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by Maya Miller, Lisa Song and Ava Kofman

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Three Democratic U.S. representatives introduced a bill last week that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to create a pilot program for air monitoring in communities overburdened with pollution. The program would have a $100 million annual budget over five years to allow local agencies to monitor the air quality in neighborhoods, block by block.

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One of the lead sponsors, Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., cited ProPublica’s work on toxic air pollution as a factor motivating her introduction of the Environmental Justice Air Quality Monitoring Act. “I’m grateful for ProPublica’s work to expose the devastating consequences of air pollution, economic inequality, and environmental racism on vulnerable Americans,” Castor said in an emailed statement to ProPublica, after highlighting stories from our “Sacrifice Zones” and “Black Snow” series on social media.

“The data provided by ProPublica’s air pollution mapping tool and the Environmental Protection Agency demonstrates the urgent need to decisively address toxic air pollution that is putting Americans at greater risk for cancer and other harmful health outcomes,” Rep. A. Donald McEachin, D-Va., a co-sponsor of the bill, wrote in an email. “For too long, low-income communities and communities of color have borne the brunt of environmental degradation and injustice, and it must end.”

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced a nearly identical bill last July, weeks after ProPublica and The Palm Beach Post published an investigation into air quality in the Florida Glades, one of the country’s largest cane-sugar-producing regions. For years, residents in the area’s largely Black and Hispanic communities had been saying that the sugar industry pollutes the air when, as part of the harvest, workers set fire to the crops to rid the cane of its outer stalk. Sugar companies have long insisted the air was safe to breathe.

State officials used a single monitor to track air quality across the entire 400,000-acre sugar-growing region. So the news organizations worked with residents to set up commercially available air sensors that measured particulate matter during the burn season and identified short-term spikes in pollution on days when the state had authorized cane burns and when smoke was projected to blow toward the sensors. These shorter-term spikes in pollution, which are a defining feature of Florida’s harvesting process, had been obscured by federal and local regulators’ reliance on longer-term averages. The spikes often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area — high enough that experts said they posed health risks.

U.S. Sugar operates a tour of fields, sugar mills and other harvesting activities in and around Clewiston, Florida. (Thomas Cordy/The Palm Beach Post)

In November, ProPublica began publishing “Sacrifice Zones,” a series of stories that exposed how and where toxic air pollution elevates the cancer risk of residents who live close to industrial facilities. An estimated 256,000 people live in areas where the cancer risk exceeds levels the EPA considers acceptable, ProPublica found through a first-of-its-kind analysis. Predominantly Black census tracts have more than double the estimated cancer risk of majority-white tracts.

Our analysis used EPA air modeling to reveal the estimated industrial cancer risks at a granular level in every neighborhood across the country. Such models are a starting point for identifying areas in need of actual monitoring. The new bill proposes a hyperlocal approach by requesting “ongoing measurements of air pollutants at a block-level resolution.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., another lead sponsor of the bill, said in an email that ProPublica’s stories “helped raise attention on this issue as well as concerns from our constituents. Our congressional district, NY-15 based in the South Bronx, has one of the highest levels of pollution in the entire state of NY. Residents are deeply impacted by bad air quality that leads to dangerous health conditions.”

If passed as currently written, the Environmental Justice Air Quality Monitoring Act would award grants or contracts to state, local and tribal agencies in partnership with local nonprofit groups or organizations that have a demonstrated ability to conduct hyperlocal air quality projects. The bill does not outline what steps should be taken if the air monitoring finds unacceptable levels of pollution in the air. The EPA said it does not comment on potential legislation.

After Markey introduced his version of the bill in July, the Senate referred the legislation to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. There is no vote scheduled for the bill, according to committee aide Jake Abbott.

The legislation “is what communities around industrial facilities have needed for a long time,” Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert, said in an email. Subra has spent her career helping communities struggling with air and water pollution. She said the data from localized air monitoring could tell residents what they’re exposed to and when the pollution exceeds government standards, which could prompt additional scrutiny of industrial polluters.

The House bill was introduced amid a nationwide push for more monitoring of air pollution. In the wake of ProPublica’s “Sacrifice Zones” investigation, the EPA announced that it would establish a new team to conduct aerial monitoring from planes and track emissions on the ground. It pledged to spend more than $600,000 on air monitoring in parts of the southern U.S., such as Mossville, Louisiana, one of the hot spots highlighted in ProPublica’s analysis. The agency also ordered a Louisiana chemical plant to install air monitors along its boundary. These initiatives follow the EPA’s decision last summer to make $50 million in American Rescue Plan funding available to communities interested in improving air quality monitoring. The deadline for applications is March 25.

Applying for federal funding, however, can be a lengthy and complex process. Penny Dryden grew up a few miles away from a handful of chemical plants just south of Wilmington, Delaware. Last summer, Dryden worked with community members to set up five handheld air quality monitors in the area after securing a grant from a local health care system. She is now working with a team to apply for EPA funds to expand that effort so that residents and regulators can better understand which chemicals they are breathing and whether more protections are warranted.

“I’ve been at this work for over 30 years, but there were rarely federal funding opportunities, and now here we are, and it is even difficult for me,” said Dryden.

She and others were encouraged by the introduction of this latest bill, which could push agencies and organizations to partner with communities like Dryden’s.

“Hopefully through this bill people can have their voices heard in wanting to understand what’s going on in their community that could be impacting their health and well-being,” said Sheryl Magzamen, a Colorado State University professor who specializes in air quality and health. Magzamen helped ProPublica and Palm Beach Post reporters design the air quality monitoring plan and assess the results of the “Black Snow” project. The work prompted Magzamen to submit a research proposal to NASA, which awarded her team a $218,000 grant to use low-cost sensors and satellite data to better track pollution in Florida’s cane-burning region and other areas.

“Problems are able to be solved when we have data that points us to what the problems actually are, and monitoring is a huge step in the right direction,” Magzamen said.

by Nuala Bishari

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the San Francisco Public Press. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

At a bustling makeshift flea market on a street corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ladybird sells her wares. One afternoon in December, wearing a black hoodie, faded black jeans embroidered with roses and carefully applied makeup, she biked three blocks from the city-sanctioned tent encampment where she lives, carrying a bag with a still-sealed Minnie Mouse stationery kit and a brand-new pair of brown high heels. Almost immediately, she was approached by a man interested in buying the stationery kit to give to his daughter for Christmas. “Eight dollars,” she said. He talked her down to five, and a deal was made.

During a pause in bartering, a text message appeared on her phone. “I’ve been assigned a case manager! It happened this morning,” she exclaimed, calling over her friend Johnny to tell him the news. “I’m going to be moving indoors in the next couple weeks.”

Ladybird said she hasn’t lived indoors in seven years. This winter, she said, she finally got approved for a permanent supportive housing unit — a subsidized room with health, employment and social services, paid for by the city and federal government. But despite her optimism, that didn’t mean the end of her wait. In San Francisco, the path from homelessness to housing can take as long as two years, and that’s for someone lucky enough to make it onto the waitlist.

San Francisco’s struggle with housing its homeless population is notorious across the nation. Multiple mayors have promised to get the crisis under control. The city’s dedicated homelessness department, created in 2016, has an annual budget of $598 million — a sum that has more than tripled in its short existence.

Nonetheless, as of early February, the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing reported 1,633 homeless people like Ladybird — approved for housing and awaiting their turn to move in. Yet records provided by the department show 888 vacancies in its permanent supportive housing stock as of Feb. 22. Filling those empty rooms would not just cut the waiting list by more than half. It would be enough to house roughly one in every eight homeless people in the city. The homelessness department said it cannot talk about individual cases, but officials acknowledged that at least 400 people have been waiting more than a year, far beyond the department’s professed goal of placing applicants into housing 30 to 45 days after they’re approved.

Hundreds of Housing Units Sit Vacant as Only a Small Fraction Are Filled

Monthly vacancies in permanent supportive housing compared with the number of people who moved in.

(Source: San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing)

These persistent vacancy numbers stem largely from two new bureaucratic problems. First, the homelessness department created a policy that bumped hundreds of people who had previously been approved for housing to the bottom of a new list. In December 2020, the department rolled out a plan that reserved all available permanent supportive housing units for residents of shelter-in-place hotels, which had been opened during the pandemic to keep people who had been living on the streets safe from COVID-19.

This led to a spike in vacancies as many hotel-dwellers opted to stay in place rather than accept a more permanent option. It also meant that everyone else — people on the streets, in shelters, in navigation centers and in city-sanctioned tent sites — was out of luck, simply based on where they slept at night.

It’s into this void that Ladybird fell. A resident of a tent site, she was behind an even larger number of people on an already-massive list.

Second, even when someone is approved to move in, the city is slow to send the paperwork — what’s called a “referral” — over to the private nonprofit organizations contracted by the city to manage housing units. Over the course of the pandemic, this problem has grown steadily worse.

Doug Gary recently retired from one of those organizations, Delivering Innovations in Supportive Housing. A year ago, he reported that the organization had 38 vacant units, with no referrals. Gary remembered passing people sleeping on the sidewalk as he walked to work, knowing he had empty units languishing in his buildings.

“There are going to be 38 people stuck on the street tonight, and they could be in DISH housing,” he recalled thinking. “And that’s been true for months.”

The last count of San Francisco’s homeless population numbered more than 8,000. There is not enough housing for all of them. To try to help, the city’s mayor, London Breed, is pursuing a new goal: She has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to procure 1,500 new units by the end of 2022. The city is on track to hit Mayor Breed’s goal, and may even exceed it.

But with so many units of housing already sitting vacant — a number that according to the department has roughly doubled during the pandemic — a critical question arises: Will the city be able to fill them?

A Deprioritized Population Struggles to Get Indoors

Funding for permanent supportive housing constitutes the largest piece of San Francisco’s budget for the homeless, and the supply of housing is growing rapidly. It consists mostly of older hotels converted into single-room-occupancy residences. The city contracts with a dozen nonprofit organizations to run the nearly 150 buildings and manage social services, such as moving people in and out of units, maintaining the properties and managing individual cases, including everything from connecting people to treatment for substance use disorder to helping someone apply for food stamps. Residents pay 30% of their income, including Social Security benefits, toward rent, and the city subsidizes the rest.

All of the 1,633 people in line for a permanent supportive housing unit had to answer a series of questions to determine who is most vulnerable and therefore most in need of housing. Every year, more than 3,000 people take this assessment, called “coordinated entry,” which takes into consideration, among other things, how long they’ve been homeless, if they have any mental or physical disabilities and if they’re addicted to drugs. Those who score highly by the city’s complex algorithm — in theory the most vulnerable — are marked “housing priority status,” and are then put on a waitlist for permanent supportive housing.

But actually getting off of the waitlist and into those units isn’t easy. The city’s software to track vacant units is error prone, unit maintenance problems take a long time to resolve, case managers quit and it can be impossible for people who have been living on the street to meet document requirements. (The homelessness department said that the city is currently working on the software and documentation issues, and has put a raise for case managers into its budget request for next year.)

Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica

On top of all that, the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic made getting housed harder by creating a system that gave top priority to those least likely to want to move in: those who suddenly found themselves living for free in shelter-in-place hotel rooms.

In spring 2020, as the city locked down and its housed residents stayed indoors, advocates raised concern for the thousands of homeless people living outside and in temporary shelters, many of whom had health conditions that increased their risk for severe COVID-19. Those fears were realized when 92 residents of a large one-room shelter contracted the illness just one month after the city shut down.

In response, San Francisco leased hotel rooms to help people experiencing homelessness quarantine indoors. It was always meant to be a temporary measure, and as the pandemic dragged on, the homelessness department strategized on how to wind the program down. The optics of sending anyone back to the street were not great, and the city created a policy of prioritizing residents of the shelter-in-place hotels for housing.

“I will be candid: It is both one of the biggest opportunities and one of the biggest challenges our city has faced in our homelessness space,” said Abigail Stewart-Kahn, then director of the homelessness department, during a Nov. 10, 2020, Board of Supervisors meeting at City Hall, where she justified the new policy. She added that the department would keep an eye on the data, and would “course correct” to ensure the process was successful. In subsequent interviews and email exchanges, the department did not respond to additional questions about why that policy was created and pursued.

The data over the past 15 months shows a gradually increasing crisis: In October 2020 there were 544 vacant units. A year later, vacancies had nearly doubled to 1,064. While units sat vacant, people living outdoors were waiting to get indoors. Any course correction has been slow to come.

From the get-go, the policy of reserving housing for people in hotels was difficult to implement. Although residents knew the hotels were temporary and could close at any time, many were reluctant to move from free, modern rooms with private bathrooms into small, older units with bathrooms down the hall, at a cost of 30% of their income. All of a sudden, one housing provider said, three applicants for housing had to be referred in order to fill one vacant room.

Inside one of San Francisco’s permanent supportive housing buildings, the kind of housing both Ladybird and Marquita Stroud hope to move into (Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press)

In the first seven months after the policy was implemented, supportive housing vacancies jumped 61%, from 600 units in November 2020 to 964 in June 2021, a period when the city was also adding new units. In February 2021, the homelessness department reported that 70% of shelter-in-place hotel residents who were offered a spot in the Granada Hotel, a newly purchased permanent supportive housing building, had rejected the placement.

When someone turned down an available housing unit, it sat vacant until a new referral appeared. Providers found themselves in a new position: having to offer incentives to persuade potential tenants to move in.

Georgetta Lovett, a property supervisor at DISH, oversees more than 300 units of permanent supportive housing. She said the organization now provides move-in benefits: free rent for the first month, free meals for three months and a free Muni transit pass.

Resistance to moving into permanent housing is not something Lovett experienced when showing units to people who had been living outside.

“People coming directly off the streets would take the place immediately,” she said. “We would be able to show them a room, they’d say, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ Most of them don’t come with a lot of stuff, and they were like, ‘I can move in today, or I can move in tomorrow.’ And normally we can make that happen right away.”

A Feb. 24, 2021, a budget hearing at City Hall on shelter-in-place hotels showed the homelessness department was aware early on that the policy was adding to the vacancy crisis in permanent supportive housing.

“We are noting that people who are not in shelter-in-place hotels are more eager to take permanent supportive housing placements,” Stewart-Kahn said, adding that it was “putting pressure on our system.” She said that the department was “reevaluating” the policy.

Three weeks later, Stewart-Kahn resigned, moving to a new role as an adviser to the city’s Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. That same month, the city established an 18-person shelter-in-place hotel housing team. Their task: to more efficiently implement the policy and move everyone qualified for housing from shelter-in-place hotels into vacant units. As a result of the change, move-ins did increase. In the six months before the housing team was established, the city moved 325 people into permanent supportive housing. In the six months after its creation, that number grew to 488.

In an email exchange with the San Francisco Public Press and ProPublica in February, Megan Owens, who oversees much of the housing process of the city’s homelessness department, acknowledged that the policy “caused a huge delay” for adults living outside of the hotels.

In June, the department told the news organizations that it planned to open up a portion of permanent supportive housing vacancies to unhoused people living outside of shelter-in-place hotels. But the department offered no transparency about how units were being allocated.

Neither effort did enough to catch up to the growing supply. By September 2021, vacancies were at their height, with 1,064 permanent supportive housing units empty.

The delay in access to housing has been rough for people living outdoors. According to the official numbers, the current median wait time for a unit is 82 days.

But Owens admitted that the software the city uses doesn’t accurately track the time between being approved for housing and moving indoors. The city and federal government spent $8.5 million for that system over the past five years, but information on people trying to get indoors still isn’t recorded accurately.

For example, if someone doesn’t contact their case manager for 90 days, their spot on the waitlist expires. In acknowledgment of the long delays, at the start of 2021 the city automatically reinstated those applications, but the software then started the timeline over from scratch.

“The 300 people that expired off the queue and were reinstated in December and January are now listed as having waited 20 to 45 days, depending when they were reinstated, but their experience is that they’ve been waiting for months,” Owens explained.

That lack of clear data worries Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. People who are unsheltered “have very high needs, and they need to get into permanent supportive housing,” she said. “If you don’t keep good administrative data, you can’t track them. You can’t support them. You can’t find them. You can’t know what their situation is. It’s very important to have good data to make these programs work properly.”

Many of those who are waiting are living in city-sanctioned tent encampments in empty parking lots around the city.

A view inside the sanctioned tent encampment where Ladybird lived for 15 months, starting in late 2020 (Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press)

That’s where Ladybird, ineligible for housing under the policy that prioritizes hotel dwellers, lived for 15 months. (She requested the use of her nickname for this story due to complicated family matters; her identity was confirmed by a member of the city’s health department.)

After years on the streets, Ladybird committed herself to finding a home. She said she took the coordinated entry assessment for housing three times — going through a mandatory six-month wait between attempts. She was finally approved in November.

“Six months is a long time,” she said about the time between applications. “You basically have to be sitting out here waiting to be raped every night.” (A University of California San Francisco study found that 32% of women living outdoors reported instances of sexual or physical assault.)

Research backs up Ladybird’s experience. “The impact of waiting weeks, months or years in a shelter or outside rather than a home has devastating consequences for a person,” said Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. “Homelessness for even short periods of time has negative impacts on people’s physical, behavioral and mental health, can strain familial and social relations, have lasting impacts on future employment opportunities, and can entangle people in the criminal justice system.”

In the city-owned parking lot where Ladybird lived during the last year, her cheap camping tent, which rested on a wooden platform in a parking lot, got moldy during a wet winter. She developed pneumonia, and said rats would run around at night, hiding under the pallet she slept on.

“I can’t be there anymore,” she said when interviewed in December. “Your body goes through a lot being homeless. I’ve had pneumonia for two months now, from black mold on my tent. My tent is literally killing me.”

While the city said it is taking steps to mitigate delays, months of living in a wet tent site took its toll on residents. In text messages sent late one night, Ladybird described the chaos that had ensued as one of her neighbors had a mental breakdown. “This situation is getting worse by the day, it’s more twisted than anything I’ve seen in my decade out here,” she said. “I would be better off on the streets.”

The situation felt hopeless. “This site hasn’t placed anybody,” Ladybird said. “Anybody who’s getting out of there is doing it on their own. There’s no social worker. It’s just a dead end.”

Paperwork Bottlenecks Stall the Process of Moving People Indoors

A tall fence encircles a city-sanctioned tent encampment in San Francisco’s Mission District. (Yesica Prado for the San Francisco Public Press)

While the policies of the last two years left people like Ladybird living outdoors, those living in shelter-in-place hotels haven’t always fared better, with some of them waiting more than a year to be connected to a home.

Marquita Stroud is one of those. She said that she has been homeless for 15 years, but that about a month before the COVID-19 outbreak began in earnest, she was approved for permanent supportive housing. “God was on my side!” she said when interviewed in December.

In April 2020, she was relocated to the Hotel Whitcomb, a historic tourist hotel repurposed to allow people experiencing homelessness to quarantine safely. Stroud was one of 500 homeless people the city moved from large, warehouse-style shelters into 25 hotels around town.

Stroud is an optimist, high-energy and cheerful, who wears her hair tied up neatly in a scarf. “It’s wet!” she exclaimed on a rainy morning, as she strode confidently down Market Street with an umbrella in one hand, pushing a cart containing her small, fluffy dog, Blue, with the other. She headed straight to a corner of the public library, a place she knows well.

Under COVID-19-era rules, Stroud isn’t allowed visitors where she lives, so she meets people at their apartments, outside or in public places. The prohibition on guests didn’t bother Stroud too much when she first moved in. But she felt isolated and, as the months dragged on, no one contacted her about moving into her own place. Stroud watched her friends and neighbors — many of whom arrived in the hotel the same day she did — move into permanent housing. Her turn never came.

In large part, that’s because the homelessness department’s process for reviewing and selecting unhoused people for referral is slow. And in the period when Stroud was waiting, things were markedly worse. In October 2020, 32% of vacant units had no pending referrals for a resident. In January, that ratio had more than doubled, to 66% of available units, according to the city’s own data. The department did not respond to questions about why this might be.

Gary ran eight buildings through DISH. In February 2021, before he stepped down, he said the problem wasn’t new, but it was getting worse.

“Somewhere there is a bottleneck where the city is not sending us the housing application — that is, the documented representation of that person that we can process,” he said. “We report the vacancy to the city, and those vacancies languish for weeks to months without a referral of a real live human being who can be housed.”

(Bianca Bagnarelli, special to ProPublica)

At least part of the problem is a shortage of case managers, who are the crucial link between vacant units and the hundreds of people approved for housing. There is frequent turnover in the high-stress positions, and nonprofits struggle to fill new job openings.

Stroud said she has been assigned six case managers in two years. To figure out who is assigned to her, she regularly checks a piece of paper taped to a wall in her hotel, which lists the name of the case manager assigned to each floor. She describes calling her case manager repeatedly to set up an appointment and not getting through.

“They pretty much don’t go knocking on your door,” Stroud said. “You got to ask for them. If I see one in the hallway — like if I see a worker talking to a client in the hallway — I always ask, ‘Are you a counselor? Are you my counselor?’ Because they don’t tell you.”

Nearly two years after being approved for a housing unit, Stroud is still at the Hotel Whitcomb. Although she dreams of going back to school, publishing her journals and giving back to the homeless community, her reality is much different. She’s had items stolen from her room, and the building has fallen into disrepair. “When we first got to this hotel, it was so cute,” she said. “Now they got the bedbugs, the roaches, the mice. Every other day, the pipes are messing up.”

Recently she met a woman who had recently moved into the Whitcomb, but was already on her way out: She’d been assigned a housing unit.

“I was asking her, what did she do to get her housing that quick? And she said her counselor just came knocking on her door like, ‘You ready to go?’” Stroud said, clearly frustrated. “I haven’t talked to anyone about housing,” she said this month, as she approaches her two-year anniversary at the hotel. “I’m still here just waiting.”

As for Ladybird, she was approved for housing in November, but three months later, she is still without a home. In January, she left the tent encampment for a short-term residential hotel, but it comes with a time limit. “After 28 days, we get put out.”

Are you currently homeless in San Francisco, and trying to get housing? Do you have experience with the city’s housing process? Email us at nuala@sfpublicpress.org.

by Justin Elliott

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Faced with a class-action suit filed on behalf of customers who claim they were tricked into paying to file their taxes, TurboTax-maker Intuit knocked the case down. The company insisted its customers had agreed to forego their right to take their grievances to court and were required to use the private arbitration system instead.

But even as Intuit was winning in the class-action case, that very arbitration system was being weaponized against the Silicon Valley company.

A Chicago law firm is using a novel legal strategy by bankrolling customers bringing tens of thousands of arbitration claims against Intuit. Win or lose, this strategy could cost Intuit tens of millions of dollars in legal fees alone — a threat that could prod the company to be more open to a giant settlement.

Nearly three years after ProPublica first reported on how many customers wound up paying for TurboTax when they could have filed their taxes for free, Intuit is fighting a complex set of legal battles to stop consumers from trying to recover money.

Besides the huge number of consumer claims that have been filed, federal regulators and state-level prosecutors are also advancing efforts against the deep-pocketed company, which made $2 billion last year.

The most unusual front in the fight is the strategy to bring tens of thousands of individual consumer claims in arbitration, the alternative to the public court system that has historically been considered friendly to business.

The so-called mass-arbitration tactic was pioneered in recent years as the legal terrain became less friendly to class-action lawsuits, the traditional tool used to recover money for consumers through the court system.

The tactic is akin to using guerilla warfare rather than having soldiers mass on the battlefield and face each other in lines. The law firm pursuing Intuit, Keller Lenkner of Chicago, has generated attention for successfully using the strategy on behalf of delivery workers for DoorDash and Postmates.

Intuit has vigorously defended its practices, denying any wrongdoing in each case. It stresses that millions of people do file their taxes for free using TurboTax each year.

“Intuit was at all times clear and fair with its customers,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica, adding that it “not only did not hide free filing options from consumers, Intuit helped drive the adoption of free tax prep by helping more people file their taxes free of charge than all other online tax prep providers combined.”

Following ProPublica’s initial stories, Intuit was first sued in May 2019 in federal court. The case centered on customers who had to pay after starting the filing process using TurboTax’s Free Edition.

At the time, TurboTax maintained the heavily advertised Free Edition alongside a similarly named Free File product. The Free Edition routed some filers to a version of TurboTax that charged them a fee based on which tax forms they had to file.

Meanwhile, the Free File product, which was offered as part of a partnership with the IRS, did not route users to paid products and was truly free for anyone making less than an income threshold. But it was difficult to find. At one point Intuit added code to its website that removed the product from online search engine results. (The company later removed those lines of code.) A subsequent investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that in 2019 alone, more than 14 million tax filers paid for online tax prep software from TurboTax and other firms that they could have gotten for free. That amounted to roughly $1 billion in revenue for the industry.

The 2019 lawsuit was a traditional class-action case, in which plaintiffs’ lawyers sue a company on behalf of an entire category of consumers who have allegedly been harmed. If the plaintiffs prevail or the company settles, millions of people may be eligible to get money from the defendant.

But for decades, corporate America waged a successful battle against class-action suits, seeking to narrow their use. In recent years, companies got help from the Supreme Court, which issued a series of decisions that smothered many class-action lawsuits by making it easier for companies to hold customers to binding arbitration agreements. When consumers, including TurboTax users, sign up for a service, the terms-of-service contracts they click on often contain a buried clause that has them agreeing to pursue any grievance through private arbitration, not a lawsuit.

Studies have shown that hardly any users actually read these sprawling contracts. TurboTax’s current terms-of-use agreement, which still contains an arbitration clause, runs to over 15,000 words of dense legalese.

Arbitrations are handled in a private forum outside the court system. Crucially for business defendants, those claims are not bundled together, as class-action cases are. This fundamentally shifts the economic incentives: If one customer was defrauded of $50, it’s not worth a lawyer’s time to pursue the case. The calculus is different if a lawyer can represent an entire class of 20 million customers who each lost $50.

“It’s been just catastrophic for consumers and workers,” said Paul Bland of Public Justice, an advocacy nonprofit affiliated with plaintiff-side law firms. “It has wiped away tons of very well-merited and powerful cases where companies clearly break the law and they just get away with it because of the arbitration clauses.”

Business groups have argued that arbitration is a “simpler and more flexible” alternative to lawsuits and that class-action cases have served mainly to enrich plaintiffs’ lawyers.

After more than a year of litigation and an appeal, Intuit effectively won the federal class-action case against it by relying on TurboTax’s arbitration clause. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that TurboTax users had agreed to arbitration by clicking a “Sign In” button on the software that stated users agreed to the service’s terms of use. Those terms contained the arbitration clause.

In that clause, the law firm Keller Lenkner recognized an opportunity. The strategy pioneered by the firm essentially called the bluff of companies that required their workers and customers to settle claims via binding arbitration. It also took advantage of the fact that companies typically must pay fees to the private arbitration organization, running perhaps a few thousand dollars per case.

What makes the strategy even more unusual is that the firm does not have the typical pedigree of plaintiffs’ lawyers, who have long been a stalwart constituency of the Democratic Party. Keller Lenkner was founded by a pair of former clerks for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee; one also was a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh when he was a George W. Bush-appointed appeals judge.

If a handful of consumers pursue arbitration, the fees companies must pay amount to a rounding error. But if businesses are facing thousands of individual arbitrations — a tactic they didn’t anticipate — the potential fees quickly add up and companies can be pressured into settling. The strategy also requires deep pockets on the part of the plaintiffs’ law firm, since they advance money to their clients to cover a modest arbitration filing fee.

While the strategy has so far been used in only a small number of cases, an academic article on the phenomenon by Georgetown Law professor Maria Glover termed it a revolution of the civil justice landscape, “one in which virtually all Americans are subject to mandatory arbitration agreements with class-action waivers, and one wherein a broad swath of claims—for consumer fraud, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, wage theft, and workplace sexual harassment—have been all but eliminated.”

Keller Lenkner disclosed in a related court filing in 2020 that more than 100,000 consumers had sought individual arbitration against Intuit. The firm advanced the consumers several million dollars in filing fees.

Intuit has tried to stop the mass arbitrations. In late 2020, following the appeals court ruling that doomed the federal class-action lawsuit, the company offered to pay a settlement of $40 million in that case.

If the court had approved the class-action settlement, consumers who failed to opt out would not be able to pursue their arbitration claims. A settlement for the entire class of consumers could have knocked out many of the ongoing arbitrations for a relatively cheap price. Keller Lenkner objected to the settlement.

At a hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, a lawyer for Intuit complained that “the Keller firm is able to threaten companies — Intuit’s not alone — into paying $3,000 in arbitration fees, for a $100 claim.”

Breyer questioned whether the proposed settlement was in the best interest of consumers.

“I did think when I looked at this, and saw that, really, that this was a way to avoid or otherwise circumscribe arbitration, that it seemed to be that Intuit was, in Hamlet's words, hoisted by their own petard,” Breyer said, adding, “I think arbitration is the petard that Intuit now faces.” His comments were first reported by Reuters.

Breyer rejected the settlement in March 2021.

Since then, the arbitrations have proceeded slowly.

Limited data disclosed by one of the main arbitration organizations covers cases resolved through the end of 2021. It offers a glimpse of the arbitration dynamics, showing outcomes in a handful of cases: Intuit won at least nine and consumers won five, with the arbitrator awarding consumers as little as $35 and as much as $3,348. Intuit has continued to win most of the cases this year, according to a person familiar with the claims.

In one case, Intuit had to pay the consumer’s attorney fees of $9,500. In another, the plaintiff’s lawyers had to pay Intuit’s attorney fees of $5,025. Arbitrators can order the plaintiff to pay the company’s attorneys’ fees if a claim is deemed to be frivolous.

The data also shows several dozen cases that were either dismissed or settled, without giving any detail on how much money changed hands, if any.

The biggest hit for Intuit was on the cost of the arbitration itself, with administrative fees totaling more than $220,000 for around 125 cases. At that rate, 100,000 cases would cost the company more than $175 million in fees alone.

Legal filings suggest Intuit may have already paid tens of million dollars in arbitration fees by now, but public records of the payments won’t be disclosed until more arbitrations are completed.

Intuit has argued that many of the arbitration claims are bogus, and a lawyer for the company dubbed Keller Lenkner’s tactic “a scheme to exploit the consumer-arbitration fee structure to extort a settlement payment from Intuit.”

The lawyer also asserted that many of the claims involve users who either didn’t use TurboTax or did use it but filed for free. More than 1,000 cases — likely ones that fall into one of those two categories — have been withdrawn by Keller Lenkner, the public data shows.

In part because arbitrations are conducted in secret, it’s difficult to tell much about the success of the strategy in past mass arbitrations. Keller Lenkner has previously said that in a recent two-year period it secured more than $190 million for more than 100,000 individual clients, an average of $1,900 per client.

In a separate case filed against Intuit by the Los Angeles city attorney and Santa Clara County attorney on behalf of California consumers, the two sides are still fighting over what documents and data Intuit has to hand over. Both sides recently proposed a trial date of July 2023, but it has not yet been finalized.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission and a set of at least five state attorneys general are still actively investigating Intuit. Tech news outlet The Information reported last month that the FTC, now led by progressive chair Lina Khan, was pushing forward with the investigation despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that trimmed the agency’s authority in such cases.

One FTC commissioner, Rohit Chopra, voted to proceed with the case before he left the agency last October. But Chopra’s vote was in place only temporarily, according to a person familiar with the matter. The rest of the commission did not take up the matter at the time. An FTC spokesman declined to comment.

This year, the IRS Free File program allows anyone making less than $73,000 last year to use tax prep software and file a federal return for free.

But the program, which was originally conceived as an alternative to the IRS offering its own free filing service, is entering its first year without the participation of the two titans of the online tax prep industry. In 2019 and earlier years, TurboTax and H&R Block together accounted for around two-thirds of all filings through the program, according to ProPublica’s analysis. Intuit announced last year it was leaving the program “to focus on further innovating in ways not allowable under the current Free File guidelines.”

Only much smaller and less recognizable companies like TaxAct, TaxHawk and TaxSlayer, which only hold a sliver of the overall market, remain.

Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger contributed reporting.

by Megan O’Matz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

After the judge in her Wisconsin divorce case ruled that her ex-husband — a man who had sought treatment for anger and alcohol issues — would get legal custody of and equal time with their four children, Julie Valadez vowed to fight back.

But in every key ruling that followed, the Waukesha County Circuit Court judge overseeing her case, Michael J. Aprahamian, found Valadez’s concerns about her ex-husband not credible and her actions unacceptable. Aprahamian took away her ability to co-parent her children. He held her in contempt four times. And after Aprahamian ordered her arrest, she braced herself for jail.

Valadez, whose accusations of domestic abuse had led to her husband’s arrest, ran through a string of attorneys and represented herself at times. Eventually she found a Milwaukee civil rights attorney to represent her, along with a public defender, and enlisted the help of a Washington, D.C., legal service for domestic violence survivors.

And in recent weeks, with a pair of rare appeals court victories and Aprahamian’s decision to remove himself from the case, Valadez has found reason to hope that better days are ahead for her and her children.

Appellate reversals in these kinds of cases are unusual, in part because of the time and money it takes to pursue them. Valadez’s case provides a window into the largely unexplored world of family court, the appeals process and the problems encountered by women who say they’ve been victims of domestic abuse.

A common concern in these situations is that family courts will favor shared custody even if one parent says the other is abusive, sometimes misapplying the law and forcing long, expensive legal battles. ProPublica reported in September on another woman’s lengthy family court ordeal, which also took place in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, but before a different judge. That story explored how Wisconsin courts, in working to give fathers equal parenting rights, often fail to deal with the complexities that arise in these cases and downplay women’s concerns about their own safety and that of their children.

State systems, according to women’s advocates, often put mothers who survived domestic violence at a disadvantage, liable to be seen as noncooperative when the court seeks some sort of compromise.

Valadez, believing that her case was being mishandled, went to great lengths to be heard while also fending off accusations that she was unruly or was somehow failing to do what’s best for her children.

Then, late last year, Valadez won her state appeal challenging Aprahamian’s custody decision on the basis that Ricardo Valadez, her former husband, had not completed the legally required treatment for domestic abusers. In its rebuke, the state Court of Appeals in Waukesha County found Aprahamian had “failed to explicitly apply the proper legal standard” required in cases involving domestic abuse.

The court stated in its Dec. 29 opinion that the judge “read words into the statute that are not there” and “ignored words that are there.” It ordered Aprahamian to reconsider the Valadez decision.

In the wake of that ruling, a January court session drew several spectators from the community: mothers who wore “#Julie4Change” T-shirts, a reference to a website Julie Valadez set up to bring attention to her legal quest.

But from the bench, Aprahamian declined to immediately alter the custody arrangement. The two sides were ordered to appear in court again at a later date.

“Why do we have to wait that long?” Valadez whispered to her attorney.

Weeks later, in early February, Valadez won at the appellate level again, as the court found that the judge had erred when he held her in contempt for emailing him after he had told her not to, failing to sign a release of records and refusing to undergo a psychological exam.

The contempt charges were a reflection of the tense atmosphere inside the court and how Valadez’s own actions have come under heavy scrutiny.

Ricardo Valadez’s lawyer has said that Julie Valadez has made unsubstantiated claims against her ex-husband and undermined the relationship between father and children. Guardians ad litem appointed by the court to determine the best interests of the children also have generally favored her ex-husband and supported the idea that Julie Valadez is being unreasonable. The judge, meanwhile, described her as disruptive and unwilling to follow his instructions.

Aprahamian has since acquiesced to her request for a new judge and is now off the case. He said he could not discuss the case with ProPublica. Ricardo Valadez, through his attorney, also declined to comment.

The victories have given Julie Valadez a measure of satisfaction, but they have yet to produce the desired effect: She’s still separated by court order from her four children, ages 8 to 16. The next hearing is set for Thursday.

“It’s been torture,” Valadez said of the legal battle that’s been going on since 2018 and now includes more than 800 documents. “I don’t even know what will happen to our family; it’s truly horrifying.”

Alcohol, Outbursts and a Fractured Marriage

Julie Valadez was a bride at 19 and a mother at 21. Her husband was 27 when they married. He studied to become a pastor and also sold life insurance.

They had three more children over their 16-year union, and Julie spent her days taking care of the brood and doing volunteer work. Two of the children are autistic, and she primarily handled the doctor’s appointments and school schedule and arranged for help from behavioral therapists, life-skill helpers and outside specialists.

In court papers, she described enduring her husband’s intimidating and violent outbursts, property damage, verbal insults and alcohol abuse. In about 2014 she took refuge for a couple of days at a domestic violence shelter, her husband acknowledged on the witness stand. She then returned home.

The Valadez marriage hit a breaking point in December 2017 when, according to a criminal complaint, Ricardo Valadez came home drunk, yelled and cursed at his wife for being on her cellphone and smashed an iron to pieces. Officers with the City of Waukesha Police Department found him “visibly intoxicated,” handcuffed him and took him out of the house.

He was formally charged months later, in May 2018, with one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor classified as domestic abuse. It later was downgraded to a municipal ordinance violation after he started participating in counseling.

At one point, Ricardo Valadez described his therapy sessions in criminal court, saying: “I cried, and I dealt with my alcohol issues. We dealt with my anger issues. We dealt with, obviously, my whole life changing, no longer in a marriage and seeing my children as much as I wanted to see my children.”

He added, “I continue to do counseling just because I want to improve myself as a person. I want to be a better dad, obviously providing for my children.”

He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.

By then, Julie Valadez had filed for divorce and secured a restraining order against him, describing incidents of stalking, harassment and violence, according to court records. “He always has threatened me if I was to ever leave him,” she wrote in her request for the restraining order. “He has said a number of times that he would kill me; and if I was ever with someone else, he’d kill them.”

At one point during the divorce, Valadez said, she abandoned her home and moved with her children to a protected address under Wisconsin’s Safe at Home program.

Wisconsin’s family law prizes cooperation between exes, but the law anticipates that interaction between parents in abusive relationships can present a dangerous, if not lethal, situation.

The law instructs court-appointed attorneys for children, called guardians ad litem, to investigate possible domestic abuse in families and then advise judges on their findings. A 2021 study by the University of Wisconsin, however, found that guardians ad litem typically don’t have enough resources for evidence collection or expert help, and they lack training about domestic abuse.

Julie Valadez has argued in her case that the initial guardian ad litem did not investigate the abusive dynamics in her marriage; she alleged that a second such attorney, appointed later during the appeal, dragged her and her ex back into court over parenting issues after the custody decision, even though neither parent had filed a motion requesting circuit court intervention about the children.

As the case wore on, Julie Valadez exasperated the court officials, including the guardians ad litem and the judge. Aprahamian deemed some of her allegations about her ex-husband “vindictive and picayune.”

As a result of her complaints, police arrested her ex-husband twice for allegedly violating the restraining order — once after he sent her reproachful electronic messages about money and once after he stepped inside the house when she wasn’t there to bring a child to a school bus. Ricardo Valadez was not prosecuted for entering the home and was found not guilty of violating the restraining order for sending the messages.

Kurt M. Schuster, Ricardo’s attorney, accused Julie in court filings of creating an unsettling environment for her children. “I don’t think she’s capable of putting her children’s best interest above her own,” Schuster said in an interview.

To Julie Valadez, the notion that she has benefited in any way from the custody battle is laughable. For instance, she said, she took a huge financial hit when she left the large house that her husband was making payments on for an apartment she had to pay for.

“It was a disaster for me,” she said. “I lost everything.”

A Skeptical Judge

The Valadez divorce trial, in early 2020, lasted five days.

Julie Valadez testified in detail about her allegations of abusive behavior by her husband. She recalled one incident in which she said he was “very drunk and being aggressive verbally and physically” as they struggled over car keys and another in which she said he grabbed her arm “to the point where it hurt and left red marks.” She testified that he threatened her, saying she would regret leaving him and he would “make me pay for this.”

She described for the judge outbursts by her husband where, she said, he punched holes in the walls of their homes. “He had punched them next to my head or he kicked a hole in the wall,” she said in court.

While on the stand, Ricardo Valadez refused to answer certain pointed questions about his wife’s allegations of domestic violence, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The questions included: “Isn’t it true you have physically hurt Miss Valadez?”

Aprahamian issued a 34-page decision in April 2020.

He agreed with recommendations by a court-appointed social worker and the first guardian ad litem that the couple exchange the children weekly. The handoffs were to be done at a police station.

Shared legal custody, however, was a different matter because of questions whether the former spouses could cooperate (although the social worker thought it unwise for either of them to act without the other’s input). Julie Valadez argued that a restraining order she obtained in 2018 against her husband made communicating with each other problematic and that she alone should have legal custody.

Aprahamian made note in his ruling of Ricardo Valadez’s 2017 arrest. Referencing incidents that spurred the divorce filing, the judge wrote that there was a “pattern of domestic abuse occurring coincident to the initiation of this case.” But he said he would not take into consideration Julie Valadez’s other accusations.

“The Court does not find credible Ms. Valadez’s other allegations of abuse and battery, including uncorroborated allegations of sexual abuse, physical abuse, stalking and property damage,” Aprahamian concluded.

The judge acknowledged that Ricardo Valadez, whom he described as an alcoholic, had lied to the court about his sobriety. Still, he wrote, “As a general matter, the Court found Ms. Valadez not credible.”

“She was evasive in answering questions and repeatedly asked to have simple, straightforward questions repeated prior to answer,” Aprahamian ruled.

For example, asked by the then guardian ad litem Katherine J. De Lorenzo if she believed she could cooperate with her ex-husband if awarded joint legal custody, Julie Valadez said at trial: “I have been cooperative.”

“Can you answer the question?” the judge asked.

“If I would be cooperative, is the question? Can you repeat your question?” she replied.

De Lorenzo obliged but warned: “Try and listen to my questions. They’re pretty simply stated, Ms. Valadez.”

Valadez said in an interview that in this and other similar instances she merely was trying to make sure she understood what she was being asked.

Aprahamian concluded that Ricardo Valadez “likely would put his children’s interests above his own.” He ruled that Ricardo should have sole legal custody, giving him control of decision-making on major issues in the children’s lives, though he was instructed not to change the kids’ school or doctors.

For Julie Valadez, the ruling was a harsh blow. She worried about how her ex would manage all the special services the children needed and about his drinking and anger issues.

“It was just a dangerous situation,” she said. “To me it seems obvious.”

She first undertook handling her own appeal in June 2020 but later had assistance from Washington, D.C., attorney Jay C. Johnson, acting as pro bono co-counsel with DV LEAP, a nonprofit that seeks to help victims pursue appeals in cases involving domestic violence.

Judges have wide discretion in custody cases and appeals are rare, said Elizabeth Vogel, DV LEAP’s managing attorney. Many litigants in family court don’t have a trial attorney, discover it’s hard to find an attorney to pursue an appeal and face short deadlines to file challenges.

DV LEAP saw merit in Julie Valadez’s case because the judge had recognized a pattern of domestic abuse but had concluded wrongly that her husband still had satisfied conditions for custody despite not receiving adequate counseling.

“Julie’s case is, sadly, such an excellent example of how judges take liberties in their reasoning to get around statutes that are meant to protect survivors,” Vogel said.

The Court of Appeals agreed that Ricardo Valadez was not entitled to sole legal custody because he had not shown he had successfully completed state-mandated treatment for batterers from a certified program.

Also, though Aprahamian required “absolute sobriety” from Ricardo and ordered the exchange of children at the police department, the appellate court ruled he did not make the safety of Julie and her children a “paramount concern” in determining who the children would live with, as required by state law.

Reversing the judgment by Aprahamian, the appellate court sent the case back to family court for reconsideration.

After the favorable appellate court ruling, Johnson tweeted that the decision “sets strong precedent for domestic abuse victims who are seeking custody of their children.”

Appealing to a Higher Court

During the year and a half that the case was on appeal, Vogel said in an interview, Aprahamian appeared to subject Julie Valadez to “an extreme level of retaliation” through his multiple rulings.

That’s not unheard of. Women across the country have told ProPublica that family courts have not only overlooked their allegations of domestic abuse but have acted to punish them by taking away much or all of their time with their children for making what the court considers to be false, or minor, allegations of abuse.

When these women openly complain, file motions or defy the court orders, judges can view them as mentally unfit or hold them in contempt.

In Valadez’s case, tensions between her and the judge never seemed to abate, and along the way she lost the ability to regularly see her children.

Aprahamian appointed a new guardian ad litem, Molly Jasmer, in September 2020 to interact with the appellate court and represent the children’s best interests.

In April 2021, Jasmer filed a 38-page brief with the appellate court outlining why Aprahamian’s ruling was correct. The brief was also signed by Ricardo Valadez’s attorney.

A month earlier, Aprahamian had taken away Julie Valadez’s parenting time with her second oldest child, then 13, after she didn’t make the boy available to meet with Jasmer. Because the judge had already ruled on custody a year earlier, Valadez questioned Jasmer’s involvement.

Jasmer declined to comment for this story.

Valadez contested the no-contact order not just in family court but in a suit she brought against Aprahamian and Jasmer in federal court in June 2021. That suit was dismissed.

“From my standpoint, it’s not personal,” Aprahamian said of the federal suit in a July hearing on the Valadez custody case. “It’s like ‘The Godfather.’ This is just business.”

Less than a month later, Aprahamian issued a bench warrant for Julie Valadez’s arrest for failing to comply with his directive to sign over certain records and undergo a psychological exam requested by Jasmer. At the same hearing, he suspended her parenting time — in effect, preventing her from seeing any of her children except under limited, supervised circumstances.

Her attorney at the time, Will Green, was taken aback. “Holy cow,” he said in court.

“Am I saying she is going to cause harm to them intentionally? That’s not what I’m saying,” the judge explained. “I’m finding she’s taken steps that are not in the best interests of the children and continues to do so.”

The judge had expressed frustration, for example, with Valadez bringing her children along with her when she served Jasmer with the federal suit.

Psychological testing is widely used in custody cases when there is a concern about a parent’s fitness.

The use of such tests, however, can be unwise when there’s a history of abuse, according to the Domestic Abuse Guidebook for Wisconsin Guardians Ad Litem. Abuse victims, it notes, may reasonably show symptoms associated with a large range of mental health difficulties, such as anxiety, paranoia, trouble sleeping, frequent worry or blaming others for their problems.

Ricardo Valadez was not asked to undergo such an exam.

“I was found to be a fit parent,” Julie Valadez said of the initial custody order. “I was never found to be an unfit parent. They had provided no valid reason for me to have a psych eval.”

Aside from some therapy sessions together, she said, she hasn’t had any significant time with her one son for nearly a year and her other three children for several months.

Valadez avoided jail when the Waukesha County public defender’s office got involved and persuaded the Court of Appeals in September 2021 to quash the bench warrant and stay the jail term during her appeal of the custody decision.

She received additional help when, last fall, William F. Sulton, a Milwaukee civil rights attorney, agreed to represent her.

“The case is so unusual in that the judge tried to put her in jail,” Sulton said. “So I really believe she was at risk of losing her liberty.”

Said Sulton: “Unfortunately, the court system does not treat unrepresented people with the respect that they deserve. And so it is not uncommon to see judges and other lawyers singling out, with draconian measures, people who are unrepresented.”

In reversing Aprahamian earlier this month, the appeals court found that the type of contempt the judge used was “punitive” and not lawful — except in one instance when the judge used it to preserve order in the court when he took issue with Julie interrupting him. It vacated the three other contempt rulings.

Getting those rulings took months of perseverance, as Valadez chased down transcripts, switched attorneys, filed court documents and appeals and studied the intricacies of Wisconsin law and court procedures. She believes her appeals exacerbated tensions inside Aprahamian’s courtroom.

“They didn’t want this,” she said. “It’s a big deal to get reversed like they did."

At the crux of the appellate court’s ruling in the custody case were the counseling sessions Ricardo Valadez attended as a result of his criminal case and Aprahamian’s decision to accept those as proof of rehabilitation even though they weren’t certified by the Wisconsin Batterers Treatment Providers Association.

Ricardo Valadez’s lawyer said his client has received additional counseling. A few days after Christmas, he filed a new document with the court stating Valadez completed a 20-week domestic violence treatment program from a certified provider.

Aprahamian’s replacement will now have to rule on custody and other related issues. Sulton said in an interview that the latest treatment program completed by Valadez should be disregarded because it came too late and is inadequate because there is no proof it reduces violence.

Still to be determined is when Julie Valadez can be an active mother to her children again.

“I just want to get my kids back,” she said. Their Christmas gifts, she said, are still waiting for them, by the fireplace in her apartment.

by Steven Lee Myers and Paul Mozur, The New York Times, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

Read in Chinese • 阅读简体中文版

Inside the Potemkin village of China’s propaganda, the Winter Olympics have unfolded as an unalloyed success, a celebration of sports and political harmony that has obscured — critics say whitewashed — the country’s flaws and rights abuses.

At Beijing 2022, the hills are snowy, not brown as usual this time of year. A Uyghur skier is the symbol of national unity, the tennis player Peng Shuai just a curious spectator. Athletes and foreign journalists praise the polite volunteers and marvel at the high-speed trains and the robots that boil dumplings and mix drinks.

While China’s control of what its domestic viewers and readers consume is well established, the country has spread its own version of the Games beyond its borders, with an arsenal of digital tools that are giving China’s narrative arguably greater reach and subtlety than ever before.

With bots, fake accounts, genuine influencers and other tools, China has been able to selectively edit how the events have appeared, even outside the country, promoting everything that bolsters the official, feel-good story about the Winter Olympics and trying to smother whatever doesn’t.

“For the Chinese Communist Party, the Winter Olympics are inseparable from the broader political goal of building up the country’s national image,” said David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, a monitoring organization. Referring to the country’s leader, he added: “This is what Xi Jinping has called ‘telling China’s story well.’”

On Twitter, which is banned in China, Chinese state media outlets and journalists, as well as diplomats, have tried to buff the image of the Games, raving about venues and cooing over the Olympic mascot.

An account called Spicy Panda used artificially boosted posts to accuse the United States of attempting to “stain the Olympics.” Notations were added by ProPublica. (Screenshot from Twitter by ProPublica)

China has also sought to influence online discussions in more concealed ways. The New York Times and ProPublica identified a network of more than 3,000 inauthentic-looking Twitter accounts that appeared to be coordinating to promote the Olympics by sharing state media posts with identical comments, for instance. Such accounts tended to be recently created with very few followers, tweeted mostly reposts and nothing of their own, and appeared to operate solely to amplify official Chinese voices.

Some of their efforts have centered on an account called Spicy Panda, which has been posting cartoons and videos to push back against calls for a boycott of the Olympics. In one cartoon, Spicy Panda accused the United States of wielding “its deceiving propaganda weapon to stain the Olympics.”

The tweet was reposted 281 times, all by the fake-looking accounts, but received little other engagement, a strong indication that the network was mobilized to promote the message. Aside from the bursts of promotion, Spicy Panda’s posts about the Olympics received almost no attention.

Watch video ➜

An analysis of Spicy Panda’s supporters turned up 861 accounts — 90% of which were created after Dec. 1. The accounts’ first wave of coordinated posts pushed Beijing’s stance that Hong Kong’s Legislative Council elections were legitimate, though critics have called the vote a sham. Then the accounts turned their attention to the Olympics. (By Thursday, all but one of the accounts had been suspended, shortly after the Times and ProPublica asked Twitter about them.)

Posts by Spicy Panda received hundreds of reposts but little other engagement, strongly suggesting coordinated promotion. Notations were added by ProPublica. (Screenshots from Twitter by ProPublica)

Spicy Panda appears to have a connection with iChongqing, a state media-linked multimedia platform based in Chongqing, a city in central China. The accounts that shared Spicy Panda’s posts often did the same with the tweets by iChongqing’s account. IChongqing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other botlike accounts promoted hashtags that seemed aimed at drowning out criticism of China, a hallmark of previous campaigns.

They promoted content under hashtags like #Beijing2022 and #TogetherForASharedFuture, this year’s official Olympic motto. Some accounts repeatedly posted tweets with identical wording, such as: “China’s hosting of the #Beijing2022 as scheduled has boosted the world’s confidence in defeating the pandemic.”

Twitter said in an emailed statement that it had suspended hundreds of the accounts identified by the Times and ProPublica for violations of its platform manipulation and spam policies. It said it was continuing to investigate the accounts’ links to state-backed information operations.

Beijing's Olympic mascot Bing Dwen Dwen. (Photo by Lian Zhen/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Even the Games’ official mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen, a cuddly panda in a suit of ice, has been the subject of an organized campaign on Twitter, according to Albert Zhang, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center.

Thousands of new or previously inactive accounts have helped the mascot go viral, he said — which China’s state media presented as evidence of the mascot’s popularity and, by extension, that of the Games.

“If you want to push out a lot of content on something like the Beijing Olympics, this is an easy way to do it,” Zhang said. He added that the campaign now underway was like others sponsored by the Chinese state to push Beijing’s narrative on topics such as COVID-19 and the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The information space inside China is not unlike the elaborate measures that have created the “closed loop” that keeps athletes, journalists and other participants strictly segregated from the general public.

Inside the “closed loop” of official propaganda, the state carefully curates almost anything ordinary Chinese people see or read. The effect has been an Olympics free of scandal or criticism or bad news.

When the United States men’s hockey team played an overmatched Chinese team, the game was not shown on the main state television sports channel, CCTV 5, and the 8-0 defeat was mentioned only glancingly in news reports. A state media slide show devoted to the men’s figure skating competition conspicuously omitted the gold medalist, Nathan Chen of the United States.

In Chinese footage of the Games, the mountains where many competitions are being held have been deftly framed to exclude the dry, brown slopes in the background, until Day 8 when a snowstorm covered them in a frosting of white.

One of the biggest political stories of these Games has also unfolded outside China’s internet firewall: the appearance of Peng Shuai, the professional tennis player and three-time Olympian who created a furor when she accused a senior Communist Party leader of sexually assaulting her.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, met her for dinner, as he promised he would when the global outcry over her fate threatened to overshadow the Games. Peng has appeared at curling and figure skating, among other events. None of that was shown inside China, where all references to her accusations have been erased.

“It’s absolutely critical to understand that this is not just another narrative,” Bandurski, of the China Media Project, said of the Olympics. “It’s a narrative that implies widespread censorship and the manipulation of public opinion, which is actually policy.”

Jack Stubbs, vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a social media monitoring company, said his firm had observed another Chinese propaganda network using foreign social media platforms, including Facebook. The network, which the company has dubbed Spamouflage, has spread videos emphasizing the Olympics as environmentally friendly and crooning about strengthening Chinese-Russian ties, punctuated by President Vladimir V. Putin’s attendance at the opening ceremony.

A video posted to Facebook by a fake account identified by the social media monitoring company Graphika criticized American media outlets’ reporting on the Ukraine conflict as “provoking China Russian relations.” (Facebook)

China has defended its use of Twitter and Facebook, platforms that it bans at home. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said last year that such sites were an “extra channel” to combat negative portrayals in the West.

One American company, Vippi Media Inc., based in New Jersey, signed a $300,000 contract with the Consulate General of China in New York to help promote the Games, according to the company’s filing with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

New Jersey-based Vippi Media Inc. signed a $300,000 contract with China to help promote the Games. (Screenshot obtained from FARA eFile database by ProPublica)

Under the contract, first reported by the research group Open Secrets, the company has been promoting the Games by recruiting “social media stars” to post on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, the company’s founder, Vipinder Jaswal, said in a telephone interview.

“They were very clear and I was very clear that it’s about the Olympics and the Olympics only, nothing to do with politics,” he said.

Once the Games began, the drama of the sports themselves dominated attention. Protests over China’s human rights record have not materialized, as some activists hoped. On the contrary, many athletes have heaped praise.

“When you really meet the people here and talk to them,” Jenise Spiteri, the American snowboarder competing for Malta, said in a state media interview, “everyone has a very good heart.”

Spicy Panda tweeted a state media report about another American competitor, the freestyle skier Aaron Blunck. In remarks posted by the official China Daily newspaper, Blunck praised China’s COVID-19 protocols.

“#AaronBlunck revealed the real China that is totally different from what some American media have said!” Spicy Panda’s post read.

Spicy Panda posted positive comments by American athletes about China’s administration of the Games. (Screenshot from Twitter by ProPublica)

Claire Fu and John Liu of The New York Times contributed reporting.

by Bianca Fortis

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When President Joe Biden was campaigning for office, he said that to beat the coronavirus, the U.S. needed the testing equivalent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board.

That board had sweeping powers to shift the country’s economy to support the war effort, and it ultimately oversaw a reported 40% of the world’s munition production during World War II.

“It’s how we produced tanks, planes, uniforms, and supplies in record time,” the Biden campaign website said. “And it’s how we can produce and distribute tens of millions of tests.”

The day after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order creating the Pandemic Testing Board. He said he would be putting the “full force of the federal government” behind expanding testing.

A year later, though, it’s remarkably hard to tell what the board has done.

As far as we can find, the group has put out no press releases, held no hearings and made no announcements. Biden’s executive order states that the head of the board would be, or be chosen by, the White House’s head of COVID-19 response. That’s Jeffrey Zients, but when we contacted him, he didn’t respond.

When we asked White House officials about the Pandemic Testing Board — who was on it and what actions it had taken — they declined to answer our questions and pointed us to the Department of Health and Human Services.

That agency did respond to our inquiries about the board, but its answers offered few details about the board’s work. It did not say who is on the panel or what decisions it has made.

“The Pandemic Testing Board serves as the forum where agencies across the federal government which are involved in testing can describe emerging challenges and what they are learning,” the agency said. “It provides a mechanism for addressing policy and implementation issues regarding the supply and distribution of tests, as well as increasing access to and affordability of tests in the community.”

The agency’s full statement also notes that the board has met regularly and has been split into two groups, one focused on test supply and the other on testing policies.

Public health experts told us they, too, hadn’t heard much about the board.

“I had assumed that they jettisoned these plans,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “If it still exists, it is certainly very low profile,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. The country’s first coronavirus testing czar, Adm. Brett Giroir, said he knew little about it as well. “It is rumored to have met, but I did not see public disclosure or reports from the meetings.”

Of course, the inner workings of a board are less important than whether the government is getting the job done. But as ProPublica detailed in November, the Biden administration has been slow to roll out wider testing — just what the board was created to do.

In October, White House officials reportedly disregarded a proposal from testing experts to send rapid tests directly to Americans in anticipation of a COVID-19 spike during the holidays. Press secretary Jen Psaki also infamously dismissed the idea in a December briefing.

Later that month, the Biden administration announced it would send tests directly to Americans. But the tests are arriving just as the omicron wave is receding, and critics have argued that the effort shortchanges communities of color.

“I think it’s damn well about time,” said David Paltiel, a professor of public health at Yale University. “It’s never too late, but some of us have been screaming and yelling about the idea for more than 18 months.”

There was no shortage of money for expanding testing. As part of last year’s stimulus package, Congress appropriated nearly $48 billion for testing, contact tracing and other efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That is in addition to $48 billion set aside for testing in 2020.

But just like with the board’s activities, details about where exactly the money has gone have been hard to come by. Since the Biden administration hadn’t released a breakdown, we submitted a request for specifics more than two months ago.

Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Roy Blunt, R-Mo., sent a letter on Jan. 3 asking for similar information. After Burr’s office shared what it had learned, the Biden administration sent ProPublica a one-page rundown of COVID-19 spending last week.

The allocations thus far include: $10 billion for testing in schools, $9 billion for manufacturing testing supplies, nearly $5 billion for testing uninsured individuals, and more than $4 billion for testing and mitigation measures for high-risk populations. Nearly $3.9 billion went toward free community testing at pharmacies and federally qualified health centers, and $2.9 billion went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for expanding labs and testing capacity. More than $1.9 billion has gone toward COVID-19 testing of unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border. About $3.6 billion is listed as simply “activities previously planned for PPPHCEA,” a reference to the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The Indian Health Service received an additional $1.5 billion. Another $4.4 billion is still pending allocation.

Mara Aspinall, an Arizona State University professor and an adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation on the subject of COVID-19 testing, has been tracking HHS press releases to figure out how the stimulus funds have been spent, since the numbers are not publicly disclosed. She said testing should have been more of a focus since the beginning of the pandemic, but there’s still plenty left to do.

“There are a lot of indications that the federal government and state governments are understanding the power of the information that tests bring,” she said. “But what we can’t repeat is the error of last spring thinking it was over and therefore not continuing to focus.”

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Lydia DePillis contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Karim Doumar

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our data newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

In October 2021, ProPublica published a gutting and outrageous narrative of a juvenile court judge who oversaw a system that jailed children at extraordinary rates, and a county full of officials who collaborated or looked the other way.

In one particularly egregious case that reporters Meribah Knight and Ken Armstrong found, several Black children were arrested at school and jailed for a crime that didn’t even exist. Two police officers who were sent to arrest them couldn’t help but wonder: If the kids had been white, would any of this have happened? A lot of readers wondered, too. Counterfactuals like that bring up a point worth flexing some investigative muscle on, even if they are challenging to answer definitively.

Ken and Meribah had discovered a story that showed that the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth had tracked how often counties violated the law by jailing kids for longer than allowed, at least up to 1999. But it was unclear if the state still collected or kept that information, and if so if it would be willing to share it. In an effort to give some scope to the issues in Rutherford County, Ken and Meribah put in a records request, but didn’t hold their breath.

This is something reporters grapple with all the time. When do we stop gathering facts and write the article? Can we tell this story without a specific piece of information? Should we wait and see, or is what we have found too important not to publish now?

In this case, since Ken and Meribah didn’t quite know what the reports would show, and they had already uncovered disturbing realities about how the Rutherford County juvenile justice system was run through other documents, depositions, interviews and more, they worked with what they had.

After the story published, the data they’d requested showed up with a surprise. Not only did the state have records going back 11 years, the reports also held aggregate totals of the children sent to jail and their races, too.

OK, bear with me as I quickly dive into the mechanics of what happened next. The data consisted of dozens of monthly inspection reports the commission had done for the juvenile detention center in Rutherford County, saved as PDFs. The PDFs included counts of children jailed, the county they came from and their races. Meribah and Ken brought ProPublica’s deputy data editor Hannah Fresques on board. To analyze the data, she needed it compiled neatly. So Ken spent a day or two moving the information by hand from the PDFs into a Google spreadsheet. (I’m sure many of you data practitioners are familiar with the soothing monotony of manual data entry.)

Hannah then used one of the most advanced, complex and highbrow techniques known to humankind. Just kidding — she used a pivot table. Pivot tables are like Data Analysis 101. They allow you to take data sets and sort, analyze and summarize them in different ways.

So Ken had compiled a spreadsheet that had the numbers of children booked into jail by each race every year for the last 11 years, and Hannah pivoted the spreadsheet to show totals by race.

The results: 38% of children Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system sent to jail were Black.

That number means pretty much nothing out of context, so the reporters used census data to compare the rate to the Rutherford County population at large.

The results: From 2010-2019, between 14% and 16% of children in Rutherford county were Black. Far below the 38% of jailed children.

That’s a huge racial disparity. But there was more context to add still.

This is where data reporting, and especially racial disparity data, can get dicey. To me, that seemed like a huge and shocking disparity. Front page news. Stop the presses. To Ken, who has been reporting on the criminal justice system for decades, it seemed expected. (Not acceptable and definitely in need of attention, but certainly not surprising.)

In fact, The Sentencing Project showed that in 2019, 41% of the children incarcerated nationally were Black, even though Black children make up only 15% of the nation’s youth.

And that’s consistent with how a lot of data reporting goes, especially when journalists uncover racial disparities. To the people paying attention, especially people living through inequalities, the journalists haven’t “uncovered” anything at all. It’s hardly even news.

“We're so used to seeing how profoundly unfair the criminal justice system is that we're almost numb to it. And then when you see something that lines up with your expectations, the temptation’s to just shrug your shoulders and say, yeah, I thought so,” Ken told me.

But there was another piece of context to check, to see if Rutherford County stood out. Hannah created another pivot table to see how the disparity had changed over time.

The results: While the racial disparity in most of the country had been decreasing for years, in Rutherford County, it was only getting larger. So even though its disparity was roughly consistent with the nation’s, we were still able to show that something is different in Rutherford County.

This straightforward analysis exemplifies the power of ProPublica’s data team. “We’re trying to document some basic on-the-ground realities,” Hannah said about the data team’s work. “These racial disparities were not things previously documented and were not public.”

But there’s still more information you’d need to make sense of the data, and it can’t be found with a pivot table or any other advanced methodology. I’m talking about causes and effects.

Doing the analysis to definitively document reality allows for more accurate next-step reporting lines.

Here’s what I mean.

In a lot of ProPublica projects, data like this might prompt reporters to ask some important questions: Who is responsible for this disparity? Why is it getting larger? What does it look like to the actual children going to jail, or to their families?

We published a great example of this just a few weeks ago. Data ProPublica obtained and analyzed showed that Black and Latino drivers in Chicago were getting a disproportionate amount of tickets from traffic cameras. But traffic cameras are supposed to take racial bias out of the equation. So the reporters dug in to try to understand what the disparity might really be exposing. They found that pedestrian- and bike-friendly infrastructure like bike lanes, large sidewalks, medians and crosswalks do a whole lot to slow cars down and are much more prevalent in white neighborhoods.

That context allowed the reporters to find a very simple but damning truth: Some of the factors that contribute to ticketing disparities, such as wider streets and lack of sidewalks in low-income communities of color, also make those neighborhoods more dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and even motorists.

And independent of the factors that caused the ticketing disparity, there was a clear effect. As that story says: “Black neighborhoods have been hit with more than half a billion dollars in penalties over the last 15 years, contributing to thousands of vehicle impoundments, driver’s license suspensions and bankruptcies, according to ProPublica’s analysis.”

In the case of Rutherford County, though, the data that documented the on-the-ground realities came after the initial investigation was published. Even without the data, Ken and Meribah were able to write a piece that examined the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County and exposed mishaps, wrongdoing, unfairness and more. It was punctuated by members of the system themselves wondering aloud about how racism had played a part in their work. It dove deep into the background of the Judge Donna Scott Davenport, who oversaw the court and the jail, and readers walked away with real questions about her qualifications, motivations and actions. (Davenport declined to comment for the initial investigation and did not respond to a request for comment about the racial disparity information. Since the first investigation was published, Davenport has lost her adjunct instructor position at Middle Tennessee State University and announced she was retiring from the bench, saying, in part “I am so proud of what this Court has accomplished in the last two decades and how it has positively affected the lives of young people and families in Rutherford County.)

You didn’t need the data showing racial disparities to know something was wrong. The reporters proved it in other ways, too. The data confirmed it.

The team at ProPublica is committed to the hard work of crunching the numbers to understand the truth as best as possible and digging past those numbers to understand how disparities come to be and the actors and systems responsible for them. We’re always wondering: What realities does this data expose?

Because data without context only gets you part of the way toward understanding the truth.

by Eli Hager

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

This story was co-published with The Washington Post.

Those in Congress who are blocking President Biden’s proposed child tax credit — a monthly federal stipend for families with children of up to $300 per child — have been making a curious claim of late. They’ve been saying that there is already a highly effective cash assistance program for low-income parents and kids: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

If the child tax credit were to be provided to these families going forward, “all the requirements that apply to those receiving TANF … would be gone,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in October.

Doing so would “shatter a decades-old consensus” that TANF has successfully transitioned people from welfare to work, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., added in December.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and key Democratic swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin, W.Va., among others on the Hill, have recently echoed these sentiments.

Here’s the problem: They are simply wrong about the success of TANF. It is a program distinguished by failure.

Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the Clinton-era welfare reform law that created TANF, which inspired me and my colleagues at ProPublica to investigate the current state of cash assistance in this country. Our reporting found that the requirements of TANF, which McConnell, Manchin and the others praised, are more often just plain cruel.

In New Mexico and many other states, for instance, low-income single mothers applying for TANF are forced, in a relic of colonial “bastardy” laws, to first identify the father of their child (and his eye color, license plate number and parents’ addresses), and also to recall under penalty of perjury the exact date when they got pregnant, before they can get a small amount of cash assistance for things like rent, child care and diapers. Many are also made to submit their children to genetic testing.

When a state has all of this information, it can then go after the dads for child support — much of which the government pockets. (ProPublica found that in 2020, nationally, more than $1.7 billion in child support from fathers meant to go to their kids was instead diverted into government coffers, as part of TANF’s design.)

Some states go even further out of their way to avoid spending TANF dollars to help struggling moms, dads and kids. In Arizona, only 6% of families below the poverty line are able to obtain assistance from the program, partly because the state uses more than $150 million a year of its TANF funding to instead pay for child welfare investigations of many of the very same poor parents, as well as the foster care costs of removing their children from them. (More than 60% of Black children in Maricopa County — metro Phoenix — will see their parents investigated by the time they turn 18, according to a recent academic study.)

And across the nation, $5.2 billion in TANF funding that is supposed to be helping provide direct assistance to low-income families is instead sitting entirely unused in states’ bank accounts, with the amount actually increasing during the pandemic even as need soared.

The sheer difficulty of accessing these dollars often leaves applicants casting about for other options. In Utah, for example, so few families seeking TANF are approved or eligible for the aid that many parents I’ve spoken to in my reporting say they feel they have to seek help from the LDS Church instead. There, they are sometimes pressured to get baptized, work for the church or read aloud from the Book of Mormon in order to receive assistance.

But if spending less on helping those in need is actually the point of welfare law, then opponents of the child tax credit in Congress are right to say that TANF works well enough already.

In fact, spending less on parents and children was built into the original structure of TANF. The program’s funding was frozen in 1996 — and has not been increased since to account for inflation or population shifts. That means less and less is available per poor family with every passing year, especially in the rapidly diversifying desert Southwest where I live.

Take Nevada, which since the ’90s has changed demographically more than any other state, due both to immigration and to an influx of tech companies and other young newcomers. Between 1997 and 2015, as the state’s increasing population caused its cost of living to skyrocket, the number of kids living in poverty there more than doubled, from 67,852 to 143,407. The result: Nevada now gets the smallest population-adjusted amount of TANF funding in the nation, at only $63 a year per child. By comparison, neighboring California receives $409.

This is the program that America’s families will be left with if Congress does not pass the child tax credit this year.

Ruby Duncan, who led marches of poor working mothers down the Las Vegas Strip and into its casinos at the height of the city’s Rat Pack glory days, a half-century ago, and who remains a leading advocate for families in the Southwest, put it best. TANF “is not a caring program,” she said. “It’s too late for it to be caring.”

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by Anjeanette Damon

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The email arrived in Elliot Malin’s inbox from his cousin’s mom.

“Scott needs a kidney,” the subject line read.

The message matter-of-factly described Scott’s situation: At 28 years old, Scott Kline was in end-stage renal failure. He wasn’t on dialysis yet. But he probably should have been.

His mom was reaching out to as many people as she could, asking them to be screened as a potential donation match.

“Thank you for considering it, but please don’t feel any pressure to do it,” she wrote. “Sorry I have to share this burden, but the best potential match is family.”

Malin didn’t need to be pressured. For him, the decision was easy.

“There was no other thought besides trying to help Scott,” Malin later said.

He clicked on a link in the email to begin the screening process.

If he turned out to be a match, Malin knew the surgery could put his health at risk. The recovery would be physically painful. What he didn’t anticipate was that it would put his finances in jeopardy. That just as he would have to trust the skilled hands of the surgeon to make sure the operation went well, he’d have to trust in the expertise of billing coders and financial coordinators to navigate the increasingly complex system that covers the costs of transplant surgeries.

Living organ donors are never supposed to receive a bill for care related to a transplant surgery. The recipient’s insurance covers all of those costs. This rule is key to a system built on encouraging such a selfless act. And for most uninsured patients in end-stage kidney failure, Medicare would pick up the tab. But in Malin’s case, he would end up facing a $13,000 billing mistake and the threat of having his bill sent to collections.

A bill from NorthStar Anesthesia to Malin for $13,064 (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

Donors like Malin play a critical role in the nation’s transplant system. According to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, in the last three years more than 30% of kidney donations came from living donors. Neither UNOS nor other national advocacy organizations track how often billing problems like those encountered by Malin occur. But advocates say they do happen and can deter donors from coming forward.

“Living donors should not be receiving any bills at all whatsoever regarding any part of the living donation process,” said Morgan Reid, director of transplant policy and strategy for the National Kidney Foundation.

Malin and Kline describe themselves as cousins, but their blood relationship is distant. Their great-grandfathers were brothers, making them third cousins. Still, they’re the same age and grew up as friends, sometimes traveling and spending holidays together. Kline attended Malin’s wedding in 2019.

Exactly what went wrong with Kline’s kidneys is a mystery. In the summer of 2020 he had just moved to Fort Worth, Texas, for work. He went in for routine blood work to monitor a medication he was taking. When the results came in, the doctor called to ask if he was on dialysis.

“You’re in end-stage renal failure,” the doctor told him.

“Oh, no I’m not,” Kline responded.

The bloodwork wasn’t wrong. He had just 17% kidney function. Thus began his search for a new organ. Kline was told his wait for a kidney could be three to five years if a friend or family member didn’t step forward. In February 2021, Kline and his family began reaching out to everyone they knew. Volunteers signed up for medical screening, but insurance would only pay to test one at a time. Waiting for one potential donor to be ruled out before testing another drew out an already lengthy process.

Four months after Malin signed up to be screened, he got final confirmation he was a match.

By June, the two cousins were deep in the byzantine organ transplant bureaucracy: screeners, financial counselors, doctors, specialists, laboratories and, the most difficult, insurance companies.

“The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do this is pretty extraordinary,” Malin said, describing rounds of medical tests, mountains of paperwork and preauthorizations for procedures. A multidisciplinary team of professionals assembled to assist the two patients through the process.

“The hospital was amazing on trying to make everything as easy as possible,” he said of the team.

Malin said they gave him one assurance: He wouldn’t have to contend with any bills or be responsible for a dime of the surgery’s estimated $160,000 cost. The team had received preauthorization from Kline’s insurance plan, which would pick up all of Malin’s medical costs.

That assurance, however well-intentioned, fell flat.

Malin, right, and his cousin Scott Kline in the hospital for the transplant surgery (Courtesy of Elliot Malin)

In July, Malin traveled from his home in Reno, Nevada, to Fort Worth, where the cousins underwent the transplant surgery at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center. The surgery was successful.

Malin spent three days in the hospital recovering, Kline a day or two longer — a painful experience made bearable by their companionship.

“We would do our little walks around the hospital floor,” Kline said. “We would be suffering together. It was really nice to have that. Usually you’re there alone, especially during COVID.”

By early August, Malin was back in Reno to finish recuperating. The next week, he started law school. Life was getting back to normal.

When the first bill arrived, it was more annoying than stressful. It totaled just $19.15 for blood work done before the surgery. The hospital said it would take care of it, Malin said. Then he got a notice that an old insurance plan he was no longer a member of had been billed $934 for lab work. Again, he notified the hospital.

In late September, Malin got a bill for a stomach-dropping amount: $13,064. While he was startled by the cost, it didn’t worry him too much. He knew Kline’s insurance was responsible for paying it. He notified the hospital and forgot about it.

A month later, a second notice arrived. Then, on Dec. 6, Malin received a document that scared him.

“Final Notice! Your account is now considered delinquent,” the notice read. If he didn’t take action, the billing company warned, it would attempt “further collection activity.”

The bill was from NorthStar Anesthesia, a firm that provides anesthesia services to hospitals across the country, including Baylor Scott & White All Saints.

NorthStar Anesthesia warns Malin that his bill could be sent to collections. (Courtesy of Malin, highlight added by ProPublica)

Now, Malin wasn’t only irritated that the bills just kept coming, he was worried about his credit.

“I did call them and kind of chewed them out a little bit,” Malin said. “I walked through what this was for, that it was a kidney donation and I’m not the responsible party.”

Malin complained on Twitter about the aggressive billing practice, eliciting an array of responses, from jokes about asking for his kidney back to outrage that he’d be in this position after such a gift.

After he called the billing company and the hospital, there was nothing else he could do.

“I’m just waiting to see if I go to collections or not,” Malin told ProPublica two weeks later.

He did his best to leave Kline out of it entirely.

“He’s had a lot on his plate,” Malin said of his cousin. “His recovery has been harder than mine. He’s the one accepting the organ, so he’ll be on immunosuppressants the rest of his life. Because of COVID, he’s largely stuck indoors. I don’t tell him a lot of it. I don’t want to stress him out.”

Still, it troubled Kline that Malin was facing such problems.

“At the end of the day, I want everything to go as smoothly as possible for Elliot,” Kline said. “He was doing me an unbelievable kindness. I owe my life to him.”

A stack of bills for Malin's transplant surgery (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

Malin heard nothing until Jan. 19, one day after ProPublica reached out to NorthStar for comment.

“The CFO of NorthStar just called me and told me she’s taken care of the bill,” Malin texted a reporter.

The next day, the company emailed Malin, confirming he would not be responsible for the bill, that he was never sent to collections and that his credit wouldn’t be affected.

“On behalf of NorthStar, I apologize for causing any confusion or concern for you regarding this matter and assure you that it has been resolved,” wrote Kate Stets, the company’s chief financial officer.

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She said that after his call on Dec. 7, the bill had been rerouted to “the correct parties,” but that the company had failed to communicate that to him. The letter explained that NorthStar had received incorrect insurance information at the time of the surgery. (A spokesperson later said NorthStar received no insurance information at the time of the surgery.) In such cases, bills are automatically sent to the patient.

The company has since adjusted its policy to prevent that from happening in future transplant cases, Stets wrote.

“To be clear, it is not NorthStar’s policy to bill transplant donors for bills related to their donation surgeries,” Stets wrote. “We recognize the well-established public policy standard and practice that transplant donors should not be billed for such services — that we and the nation’s health care system have a responsibility to foster and encourage such acts of selflessness and generosity.”

In a statement, a NorthStar spokesperson said no other organ donors owe “out of pocket payments.”

“NorthStar did not hear from Baylor on this matter previously and was first notified of the billing error on December 7, 2021 after insurance information was not provided to NorthStar by the transplant center at the point of care,” a spokesperson said. “NorthStar resolved the error immediately and closed the account that same day, prior to any inquiry from ProPublica.”

Both Malin and Kline commended the team at Baylor Scott & White All Saints that guided them through the process. The hospital, however, declined to grant an interview to ProPublica about what went wrong with the billing.

A spokesperson provided a short statement: “We are pleased this has been resolved for our patient by NorthStar. Although billing can be complicated, these occurrences are rare. We have also been in touch with the patient and we don’t have anything further to report.”

Financing such surgeries is so complex that transplant centers employ coordinators to help both patients with the process.

“I tell donors, I can’t guarantee you won’t get a bill, but if you do, call me,” said Deidra Simano, president of the Transplant Financial Coordinators Association.

In one case, after trying everything to get a provider to bill the proper insurance, Simano resorted to paying a patient’s $200 bill with the transplant center’s credit card.

“That’s what we had to do to make it go away,” she said.

Malin said he feels fortunate to be equipped to fight the billing issues. He worries about others with fewer means facing a similar situation, recognizing it could be a barrier to those selfless enough to donate an organ.

“It sucks but I wouldn’t have changed any of it,” he said. “I like my cousin. I want him to be healthy.”

Malin with a kidney-shaped pillow given to him at the hospital for his recovery (Andri Tambunan, special to ProPublica)

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by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS, and Chris Morran and Mariam Elba, ProPublica

ProPublica and Rocky Mountain PBS would like to talk to Coloradans who have lived in a community with a homeowners association. We know there are a lot of you: As of 2020, an estimated 74 million residents belonged to one of America’s 355,000 HOAs. There are more than 10,000 of these groups in Colorado alone, and they’re estimated to be home to nearly 2.4 million residents. These resident-governed organizations collect dues and fees from members to provide for improvements to and upkeep of shared areas, and to pay for some insurance coverage. HOAs can also set standards for public-facing aspects of members’ homes, including lawn maintenance, exterior paint colors and the use of lights and other decor.

HOA members who fall behind on dues or run afoul of rules set by the board can face additional fees, including legal fees charged by the HOA board’s attorney. If the dispute is left unresolved, the HOA could place liens on the homeowner’s property and attempt to foreclose on the home.

Because these processes often occur outside of the public eye, it is difficult to know just how common they are. If you have firsthand experience with an HOA, please fill out the brief questionnaire below.

by Caroline Chen, Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp, graphics by Haru Coryne

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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as of the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report of what we’re doing about it. This is the report for 2022; here are all our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is crucial to fill our newsroom with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, not only in journalism but particularly in investigative journalism. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 137 full-time employees at the start of 2021 to 160 in 2022, largely due to the launch of regional units in the South and Southwest and the expansion of our Midwest office. In addition to our talent recruitment efforts, mentorship opportunities and financial stipends, many of ProPublica’s diversity efforts this year continued to be internal, focused on onboarding and staff development.

The Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Caroline Chen, Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we tracked candidates through the application and interview process. Out of 50 positions filled in 2021, 55% of the candidates we interviewed identified as women, and 47% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Of those we hired, 45% identified as women and 44% as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

The percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as last year. In editorial positions, staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white also stayed the same as last year, at 58%.

For the fourth year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 51% of the staff.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here are the breakdowns:

Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica Race and Ethnicity: Editorial Race and Ethnicity: Managers Gender: All of ProPublica Gender: Editorial Gender: Managers

Note: The data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, from this year onward we are stating these numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” We hope this will provide more specificity and accuracy. In previous years, we have sometimes given statistics with the term “people of color.” To better compare current data to previous years, ProPublica used employee information as of Jan. 1, which was not the date used in the 2021 annual report; as a result, figures for 2021 differ from what was previously reported. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people and do not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding.

Our Ongoing Efforts

We think about our efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism), recruiting talent and improving our hiring process, and inclusion and retention. As the pandemic continued to disrupt our ability to carry out many in-person diversity initiatives, ProPublica has continued to offer virtual training and development opportunities:

• The conference subcommittee, led by Maya Miller and Irena Hwang, partnered with Journalism Mentors in the lead-up to the summer conference season. Twenty ProPublica staff members provided affinity conference attendees with general advice or portfolio reviews. The partnership was so successful that we decided to keep it active outside of the traditional conference season. (Interested in signing up for a session? You can do so here.)

• In June 2021, Ellis Simani, Irena Hwang and former ProPublica staffer Beena Raghavendran continued a career-building webinar for “alumni,” current members and selected finalists of ProPublica programs (Conference Stipends, Data Institute and Emerging Reporters) to hear from our staff about topics including journalism ethics, burnout and side-hustles. ProPublica is working on a similar virtual gathering for 2022.

• Diversity Committee Office Hours: We have continued to offer a casual hangout on Zoom twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, ask questions about ProPublica’s ongoing DEI programs or chat about diversity-related concerns in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Building the Pipeline

• Conference Stipends: ProPublica offers funding to help student journalists attend conferences. This effort is coordinated by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo. In the sixth year of the program, we teamed up with The Pudding to award 25 stipends of $750 each. Because of the pandemic, we also gave students the option to use the money for journalism-related expenses in addition to online conference expenses. Apply for this year’s stipend here.

• Emerging Reporters Program: This program provides stipends and mentorship to six students who have demonstrated financial need and encourages applications from people with diverse backgrounds. The program includes a $9,000 stipend and admission to a journalism conference. This is the program’s seventh year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford. Check out our most recent class and find out more about the program.

• ONA (Online News Association) Diversity Breakfast: An annual breakfast at the ONA conference, facilitated by Ruth Baron, Karim Doumar and former ProPublica staffer Beena Raghavendran, pairs managing editors, executive editors and other leading professionals in the industry with journalists from historically underrepresented communities. For the past two years, we have hosted a virtual breakfast at the conference and plan to keep doing so, whether in person or virtually, this year.

• Chicago External Mentorships: Quarterly mentorship sessions with The Real Chi, a Chicago-based learning newsroom powered by young reporters and editors ages 18 to 25 that cover the city’s West and South sides. Led by Duaa Eldeib and Tony Briscoe, workshops include sessions about public records, fact checking and investigative reporting.

• Outreach Trips: A team coordinates visits, in person or by Zoom, by ProPublica journalists to schools across the country, especially historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions with journalism programs. Contact Topher Sanders if you’d like us to visit your school virtually or in person, once we’re able to do so safely.

Recruiting and Hiring

• Rooney Rule: We require that hiring managers interview at least one person who does not self-identify as solely non-Hispanic white. In addition, we have made it explicit that every application must be read by at least two people.

• Application Process Data Analysis: We gather and analyze data about our job, fellowship and Local Reporting Network candidates to better understand who’s making it to the interview stage and look at the makeup of our overall applicant pool.

• Affinity Conferences: Our conference subcommittee coordinates and encourages ProPublica presence, participation and events at affinity conferences such as NAHJ, NABJ and AAJA. The subcommittee spent the year reassessing its budget and relationships with affinity groups, and its members are excited to be entering 2022 with more opportunities to engage in conferences as a result.

Inclusion and Retention

• Unconscious Bias Training: In 2021, ProPublica hired Paradigm Reach to conduct ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training with staff, including mandatory training for all managers.

• ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song that matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to meet each other, develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions.

• Welcoming New Hires and Focusing on Internal Culture: Following a year of expansion and rapid hiring at ProPublica, two new subcommittees, led by Michael Grabell and Ariana Tobin, were formed to think about how to improve the news organization’s onboarding process and how to be more inclusive and equitable in our newsroom.

• Rethinking Language Around Identity: An ad hoc subcommittee led by Melissa Sanchez was created to discuss best practices for language in job application forms and other ProPublica internal documents to allow people to identify themselves most accurately.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new full-time positions, and here’s our fellowships page. At the bottom of either page, you can sign up to be automatically notified when we have a job or fellowship available.

by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo

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We are proud to announce our seventh annual conference stipend program (formerly the Diversity Scholarship), aimed at providing students with an opportunity to learn from professionals in the field. This year we are once again teaming up with The Pudding, a longform data journalism publication.

ProPublica, with additional support from The Pudding, will be sponsoring need-based stipends for 25 students to attend journalism conferences in 2022. Anyone who is U.S. resident for tax purposes is eligible. All are welcome to apply. We especially encourage students from underrepresented groups in journalism — including people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities — with interests in investigative and data journalism to apply. Check out last year’s scholarship recipients.

The $750 stipends will go to students who would otherwise be unable to attend conferences. If a student intends to go to a conference that ends up going virtual, they will have the opportunity to use any leftover portion of the stipend toward journalism-related expenses such as subscriptions to news publications, software, FOIA fees or equipment (think cameras, recorders, etc.).

Journalism conferences offer great opportunities for networking and professional development, especially for those just starting out in their careers.

The deadline is March 7 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time. Students have the option to select a conference as part of their application. We understand that dates and formats may change, but we would still like to know which you are interested in attending. Please note that the list below is not exhaustive.

• AAJA, Asian American Journalists Association. Los Angeles, California, July 27-30.
• AHCJ, Association of Health Care Journalists. Austin, Texas, April 28-May 1.
• IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors. Denver, Colorado, and virtual, June 23-26.
• JAWS, Journalism and Women Symposium. Austin, Texas, Sept. 8-11.
• NABJ, National Association of Black Journalists. Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug. 3-7.
• NAHJ, National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Las Vegas, Nevada, Aug. 3-7.
• NAJA, Native American Journalists Association. Phoenix, Aug. 25-27.
• NLGJA, Association of LGBTQ Journalists. Chicago, Illinois, Sept. 8-11.
• NPPA, National Press Photographers Association (Northern Short Course). Virtual, March 31-April 2.
• ONA, Online News Association. Los Angeles, California, Sept. 21-24.
• RNA, Religion News Association. Bethesda, Maryland, March 24-26.
• SND, Society for News Design. Location and dates TBD.
• SRCCON, organized by OpenNews. Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 22-23.
• MVJ, Military Veterans in Journalism. Washington, D.C., October, exact dates TBD.
• LSM, Latino Media Summit. New York City and virtual, June 3-4.

Every year, we share what ProPublica is doing to increase the diversity of our newsroom and of journalism as a whole. These stipends are a small but important step to help student journalists from underrepresented communities take advantage of everything these conferences offer.

High school, college and graduate students are welcome to apply. You must be a student at the time of application, but it’s OK if you’re graduating this spring. Students currently in a gap year are not eligible.

Questions about the application process? Want to contribute to our stipend fund to send more students to these conferences? Get in touch at student.conference@propublica.org.

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by Robert Moore, El Paso Matters

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This story was co-published with El Paso Matters.

A government investigation into the 2019 death of a Guatemalan teenager in Border Patrol custody has found serious problems with the agency’s handling of sick detainees.

The report, obtained by ProPublica through a public records request, concludes that Border Patrol agents did not check on 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez Vasquez, who died of the flu after writhing on the floor of his cell in Weslaco, Texas. The report also found that the case reflected broader problems with care in a detainee system that at the time was overwhelmed with migrants, many of whom were ill.

Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez (Via Facebook)

The findings echo the conclusions of a ProPublica investigation from two years ago that revealed how the government failed in taking care of Hernandez.

Hernandez had been detained by Border Patrol agents in May 2019. After being in custody for a few days at an overcrowded processing facility, the Guatemalan migrant had been diagnosed with the flu and was running a 103-degree fever. A nurse practitioner who treated Hernandez wrote that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.

Agents noted in log books that they regularly checked on the boy after he was moved to another Border Patrol station that housed sick migrants. But video surveillance of his cell showed no sign of it, the report said.

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

The government report said that agents never went inside Hernandez’s cell that night as he lay ill. It wasn’t until the morning, when Hernandez’s cellmate woke up and found him unresponsive, that agents finally entered the cell.

Falsifying federal records to impede administration of an agency’s function is a crime. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas declined to prosecute anyone in Hernandez’s death, the report said. The U.S. attorney declined ProPublica’s request for comment on the decision.

The report is by the Office of Inspector General, which is the internal watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security. The government issued a press release in September about the general findings, but the report itself was not released. Most of the report was provided to ProPublica in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

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The report still leaves many questions unanswered, including whether anybody involved in the case has been disciplined.

The government also did not provide the full report to ProPublica. The inspector general’s office said it was releasing 164 pages of documents, but it has provided only 104. The agency hasn’t responded to numerous inquiries about the discrepancy.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, declined to comment on whether any agents have faced discipline stemming from Hernandez’s death or whether any changes had been made as a result of the inspector general report.

The agency said it is continuing an internal investigation, 32 months after Hernandez died and four months after receiving the inspector general report.

The Texas Civil Rights Project, which represents Hernandez’s family, also declined to comment on the report.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the report identified several failings. It “confirms a concerning lapse in care for the health and well-being of Carlos, as well as the importance of appropriate training and resources for personnel caring for children in custody. CBP must do better,” the Mississippi Democrat said.

The report found that only one health care worker was on duty when Hernandez died the night of May 19, even though more than 200 sick migrants were housed in a makeshift ward.

A pediatrician who reviewed the case for investigators wrote that agents should have noticed that Hernandez was in trouble. The doctor noted that videos showed Hernandez using the bathroom an “extraordinary” number of times. The doctor said it was “especially worrisome” that agents’ logs of Hernandez’s last hours noted no problems even as the boy, the doctor wrote, “was lying motionless on the bathroom floor.”

The doctor, whose name is redacted from the report, stated that Hernandez probably would have died even if he had been watched more closely. In addition to the flu, Hernandez had sepsis and a severe immune disorder, according to an autopsy report.

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

But Dr. Alia Sunderji, a pediatric emergency medicine physician who has researched the deaths of migrant children in Border Patrol custody, said the inspector general report hadn’t properly framed its question about Herndandez’s illness.

“I would say that the question shouldn’t be, or isn’t, ‘Might he have died anyway?’ The question is, ‘Might he have lived?’” said Sunderji, who has reviewed autopsy reports and Border Patrol medical records of Hernandez’s care at our request. “That answer is yes, there is a possibility that with prompt treatment he could have lived.”

Dr. Judy Melinek, a San Francisco-based pathologist who has reviewed Hernandez’s autopsy report and Border Patrol medical records, said she believes his immune disorder was caused by his untreated illness.

“It can occur in overwhelming untreated sepsis,” said Melinek.

Hernandez was the fifth child to die either in Border Patrol custody or shortly after release between December 2018 and May 2019. Three of them died of the flu.

Hernandez and his 18-year-old sister were among almost 133,000 migrants taken into custody at the southern border that May, the highest total in 13 years.

His sister was allowed to travel to New Jersey to be with another brother while immigration courts decided her status. Hernandez was held by the Border Patrol because he was a minor and was supposed to be turned over within three days to the agency responsible for finding placements for unaccompanied children.

But the large numbers of children crossing the border had created delays. Hernandez was still in Border Patrol custody in McAllen, Texas, six days later when he got sick.

He was moved that afternoon, May 19, to another Border Patrol facility in the nearby town of Weslaco, which was serving as a makeshift isolation ward for sick migrants.

Hernandez was seen by a nurse practitioner that evening, his last contact with a health professional.

Health care workers and Border Patrol agents told investigators that it was common to have only one or two medical staffers on duty at the Weslaco station. The report said the workers, employed by a contractor called Loyal Source Government Services, repeatedly raised concerns about low staffing levels. (Company officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

The inspector general said Loyal Source’s policies didn’t set a ratio for medical staff to detainees. The report said the Border Patrol rushed to provide medical staffing at detention centers after two children died in custody in December 2018 but “did not ensure adequate oversight procedures were in place.”

The inspector general report also found a breakdown in required welfare checks of detained migrants. The lead Border Patrol agent at Weslaco on the midnight shift the night of Hernandez’s death told investigators he had been instructed to check on each person hourly but had never received training on how to do the checks.

The lead agent told investigators that he made hourly checks of Hernandez’s cell but didn’t remember seeing anything that raised concerns.

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

He also told investigators that it was common practice for lead agents to “check the ‘select all’ tab in the [logging] system and press enter, reporting all detainees received an hourly welfare check.”

(Excerpt from Office of Inspector General report obtained by ProPublica)

The agent’s name is redacted in the inspector general report released to ProPublica. But Border Patrol log records previously obtained by ProPublica from the Weslaco Police Department showed that Agent Oscar Garza logged welfare checks at 2:02 a.m., 4:09 a.m. and 5:05 a.m.

Closed-circuit video showed that Hernandez’s last movement was at 1:41 a.m., as he lay beside the toilet in his cell. A pool of blood was visible on the floor near his concrete bed.

Garza told investigators he hadn’t noticed any problems. He did not respond to requests for comment.

by Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times

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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A school district in Washington state has offered an extraordinary $34 million settlement to students and parents exposed to toxic chemicals that lingered for at least eight years on a public school campus.

The Monroe School District, northeast of Seattle, proposed the striking settlement in November under court seal, preventing the public from seeing the offer. However, the $34 million figure appears in a separate court document obtained last week by The Seattle Times.

In publicly available court documents, the school district did not accept responsibility for hazardous conditions on the Sky Valley Education Center campus, detailed in a recent Times investigation. Instead, the district defended its cleanup efforts on campus, saying it acted appropriately to remove toxic chemicals and inform parents.

Records show the school district was slow to clear out toxic material from the Monroe campus, even as pressure from parents and staff escalated and dozens reported illnesses. As early as 2014, Monroe School District officials found a mixture of harmful conditions at the school, including poor air ventilation and the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a banned, synthetic chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has linked to some cancers and other illnesses.

Children and staff claimed they became severely ill, reporting hormonal problems, skin conditions, cancers and brain damage. More than 200 parents, teachers and students filed lawsuits against Monsanto, the manufacturer of the PCBs, for exposure to the toxicant at Sky Valley. Monsanto, which is now owned by Bayer, has gone to trial in two of the lawsuits, with juries awarding 11 plaintiffs a collective $247 million. Several other suits are awaiting trial.

Monsanto originally produced the PCBs, a chemical preservative used in light fixtures and caulking in Sky Valley’s 1950s- and 1960s-era buildings. The light fixtures at Sky Valley started failing in 2014, leaking oily, yellow PCB liquids into classrooms.

The school district has been slow to remove the PCB-laden light fixtures from the campus, even after the EPA stepped in to guide officials and encourage a swift cleanup. At one point, school officials certified in writing — and assured parents — that they had removed all PCB-containing material from Sky Valley, but an EPA inspection later revealed that wasn’t the case, The Times reported last month.

At least 15 of the King County Superior Court lawsuits, totaling 195 plaintiffs, also took aim at the Monroe School District, which opted to negotiate a settlement separately from Monsanto. The proposed settlement excludes Sky Valley staff who sued Monsanto, because Washington state law bars employees from suing their employers for negligence in most cases.

The $34 million offer is the maximum allowed under the Monroe School District’s insurance policy “in order to protect MSD’s finances and its ability to continue operating,” according to a statement the district provided to The Times last week.

The district called the settlement a “prudent action under the circumstances.”

It isn’t clear if the $34 million is the highest settlement payout for a school district in the state, but the sum is about half the total that the district’s insurance service, Washington Schools Risk Management Pool, paid out all of last year on claims, according to risk management records. Washington state schools enroll about 1 million students.

The Monroe School District, which serves about 6,000 children, has an annual budget of $93 million.

The $34 million settlement figure first appeared in a report by a special master, an outside judge tasked with deciding how the sum should be split among the 195 claimants.

The report suggests that those who were exposed to PCBs as children, some of whom are now adults, should collect the bulk of the payout. Adults who were exposed would get the next highest payouts. And family members of those exposed would collect the least.

About a third of the settlement would go toward attorneys’ fees and costs. After subtracting the fees, each child exposed would collect roughly $171,000; each adult exposed would collect about $58,000; and each family member of someone exposed would collect about $2,300, according to estimates in the report.

Many plaintiffs experienced “significant, profound damages which they will have to live with for the remainder of their lives and for which they deserve to be compensated,” wrote the special master, King County Superior Court Judge Richard McDermott.

Though McDermott is only overseeing the school district cases, he offered his opinion on the ongoing lawsuits against Monsanto, writing that the chemical giant “is going to have to get serious about a global settlement that is large enough that the plaintiffs will have to pay attention.”

Earlier this week, Monsanto filed a motion to strike elements from McDermott's report or seal the report entirely and bar any parties from publicly releasing it. Monsanto, which claimed the report commented on topics that were still being litigated in trials, wasn’t involved in the Monroe School District settlement discussions.

“The anti-Monsanto statements in the report were not supported by any judicial fact-finding, not adopted by the court, and are damaging to a fair and impartial jury selection and trial process,” read a statement provided to The Times by Bayer, which in 2018 acquired Monsanto, explaining the request to revise or seal the reports.

King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North, overseeing the Sky Valley cases, hasn’t ruled on Monsanto’s request.

The cases have apparently pitted Monsanto and the school district against one another, with each party arguing that the other is to blame for the health crisis at Sky Valley.

McDermott wrote in his report that Monroe School District is “far less culpable than the product manufacturer.”

Monsanto, on the other hand, argued in court that the school district was repeatedly warned about PCBs but failed to take aggressive action.

To this day, the EPA is still working with the district on a cleanup, and Sky Valley, with about 700 students and teachers, remains open. In response to the Times story, Monroe School District said it prioritizes the health and safety of students and continues to work on remediation efforts. The latest PCB testing on campus, carried out in August by a district contractor, showed negligible levels of the chemical, according to school district records.

Experts say hazardous PCBs are likely lingering in aging campuses across the state and country, but Washington does not require testing school buildings for PCBs.

And though health districts are required to inspect campuses for environmental hazards, state law does not require enforcing recommendations or removing certain hazards — a gap that afforded school and health officials a defense against allegations of negligence at Sky Valley. State law also does not require school districts to disclose testing results to parents, students or teachers.

Those omissions have lingered despite the Washington State Department of Ecology flagging PCBs in schools as a priority in 2015, calling the hazard posed by the chemicals “especially concerning.” The department requested legislative dollars to survey schools and target potential hotbeds of PCB exposure, but because lawmakers delayed funding the request, Ecology only started surveying school districts last summer, starting with Eastern Washington districts.

Without a survey, there’s no way to know how many campuses across the state may be exposing students and staff to toxic conditions.

In response to the Times reporting on Sky Valley, state lawmakers and advocates plan to push for PCB testing and prioritize renovating or replacing older buildings. Legislators also proposed creating mandatory timelines for school cleanups and a working group to tackle environmental hazards in schools.

by ProPublica

ProPublica has expanded its engagement team with the hiring of two new reporters — Byard Duncan and Asia Fields. In addition, Jessica Priest is joining as an engagement reporter for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative unit, a first-of-its-kind collaboration focused on Texas. All three will use crowdsourcing and community outreach to engage diverse audiences for investigative projects.

“We are thrilled to add these extraordinarily talented journalists to our team,” ProPublica Crowdsourcing and Engagement Editor Ariana Tobin said. “Their proven ability to tell impactful, community-driven stories makes them a perfect fit for our newsroom.”

Byard Duncan joins ProPublica from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. There, he created and managed Reveal’s Reporting Networks, which provide more than 1,100 local journalists across the U.S. with resources and training to continue Reveal investigations in their communities. Duncan also led engagement reporting initiatives around Reveal’s major investigations and reported on threats to U.S. democracy. He was part of Reveal’s “Behind the Smiles” project team, which exposed the true toll of Amazon’s relentless drive for speed on its workers by using public injury records from the company’s warehouses and deep sourcing from current and former Amazon workers. The project was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019. Duncan is the recipient of two Gerald Loeb Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a National Headliner Award, an Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and two first-place awards for feature storytelling from the Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the West. In addition to Reveal, Duncan’s work has appeared in GQ, Esquire, The California Sunday Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets.

Asia Fields joins ProPublica from the investigative team at the The Seattle Times, where she helped lead coverage of the coronavirus’ devastating toll in long-term care facilities, including the site of the nation’s first-known outbreak. She and her colleagues exposed early missteps that allowed the virus to spread in facilities and worked with the families of residents to track outbreaks at a time when officials weren’t able to provide data. This work was selected as a finalist for the Scripps Howard Award and IRE Award for breaking news. For a series on Title IX, Fields connected with dozens of survivors who felt their universities failed them and, in some cases, put other students in danger. Her work has also exposed gaps in colleges' sexual misconduct policies and led to a law in Washington state requiring schools to share information about employee misconduct as part of the hiring process.

Jessica Priest joins the ProPublica and The Texas Tribune investigative unit from the Fort Worth Report. As one of its founding reporters, she exposed corruption by the head of a large public port, prompting a grand jury investigation. At the Victoria Advocate, her call-out driven series about gaps in mental health care in rural Texas won the Star Investigative Report of the Year award from the Texas Associated Press Managers. Later that year, she drove to every apartment complex in Victoria to map damage from Hurricane Harvey, giving visibility to renters all but forgotten in the recovery process. The story and map were part of a series that received a Sigma Delta Chi Award for public service journalism. Most recently, at USA Today and the Austin American-Statesman, Priest detailed a Midland prosecutor’s serious conflict of interest. After this reporting, Texas’ highest criminal court overturned a death row inmate’s conviction. The State Bar of Texas has also recognized Priest’s reporting for fostering public understanding of the legal system and highlighting needs for reform. Her work has also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the Temple Daily Telegram and the Texas Observer.

by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum

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This story was co-published with The Capitol Forum.

Saying they were “deeply troubled by recent reports” that JPMorgan Chase has “renewed its predatory practice of robo-signing,” six Senate Democrats on Monday asked Jamie Dimon, the company’s CEO, to provide “detailed information regarding the bank’s credit card debt collection practices.”

The letter, signed by five members of the Senate Banking Committee and its chairman, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, cited an article by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum that revealed how Chase had launched an ongoing lawsuit blitz against indebted credit card customers when the pandemic began battering the economy in early 2020.

Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits nearly a decade ago when regulators found that the bank’s legal paperwork was often faulty. Back then, Chase lawsuits did not include extensive billing records; they typically contained a two-page affidavit signed by a Chase employee who swore that the bank records were reliable.

Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing,’” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in a consent order with Chase in 2015. Nearly 10% of lawsuits Chase won were for inflated totals and “contained erroneous amounts,” the CFPB found. Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings at the time, but agreed to provide “relevant information and documentation” in future suits.

When key terms of the CFPB settlement expired on New Year’s Day in 2020, Chase returned to suing credit card borrowers much as it did before, according to consumer lawyers and legal records.

“Chase should not utilize robo-signing in pursuing these debt collection suits, or any other debt,” according to the lawmakers’ letter. The letter asked Dimon to lay out the steps the company takes to verify the accuracy of its lawsuit claims. “How does Chase quality check the affidavits?” the lawmakers asked. “Do these employees have personal knowledge of the case?”

The letter also requested that Dimon provide details about the company’s credit card suits and their outcomes, and it inquired about Chase’s past promises to grant hardship exemptions to customers during the pandemic. Finally, the letter noted the “extensive evidence about racial disparities in debt collection” and asked what measures Chase has in place to make sure its debt collection practices don’t create these gaps.

Chase did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But in a statement for the earlier article by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum, Chase said its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the bank said. And, Chase said, “we continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.”

Before the CFPB settlement, roughly half a dozen Chase employees, working from a single San Antonio office, signed hundreds of thousands affidavits. Today, Chase has about a dozen employees mass-producing affidavits from the same office using some of the same methods as in the past, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.

Chase declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. The company sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Houston, Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits last year after filing only seven in 2020.

The lawmakers asked Dimon to respond to their letter by Feb. 21.

by Heather Vogell

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Daniel Cooper could barely afford a tiny apartment at the 13-story Olume building in downtown San Francisco. But the expansive view from the roof deck captivated him.

Raised in a small city in Kentucky, Cooper was struck by the grandeur of the skyline before him, from the soaring heights of Salesforce tower, San Francisco’s largest skyscraper, to the gleaming gold cupolas atop St. Joseph’s Church, one of the city’s historic landmarks.

The sense of opportunity he felt when looking out on his new hometown helped convince the software engineer to become one of the glassy new building’s first tenants in 2016. He joined Mévis Mousbé, a driver for a ride-sharing service who had been the first to move in. She admired the high ceilings in her new junior studio on the sixth floor, which she shared with her Shih Tzu, Roxie-Jolie. A few months later, “Specs” Titus, an entrepreneur whose eyeglasses inspired her nickname, settled happily into a corner unit on the eighth floor with her daughter. She’d won it in a lottery for apartments with below-market rents.

But prospective tenants weren’t the only ones eyeing the new apartment building, with its 121 units, gym and rooftop fire pits.

In July 2017, Cooper received an email announcing that Greystar, the property management and real estate investment behemoth, was taking over the building. The private equity-backed firm was buying the Olume’s owner, Monogram Residential Trust, and its investments in four dozen properties scattered across 10 states. Cooper worried his new community was about to change.

As Greystar took charge, his alarm grew. Rents soared. Trash collected in the hallways and on the rooftop deck, Cooper said. The security guard showed up less often. One tenant said she was frightened when she encountered a large, seemingly drunk man she didn’t know dancing in a leotard and tutu in the parking garage. Another renter described having to heat her bathwater on the stove after she woke several times to find only cold water flowing from her tap.

“I understand that rent goes up, cost of living goes up, everything goes up,” Cooper said. “But with that, we would expect the quality of the building, and the quality of the management, would stay the same, and that was not what we saw.”

Greystar did not respond to questions about tenant complaints, except to say that resident satisfaction was “very important” to the company.

Cooper and his fellow tenants were experiencing firsthand the effects of a dramatic, though mostly unnoticed, shift in control of a vital portion of America’s housing stock, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica.

During the past decade, private equity-backed firms such as Greystar have stormed into the multifamily apartment market, snapping up rentals by the thousands and becoming major landlords in American cities, according to ProPublica’s analysis of National Multifamily Housing Council data on the nation’s biggest owners of apartment buildings with five or more units.

Private Equity Firms Were Behind 85% of Freddie Mac’s Biggest Apartment Complex Deals !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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Nearly seven years ago, Melanie Graft’s 4-year-old daughter was in the children’s section of her local North Texas library when she picked up a book about an LGBTQ pride parade. Within the colorful pages of the book, “This Day in June,” children and adults celebrate with rainbow flags and signs promoting equality and love over hate. Adults embrace and kiss one another.

Alarmed, Graft launched a campaign against the book and another about a boy who likes to wear dresses, suggesting that their presence in the library foisted inappropriate themes on unsuspecting children. By June 2015, the Hood County Library Advisory Board had received more than 50 complaints asking that the two books be removed from the shelves of the children’s section. The board refused, saying the books did not promote homosexuality, as some complaints had suggested, and arguing that the library already required parents of young children to accompany them and check out materials. Librarian Courtney Kincaid called “This Day in June” a tool to teach respect and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, but she agreed to move it to the adult section. She kept “My Princess Boy” in the children’s section.

Opponents of the books then turned to the entirely Republican Hood County Commissioners Court, which appoints members to the library advisory board. After an emotional three-hour meeting that July, commissioners declined to remove the books on the advice of the county’s attorney, who concluded that such action could spur a lawsuit over unlawful censorship because of potential violations of state law and the U.S. Constitution.

Anger over that decision helped fuel a seven-year effort by far-right Christian conservatives in Hood County to seize control of elected offices and government boards from more traditional Republicans. They won spots on the commissioners court, grabbed seats on the library advisory board and, last year, launched a monthslong campaign to oust Michele Carew, the county’s independent elections administrator, accusing the Republican of harboring a secret liberal agenda.

In November, the group claimed a major victory after Graft won a seat on the school board in Granbury, the county seat. Also elected was Courtney Gore, the co-host of a local far-right internet talk show who has railed against masks and vaccines and promoted Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. On the campaign trail, the women promised to comb through educational materials for any signs of “indoctrination” in the form of books or lesson plans that they charged promote LGBTQ ideology or what they referred to as critical race theory, a university-level academic discipline based on the idea that racism is embedded in U.S. legal and other structures.

“When my daughter was 4 years old, my parental rights were taken away here at the public library in Hood County,” Graft, who said on the campaign trail that her school-age children did not attend Granbury public schools, told attendees at a GOP forum before the election. “I stood up for my daughter then, and I’ll stick up for our kids now.”

The yearslong journey in Hood County offers a window into the fiercely contentious debates over curriculum and library books that have cropped up across the state and country in recent months. Once-nonpartisan school board races are taking on a decidedly partisan tone, and administrators are now sounding like political operatives.

Peter Coyl, a librarian who testified on behalf of the American Library Association in 2015 against removing the books, recalls thinking at the time that Hood County was an outlier because of how extensively the fight consumed the community. In retrospect, Coyl said, Hood County foreshadowed the larger battle that is playing out in school board races and over library books across the country.

“It was obvious that there was a portion of the community that was not happy with the outcome,” said Coyl, who now leads a library in Sacramento, California. “But I think now we are in an era, a time where people aren’t willing to have discourse or conversations about things. They want their way and they want to impose their view on anyone and everyone, because they feel that they’re right.”

The Granbury Independent School District elections last fall served as a litmus test of loyalty to the GOP’s most conservative wing, which pushed candidates for nonpartisan posts to declare their party affiliation and to explain how they would actively push far-right initiatives.

Graft, left, and Courtney Gore are sworn in to the board of the Granbury Independent School District on Nov. 15, after winning their races. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

“This was the first election where candidates felt the need to put ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican’ on their campaign signs and in their literature that they sent out,” said Nancy Alana, a self-described conservative Republican who lost to Gore in November after serving on the school board since 2009. “And I have always shied away from that because I understood that the school board position was nonpolitical. And that was what I was trying to uphold.”

A career educator who spent 30 years as a teacher and principal, Alana shares views similar to those of Graft and Gore on books and curriculum, but was pegged by some far-right Republican activists as too passive for their vision of a more uncompromising “new Granbury.” Alana said she worried that the focus on culture-war battles over books and curriculum could distract leaders from important issues like overcrowding in the growing district.

Graft did not respond to requests for comment. Gore said in an email to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that declaring party affiliation makes school board elections more transparent. She said that the board “​​more accurately reflects the population now.”

“Any entity that taxes or oversees school curriculum is inherently partisan, whether people want to admit it or not,” Gore said. “I proudly ran as a Conservative Republican and will never apologize for being one.”

Challenges to books about sexual orientation and racial identity in Texas are the latest in a wave of divisive national political issues driving local campaigns. In October, Matt Krause, a Republican state representative from Fort Worth who was then running for attorney general, sparked national attention when he released a list of 850 books that he said should be investigated and potentially banned from school libraries. The majority of the titles dealt with LGBTQ themes, and some were targeted for merely including LGBTQ characters, according to an analysis by BookRiot.

Gov. Greg Abbott, facing a Republican primary challenge from two opponents running to his right on education issues, later ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate the availability of “pornography” in public schools, a term that some politicians and district leaders have interpreted as a catchall for books on sexuality and sexual orientation. He urged criminal prosecutions under the state penal code of educators who make such material available.

At a January school board meeting, Granbury Superintendent Jeremy Glenn, who is appointed by the board, referenced Krause and Abbott in defense of the district’s recent decision to remove more than 130 books that deal with race and sexual orientation from school libraries, pending a review.

The Granbury school board went a step further during its meeting Jan. 24. Led by Graft, the school board cleared the way for the district to strip any material deemed vulgar or unsuitable by administration and the board from its shelves without a committee review.

The next night, at Brazos Covenant Ministries church, Glenn assured attendees at a Republican Party gathering that school board members would act as gatekeepers against books and “woke” curriculum about sexual orientation and racial identity.

Speaking in partisan political language not common among school superintendents, Glenn pointed to decreasing margins of victory for Republican presidential candidates in the state, and warned local party leaders that “there are individuals out there that want to destroy what you believe.”

“They don’t believe in the same America that you and I grew up in, and that’s just the truth,” he said. “Our community has to decide whether or not we want to hold the line.”

Community members at the Granbury school board meeting in November 2021 watch the swearing-in of Graft and Gore. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) An Old Fight Resurfaces

A week after the November election, Emily Schigut, a fifth grade reading teacher and soccer coach, put her house on the market. She knew it was time to leave her job.

Schigut, who has family in Hood County, was teaching in Midland, Texas, five years ago when the principal of STEAM Academy at Mambrino in Granbury reached out to her about an opening at its campus.

She recalls her excitement at coming to the district, which she said was a model of innovation. Now she worries that politics have taken hold in a way that makes it difficult for teachers to do their jobs. And as someone who identifies as queer, she is concerned about the message the district is sending to educators and students.

“It’s absolutely terrifying,” Schigut said in an interview. “All anyone has to do is listen to the words they’ve said. They aren’t there for the kids. They are there for a political agenda. You watch all these things happening around the country, and in the blink of an eye, it was happening here.

“It’s very sad because I 100% believed in this district. But I do not feel safe here any longer.”

While the shift in tone at the school district felt sudden to Schigut, far-right Republicans had spent years working toward electing candidates to local political offices. Their efforts gained steam in the summer of 2015 amid outrage over two failed fights: one over the LGBTQ books and another when Hood County was required to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage. County Clerk Katie Lang initially refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple.

Despite losing the debate over books, opponents claimed a major victory that year when Kincaid, Granbury’s librarian, resigned. She said she could no longer endure harassment and bullying by the group, which she recalled had posted someone at the library’s circulation desk every day to watch her.

“Even going out to lunch was a gamble because I didn’t know if my food would be tainted in any way by someone who disagreed with my decision to keep the books. Whenever I would leave the library, be it during my lunch time or running an errand for work, I was followed,” Kincaid told the American Library Association in 2017 after her resignation. Kincaid, who faced additional harassment following her departure from Hood County, declined an interview.

Graft became increasingly active in local politics, serving on the local library advisory board and as a Republican Party precinct chair. Her fight against the books made her popular in far-right circles, giving her a platform across the state.

Graft listens at the board meeting after winning her seat in November 2021. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

During an interview with Doc Greene, a self-described conservative activist radio show host, at the 2016 state Republican convention in Dallas, Graft described the moment her daughter encountered “This Day in June” by Gayle Pitman.

“She picked it up, turned to the page and showed it to me, and I was appalled,” Graft said. “There were political issues. Signs like love over hate, equal rights, things that a child certainly can’t understand. And this book on the back binding was recommended for children ages 4 to 8.”

She continued, “They have an agenda and an indoctrination for our children. It’s not enough to tolerate. They want us to participate. And they want our children.”

After Graft had finished, Greene said he was not a violent man, then added, “But something like this enrages me to such a degree that violence is not completely ruled out. Because when you go after the children, this is not the time to just stand by and talk about it.”

Graft responded that she was not a proponent of violence, but Greene continued pressing.

“If you’re not willing to kill for what you believe, you’ve already lost the war. Our children are worth saving,” said Greene, who did not respond to requests for comment.

“I can’t argue with that,” Graft said. “I agree.”

A month later, the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party near the library where Kincaid had relocated uploaded a video of Graft speaking at one of its meetings to YouTube.

“This is Courtney Kincaid. You need to know her name,” Graft told the group as a screen flashed behind her. “We have to stand in the gap between the liberal left and our children. It only takes one liberal library with an agenda to steal the innocence of your child.”

Two years later, one of Graft’s allies in the fight against the books, Dave Eagle, a former tea party leader, was elected to the Hood County Commissioners Court. Eagle, who lost a bid for the school board in 2016, had vowed in a letter to the Hood County News the previous August that the Hood County Tea Party would “continue to reap political dividends” from the fights over same-sex marriage and LGBTQ books, as he complained about the local news organization’s coverage.

Eagle, who claimed credit for Kincaid’s departure, frequently sparred with members of the library’s advisory board and worked to change the makeup of the panel. In 2019, the Hood County Republican Party issued a formal resolution calling for the board to be disbanded, claiming that it failed to represent the “moral character” of the community. County commissioners dissolved the board last year after political divisions had made it difficult for the board to get much accomplished.

“It has become a lightning rod,” David Wells, the former library advisory board chair, said after the board disbanded. “It’s lost its sense of purpose, of what it’s there for. It’s way beyond the purpose for which it is designed.”

Eagle, who did not respond to a request for comment, also helped lead an effort last year that sought to abolish the elections administrator position held by Carew and transfer her duties to Lang, the county clerk, who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud. Aside from saying she would abide by the constitution, Lang has declined to speak about the issue. Carew resigned in October. She is now running for office against Lang, an effort she said she undertook to prevent partisans from taking control of elections if commissioners decide to dissolve the independent election office.

Debates over national issues have left the ground fertile for takeovers in rural counties and small towns across Texas, provided local far-right activists can organize as they have in Hood County, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

“Local organizers can ride these national waves to power,” Rottinghaus said. “With the right spark, I think that’s a model they can replicate across the state.”

Pitman, the author of “This Day in June,” one of the children’s books targeted by Graft and tea party members in 2015, said the school board election in Hood County marks a worrisome escalation of rhetoric that previously seemed more isolated. “It just seems like there’s been a shift in the political climate,” Pitman said, adding that she never expected to see the massive wave of current book challenges.

“I think the most disturbing thing about this to me is that if you look historically at book challenges, for the most part, books were challenged because of the ideas that were in them,” Pitman said. “And that, to me, is really disturbing because it’s no longer about ideas or exchange of information or discourse, it’s about marginalizing an entire community.”

Emily Schigut, who identifies as queer, decided to leave her job as a fifth grade reading teacher in Granbury last year after Graft and Gore’s election. “You watch all these things happening around the country, and in the blink of an eye, it was happening here,” she said. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Reviewing 130 Books

In January, administrators in the Granbury school district summoned its librarians to a meeting to review library offerings “based upon the Governor’s criteria,” according to emails obtained by a Granbury parent through the Texas Public Information Act and shared with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

District officials immediately removed from the library shelves five books unrelated to LGBTQ themes by Abbi Glines, an author known for including explicit sex scenes that push the boundaries of young adult fiction. They also pulled about 130 other titles from school libraries, pending a review by a district committee composed of teachers, librarians and parents.

“​​Let’s not misrepresent things. We’re not taking Shakespeare or Hemingway off the shelves,” Glenn said at a school board meeting last week in which he blasted opponents of the book removal effort. “And we’re not going and grabbing every socially, culturally or religiously diverse book and pulling them. That’s absurd. And the people that are saying that are gaslighters, and it’s designed to incite division.”

Glenn made no mention of the dozens of LGBTQ-themed books that had been pulled from the shelves for further review. Of the 130 books temporarily removed, about 94, or 73%, feature LGBTQ characters or themes, according to a ProPublica and Tribune analysis of the popular book review site Goodreads.

Coyl said he is concerned that political candidates are increasingly using the issue of book censorship to win public office. “People need to be very vigilant and aware of it,” he said. “It’s a slippery slope. If we allow the restriction of one thing, it’s very easy to slide into more suppression.”

Experts say waves of backlash against LGBTQ communities often follow moments of cultural transformation. Schools have long been the battleground, dating at least to the 1970s, when anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant led a national movement to save children from gay adults.

But fed by social media, the same message today is spreading farther and faster than during past waves, experts said.

Gore and Graft’s election was a major victory for campaigners who had spent years working toward electing far-right candidates to local political offices in Hood County. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Vox Jo Hsu, an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the effect of public rhetoric on racial, gender and sexual minorities, said movements to censor LGBTQ books can leave young people feeling alone.

“I can’t overstate the type of damage it does to create a culture of shame and silence around LGBTQ topics,” Hsu said. “You are teaching them, from a young age, these false narratives about who they are that they will have to unlearn and you’re depriving them of resources and communities they will need to do so.” Leaving a school district is not an option for all LGBTQ students or families, and children who are left behind when others depart will only become more isolated, Hsu said.

Last month, students in the Granbury district launched an online petition opposing the book removal effort. Within days, the petition had gathered more than 600 signatures. Students also spoke against the removal at last week’s school board meeting.

“I don’t think that little children should be shocked or disgusted by our identities,” a queer senior at Granbury High School said at the meeting, warning that removing the books would send a dangerous message. “It’s disgusting that, even in 2022, we still have to have these discussions about censorship.”

Glenn saluted the students for speaking out, but then took aim at those who questioned the removal of the books.

“During my tenure, I have witnessed radicals come into our boardroom and go onto social media platforms to distort the truth, exaggerate issues and bad-mouth our trustees,” Glenn said. “To those individuals, please know, like the little boys who cried wolf, you have lost all credibility to the majority in this community. We will not back down from you.”

In an email, Gore applauded the book removals and said the district is not taking aim at LGBTQ students or community members. “All students at GISD are loved and cared for by the amazing staff and administration,” she said. “With that, public schools are not the place for young people to express themselves sexually.”

Near the end of the discussion, Graft made a motion to amend the district’s policy on book removals, eliminating the requirement for campus-level committees that have determined whether concerns are merited.

The revised policy, which passed unanimously, will allow the district to remove books the administration and board deem “pervasively vulgar” or educationally unsuitable without going through the district’s existing process. Before the change, books had to stay on shelves until a review was completed.

“This is going to align the policy so that in the event that we do have a book that is in our library that is vulgar and overtly sexual, it can be removed without review,” said Tammy Clark, an assistant superintendent in the district.

Despite the policy change, district spokesperson Jeff Meador said a committee will review the books, and most of them “will likely be returned to the library shelves.”

Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at nonprofit PEN America, which promotes literary culture and defends freedom of speech, said the Supreme Court has not settled the constitutionality of removing school library books without a review. Still, he said it’s “highly concerning” that Hood County school board members “appear to have changed the policy just in order to appease the state lawmakers’ list of books.”

Friedman said that while there hasn’t been a recent legal challenge related to the spate of book removals, districts could find themselves in legal jeopardy if it becomes clear that their motive was based on “hostility towards the views in those books.”

Efforts to censor material usually fail, but the process can still be divisive and counterproductive, said Whitney Strub, a history professor at Rutgers University.

“I think history shows that these movements don’t actually succeed, but they do a lot of damage and inflict a lot of destruction and harm along the way,” Strub said. “And I absolutely think that’s likely to be the case at the local level.”

Two empty frames, soon to be filled by Graft and Gore, hang in the district’s administration building alongside portraits of other members of the Granbury school board. (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Seeking Safety

The escalation of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric worries one Granbury mother of a 4-year-old, who asked that her name not be used as she fears retaliation because she is gay.

She recalled feeling reassured after county commissioners denied efforts to ban LGBTQ books from the local library in 2015 when she lived in a neighboring county. Although she didn’t have a child at the time, she believed that the books provided an opportunity to teach children that having gay parents is normal.

On election night in 2021, she was shocked when Graft, who had led the fight against the books, won. It was then that she and her wife decided to send their son, who is entering kindergarten, to another district. “It makes me worried that someone like her would tell kids that it’s not OK to be like that,” she said.

The woman can tick off the incidents of hate she has experienced since moving to the county four years ago: the stranger at the grocery store who called her a “faggot,” the senior citizen who threw his arms in the air in disgust and stormed off when he saw her kiss her fiancee goodbye.

She wanted school to be a safe space for her son, one that didn’t vilify him for having two moms.

“I wouldn’t put it past someone to physically harm me because I gave my fiancee a kiss,” she said. “Seeing stuff like the school board election definitely opens my eyes. Even though this is a small town, and I know most of the people, and I grew up next door, when it comes to sexuality nobody’s safe.”

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by Brian J. Conley, Mohammad J. Alizada, Samira Nuhzat, Abdul Ahad Poya and Mirzahussain Sadid, Alive in Afghanistan, Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica, and Lynzy Billing for ProPublica

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This article was co-published with Alive in Afghanistan, a news agency launched in the days after the fall of Kabul, aimed at bringing the perspective of the most marginalized Afghans to the world.

Days before the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, thousands of desperate Americans and Afghan allies seeking to flee the country were using unguarded routes across open fields and through narrow alleys to reach one of the only gates providing access to the Kabul airfield.

Despite intelligence warning of terrorist attacks, U.S. military commanders encouraged use of the routes. Some U.S. officials even provided maps to evacuees trying to bypass Taliban fighters stationed at a checkpoint outside the airport.

It was a decision born of necessity, senior military officials told Alive in Afghanistan and ProPublica. The U.S. had publicly committed to helping the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked on its behalf to safety. The choice was stark. The government’s hold on Afghanistan was collapsing far sooner than intelligence agencies had expected, and the U.S. was forced to improvise a way to evacuate more than 120,000 people in a chaotic environment barely controlled by its remaining forces.

The Taliban controlled the outer checkpoints and were preventing Americans and Afghan civilians from getting to the airport entrance known as Abbey Gate, according to military officials. Commanders on the ground had to weigh the safety of American forces posted at the gate against concerns about leaving behind U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.

On Aug. 26, U.S. intelligence issued warnings of an imminent threat at the airport. That evening, a man loaded with explosives “likely” used one of the unguarded routes to gain access to Abbey Gate, according to a military investigation reviewed by the news organizations. He detonated his suicide device, killing 13 American servicemembers and an estimated more than 160 Afghan civilians.

“This was not the original way it was intended to work,” a senior military official familiar with the investigation told the news organizations, suggesting the compressed timeframe of the evacuation led to the decision to leave the routes unimpeded.

This satellite image of Abbey Gate was taken at 2:54 p.m. on Aug. 26, several hours before the bombing. The positions are approximate. (Image: Planet Labs PBC. Map: Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

Alive in Afghanistan and ProPublica recently interviewed several Kabul-based doctors who believed they saw gunshot wounds in civilians coming from Abbey Gate. In response to questions, senior military officials provided a preview of their inquiry into the attack, which found there was no evidence civilians had been shot. The officials allowed the news organizations to interview officers familiar with the investigation and view previously unreleased video and drone footage.

At a press briefing Friday, Pentagon officials said that three commanders huddled near the gate roughly 30 minutes before the bombing. The commanders discussed the deteriorating situation on the ground and the possibility of closing the gate. Brig. Gen. Lance Curtis, who led the investigation, declined to elaborate on what decisions, if any, were made.

Taken together, the new information provides the most detailed look yet at the Pentagon’s evolving story of what happened at Abbey Gate that day. Young Marines and Afghan families were exposed to extraordinary danger as a result of a hastily executed evacuation that left ground commanders with hard decisions and limited options.

Ultimately, investigators determined that the attack was “not preventable” without undermining the evacuation mission.

The investigation also provides insight into how the military made a striking reversal of its assessment of the damage done by gunfire that followed the blast. Initially, top officials told the public that Islamic State fighters opened fire on the Marines. Now, the Pentagon has concluded that there was no enemy gunfire. American and British troops fired their weapons, but they didn’t hit any of the thousands of Afghans crushed against the gate seeking refuge, officials said.

The investigation and its conclusions are likely to raise new questions about the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban rapidly retook the country. The suicide bombing at the gates of the airport was one of the deadliest attacks on American forces in the 20-year history of the war. In addition to those who lost their lives, 45 U.S. service members and an estimated 200 or more Afghans were wounded.

With the date of the final withdrawal approaching, tens of thousands of Americans, green card holders and other Afghans flooded toward the Kabul airport, which was surrounded by high walls with entrances at locations around the perimeter.

The crowd pressed against the gates, some attempting to jump the fences while others passed children over the walls to Marines and members of NATO forces inside the airfield. As the situation grew ever more desperate, commanders leading the evacuation decided to shut down all of the main airport entrances on Aug. 25 except Abbey Gate.

Each gate had to close due to its own unique vulnerability, the officials explained. At the northern entrance, three roads converged to provide “high-speed approaches” susceptible to a car bomb. The eastern gate sometimes required an entire squad to evacuate a single civilian because the Marines decided they could only safely bring in one person at a time.

“The reality is that Abbey Gate was the least risky of all the gates,” one official said.

Alongside dozens of U.S. Marines positioned at the gate, U.S. Army soldiers looked on from a tower inside the airport walls. British troops staffed checkpoints and watchtowers to the southwest. And, in an uneasy alliance, Taliban militants worked with allied troops, guarding the perimeter and controlling the access of civilians into the airport.

The Marines positioned a cluster of shipping containers at the end of an entry road to the gate to form what became a Taliban-controlled checkpoint. Past the checkpoint, the area around the gate had natural advantages. The long, narrow path to it was divided in the middle by a sewage ditch, which provided some measure of crowd control. Several surrounding towers offered key vantage points for American and British troops.

But the protections only held up for so long. As the numbers of people grew, more Marines were needed to form a human barrier to hold back the crowd. They were forced into a tight clump, increasing their vulnerability to attack. At the same time, they had to act as de facto immigration officers, examining documents to determine who to allow to pass through the gate into the airport. Soon, the sewage ditch was filled with desperate Afghans, holding up paperwork and pleading with the junior Marines who lined the canal wall.

A video obtained by the military showed the moment of the attack: At 5:36 p.m., a figure dressed in black took a single step out of the crowd and disappeared in a plume of smoke. A Marine in the frame was staggered by the blast wave, which traveled as far as about 50 meters, the senior military officials said.

In the moments after, investigators determined, American and British troops then fired from four positions surrounding Abbey Gate.

Two British troops fired roughly 30 warning shots into the air, the investigation found. One Marine fired four warning shots over the head of what investigators called a “suspicious individual” and said he saw him run away unharmed. Another Marine fired fewer than 30 rounds at an adult male allegedly holding an AK-47, who was positioned on a rooftop to the east.

“What they don’t see is a hostile act,” said a senior official familiar with the investigation. “They don’t see him firing.” Investigators were unable to determine who the man was or what happened to him. The investigation said it was unlikely he shot at Marines, and that if he did, he was most likely a “rogue Taliban member.”

After the gunfire ceased, Marines began to rush casualties — injured and dying Marines and civilians — into the airport for treatment. In the hurried operations that followed, military doctors assessed that many of the injured and dead had been shot. The doctors treated U.S. service members and dozens of Afghan civilians.

After consulting military medical examiners, the investigators determined the doctors were mistaken in their assessment of what they thought were gunshot wounds. None of the doctors recovered bullets from any patients. What the doctors thought were bullet holes were actually caused by ball bearings exploding from the suicide bomber’s device, the investigation concluded. Blast experts interviewed by ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan said that these metal balls can produce wounds that look extremely similar to those caused by bullets.

ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan spoke to six doctors from three different Kabul hospitals about their experience treating civilians in the aftermath of the attack. The doctors remained convinced that they saw wounds from bullets, not only ball bearings. All said they had the experience necessary to make the distinction, having responded to numerous terrorist attacks and firefights in their medical careers.

Their accounts suggest a potential gap in the Pentagon’s inquiry. The investigation concluded there was no evidence that civilians had been shot by anyone. But the investigators never spoke to any of the local, Kabul-based physicians who treated the majority of civilians.

Doctors with Emergency Surgical Centre, a well-regarded, Italian-run facility in Kabul that specializes in the treatment of war victims, said they received 10 people with fatal injuries from gunfire.

Eight were shot in the head or neck, they said. The others were shot in the chest. The doctors said they also treated patients with gunshot wounds.

“It was really a disaster situation,” said Dr. Mir Abdul Azim, a senior surgeon on duty that night who has worked at Emergency for 15 years. Azim did not find any bullets in his patients or the dead. But he said he could tell that the wounds were caused by bullets and not ball bearings from the shape and size of the entry and exit wounds, along with other factors such as the tissue damage he saw.

Dr. Hares Aref, a senior surgeon at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, one of Kabul’s largest public hospitals, said he personally operated on three patients with bullet wounds in their legs. “We had patients with bullet injury in this attack, it’s clear,” he said. Aref said that the distinction between ball bearing and bullet wounds is clear to him after witnessing multiple similar mass casualty events in Kabul. “My proof is my experience.”

Dr. Rafi Amiri, a surgeon in charge of the same hospital’s emergency department that night, described a visual inspection of dozens of dead Afghans at the hospital morgue. For many of them, he wrapped their heads in cloth, following an Afghan tradition of preparing bodies for burial. A number of them had what appeared to be gunshot wounds. “Their bodies were intact,” he said. “They only had a bullet wound to the head or the chest.”

Dr. Rafi Amiri in the emergency room at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, where he treated patients after the Kabul airport bombing in August. (Oriane Zerah for ProPublica)

In the interview, Amiri repeatedly cautioned that he did not conduct a forensic examination and said he was not interested at the time in determining a cause of death.

Pentagon officials dismissed doctors’ external assessments of wounds as scientifically inconclusive. Only an autopsy “could produce definitive results,” said Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command.

Urban also said the ball bearings used in the bombing were almost the same size as bullets used by American troops, adding to the potential for confusion.

Dr. David King, a trauma and combat surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Trauma Center, treated victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, in which terrorists used improvised explosive devices loaded with ball bearings and nails. In an interview, he told Alive in Afghanistan and ProPublica that it was very difficult to distinguish wounds from gunshots versus ball bearings.

“As a generalization, I would say that with a high degree of confidence, looking at the hole alone, you largely, generally cannot tell the difference,” he said.

Michael Cardash, a former deputy head of the Israeli National Police Bomb Disposal Division, has examined bomb attacks for more than 30 years. In an interview, he said that some experienced war zone doctors can distinguish such wounds on sight.

“If he’s a doctor in Kabul, he has probably seen gunshot wounds before,” he said. “I would say, if he is an experienced doctor, he probably knows what he is talking about.”

The military has collected additional evidence that it says disproves allegations of a mass shooting.

The Pentagon investigators conducted interviews with 139 American and British personnel about the incident, according to Urban. “Not a single individual described wanton or reckless shooting post attack,” he said.

While there were “a small number of inconsistencies in the sworn testimony of some of the witnesses interviewed,” Urban said, investigators attributed them to the inexperience of some Marines and the effects of the blast, which left nearby troops disoriented or concussed.

Military officials showed drone footage of the blast site to ProPublica and Alive in Afghanistan reporters. Asked why there was no overhead video of the gate at the time of the blast, the officials said it was because drones were monitoring the airstrip and other “classified threats.” They declined to elaborate. The footage starts three minutes later. The camera bounces between Abbey Gate and other locations around the airport. When it focuses on the gate, no gunfire is clearly visible.

“While this video is not definitive proof that no one was shot during periods of time when the scene was not observed by overhead cameras, they did conclusively demonstrate that the scene of the explosion was not the site of a mass shooting,” Urban said. “Such an incident would have caused panicked fleeing that continued long after the shooting ended and the likes of which were never observed by any video.”

The investigators’ findings are substantially different from the Pentagon’s initial version of events. The day of the bombing, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the leader of Central Command, said that Islamic State gunmen fired at Marines and the crowd. Three weeks later, Maj. Ben Sutphen, operations officer for the battalion at the gate, appeared on CBS News with his own firsthand account.

“He’s blown off his feet,” Sutphen said of a corporal under his command who was knocked over by the blast. “Shot through the shoulder, immediately recovers his weapon and puts the opposing gunman down.”

Urban said Sutphen’s account was “based upon the events as they were shared with him as opposed to his recollection of the events” and that he later told investigators “he may not have been remembering the event correctly.” Urban also said that people close to a bombing can suffer concussions that impair their recall, and thus can “unconsciously” use secondhand information “to fill in the gaps of their memory.”

Update, Feb. 4, 2022: This story has been updated to include information released in a Pentagon press briefing on Friday.

Alex Mierjeski and Doris Burke of ProPublica contributed research.