigation finds evidence that a doctor violated the law, the medical commission issues a statement of charges. The doctor has a right to contest these before a health law judge or the commission issues a final order spelling out any disciplinary action or dropping the case. Months can go by in the interim.

Washington law directs the medical commission to report both statements of charges and final orders to interested parties: the person whose complaint triggered an investigation, certain professional organizations and the public. 

Specifically, the law says public notification “shall include press releases to appropriate local news media and the major news wire services.”

Two legal experts said the availability of the state’s email list notifying subscribers of “legal actions,” which requires journalists and others to opt in, conceivably meets the law’s requirements. But Seth Rosenberg, an administrative and employment law attorney, said by email that the fact that it gives only names, dates and locations — not a description of the charges doctors face — arguably means “it is bereft of meaningful detail.”

Whether or not the emails convey enough information, KUOW and ProPublica’s review found that they often are not issued for a long time. 

The review focused on charges against doctors whose licenses remained untouched while they awaited a disciplinary decision. It turned up 13 emails or press releases from May 2024 through July 6 that announced charges while the case was still open, five of which were not sent for more than two months after charges were brought.

In another 12 cases, the commission did not send out public notifications until after it resolved charges against the doctor, often months after the physician was put on notice. Three of these cases were shared by way of the agency’s quarterly newsletter, which doesn’t necessarily go to subscribers on the legal actions list.

Four doctors accused last year or in January still have yet to appear in an email, press release or newsletter noting their charges as of July 6.

All told, the commission has gone 100, 200 or even 300 days — in the case of Watson, the Richland doctor accused of sexual misconduct with coworkers — without either publicizing charges or taking away a doctor’s license.

It’s unclear how many of the physicians identified in KUOW and ProPublica’s review continued practicing while waiting for their cases to be resolved, but they had the legal ability to do so.

The commission did not respond when asked to verify that it had failed to publicize cases against doctors for whom no email bulletins could be found from early in the disciplinary process. Executive Director Kyle Karinen said the commission has consistently attached charges to doctors’ entries in an online database and listed charged doctors in commission meeting materials online.

The Washington Department of Health, a related agency that handles sexual misconduct allegations against doctors when the investigations do not require medical expertise, acknowledged that it failed to publish any bulletins on 30 enforcement actions since 2016 but said it has recently fixed the problem.

The medical commission’s delayed or or nonexistent notifications encompass a range of alleged doctor misconduct. 

Kareematulai Arogundade was accused in August of failing to undergo a mental examination that the commission required. The physician, who did not respond when contacted by KUOW and ProPublica by email and phone, first appeared more than 120 days later in the commission’s winter newsletter after his license was indefinitely suspended.

Sophie Gomez was accused in October of failing to respond to a request for information about a complaint filed with the board, and her license was indefinitely suspended in February, after which the commission issued a press release. (Gomez declined to comment when contacted by KUOW and ProPublica.)

The commission did announce charges prior to resolving the case against Jonathan Wynn Hemmert, who oversaw clinical operations at three Washington clinics that used a device called Cryoskin, a temperature-controlled wand that manufacturers say can remove unwanted fat cells when it’s rubbed against a patient’s skin. 

The state agency said clinic staffers had clients sign a personal injury waiver, which the commission said was unenforceable, against public policy and deceptive and dishonest. The commission said he also failed to ensure the device was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and failed to supervise staff using the device on patients.

Hemmert signed a settlement agreeing to address the concerns, but the commission in November filed formal allegations that he had breached it. (Hemmert did not respond when asked to comment on the allegations, which have not yet been adjudicated.)

A press release was posted to the commission’s website in March, 112 days after he was charged with breaching the settlement. Two months after that, a listserv notice went out.

“A Right to Know”

The 1984 Washington state law that requires public notification was passed as part of the Uniform Disciplinary Act, a set of guidelines for state medical boards and commissions that license providers and investigate complaints. 

Among the sponsors was then-state legislator Mike Kreidler, a Democrat and optometrist who served 16 years in the Legislature and 24 as insurance commissioner. 

Kreidler said he doesn’t recall the details of how the 1984 law came together. But looking back at it, Kreidler, now 82, said he believes the public notification requirement fulfilled an important function. He said to get to the point where the commission completes an investigation and files charges means a complaint has enough evidence behind it to proceed toward disciplinary action.

“They’re not going to be frivolous in any fashion, and therefore the public certainly does have a right to know,” he said.

Presented with KUOW and ProPublica’s findings, people who support policies favoring disclosure to patients said the commission’s interpretation of the 1984 notification law falls short.

Patricia Kelmar, senior director of healthcare campaigns at PIRG, a nonprofit advocacy organization for consumers, said the commission should be expansive in discharging its duty to notify the public as the law requires, contacting not only reporters but also a doctor’s current and former patients.

“ We should not be hoping that we stumble across the information that’s going to protect us from a doctor who’s dangerous,” Kelmar said. 

Lisa McGiffert, patient safety activist with the Patient Safety Action Network, said the commission’s frequent delay in notifying the public does not fulfill the spirit of Washington’s law, which in her interpretation necessitates a quick release of information. 

“ There’s nothing preventing Washington state from saying these have to be sent out to the news media within four or five working days,” McGiffert said.

Local media outlets have paid attention in the occasional cases where the medical commission has announced an action via the press release section of its website. A review of news releases about in-state doctors accused of conduct unrelated to their mental health shows that, more often than not, relevant media outlets have published stories afterward. 

A news tip to a local journalist, not the commission’s email list, prompted the first media coverage of the case against Mulholland last June — nearly two months after the commission formally charged the gynecologist with misconduct involving three patients.

The woman who later accused Mulholland of performing an uncomfortable rectal exam and saying her vagina looked nice said the actions occurred at an appointment on May 1, 2025, or just days after the commission filed formal allegations.

The woman told KUOW and ProPublica that she was angry that she heard no news about the commission’s existing allegations before she saw Mulholland.

“I’d never heard anything bad about him,” she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. 

Had she known, she wouldn’t have gone, she said.

The post Washington Law Says to Alert the Public When Doctors Are Accused of Misconduct. It Can Take Months. appeared first on ProPublica.

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.

“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.

The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”

“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.

ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to Paxton’s campaign on June 3, 15 and 25, asking why he remained registered to vote in Collin County when he appeared to no longer live there and about his connection to the Denton County property. A reporter also left a voicemail on his personal cellphone on June 25. The news organizations sent his government office and campaign staff an email on Monday with a detailed list of questions, including a request for Paxton’s response to election lawyers’ belief that he may be violating the law. 

Paxton and his office did not reply until Monday’s email. Campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy did not answer the questions from the news organizations. Instead, she issued a statement saying that the attorney general has been “a national leader on election integrity, with a long record of defending Texas elections.” Cercy said that “attempting to insinuate otherwise and tear him down with a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story is not real reporting.”

Asked twice to provide specifics about what they believed was inaccurate, the campaign did not respond. 

Voting in an election when the voter is ineligible is a second-degree felony under Texas law and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. But prosecutors rarely bring cases challenging individual voters’ residency claims because they are hard to prove, the election lawyers said.

State courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no single way to determine where someone lives, and judges must consider multiple factors, such as where a voter sleeps or stores personal belongings. Prosecuting such cases also requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law.

Even if it’s clear that someone doesn’t live at the address where they are registered to vote, state law allows them to remain registered if their absence is temporary and they intend to return. The provision is commonly used by college students and military service members.

“So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine,” said Beth Stevens, an election lawyer who worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When you start doing things that suggest, ‘Oh, I’ve fully moved. I’m just wink-wink saying I intend to return,’ that’s when you get into questionable territory.”

Paxton’s public and contentious split from his wife could make it difficult to argue that he intended to return to the home they own and where she continues to reside, said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department.

“I think there would be questions raised about a residence where someone does not live, does not spend the night and can in no way have the intent to continue to reside. Those would probably raise red flags in any state,” Becker said.

Becker, who is now the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to build public trust in elections, added that the situation is particularly problematic because Paxton’s job is to enforce election laws.

“Certainly, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas, someone who has made claims about election integrity and made it a priority of his office, should be charged with knowing the laws of residencies of the state of Texas with regard to voting,” Becker said.

Paxton has advocated for strict enforcement of the state’s election fraud law, including in cases against voters his office alleged had falsified records about where they lived. In 2018, the attorney general’s voter fraud unit arrested nine people on suspicion of using residential addresses where they did not live to vote in a municipal election in Edinburg, in the state’s Rio Grande Valley. County prosecutors, acting on behalf of Paxton, later dismissed the charges after failing to secure a conviction against the mayoral candidate they alleged had encouraged those voters to register at false addresses. The candidate, Richard Molina, said he was innocent and said the prosecution was politically motivated.

Clark Birdsall was not the attorney on those cases but defended another resident whom Paxton prosecuted for illegal voting. Birdsall was stunned that the attorney general appears to have voted under an address where he does not live.

He called it “especially egregious that someone such as Ken Paxton appears he’s not conforming to the law.”

State privacy laws allow some politicians and law enforcement officials to shield their voter registration information from public view. Paxton does not do so. His opponent in the Senate race, Democratic State Rep. James Talarico, does. Talarico’s campaign said he lives and is registered at the north Austin home he purchased in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune were not able to independently confirm this.

Paxton’s campaign did not raise any issues with Talarico’s voter registration. In her statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, however, Cercy said, “Talarico has actively campaigned against voter security measures” and has said he opposes voter identification requirements. She pointed to a 2021 Fox News interview in which the state representative said he opposed voter identification rules that would require Texans to provide their driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for mail ballots. Talarico said hundreds of thousands of Texans, who don’t drive, lack a driver’s license. He did not directly answer a question about Social Security numbers during the interview.

The Talarico campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Paxton’s living arrangements since he separated from his wife are not public, but information obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune offers some indication of where he may have been residing since February.

In mid-February, a trust bought a 5,000-square-foot home listed for $2.4 million in a gated community in Denton County, according to the appraisal district and the seller’s real estate agent. The trust did not disclose its ownership to Denton County officials. Trusts are not required to by law, a spokesperson for Travis County’s appraisal district said.

Paxton shares a separate blind trust with his wife, Angela, that they have used to purchase property and other assets. For years, the address listed for that blind trust had been an office building in Collin County. But that address was changed to the Denton County home a week after the property was purchased.

Angela Paxton said through a spokesperson that she has no connection to the Denton County home or the trust that purchased it. The trustee of the Paxtons’ trust, family friend Chip Loper, did not respond to questions about the address change.

In June, a reporter knocked on the door of the Denton County home. No one answered. When the reporter placed a letter for Paxton in the mailbox, an envelope addressed to Warren Paxton, the attorney general’s given name, was visible.

Later that week, Paxton appeared on a podcast with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Video from the podcast showed Paxton seated in front of a fireplace and mantle that were nearly identical to those depicted in the home’s online real estate listing. One resident also told the newsrooms that they spotted Paxton in the gated community.

Separately, the Daily Mail reported in May that Paxton had moved into the Denton County home with Tracy Duhon, whose extramarital affair with Paxton, the news outlet said, prompted his wife’s divorce filing. The Daily Mail also published a video of Paxton and Duhon that it reported was taken at an airport in Iceland in late June. The video was quickly seized upon by Talarico, who depicted Paxton as out of touch with Texans. Duhon did not respond to questions about her connection to the Denton County property or about the Daily Mail reporting.

Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County, voter rolls show. Instead, since February, he has voted in Collin County twice: once in the March Republican primary and once in the May runoff. Each Texas county elects its own slate of local officials, which is why state law requires voters to register where they live.

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan whose expertise includes election law, said Paxton’s voter registration situation should remind the attorney general of what studies have consistently shown: that intentional illegal voting is rare.

“You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things,” Yankah said. “It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.”

Paxton cannot claim ignorance of the law because he enforces it, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, as attorney general, Paxton should avoid even the appearance that he is not following the law, Blank said.

“We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” Blank said. “When our elected officials who are tasked with passing and enforcing these laws exhibit troubles in engaging with the voting process themselves, that raises serious questions.”

The post Ken Paxton Vowed to Crack Down on “Illegal Voting.” He May Have Violated Texas Election Law. appeared first on ProPublica.

The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.

Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management — the first overhaul since 1995 — would instead expand the practice.

The proposed rules would also ratchet back public participation in the agency’s decisions to allow grazing on federal public lands. The BLM’s proposed updates would strictly limit who has a say and when they can object, eliminating many steps where the public has been able to observe and comment on decisions to issue or renew permits.

“They’re clearly trying to reduce involvement of anyone other than ranchers,” said one BLM employee who works on rangeland management.

The BLM did not respond to questions about the proposed regulations, which were released publicly in May and, after a period for public comment, will go back to the agency in mid-July for further review.

In a June news release announcing the action, the agency said it “reflects the Trump administration’s priority to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, promote productive working lands and strengthen local economies.”

ProPublica and High Country News spoke to multiple current and former BLM employees to gauge the impact of the proposed regulations. Some, like the BLM staffer who works on rangeland management, requested not to be named because they still are employed by the agency. The employees agreed that the updated regulations offer several concrete benefits, including a requirement that the agency study the ecological impacts of all uses of public lands — from timber harvesting and recreation to mining and oil drilling. The current rules limit such reviews to the livestock industry, where they have uncovered tens of millions of acres of damage due to overgrazing.

The regulations would also allow the BLM to handle low-level violations of grazing regulations more informally, avoiding potentially unnecessary fights between ranchers and regulators; clean up sections of the code that may be at odds with recent court decisions and laws; and offer the agency and ranchers more flexibility in how they manage the range, allowing for quicker decision-making responding to a local ecosystem’s needs.

Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Lands Council, a ranching trade group, in a news release called the update “a massive step forward.”

He said the existing regulations grew from the “cattle free by ’93” movement of the early 1990s that was hostile to ranching and aimed to rid public lands of livestock. “The resulting regulations all but ensured ranchers did not have the flexibility to take full advantage of the scientific and management advances that the industry has made over the last 35 years,” Canterbury said.

Other groups working on rangeland management say the regulations go too far in the opposite direction, tipping the scales toward ranchers. They point to proposals allowing ranchers to continue business as usual if they appeal agency decisions limiting grazing, threatening Native American tribes’ ability to graze bison and enshrining highly subsidized grazing fees. (ProPublica and High Country News found that in 2024 the federal government charged ranchers $284 million below market rate for the use of public lands.)

“We can expect considerably more places where cows and sheep are going to be and more damage,” said Josh Osher, public policy director of the Western Watersheds Project, a conservation group. “I think we see big impacts on wildlife.”

“Back to the Ronald Reagan Years”

The livestock industry influenced the regulatory rewrite from both outside and inside the Interior Department.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Public Lands Council, two main trade groups, publicly celebrated their meetings with the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments in the spring. Among their agenda items was a memorandum of understanding allowing the trade groups to give guidance to the departments, including on a “Grazing Action Plan” that involved updating regulations.

The groups did not respond to requests for comment. (The Western Landowners Alliance, which represents conservation-minded ranchers and landowners, said it’s still evaluating the regulations.)

Representatives of Native American tribes and conservation groups, meanwhile, told ProPublica and High Country News that the administration offered them no opportunity to provide input on the draft regulations before they were published.

They also take issue with the process due to the involvement of Karen Budd-Falen, a high-ranking official in the Interior Department and a long-time grazing advocate whose family is in the ranching business. She served in the first Trump administration and was barred from discussing grazing policy due to potential conflicts of interest. But after rejoining the department, she received an ethics waiver allowing her to work on grazing policy.

In December, Budd-Falen participated in a discussion about public lands management with Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. During that event, Budd-Falen called grazing regulations the issue that “probably was the closest to my heart” and gave a rare view into the effort to update them.

“You want to know what put the public ranchland out of business — it was Bruce Babbitt’s regulations,” she told Lummis, referring to President Bill Clinton’s Interior secretary from 1993 to 2001. “By the first of next year, you will see fully new regulations that don’t just fix a few of the Babbitt things. We went back to the Ronald Reagan years and are putting back in those regs.”

“I am so excited about these regulations,” she said.

Native American tribes that manage bison herds say Budd-Falen’s efforts to aid ranchers could hurt their operations. Several rancher and stock grower associations in Montana, which at one time were represented by Budd-Falen, have railed against a conservation group called American Prairie that uses permits to graze bison herds to revitalize local ecosystems. The ranchers worry this will cost them subsidized leases and that the bison could spread disease to their cattle.

The Trump administration has sided with the ranchers in the dispute — first by revoking American Prairie’s permits and then by redrafting grazing regulations to mandate public lands livestock operations be “production-oriented,” potentially eliminating permits for herds used to revitalize ecosystems. Tribes fear they too could lose permits for the bison herds they manage to preserve cultural practices or restore the land.

“We’re really concerned about this,” said OJ Semans Sr., a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, which represents more than 15 tribes. “I’m just kind of confused about how badly it was written.”

Less Public Input, More Public Lands Grazing

Ranchers have long complained that conservationists are quick to sue to prevent them from placing their herds on public lands, miring their businesses in litigation. The BLM’s updates would reduce green groups’ ability to challenge decisions.

The agency proposes changing the definition of “interested public,” meaning those who have a say in rangeland management. Under the new proposal, the public would have to prove a “cognizable” interest in the grazing in question. The agency did not respond to a request to define its use of the word. But a former BLM higher-up said that would likely set a higher bar for who gets advance notice of agency decisions and their ability to comment on them. Environmentalists assume it means only those with a business interest would be allowed to influence agency decision making.

The new regulations would also remove a mandate that the BLM include the public in “consultation, cooperation and coordination,” the agency’s process of gathering feedback when preparing to take actions such as authorizing grazing. The update would significantly narrow who must be involved, staff said.

Throughout the regulations, the agency proposed changes that would keep animals on the land.

Mark Squillace, a law professor focused on natural resources at the University of Colorado Law School, noted that if a rancher appeals an unfavorable ruling, it is automatically paused, meaning the rancher can continue the very practices that had been found to be harmful. “That effectively invites everyone to appeal to avoid the decision,” Squillace said. “That is a disaster.”

The new regulations also elevate cows’ status as firefighters, making it easier to place herds on public lands under the justification that they eat vegetation that could become fuel for wildfires.

Nada Culver, deputy director of the BLM during the Biden administration, said that some provisions would make it more difficult for agency staff to tell ranchers to take animals off the land, hindering their ability to address overgrazing. And renewing permits to continue grazing would be even easier under the new regulations, she said.

“The most text in this regulatory proposal is devoted to explaining why the public no longer gets to participate in pretty much every step of the process,” Culver said.

The Trump administration has also prioritized restocking vacant areas, which may be without cows and sheep because they are far from a water source, they need time to recover from wildfire or the agency is attempting to eradicate invasive species. Within months of President Donald Trump returning to the White House, political appointees instructed staff to build lists of every vacant plot that might be eligible for more livestock.

“By the end of next year,” Budd-Falen said in her discussion with Lummis, “every single vacant allotment will be filled by a rancher.”

The post The First Major Overhaul of Public Lands Grazing Regulations in a Generation Looks to Cut Out Public Involvement appeared first on ProPublica.

Ten Democratic lawmakers told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a letter Sunday that his gutting of a program focused on protecting civilians is a leadership failure that imperils service members and erodes the military’s moral standing.

Led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the joint letter echoed concerns raised by a recent Defense Department inspector general report that described civilian protection efforts as largely “inactive.” Lawmakers also cited reporting by ProPublica and other news outlets in pushing to preserve the framework known as civilian harm mitigation and response, or CHMR.

“The Trump administration — potentially in violation of federal law — has defunded and impeded civilian protection efforts,” the lawmakers asserted.

A Pentagon spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica, noting: “As with all congressional correspondence, the Department will respond directly to the authors.”

The retreat from civilian protection drew global attention in February when an apparent U.S. strike killed dozens of children and teachers at a school on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran — an incident the Pentagon says is under investigation.

Beyond those deaths, conflict monitoring groups have recorded a surge in reports of civilian casualties, most notably in Somalia and Yemen, which have both seen a dramatic increase in U.S. strikes under the second Trump administration.

In March, ProPublica interviewed current and former national security officials across party lines who said the discarding of civilian protections is part of a broader remaking of the military around two key principles: more aggression, less accountability.

The harm mitigation leadership, housed in a specialized Civilian Protection Center of Excellence mandated by Congress in 2022, aimed to reduce the number of civilian casualties of U.S. military operations, a problem that has spanned administrations in the post-9/11 “forever wars.”

The idea was to embed prevention specialists within targeting teams and foster a culture that prioritizes civilian security in accordance with U.S. law and international rules of war. Senior military leaders have publicly supported the mission, expressing both a moral obligation to safeguard civilian life and a necessity to hit their intended targets.

The program was still being rolled out when momentum halted under Hegseth.

In the spring of 2025, as U.S. operations in Yemen reportedly killed dozens of civilians, the Defense Department was scrapping the CHMR mission as out of step with Hegseth’s “lethality” doctrine, according to current and former staffers. Hegseth repeatedly has expressed disdain for guardrails he describes as hindrances to combat forces.

By the time of the Iran school strike, current and former personnel told ProPublica, the protection mission had been slashed by about 90%, leaving just a handful of staffers to monitor civilian harm issues even as the Defense Department accelerated the strike tempo across swaths of Africa and the Middle East.

Militant groups exploit civilian casualties to gain recruits and support, a practice retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has called “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, the theory goes, at least 10 new enemies are created.

“The Trump administration’s military adventurism overseas, combined with its obvious disregard for civilians, do not make the American people or our service members safer,” the 10 Democrats said in their letter to Hegseth.

Three signees are military veterans: Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado.

The letter ended with 20 questions the lawmakers want answered by July 9, including requests for the latest CHMR staffing and funding numbers, and an explanation for why the department wasn’t cooperative with the inspector general’s inquiry.

Current and former CHMR personnel said it’s impossible to know whether a more robust prevention team could’ve helped the military avoid civilian casualties in Yemen and Iran. But they said the program could have made a difference, providing transparency and immediate inquiries into civilian deaths.

Within days of the strike on the elementary school adjacent to an Iranian military compound in Minab, open-source investigative outlets surfaced video showing a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile likely was responsible. The Washington Post, citing officials familiar with the Minab inquiry, reported that the school was on a U.S. target list and “may have been mistaken for a military site.”

Nearly five months later, the Trump administration has yet to explain what happened.

“The command investigation will take as long as necessary to address all the matters surrounding this incident,” Hegseth said in March.

Annie Shiel, U.S. director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, which advocates for the protection of noncombatants in warfare, said congressional support is “critical” at a moment when the CHMR mission hangs in the balance.

“The department is violating U.S. laws and policies that have grown out of hard-learned lessons from past wars and garnered bipartisan support across multiple administrations,” Shiel said.

Plan Sprung From Civilian Deaths

Historically, the military’s prioritizing of civilian protection has followed a pattern, analysts say: A catastrophic incident kills civilians, the Pentagon pledges reviews and reforms, the issue recedes from view and oversight slips until the next disaster.

During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”

That incident, along with a New York Times investigation into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the civilian harm mitigation and response action plan in 2022. Proponents didn’t view the plan as a cure-all but called it a step toward breaking the cycle of intermittent attention by making civilian protection a year-round mission.

Now that mission is in limbo, and, according to the May inspector general’s report, defense leadership “withheld access” to department tools that track the program’s implementation.

“You are in violation of the law right now on civilian harm,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll at a hearing in May. “I’d like to know either A. what the explanation is for why you think it’s OK for you to ignore the law that this Congress passes or B. what you’re planning to do to fix that problem.”

The new letter comes as critics, including some Republicans and veteran commanders, grow increasingly vocal about Hegseth’s attempts to overhaul the Department of Defense, which the Trump administration refers to as the Department of War.

The secretary’s sweeping terminations of high-ranking officers without public explanation has drawn bipartisan criticism and accusations that the moves are rooted in political vengeance, racism and bias against women. Hegseth has repeatedly condemned military officers for comments lauding diversity, saying in one speech, “We became ‘the woke department.’ … We’re done with that shit.”

Hegseth has said that out of respect for the officers he won’t speak about why they were fired. He said it was “very difficult to change the culture of a department that was destroyed by the wrong perspectives with the same officers that were there.”

Public rebukes followed Hegseth’s decision last month to effectively fire Gen. Chris Donahue, a respected four-star commander who came up the ranks through the special forces. In 2023, Donahue said that any concerns over wokeness were “BS,” adding: “We’re focused on people, war-fighting and making sure that we’re prepared for the next fight. There ain’t no ‘woke’ here.”

The post Amid Mounting War Casualties, Pete Hegseth “Defunded and Impeded” Efforts to Protect Civilians, Lawmakers Say appeared first on ProPublica.

For the first few weeks after he arrived at the immigration detention center in Winnfield, Louisiana, 18-year-old Elder Chavez was wide awake most nights, listening to the creaky sounds of the bunk beds and to voices of dozens of men, also sleepless, around him. He suffered terrible headaches and would finally doze off around 4 a.m. — just when guards would begin to summon the detainees for breakfast. Then he’d sleep for most of the rest of the day.

He had developed the schedule of an owl. And he thought to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one.

He’d landed at the Winn Correctional Center after Alabama state police had caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license. He was on his way home from getting his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was pulled over. Once the officers realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Chavez offered to show them documents that proved he wasn’t living in hiding. Immigration authorities had granted him Special Immigrant Juvenile Status because, as a toddler, he’d been abandoned by his parents in Honduras and had come to this country on his own when he was 14. His sister, who’d migrated years earlier and was living in Alabama, offered to help take care of him. A lawyer was helping him pursue permanent residency. 

“I’m legal in this country,” Chavez pleaded with the officers. But the officers, he said, weren’t having it. One of them told him, “Your papers are of no use to me.”

And just like that, an otherwise law-abiding high school student — who loved his welding and carpentry classes, had braces and a girlfriend, and spent weekends playing soccer at the park with his nieces and nephews — was thrown into detention and put on a path toward deportation.

“I’m just waiting here,” he said during a video call from detention. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Chavez is hardly alone. A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office. In addition, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term.

The vast majority of unaccompanied minors removed last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed. 

Before Trump returned to office last year, Chavez would have likely been given a ticket and allowed to return to his sister. But as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign, his administration has moved to systematically roll back policies that provided immigrant minors access to legal counsel and relief from deportation while they pursued permission to permanently stay in the country. Those policies were based on laws that had been implemented over more than two decades, with bipartisan support, because both parties believed unaccompanied immigrant minors — ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system daunting to most adults — are especially vulnerable to trafficking and other kinds of exploitation. 

Congress created SIJ specifically to protect immigrants, like Chavez, who are under 21 and are able to prove in family court that they had been abused, neglected or abandoned by at least one parent in their home countries.

Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are the programs designed to help unaccompanied minors rife with fraud, but that their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to embark on dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands. To make its case, his administration points to the record 450,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and were released into the country under President Joe Biden. 

Neither those children nor the people to whom they were released were properly vetted, say Trump administration officials. As a result, administration officials say, some of the children became victims of abuse or exploitation. Alarming numbers of them were found working illegally in factories or in other jobs that put them at risk for trafficking, injury and wage theft. 

Other minors, the administration has said, became criminals. It put out a July 2025 government report that said since 2013, some 19,000 SIJ petitioners were found to have criminal arrest records, including hundreds with serious charges like murder and sex offenses. The administration says the best way to stop such abuses and criminality is to disincentivize immigrant children from coming in the first place. 

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is “undoing the damage Biden did.” Responding to questions about ProPublica’s data analysis, which was based on data provided via Freedom of Information Act requests and was validated with outside experts, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency “could not verify the veracity” of the data. 

Advocates argue that the administration is using exceptional cases to cast all immigrant minors and the adults who sponsored them in a negative light. They say that some of their clients who have been living in the U.S. for years, including those, like Chavez, who have since turned 18, face serious risks if sent back to their home countries. The majority of the unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States in the last decade were fleeing Central American countries crushed by economic turmoil, violence and political upheaval. Some came from families riven by poverty and domestic violence. Some, like Chavez, have no parents to go back to. 

“These children have been through incredibly harrowing and traumatic experiences,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a legal defense organization. “And ICE is retraumatizing them.”

To the administration’s claims that its policies are aimed at protecting minors, he said, “If you’re worried about the welfare of kids, stop rounding kids up and trying to deport them.”

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Sometimes the deportation orders issued in immigration court have been coming so fast that lawyers say even they have a hard time explaining them to their clients. Within a span of three hours on a single morning in April in a downtown New York immigration courtroom, Judge Jem Sponzo issued deportation orders for 25 minors, almost everyone on her docket appearing virtually that morning. Some of the hearings were only a few minutes long, and some of the minors were too young to understand what was happening to them.

Among the children in court that day was an 8-year old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and SIJ. The girl’s mother had already won asylum in a separate case. But Sponzo ordered the girl to be deported anyway. 

In another case, an attorney pleaded for more time to prepare enough evidence to support an asylum petition for her client from Guatemala. The attorney said her client’s home in Guatemala was dominated by an abusive father whose violence made it hard for her to gather information she needed for the case. Sponzo politely denied the request, saying, “I empathize and thank you for your efforts.” Then she ordered the child deported.

A high school senior from Guatemala who lives in Queens, with side-swept black hair and wearing a short sleeve athletic shirt, appeared on a video screen from a room with piled-up clothes on the bed and an American flag tacked on the wall. He stayed on mute while his lawyer asked for more time for his applications for SIJ and asylum to be processed. Sponzo said no and ordered him deported. His lawyer said in an interview her client is now afraid he could be picked up by ICE at any time.

At the end of the day, several of the attorneys said they felt blindsided by the judge’s rapid-fire denials. Although they all said they would appeal her rulings, which could buy their clients some time to stay in the U.S., one said the deportation orders would “hang over their heads like a loaded gun.”  

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw juvenile dockets in New York, said that before Trump returned to office, there was widespread recognition that it took time for immigrant minors’ SIJ and asylum petitions to work their way through the backlogged system. For SIJ recipients, getting a green card often takes years. Judges typically gave minors that time. Now the authorities overseeing immigration courts have instructed them not to do so. Sponzo cited those instructions at the end of many of the cases she heard that day in April.

Cassin is one of the more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired since Trump returned to office. Some of the judges who lost their jobs said they believe they were pushed out because the administration saw them as not aligned with its agenda. But they also say they’ve received no official explanation for their firings. Sponzo was also fired recently. She could not be reached for comment. 

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the firings.

It’s not just the overhaul of the immigration courts that is having an effect on immigrant kids. Early on in Trump’s second term, officials moved to curb funding for advocacy groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. It also put an end to a Biden-era policy known as “deferred action,” which protected minors who had been granted SIJ from deportation. SIJ on its own does not confer legal status, and the deferred action policy was implemented to cover those with SIJ until they could get their green cards.

After advocacy groups took the administration to court, federal judges ordered the government to restore funding for legal assistance andaccess to deferred action for SIJ recipients. Despite those rulings, some legal advocates say they still have not been paid what they’re owed. And in June, several groups said federal agents appeared at their Washington-area offices, seeking to look at client files, even though they didn’t have warrants. The advocates said they saw the move as an attempt to intimidate them. 

As for granting deferred action, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that the agency would do so only under “compelling circumstances on a case-by-case basis.” DHS, which oversees USCIS and ICE, emphasized in an email that having SIJ “does NOT confer lawful status,” adding that “any recipient may be subject to removal.” The agency did not respond to a question about the agents who visited advocates’ offices.

Over the last year, the administration says it has tracked down 146,000 of the unaccompanied minors who entered the country under Biden in order to check on their well-being. The majority of all the minors who entered the country in recent years had been released to one or both parents in the United States or to other close relatives. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a June press conference that some of the welfare checks found minors were doing fine with their families. But he asserted that he’d also tracked down children who were in the hands of rapists and other criminals. “We start digging into these cases and you start hearing absolute horrific things,” he said. 

When asked for verifiable details about some of the cases Mullin mentioned, DHS did not respond. A DHS spokesperson later sent a list of 16 people who had sponsored immigrant minors and had previously been charged with crimes including assault, drug trafficking or domestic violence. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials said they’d indicted less than a handful of people on charges of smuggling or exploiting immigrant minors.

No officials from DHS or the Justice Department explained what had become of any of the children connected to those indictments. As for immigrants who had entered the U.S. as children and are now adults, Mullin said, “we are working on the process of sending them back.”

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Soon after Chavez arrived in detention, one of the men in his cell recognized the teen’s pattern of sleeping through the day as a silent cry for help. Carlos Della Valle, who had migrated to the United States from Mexico, was attuned to Chavez’s struggles because he had a son around the same age. Even in detention, Chavez, with a head full of  tousled black hair and big brown eyes, had an easy laugh and smile. Della Valle worried that Chavez was “losing valuable time that he’s never going to get back.”

Winn was a tough place, advocates and detainees said. Two migrants died there earlier this year. One of the deaths was reportedly caused by cardiovascular disease, and authorities have not determined a cause for the other.  

A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General described unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Winn, including leaking ceilings, dirty food prep areas and an incident in which a guard put a detainee in a prohibited choke hold. A DHS spokesperson said that the agency is working to address the issues raised in the report, adding, “our death rates are lower than most state prisons.” 

Della Valle began nudging young Chavez out of bed in the mornings and put him to work helping keep their cellblock clean. 

Detainees were given an hour a day outside, sometimes less than that. Della Valle told Chavez that keeping himself busy, in whatever constructive ways possible, was the only way to make it through the monotony with his sanity intact.

Chavez briefly took a job in the barber shop that paid the standard wage for someone in detention —  $1 a day — but he said that giving haircuts to around 80 men in a shift was so grueling that he only lasted a month. Instead, Chavez and Della Valle pored over passages from the Bible together. They sat together for most every meal. Chavez learned to mix packets of powdered juice just the way Della Valle liked it.

Della Valle offered to help Chavez navigate the immigration system. He knew it well. In 1997 he’d twice illegally entered the United States. He was deported the first time but illegally entered again, married a U.S. citizen soon after and settled in Pennsylvania. 

Because of his reentry, which is a felony, he has been ineligible to regularize his status. But he lived underground with little worry. Immigration authorities generally avoided targeting immigrants with long ties to their communities, like him. Not anymore.

Authorities intercepted Della Valle when he and his wife were returning from a Virgin Islands vacation, though they released him on bond at the time. Months later, however, he was taken into ICE detention. By the time he met Chavez, he had spent months being transferred among close to a dozen holding facilities. He worried about what detention might do to Chavez. Other men in his cellblock, who nicknamed Chavez “El Niño,” worried too.

“It was hard to see him, you know, because he’s just a boy. He’s not a grown man,”  Della Valle said. “I had to do whatever I could for him.”

---

While the administration has made progress bending immigration courts to its will, there’s evidence that federal courts, where tens of thousands of immigrants have challenged their detentions as illegal, are pushing back. 

The National Immigration Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, tracked the cases of 263 immigrants who entered the country as unaccompanied minors and SIJ applicants. The group found that federal judges ordered releases or bond hearings in all but 12 of them since the start of the second Trump administration. In March, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown issued a scathing rebuke in one such case, writing, “The laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” 

The administration can set policy, he wrote, but he added that “it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws — a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.”

Among those recently released was 20-year-old Fredy Martinez. Born in Honduras, he was a teenager when he crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor. He had graduated from high school in Texas and was delivering a DoorDash order on his bike when he was detained, according to court documents about his case. He was held for eight months at a sprawling and deeply troubled tent detention camp in El Paso, Texas — which has seen a measles outbreak and detainee deaths, including one ruled a homicide — before a federal judge found his detention was illegal and ordered him released. DHS did not respond to a question about the center.

Another teenager named Carlos from Guatemala said in an interview that he was detained on his way to work at a car wash in Rockland County, New York, when he was 18, despite having been granted SIJ and deferred action. He was flown over 1,000 miles to a detention facility in Louisiana, though not the same one as Chavez. Carlos asked to be identified only by his first name because of his ongoing immigration case. 

After his arrest, he said, “I was just thinking that I would never see my family again.” Carlos was held for more than two months before a federal judge set him free.

The DHS spokesperson did not answer questions about any individual cases. They said federal court rulings against the administration “should come as no surprise,” since “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate.”

---

Six months into his detention, Chavez is on his own. He was ordered deported but is appealing the decision and filed a habeas petition. 

Della Valle has been released, thanks to his wife’s outspoken advocacy. His release was bittersweet for Chavez. But Della Valle has not forgotten him. 

Della Valle and his wife, Angela Della Valle, have helped Chavez’s sister, Mayuri Chavez, to pay off his outstanding traffic tickets and prepare his defense. The couple started a letter-writing campaign for him. They’ve passed out flyers with a picture of a chair Chavez made in carpentry class, asking people to color it in and send him messages of encouragement. 

Della Valle said he feels pangs of guilt about leaving Chavez behind. He still speaks to Chavez most days and tries to keep the teen’s spirits up, but worries his words don’t carry the same weight now that he’s out. Della Valle tries to convince himself that Chavez will be OK, saying, “I think me being out might be good for him because he knows that there’s hope.”

Meanwhile, Chavez has been moved to different cells multiple times. One had only a single functional shower for dozens of men. The video call system often malfunctioned. Someone stole his small notebook, where he had carefully written down all the telephone numbers of the people he was in touch with outside. One night he dreamt he was free. When he woke up and realized he was still in detention, he panicked and had trouble breathing. 

He said he has been trying to keep up the routine he started when Della Valle was there, but each passing week makes it harder.

In a series of interviews from detention, Chavez worried about losing half his junior year of high school. He missed a required English test and a deadline to turn in a history project, and now that the school year is over, he is unclear if he will be able to make the assignments up to be able to graduate on time. His sister spent a lot of money to get him braces, and without regular adjustments he worries it will all be for nothing. He missed the birth of his new nephew, and he is unsure if he will be able to meet him.

“I had so many plans,” he said, “but now everything is ruined.”

The post These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled. appeared first on ProPublica.

The abandoned house next door meant a lot to Christina Kary. For years, she tended to it, planting purple flowers, removing weeds and picking up trash. She attached locks to the doors to prevent trespassers from entering. 

She had considered buying the property, located on the Cadillac Heights block where her family built the first houses in the early 1900s. Several years ago, she learned that the small home with a front porch was owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which manages the city’s vacant properties. Kary, 86, said she told a land bank inspector she wanted to purchase it but didn’t follow up, thinking she would eventually hear back.

Then, one morning in 2024, she heard a commotion as heavy equipment squeezed through the alley. Kary watched from her backyard as the house was demolished, her feet vibrating beneath her. She marked the day in yellow highlighter on her paper wall calendar where she records other notable events like birthdays, doctor appointments and Bible study meetups. She would later learn that the city had sold the home to Crown Enterprises, a real estate firm owned by members of the Detroit area’s wealthy and politically connected Moroun family.

Over the last seven years, Crown has obtained dozens of parcels in Cadillac Heights and secured permits to demolish more than 20 structures. In all, the company now owns more than 160 lots in the neighborhood, most of which are barren. It also has erected a concrete-mixing plant just across the street from Kary’s home, creating clouds of dust, noise at early hours of the day and late into the night, and industrial lights that pierce through the area. 

The company’s takeover of the southeast section of the neighborhood has marked the end of the community Kary and her neighbors knew — a process aided by the decisions of city officials. First, the city turned over dozens of properties to the company as part of a historic land-swap deal in 2019 and then gave it first dibs to purchase other lots, including the one next to Kary’s home, until 2034. 

The city has also enabled the company in other ways, providing latitude on permitting and neighborhood maintenance. For instance, although city inspectors have repeatedly ticketed the company for violating rules limiting the spread of dust, the city also set up a system under which the company’s fines were dismissed.

As Detroit rebuilds from the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, major construction has reshaped the city: the first new skyscraper in 50 years, new hotels and sports complexes, repaved roads, and the renovation of Michigan Central Station, which had sat empty for decades while owned by the Moroun family and became a symbol of the city’s decline.  

To meet the demand, at least three new concrete facilities have opened in the city since 2019. One is by a park, and two are in residential neighborhoods, including the plant in Cadillac Heights, called Kronos. The state also approved a permit for a new cement grinding plant that has not yet opened in an industrial area of southwest Detroit. Other proposed operations have been blocked after residents protested. 

The new concrete plants are producing materials needed to help rebuild parts of the city while creating a bitter irony for residents such as Kary. She said Detroit’s decision to turn so many properties over to Crown “guarantees the death of this area.” 

In written responses to questions from BridgeDetroit and ProPublica, company representative Kenneth Dobson called Kronos “a good neighbor.” He said the company complies with all permitting requirements and city ordinances, and that it properly mitigates dust. 

Dobson said having a concrete supplier within the city helps support rebuilding and broadly improves the lives of Detroiters. Without concrete facilities in Detroit, “not only would there be less jobs and less City tax revenue, but the cost of both public and private infrastructure development would go up,” wrote Dobson, vice president of the Detroit International Bridge Company, another Moroun-owned business. 

Dobson said Crown has invested $10 million in the neighborhood. When asked what that has funded, he cited costs related to the Kronos development: demolishing homes, obtaining permits and equipment to operate, and taking measures to control dust and monitor air quality.

Messages sent by ProPublica to email addresses linked to Matthew Moroun, who oversees the family business, didn’t receive a response. Dobson said the email was forwarded to him and he responded on Moroun’s behalf.

With City Help, Crown Moves In  

Cadillac Heights’ most recent transformation began in May 2019, thanks in part to a vote by Detroit City Council to approve a nearly $267 million multipronged land swap orchestrated by former Mayor Mike Duggan.

The deal delivered ownership of dozens of lots in Cadillac Heights to Crown. In exchange, Crown gave up land in another part of the city, which allowed automaker Stellantis to open the first new car plant in Detroit in three decades, with the promise of 5,000 new jobs. 

Duggan declared the day the land swap was approved as the “greatest” day he had had as mayor. 

“Today was historic,” Duggan, who served for 12 years and recently gave up his bid for governor, said at a press conference. “Detroit was the city that built the middle class in America, and today we started to rebuild the middle class in Detroit.”

The news that day focused on the promise of Stellantis, not on what the deal meant for Cadillac Heights. Duggan spokesperson Andrea Bitely said the mayor did not know that Crown would put a concrete plant in the neighborhood and that doing so would ultimately drive out residents. 

At its prime in the 1960s, Cadillac Heights had been full of local businesses and community life. The neighborhood attracted a predominantly working-class community of Black families who lived in modest single-family houses. 

Buddy’s Pizza, famous as the birthplace of Detroit-style pizza, was founded there and drew crowds from across the city. Cadillac Heights also was home to Simpson’s Records, one of the city’s longest-running record shops.

But over several decades, Detroit declined under the weight of the crack epidemic, massive population loss and disinvestment. City historian Jamon Jordan said some neighborhoods saw more problems than others, but Cadillac Heights “had all of those things.”

By the time of the 2019 deal, roughly a third of the homes that were left had been abandoned, according to census data, and the streets were lined with empty storefronts. The remaining residents, many of whom, like Kary, had lived in Cadillac Heights for decades, said they tried to keep the neighborhood clean and enjoyable.

The Moroun family, too, had owned property in Cadillac Heights since the 1960s and operated a trucking depot there, which residents also found bothersome, but less so than the concrete facility. (The family also owns the Ambassador Bridge to Canada and more than 1,000 properties throughout Detroit, and has tried to block a competing bridge to Canada.)

Crown gradually acquired more land in Cadillac Heights and had about 80 properties at the time of the land swap, records show.

The deal gave Crown 34 more parcels throughout the neighborhood and the first rights to purchase others if they end up in the Land Bank by repossession due to tax foreclosure or other reasons. So far, Crown has purchased seven parcels under this option and demolished three homes, including the one next to Kary’s. 

Detroit officials made other decisions, some in violation of city rules, that enabled Kronos to operate by summer 2022, before the company obtained a permit. The city ordered that operations stop. It then issued the permit without fining the company, and the concrete plant was reassembled. A city spokesperson did not respond to a question about why the company wasn’t fined.

The city issued a permit even though Crown had unpaid tickets for blight violations, which should have disqualified it from getting the approval to move forward. Crystal Rogers, a manager in the city’s Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, attributed that to “human error.” 

The company also accrued tickets between when it first applied for the permit and when the city approved it; Rogers said checking whether a company has pending tickets during that time period would “slow the development process.” 

The tickets also should have prevented Crown from purchasing property from the county’s tax auction, according to city law. Yet records show the company was able to purchase a four-bedroom, single-family house in Cadillac Heights in October 2022 while it had unresolved blight tickets. Crown said it had disputed some of the tickets. The city acknowledged the tickets but said they were resolved by the time the sale was recorded months later.  

After the concrete plant opened, the company acquired additional property from homeowners who decided to leave, further transforming the neighborhood. Dobson said the company is buying properties to create a buffer around the plant.

Martin Murray, a University of Michigan urban planning professor, said what’s happening in Cadillac Heights follows a similar pattern to other U.S. cities undergoing redevelopment. Businesses “can promise jobs, they can promise a tax base, and the city will go along with that, because it makes them look better and they’re willing to sacrifice residents,” he said.

City Council President James Tate Jr. and member Scott Benson, who represents the Cadillac Heights neighborhood, voted in favor of the land swap. Tate said he thinks the arrangement benefited the city overall, but that officials should have questioned how Crown would use the properties before they approved the deal.  

“Knowing what I know now, there are some additional protections and questions that I would ask,” he said. “I would never sacrifice one neighborhood to satisfy another, but there are times when you have to look at deals, and there may be some unintended consequences.” 

Benson declined to comment on his decision to approve the deal and said he has advocated for zoning changes that would make the area less industrial.

“They Could Taste the Dust” 

Since the Kronos plant opened four years ago, residents have filed about 80 complaints to both city and state environmental offices, according to records obtained by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. They have sent photos, videos and pleas for help. 

In complaints filed with the state, they described “literal whiteout conditions” and “dust clouds.” They said the dust was blanketing their neighborhood and irritating their eyes. They said they had to stop doing yardwork, go inside and shut all their windows.

“They could feel grit and debris hitting their eyes, that they tried not to inhale but they could taste the dust,” according to a state inspector’s summary of one complaint. The state’s environmental division repeatedly has recommended that Crown spray the site with water to minimize dust, which the company says it does every hour the plant is operating. Inspectors also told Crown multiple times to reduce the speed of its trucks to limit the spread of dust.

Josef Stephens, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said that while the state has noted dust at and around the Kronos site, it has not been opaque enough to warrant a violation.

City officials, too, are aware of residents’ concerns. In 2024, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring companies to control the spread of dust or face penalties. The city set up a hotline and email address so residents could submit complaints. 

Nearly half of the complaints submitted to dust@detroitmi.gov have been about Kronos,  according to city officials. 

Dobson, the company representative, said readings from its air monitor have never exceeded the city’s pollution limits and that the facility is “fully compliant.”

Matthew Tomasz, who lived across the street from Kronos, filed complaints with the city and also ended up in a legal battle with Crown. The company sued him for trespassing on its vacant property next to his home. He countersued, claiming the company had violated the city’s dust ordinance when particles from the concrete facility traveled onto his property, calling it an “invasion.”

“Each day that dust from Kronos or the vacant lots lands on Mr. Tomasz’s property, a new trespass occurs,” according to the complaint. The lawsuits settled in February, but the terms were not made public, records show. 

“I feel like I’m staring into a wasteland every day,” Tomasz said in an interview late last year. He said dust from the plant was so thick that he couldn’t see 10 feet in front of him. “There’s no peace to be had at my house.” 

The city required that Kronos develop and adhere to a plan to limit the amount of dust. But despite five violations since Kronos agreed to adopt a plan, only once has the city’s environmental department fined the company for its failure to comply. The city last month dismissed two tickets issued to Crown, totalling $2,500, for the company’s failure to keep dust from traveling into the neighborhood.

The company has been excused from the dust-related fines, as well as tickets for other reasons, because of an agreement it signed with the city in 2022 after the plant opened. That first-of-its-kind property maintenance agreement gives Crown up to 30 days to fix nonemergency building and environmental violations — and up to 10 days to address overgrown weeds and trash — before it is assessed fines. The city has since entered into similar agreements with two other concrete businesses and a developer.  

The agreement with Crown came after the company racked up blight tickets across the city. At the time it was signed, the city’s law department acknowledged it didn’t know the number of outstanding tickets but agreed that the company could pay $50,000 to resolve all the past violations before the new agreement kicked in. 

One ticket that was excused last year came after Detroit resident Jahdante Smith emailed a complaint to city officials in July with a video showing a cloud of dust blowing near the facility. “This is a ridiculous everyday occurrence,” Smith wrote.

A city inspector issued Crown a $500 ticket seven weeks later for failing to mitigate dust, but the city’s environmental department dismissed it under the agreement. 

The city also waived a $1,000 ticket issued to Crown in October for exceeding state and city requirements to limit dust opacity. The company temporarily suspended operations and agreed to sweep and spray water on the streets daily to control the dust, and the ticket was dismissed, Rogers said. 

City inspectors also alerted Crown to code violations at other properties in the neighborhood, including a vacant lot littered with garbage and another with overgrown weeds and broken tree limbs. An abandoned home was unsecured, leaving it open to trespassers, a city inspector found. 

Because of its agreement with the city, Crown was not issued any fines after it addressed the issues with the three properties. The vacant home has been demolished, and the other lots are now barren. 

However, a recent visit to the neighborhood showed that similar issues have resurfaced: Another home that Crown purchased in January had missing first-floor windows and no front door, allowing anyone to enter. The lawn was covered in tall weeds and grass, and trash littered the yard. Crown plans to demolish the home but is waiting on the utilities to be disconnected, said Dobson, the company representative.

Dobson said the property maintenance agreement has worked because the company responds to concerns and fixes “the potential violation.” Conrad Mallett, the city’s top attorney, who negotiated the agreement, said it is “working well from the perspective of both parties.”

But residents and advocates have continued to protest, speak out at City Council meetings and collect hundreds of signatures to shut the plant down and get the area rezoned to be less industrial. Councilmember Benson asked the city’s law department about legal avenues the city could pursue to close Kronos.

The department, in response, said officials have no legal authority to interfere because the plant is properly permitted and complies with zoning regulations and city rules. And even though the city is considering rezoning some parts of Cadillac Heights to make them less industrial, the plans stop just short of the lots owned by Crown, records show.

The Moroun family continues to expand its concrete supply business, called Hercules Material Holdings, which now has seven locations in Michigan. Other facilities are expected to open in Toledo, Ohio, and Windsor, Ontario, where the Morouns have been purchasing properties for decades.

Residents Move Out  

Some Cadillac Heights residents say they can’t coexist with the concrete plant. 

They recently turned to the Wayne County Commission for help. At a May county committee meeting, advocate Sharon Buttry told commissioners that residents are frustrated that Crown hasn’t been ticketed more.

Commissioners voted to pass a resolution urging the state and city to further monitor the site and revoke permits if there are violations. “Our neighborhoods should never have to sacrifice their health and peace of mind for industrial operations that create ongoing public nuisance concerns,” county Commissioner Martha G. Scott said in an interview. 

The county is paying a local air monitoring company, JustAir, to track and analyze air quality near Kronos. The company found the quality was “measurably worse” during the six days of the week when Kronos operates.

Separately, Mayor Mary Sheffield, who took office this year, directed the city’s environmental agency to install four monitors near the plant so residents “knew that the administration is taking their concerns seriously,” according to city spokesperson John Roach. He said the monitors have not measured pollution that exceeds moderate levels. (Sheffield voted against the land swap when she was on City Council.) 

Kronos representatives, meanwhile, have worked to build public support. The company has said that it has hired Detroiters to work at the plant, donated food and backpacks to community groups, and paved a new parking lot for a neighborhood church. A few years ago, it published renderings online showing how it would improve the neighborhood with paved sidewalks, mature trees and 6-foot-tall grassy hills to create a buffer from the plant.

Those images don’t match what the neighborhood looks like. Sidewalks are missing or cracked. Barbed wire hangs from fences over debris-strewn lots. Water sprayed to control dust creeps into the streets, creating small pools of green liquid. Lots are barren and gray after being treated with herbicides to prevent weeds.

Dobson said Crown hasn’t been able to carry out the improvements because the city hasn’t signed off on its plan. Roach said the city won’t grant permission until the company addresses code violations, including an unpermitted chain-link fence and inadequate screening to hide operations. 

If Crown doesn’t make the improvements soon, Mitchell Gross, who lives across the street from Kronos, said he’s going to plant evergreen trees himself “to filter the dust.” 

He said he keeps his windows shut and that his son and his two young grandchildren, who used to live with him, have left Detroit to protect their health. “They’re in a nice place and getting good air to breathe,” said Gross, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 50 years.

Some of Cadillac Heights’ longtime residents aren’t sticking around to find out whether things will improve. At least 16 residents who lived in the area closest to the Kronos plant have sold their land to Crown since the land swap, according to records reviewed by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. The sellers have received “a windfall,” with an average 2024 purchase price of $114,000 that has been “increasing,” according to Crown representative Dobson. 

Bitely, the spokesperson for Duggan, said that having so many private sales to one entity “had never happened before in Detroit.”

Samantha Flowers was among the first residents to fight against the concrete operation. Last year, she texted BridgeDetroit and ProPublica a video of the plant, taken at 6:15 a.m., to demonstrate the daily noise and bright lights residents are accustomed to. “Typical morning in the neighborhood,” she wrote. 

Flowers sold her home and five other parcels to Crown in January for $125,000, according to the county’s online records. Tomasz, who had filed a lawsuit against the company, gave up his hope of buying the lot next to his and instead sold his home to the company for $150,000. Dobson said the property will be used to create additional buffering from the plant.

Kary, however, plans to live out her final years in her family’s home. She pays for grass seed to maintain the Crown-owned vacant lot next to hers so she can look out her windows at something nice. 

“It’s home,” she said. “I’m not leaving.”

The post Left in the Dust: How a Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant Took Over a Detroit Community appeared first on ProPublica.

Guards at an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, could see a detainee in his cell with one end of a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and the other tied to the door handle. If they opened the door, the sheet would tighten and strangle him. 

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, had been in detention at Camp East Montana for a month by then. The facility itself was still relatively new and had been opened as part of the Trump administration’s plans to house and quickly deport thousands of immigrants at a time.

Almost immediately after being admitted, the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant began expressing frustration about his care, according to a nearly 300-page unpublished medical examiner’s investigative report. 

The report, reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, includes dozens of notes that detail medical staff interactions with Lunas Campos, who had a history of mental illness and had been previously institutionalized in New York. 

The report and the records it contains offer a rare and disturbing look at how immigrant detention facilities — erected rapidly and with little oversight — manage detainees with serious mental health needs. The records paint a portrait of a man in a crisis and a facility whose staff, on several occasions, discussed transferring him to a facility where he could get a higher level of care. 

According to the records, he complained at least eight times to staff about skipped or late doses of antipsychotic drugs to treat his depression, anxiety and hallucinations. He “expressed frustration regarding his medication dosage,” says a Sept. 9 entry from medical staff. 

They point to moments of exasperation that led to self-harm. He banged his head against the wall after he couldn’t afford to pay the charges to talk with his children in New York. That left him with a black eye. In response, staff simply noted that they spoke with him about “not hitting his head against the wall bc he must take care of his brain and his eyes.” 

The incident with the noose and the doorknob came in early October. A mental health provider eventually coaxed him to untie it. Notes detailing the incident stated that Lunas Campos affirmed he wasn’t suicidal. The notes dismissed what occurred as a “suicidal gesture made to force security staff to release him” from the isolation room where he had been segregated from the rest of the detainees. Hospitalization, the notes stated, was “not clinically indicated at this time based on assessed risk and protective factors.”

Lunas Campos died in detention nearly three months later, after an altercation with guards over his medication. The Trump administration initially claimed that he had experienced medical distress, but a coroner later ruled his death a homicide. 

The conflicting accounts over the cause of his death have drawn significant media attention and served to rally advocacy groups who have alleged that it is one of the more shocking pieces of evidence of the dangerous conditions endured by immigrants in federal detention facilities. 

But little had been reported about Lunas Campos’ condition and treatment before that day. On Monday, Lunas Campos’ three children sued the companies running the facility at the time of his death. The lawsuit alleged that guards killed him and argued negligence, including missed medication doses and the improper use of force and restraint. The Washington Post on Thursday reported that Lunas Campos had repeatedly sought treatment for his mental illness, pointing to the medical examiner’s investigative report. The companies have not responded to the allegations in court filings and did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed the contents of the report several weeks ago. Two doctors, who are experts on mental health and deaths in detention, also reviewed the report at the news organizations’ request. The takeaway was clear: The detainee asked for help, the facility staff failed to adequately respond.

The news organizations separately reviewed more than 160 emergency calls, as well as records and interviews with staff and government officials familiar with the detention center. They show medical and mental health emergencies beyond those experienced by Lunas Campos, as well as staff indicating they felt ill-equipped to respond. Detainees had little access to recreational activities and time outside, which mental health experts say exacerbates their despair. Staff also ignored warning signs, such as detainees’ previous efforts to harm themselves.

“It’s civil detention,” said Will Horowitz, an attorney representing Lunas Campos’ adult children in the lawsuit. “They’re not in detention because they’ve committed a crime.”  

The White House declined to comment. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview and did not answer a list of written questions. The administration has previously dismissed detainee accounts of inadequate medical care and poor conditions at Camp East Montana and other detention centers as “false” and called them “fearmongering clickbait.” Federal officials have repeatedly said that for many immigrants, the medical care they receive in detention is the best in their lives.

In Lunas Campos’ case, officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, initially minimized the incident that led to his death, pointing to his criminal history. Later, in response to news reports that the medical examiner planned to rule the death a homicide, a DHS spokesperson said guards had used force to keep him from killing himself. 

Lunas Campos was sentenced to a year in jail after a 2003 conviction for sexual contact with a child under the age of 11, according to The Associated Press. The news organization also reported that he was convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance and sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervision in 2009.

Horowitz said Lunas Campos’ criminal history is irrelevant to his detention. Lunas Campos’ children declined to comment on the failures highlighted in the medical examiner’s report or on his criminal history, but, Horowitz said, “They want people to know that he was a person like anyone else and that he didn’t need to die.” 

In a report issued after Lunas Campos’ death, DHS officials said he received regular medical and psychiatric evaluations, with staff adjusting his medication as needed. They also contended that he was monitored for suicidal ideation. Investigative records from the El Paso medical examiner show a period during which facility staff checked on him every 15 minutes following his suicide attempt, as required by the federal government. 

But the medical examiner’s report also brings into focus a series of breakdowns in care, according to Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He said Lunas Campos’ case is a model of how such moments compound, creating crisis after crisis with dire outcomes.

“The clinical trajectory documented in his chart — escalating agitation, self-harm, pressured speech, repeated confrontations with staff over medication — is the predictable result of erratic psychotropic medication administration in a patient with serious mental illness,” Basu said.

He pointed to records that show staff didn’t transfer Lunas Campos to a facility that could better treat his mental health, even after noting that they were working to move him as early as Oct. 8. Lunas Campos was also repeatedly placed in segregation cells, separate from the rest of the camp population, which had little more than a bed in them. The government’s own detention standards say staff should generally make every effort to avoid placing detainees with a serious mental illness in segregation. 

Most critically, instead of taking his previous suicide attempt seriously, staff interpreted it as an effort to manipulate them, Basu said.

The records, Basu said, clearly show “systemic neglect.” 

A System Unraveling

Camp East Montana was supposed to be the model for how detention centers across the country would operate under President Donald Trump’s administration. It was near the U.S.-Mexico border and had easy access to a highway and an airfield to quickly transport and deport unauthorized immigrants. Its location on barren, massive Fort Bliss land also allowed for a space that could hold up to 10,000 unauthorized immigrants at a time, more than any other facility in the country.

Instead, the detention center became an example of what could go wrong. 

Within months of the camp’s opening, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the federal government, published accounts from immigrants who said they were beaten by guards, denied lifesaving medication and kept in squalid conditions with sewage at times spilling into their eating areas. Detainees commonly caught measles or tuberculosis. The government hasn’t responded formally to the lawsuit, but in statements to the media a DHS spokesperson said claims of inhumane conditions and detainees being abused are “categorically false.” 

The problems treating people with mental health challenges were not as visible but stacked up in ways that experts said added mental distress and could contribute to more suicide attempts. In the worst cases, they said, detainees unnecessarily died.

The facility was never set up to house detainees struggling with serious mental health conditions, a DHS official and a medical provider who worked there told ProPublica and the Tribune. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government did not authorize them to discuss conditions at the camp. 

Several staffers told the news organizations that they had a lot of relevant information they could share, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements.   

The DHS official said immigrants didn’t have adequate space to read, pray, write or get legal services. They were kept inside windowless cells with nothing to do. Detainees were also granted little time outside, partly because the facility’s outdoor space was not big enough for all of them, a government report later found. The federal government requires detention centers to provide detainees at least one hour of outdoor time per day, but many got only a couple of hours a week, detainees told ProPublica and the Tribune. 

“Recreation and amenities, games, books, TVs, are all lifelines for people in detention,” the DHS official, who did not participate in the report, said. 

Prolonged confinement made detainees more anxious and desperate, at times leading to hunger strikes and fights. Immigrants were only supposed to remain at Camp East Montana for a maximum of two weeks, according to contract documents and statements from federal officials. When Lunas Campos died, the typical detainee had spent 38 days in the facility, according to a ProPublica analysis of government data provided to the Deportation Data Project, which collects and posts immigration enforcement information. He had been there far longer, more than 100 days.

Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser for the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights who has studied healthcare in immigration detention centers, said that the conditions reported at Camp East Montana signal that it is not a safe place for any detained individual. 

“You’ve been detained. You don’t know what the process is going to be. You don’t know when you’re going to be released,” Peeler said. “It’s really hard to trust people who are in charge to give you accurate information and so, as a result, you’re going to have a lot more despair and a lot more kind of anguish.” 

The situation is worse for people with a history of mental illness, Peeler said. Solitary confinement can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, self-harm and suicide risks, according to a 2024 report that Peeler co-authored with partners, including students and staff at Harvard University. 

“We are creating a mental health crisis that does not need to be there,” Peeler said.

Some detainees at Camp East Montana who showed signs of potential self-harm were placed in isolation rooms that were not suicide-proof. They had doorknobs and mesh ceilings to which detainees who wanted to harm themselves could tie a bedsheet, the DHS official said. 

National detention standards don’t specify the number of suicide-proof rooms needed in each facility but make clear that detainees who are suicidal should be placed in rooms “free of objects and structural elements that could facilitate a suicide attempt.” 

“It’s insane,” said the medical provider who spoke to ProPublica and the Tribune. “If somebody wants to kill themselves, there’s nowhere to put them that’s actually safe.” 

“They Just Didn’t Do It”

Lunas Campos was in such a room when he first tried to commit suicide. By then, staff had reported at least three other suicide attempts to 911.

There were the two calls in September, one about a detainee who lay on the floor holding his stomach in agony and unable to speak after swallowing an unknown object. The other about a man biting his arms and trying to cut his wrists with a piece of cardboard and a comb. 

Another call came in October, the day before Lunas Campos was spotted with a sheet tied around his neck. A man being kept in a medical isolation room to rule out tuberculosis tried to hang himself, the caller told the 911 operator. 

Suicide attempts are warning signs of a larger problem at a detention center, which could include inadequate strategies for observing or flagging self-harm or more general medical issues, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official at ICE who served in the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations. 

Out of 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump returned to the White House, at least 10 have been reported as presumed suicides. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for independent investigations into the ICE deaths and expressed alarm over the reported use of solitary confinement.

“You would hope that if you have a number of negative outcomes of problematic incidents like that, that they would do critical incident reviews, figure out what was going on and try to take corrective action,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Last week, DHS’s inspector general launched probes into detainee deaths and whether the department was following its own standards on the use of force, citing a rise in ICE custody fatalities since 2022. 

Other problems were already identified in a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found millions of dollars had been wasted, pointed to gaps in medical care and noted unsanitary conditions at the El Paso facility. The report mentions that in October, ICE officials raised concerns with the contractors running the facility about the lack of windows on some doors in medical holding rooms, which prevented staff from easily seeing what was happening inside. 

The DHS official flagged several other problems that the government could have worked to improve. It could have assigned more ICE agents to help with chronic staffing shortages, created more opportunities for recreational activities and built special tents with suicide-prevention rooms, the DHS official said. 

“There was no lack of money or space and there was an obvious incentive to do it,” the official said, referring to the suicide attempts at the facility. “They just didn’t do it.”

There seemed to be a push-pull between career ICE staff and political appointees, the DHS official told the news organizations. 

“The political side didn’t want to give the appearance that it was so chaotic, they wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening,” the official said. 

Even without the proposed changes, staff at the detention center should have done more to treat Lunas Campos’ mental illness, said Joanne Ahola, a psychiatrist who has spent 17 years evaluating immigrants inside detention centers for Physicians for Human Rights’ volunteer Asylum Network. She also reviewed his records at the request of ProPublica and the Tribune.  

Lunas Campos’ early pleas for help continued throughout his detention. Nearly two weeks after his suicide attempt, he again flagged that he wasn’t getting his medications.

“Pt reported being very frustrated and anxious because he had not received his medication for a couple of days,” a medical note from Oct. 19 read. It noted that Lunas Campos was visibly “irritated and yelling.”

Another note on Nov. 10, said Lunas Campos “had not gotten his medications since Nov. 6.” 

And, on Nov. 11, more than a month after staff told Lunas Campos that they were working to move him to a facility with a higher level of care, shorthanded as HLOC, he was still waiting. “Continues to request transfer to HLOC stating conditions at current facility are adversely affecting his mental health,” according to a note from that date.

Lunas Campos was temporarily moved to another facility, but it was another detention center that experts say did not provide the higher level of care he needed.

On Jan. 2, a day before his death, he returned to Camp East Montana. A note from medical staff at 9:42 p.m. said they “provided emotional support,” “reviewed grounding and breathing techniques to manage anxiety,” encouraged him “to seek ongoing mental health support as needed,” and added his name to the medical sick call for a psychiatric evaluation. 

“This is a man who needed regular medications, a full evaluation, mental health clinicians and, no doubt, re-hospitalization,” Ahola said.  

“Instead, it almost seems like it was brushed off or brushed under the rug,” she added. 

Less than two weeks after Lunas Campos’ death, the health administrator at Camp East Montana called 911 again.

Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan native, was found in a cell with his pants tied around his neck. He was in a room with no windows.The staff found him as they were doing routine checks.

An ambulance was needed, the health administrator told the operator, explaining where emergency responders should go upon arrival at the facility. Without hesitation, he added, “They’ve been out here many times.” 

Díaz, who cooked chicken and washed dishes at a Minneapolis Korean restaurant, had been picked up and flown to Camp East Montana a week earlier. The GAO noted that ICE itself later acknowledged in a report that staff had not properly followed procedures after he “exhibited risk factors for suicide.” Staff placed him in a medical holding room — not a suicide-resitant cell — and left him unattended for periods longer than 15 minutes, the GAO stated. 

His autopsy, which was conducted by the military, has not been made public. 

The post “He Didn’t Need to Die.” How an Immigration Detention Center Repeatedly Failed to Address a Mental Health Crisis. appeared first on ProPublica.