ProPublica

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

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The inability of police to communicate with immigrants who don’t speak English has long created problems, sometimes with tragic consequences. Those obstacles can inhibit crime victims from calling law enforcement for help and make it difficult for investigators to solve crimes.

But as part of an initiative by the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice is pushing law enforcement agencies to better serve people who don’t speak proficient English.

Last week, for example, the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington agreed to appoint a manager for a language-access program, restrict the use of children and others who aren’t qualified to serve as interpreters to narrowly defined situations, and develop a training program and complaint process.

In December 2022, the Justice Department agreed to similar measures with the city and county of Denver and the Police Department there in response to complaints that officers had failed to provide language assistance to Burmese- and Rohingya-speaking residents, including during arrests.

And in Dane County, Wisconsin, the Justice Department is now working with the sheriff’s office on its first-ever written policy on how to respond to incidents involving people with limited English proficiency.

This development follows a ProPublica report last year about the flawed investigation into the death of a Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm in the county.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on its work in Dane County but referred reporters to its law enforcement language access initiative, launched in December 2022. Under the initiative, law enforcement agencies can get help improving how they respond to people with limited English proficiency, including technical assistance, resources and training.

“We have seen that a failure to provide such meaningful access can chill reporting of crimes, leave victims and witnesses with [limited English proficiency] vulnerable to flawed investigations and even wrongful arrest, and threaten the safety of officers and the general public alike,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote in a December letter to law enforcement agencies.

Under the federal Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding are prohibited from discriminating against people because of their national origin; as a result, they must provide meaningful language assistance to people with limited English proficiency.

ProPublica had found that, due to a language barrier, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office wrongly concluded that the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, was operating a piece of farming equipment that killed 8-year-old Jefferson. The sheriff’s deputy who questioned Rodríguez made a grammatical error in Spanish that contributed to her misunderstanding of what had happened.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident, but Rodríguez was publicly blamed.

At the time of Jefferson’s death, the sheriff’s office lacked any written policies on what officers should do when they encounter people who speak a language other than English or when they should bring in an interpreter. The sheriff’s office also relied on employees to self-report their proficiency in foreign languages.

As a general practice — though not a rule — patrol deputies are supposed to ask if any of their colleagues speak that language and, if none are available, seek help from other agencies, the sheriff’s office said previously. On the night Jefferson died, the deputy who interviewed the father was the only Dane official on the scene who self-reported speaking any Spanish.

In response to our findings, the sheriff’s office has said that its goal is to conduct thorough and factual investigations, and that it would welcome any new information from any witnesses or parties who wanted to come forward.

After our story was published, the sheriff’s office drafted a proposed policy on how to respond to incidents involving residents with limited English proficiency. It establishes a testing process to determine employees’ foreign language skills, breaks down how deputies are supposed to identify what language somebody speaks and commits to providing training so employees know when and how to access professional interpreters.

Elise Schaffer, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, told ProPublica in an email that the draft policy was created based on the Justice Department’s standards and had been written “prior to any inquiries from DOJ.” Schaffer said the draft policy has been “submitted to the DOJ for their input and any recommendations they may have.”

In our reporting in Wisconsin, we found that workers on dairy farms routinely encounter language barriers in their interactions with law enforcement. Records showed that police officers and sheriff’s deputies responding to incidents on farms often rely on workers’ supervisors, co-workers, relatives and sometimes even children to interpret. During traffic stops, officers routinely turn to Google Translate on their phones rather than professional interpreters.

Mariah Hennen, the program manager of the Farmworker Project at the nonprofit Legal Action of Wisconsin, said language gaps can lead to serious consequences for immigrant farmworkers when they are victims of crimes.

“Farmworkers want to be able to report what happened to them,” she said. “But often [they] are not able to do that fully when they cannot communicate clearly with law enforcement.”

Rodríguez said his experience led him to believe that, because he’s an immigrant, authorities weren’t concerned about figuring out what happened to his son. “I am Hispanic and so, of course, they didn’t care about trying hard to do their job,” he said in Spanish in a recent interview.

He said he hopes federal attention to language access in Dane County will help other immigrants who encounter law enforcement. “When police feel like they’re required to do so,” he said, “maybe they’ll try harder.”

Mariam Elba contributed reporting.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

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

Idaho Republican leaders introduced a bill Thursday that would provide $1.5 billion in new funding over 10 years for school districts to repair and replace their aging and overcrowded school buildings — a proposal they said would mark the largest investment in school facilities in state history.

The bill would create the School Modernization Facilities Fund, which districts could use for construction and maintenance needs. It would also provide money through an existing fund to help school districts pay off their bonds and levies, which are used to finance school facilities and district operating costs.

School districts across Idaho have for decades faced challenges to fixing or replacing their aging, deteriorating schools and to building new ones to accommodate growth. Last year, an Idaho Statesman and ProPublica series showed how the state’s restrictive school funding policies and the Legislature’s reluctance to make significant investments in school facilities have challenged teachers and affected student learning. Some students have had to learn in schools with leaky ceilings, discolored water, failing plumbing and freezing classrooms.

During Gov. Brad Little’s State of the State address earlier this year, he announced he wanted to make funding for school facilities “priority No. 1.” He proposed putting $2 billion toward school facilities over 10 years, or $200 million per year.

The new bill, which has about 40 co-sponsors and was crafted by the governor’s office and Republican lawmakers, would redirect $500 million from other programs in addition to providing new funding, bringing the total value to $2 billion over 10 years.

The bill included compromises needed to get it introduced and passed through the heavily Republican Legislature.

During his address, Little, a Republican, cited the two news organizations’ reporting and used photos from a recent article, in which students, teachers and administrators shared visuals and stories about the conditions they deal with on a daily basis. Idaho has long ranked last or near last among states in spending per pupil, and it spends the least on school infrastructure per student, according to the most recent state and national reports.

Districts across the state struggle to pass bonds — one of the few ways they can get funds to repair and replace their buildings — because doing so in Idaho requires support from two-thirds of voters. Most other states require a simple majority or 60%. Many superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that reaching Idaho’s threshold has been nearly impossible in their communities, and some have given up trying.

Idaho lawmakers have also discussed a proposal that would start the process to lower the two-thirds threshold for bonds. That proposal hasn’t been introduced yet this legislative session, but Republican Sen. Dave Lent said it is written and could be introduced next week.

The bill introduced Thursday would provide the money from the School Modernization Facilities Fund to school districts based on average daily attendance, meaning larger school districts would get more funding.

“If we’re going to spend money for buildings, that money needs to go to where those children are at,” Republican House Speaker Mike Moyle told the House Revenue and Taxation Committee Thursday.

During a virtual public forum last week with the Statesman, Republican Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen said that basing the allocation on attendance was a concern for some legislators and smaller districts, but that it was “the only way they could get the bill across the finish line.” This could leave smaller, rural districts that have long struggled to pass bonds without enough money to build new schools.

Assistant Majority Leader Jason Monks, R-Meridian, said it was the fairest way to distribute the funding.

“We’re always worried about making sure that it’s fairly distributed to everybody. And I can’t think of a better way to do it than just by how many students you have,” Monks said. “If you have more students, you get more money.”

The program would be funded with $125 million in state sales tax revenue each year over 10 years, which would be used to issue a bond for $1 billion. Each school district would have the option to get the funding via a lump sum now or get a portion of it annually.

West Ada, the largest district in the state, could get over $100 million, while the Salmon School District in Central Idaho could get about $2.4 million. Salmon has tried around a dozen times to pass a bond over the past few decades but has never reached the two-thirds threshold. (Those sums don’t include money districts would get from the other portion of the bill to pay off existing bonds and levies.)

The money is intended to be used for facilities “directly related to the school district’s core educational mission” and can’t be spent on athletic facilities that are not primarily used for gym class, lunch or other educational purposes, according to the bill.

The bill also includes elements designed to appeal to more lawmakers in Idaho’s Legislature, which is dominated by conservatives.

The second part of the proposal would redirect about $50 million from the state lottery and an estimated $25 million more per year into a reserve created last year that was intended to lower property taxes by helping districts pay off their bonds and levies. Districts with money remaining from this allocation could put that money toward construction, renovation and maintenance or save it for future needs.

The state would phase out a different program that provides some state support for districts that have passed bonds.

The bill would also lower the individual and corporate income tax rate from 5.8% to 5.695%, which the sponsors said would give residents more money so they could better support local bonds and levies. And it would eliminate the August election — one of the three dates on which school districts can run proposals for bonds and levies. Republican leaders say that given the new money, there will be less of a need for districts to ask their communities for funding.

“I made it no secret. I would love for school districts never to have to bond because we provided the resources that they need,” Monks told the Statesman and ProPublica. “That’s the objective from me.”

This bill doesn’t accomplish that, he said, but it gets closer.

To be eligible for the modernization fund, school districts also must submit a 10-year facilities plan to the state Department of Education that includes their anticipated construction, renovation and maintenance needs.

A spokesperson from the Idaho Education Association said this bill addresses a problem that has long been ignored and has the potential to create better learning environments for students. “Idaho is finally looking for a solution to this challenging problem, thanks to Gov. Little’s leadership,” the spokesperson, Mike Journee, said in a message to the Statesman.

The bill will now need a public hearing before it heads to the House floor.

by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Michael D. Sallah and Michael Korsh, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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

In the winter of 2021, with its stock price plunging, lawsuits mounting and popular breathing machines pulled from the shelves, Philips Respironics made a surprise public announcement.

The company said the sleep apnea devices it had recalled only months earlier had undergone new safety tests and did not appear to pose a health threat to the millions of patients who relied on them to breathe.

It was a remarkable reversal for the global manufacturer, which had drawn headlines after admitting that an industrial foam placed inside the devices could break apart in heat and humidity and send potentially toxic and carcinogenic particles and fumes into the masks worn by users.

The new results, Philips said, found the machines were not expected to “result in long-term health consequences.”

But a series of emails obtained by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette show the Food and Drug Administration quickly rejected those safety claims, telling Philips that the new tests failed to account for the impact on patients who had used the devices for years. The FDA also said it still considered the machines a significant health threat that could inflict severe injury or even death.

“These tests are preliminary,” the agency told Philips. “Definitive conclusions cannot yet be drawn in support of reduction in hazards.”

The FDA did not publicize its assessment, even though patients across the country were at risk and an untold number continued using their recalled machines while they waited on Philips to send replacements.

At the time, the FDA made only one public reference to the dispute — on the fourth page of a 14-page letter to Philips in May 2022. To see it, customers would have had to find it on the agency’s website and then wade through scientific language about “cytotoxicity failure,” “novel continuous sampling” and other complex concepts.

Philips went on to publicize more test results, all playing down the potential health dangers. To this day, the FDA has said little about its ongoing disagreement with the company over whether the machines were safe.

The emails over the course of 2022 were obtained by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette through a public records lawsuit filed by the news organizations against the FDA. Taken together, the exchanges reveal a startling lack of transparency by both Philips and the government while patients and their doctors struggled to make sense of one of the largest and most tumultuous medical device recalls in years.

“The bottom line is that lives were at risk,” said Dr. Bob Lowe, a former emergency room physician and public health advocate in Oregon who used one of the recalled machines. “People have a right to know and providers have a right, or really an obligation, to be fully informed. As a physician, if I don’t know what the dangers are, then I can’t protect my patients.”

Dr. Robert Lowe, a former emergency room physician and public health advocate in Oregon, used a recalled device. (Liz Moughon/ProPublica)

In the emails to Philips, the FDA described a litany of concerns, notably that the company’s analysis did not consider the “real world” use of the devices, which send air directly into the noses, mouths and lungs of patients for hours at a time.

Philips had brought on independent testing labs to assess whether the chemicals and particles released into the masks of patients reached dangerous levels, but the government in its emails said the testing program was “limited in its utility and does not fully assess or account for all risks.”

“FDA has not accepted the data or Philips Respironics’ conclusions,” Denise Hampton, with the FDA’s Office of Health Technology, wrote to the company in one of the emails.

It wasn’t until October 2023 — nearly two years after Philips started promoting the favorable test results — that the FDA released a public statement about its concerns, saying that testing and analysis were not “adequate” and that Philips had agreed to conduct additional studies.

Richard Callender, a former mayor in Pennsylvania who used his sleep apnea machine for six months after the recall, said patients should have been given details far earlier.

“We deserve that. If they had concerns they should have at least informed the public,” he said. “Don’t let everybody walk around saying, ‘Hey, I’m OK because [Philips] told me they think it’s all right.’”

The FDA defended its handling of the matter, saying it released the statement in October after completing an analysis of the company’s test results. “Any health determination made by the FDA is science-driven and based on thorough analysis of the information presented to the agency,” it said.

The agency said it “has been clear” about the government’s concerns with the foam in public alerts and other communications and has maintained its position about the potential health risks.

Lowe, however, said the FDA waited far too long to publicly challenge Philips as the company repeatedly told patients that the devices were safe.

“It’s not full disclosure,” he said.

Philips did not respond to specific questions from ProPublica and the Post-Gazette, but it has previously said that the tests found the foam caused no “appreciable harm” to patients and that the company would continue to carry out additional tests.

In its emails to the FDA, Philips said that the favorable findings were based on the “worst-case chemical release” and that testing had found particles from the foam did not exceed safety levels.

While Philips continues to defend the safety of the devices, the company late last month announced it would not sell any new sleep apnea machines and other respiratory devices in the United States under an agreement with the federal government.

Days later, the FDA said it had received 561 reports of deaths associated with the machines since 2021.

From the outset of the recall, there was little debate that Philips had a serious problem: Noise-reducing foam that the company had fitted inside the devices years earlier was crumbling.

Both Philips and the FDA at the time described potential health risks for patients exposed to the material, including respiratory tract illnesses, headaches, nausea, and toxic and carcinogenic effects.

Philips, however, began to walk back its warnings in December 2021, six months after the recall began. And by the following year, the company made multiple announcements about the new test results.

In email exchanges, the FDA challenged the “significant limitations” of the company’s testing program as well as efforts to change an earlier evaluation of the health risks conducted by about a dozen company officials. The 2021 internal assessment was damning, describing the deteriorating foam and dangerous chemicals and declaring the risk to patients who used the machines “unacceptable.”

Months later, Philips turned in a modified evaluation to the FDA, lowering the threat level from “crucial” to “marginal.”

Inside Philips, scientists and others were also alarmed, criticizing the company for minimizing the health risks without carrying out comprehensive testing to determine whether the machines could inflict serious harm, according to interviews and internal communications obtained by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette.

The dispute reached the company’s highest levels. Medical director Hisham Elzayat broke ranks and refused to sign the evaluation that downgraded the risk level, according to court testimony and the internal communications.

“I haven’t seen or heard anything that makes me decide acceptable risk,” he wrote at the time.

In another message, he noted about the evaluation, “There is nothing I can do about it.”

He also wrote, “If only all this effort is steered towards fixing the problem instead of hiding it.”

Elzayat, a cardiothoracic surgeon who still works for Philips and whose differences with the company were described in a federal court hearing in October, declined to comment.

According to the court testimony, after Elzayat refused to endorse the new evaluation, he was removed from the team inside Philips that was handling the crisis and stripped of his access to data about the foam.

Another company supervisor also raised concerns, complaining about the company’s push to change the evaluation, internal communications show.

“They desperately want to make changes,” the supervisor wrote. “I am trying to limit what they are doing.”

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette are withholding the supervisor’s name because of fear of reprisals.

Another official at Philips cited similar concerns, writing about the actions by a company manager to ensure that a testing lab reported favorable results. “You wouldn’t believe the magic he worked to ensure that compound was labeled a non-risk,” the official wrote.

The debate was captured in internal communications, some of which have been turned over to the Department of Justice. The DOJ has been carrying out a criminal investigation, according to sources familiar with the probe and a document reviewed by the news organizations.

Philips, which has said it is cooperating with authorities, declined to answer questions about Elzayat’s role in the controversial evaluation of the foam.

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette have reported that the company held back more than 3,700 complaints about the foam degradation from customers and the government before announcing the recall. The news organizations recently obtained more records from the FDA that identified an additional 1,100 complaints that Philips did not turn over to the government before the recall.

Federal law requires medical device makers to submit reports about malfunctions, patient injuries and deaths to the FDA within 30 days. Philips has said the company reviewed the complaints on a case-by-case basis and gave them to the FDA after the recall out of an “abundance of caution.”

The private debate about whether the machines were safe played out as hundreds of thousands of people were left to decide whether to continue using their recalled devices while waiting for a replacement from Philips. Many reached out to members of Congress, who forwarded a series of complaints to the FDA, records show.

“Having to choose whether to continue using a life-saving device and risk further health complications or to stop using them altogether and risk death is an unthinkable decision to make,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., wrote to the agency in 2022. “It is imperative that patients and healthcare providers have the best guidance.”

The back-and-forth between federal regulators and Philips also unfolded as longtime users of the devices and their relatives stepped forward to report illnesses, including throat, lung, esophageal and nasal cancers. Some described deaths of wives, husbands and other family members.

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette previously identified reports that described nearly 2,000 cases of cancer, 600 liver and kidney illnesses, and 17,000 respiratory ailments.

Medical experts interviewed by ProPublica and the Post-Gazette say that it may take years to determine the health consequences but that early findings are worrisome. The devices tested positive numerous times for genotoxicity, the ability of a chemical to cause cells to mutate, a process that can lead to cancer, company records show.

The biggest challenge, they said, is conducting more comprehensive testing, including an epidemiological analysis that tracks the health of people who used the machines over years.

“You would want more than lab tests to really confirm that these devices are safe,” said Kushal Kadakia, a public health researcher at Harvard Medical School who has written about the recall. “You’d want data from patients over multiple years.”

Mike Wereschagin of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed reporting.

by Stephen Engelberg

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Almost every weekday at 7 a.m., Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador holds a press conference known in Spanish as “la mañanera,” or, loosely translated, the morning show. He takes questions from reporters, but his purpose is to control the news, recounting his achievements and bashing his enemies, real and perceived — especially those in the media.

Since last week, López Obrador has focused much of his ire on an article we published on Jan. 30 about allegations that drug traffickers contributed $2 million to his first, unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2006. He dismissed the story as “completely false” and “slander.”

The president has been aggressive in attacking the story’s reporter, Tim Golden, calling him “a mercenary in the service” of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a tool of the U.S. State Department and “pawn,” among other things. “As far as I’m concerned, they should give him the prize for slander,” he said of Golden, who has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize.

On Wednesday, López Obrador challenged Golden to come to the National Palace in Mexico City to answer questions about the origins of the story, why we wrote it and the identity of his sources in the United States and Mexico.

Although Golden might enjoy the debate, he won’t be appearing on the morning show. He made extensive efforts to include López Obrador’s views before the piece ran. We contacted the president’s chief spokesperson more than a week before publication and provided a detailed summary of the story’s findings along with a series of questions. After numerous requests, the spokesperson promised a reply, but we never received one.

ProPublica has requested an interview with López Obrador about the story and the questions it raises, and we would speak with him as we would any other head of state — not for an episode of the regular mañanera segment he calls “Who’s Who in the Lies?”

I do think it’s useful to engage the president on the legitimate questions he has posed about why we are doing this reporting and how we went about it.

To recap: Our story, which was based on interviews with current and former officials and a review of government documents, disclosed the existence of a previously secret investigation by the DEA into reported donations to López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign by traffickers working with the so-called Sinaloa Cartel.

The case began when a Mexican drug lawyer working as an informant for the DEA reported in 2010 that he had participated in the meeting at which the donations were first negotiated, officials said. He reported having given most of the agreed-on funds to an operative in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign, Mauricio Soto Caballero. The informant then enticed Soto to come in on a small-time cocaine deal. DEA agents arrested Soto in McAllen, Texas, and he agreed to work undercover for the Americans to stay out of federal prison.

Ultimately, three other witnesses, including Soto, confirmed the drug lawyer’s account to the DEA, officials said. To gather more evidence for a possible corruption case, the DEA had Soto surreptitiously record two conversations with the man to whom he said he had given most of the traffickers’ money, Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, one of López Obrador’s closest aides.

Justice Department prosecutors reviewed the tapes and found them incriminating but not decisive, people familiar with the case said. DEA agents wanted to go forward with a more elaborate sting operation inside Mexico, but DOJ officials rejected that plan in late 2011, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.

The case was closed and, to our knowledge, no further investigation of López Obrador or his inner circle’s possible links to drug traffickers was pursued by U.S. investigators.

(Soto did not respond to our repeated questions about his role in the U.S. investigation, but he denied in recent interviews that he acted as a confidential source or taped his friend and colleague Mollinedo. In an interview, Mollinedo told us he never received donations from drug traffickers, disputed that López Obrador would ever tolerate such corruption and said he knew nothing of any U.S. investigation involving his friend Soto.)

López Obrador was elected president in 2018 after promising a turn away from confrontation with Mexico’s powerful crime groups. He called the policy “Hugs, not bullets” and immediately began to scale back counterdrug cooperation with the United States.

Some critics of our reporting have asked why we pursued an allegation of corruption that dates back to 2006. It’s a fair question. We viewed this as a case study of the conflicting pressures faced by U.S. officials when they learn of possible corruption in Mexico. While some American officials feel that policing government corruption should be a Mexican responsibility, others note that government collusion has been a crucial element (along with a porous 2,000-mile border and a vast illegal drug market in the United States) fueling the drug gangs’ rise as a global criminal force.

The power of those gangs, which lord over large swaths of Mexican territory and extort businesses across the economy, has become a growing national security problem for both countries. In the United States, annual deaths from drug overdoses have surged over 100,000 in recent years. Hugs notwithstanding, criminal violence in Mexico remains at historic levels. After more than 15 years and $3.5 billion dollars in U.S. aid, bilateral efforts to overhaul Mexico’s criminal justice system have faltered badly.

Washington officials’ ambivalence in the face of Mexico’s corruption problem has become even more acute as immigration has taken center stage in American politics: U.S. officials understand that López Obrador’s administration could react to criminal charges against its officials by easing efforts to stop migrants at the border.

While it might disappoint López Obrador, we do not reveal the identities of the present and former government officials who speak with us for these stories. But we can offer some context on the latest article. This was not an orchestrated leak; the Biden administration officials with whom we spoke were uniformly dismayed that it was going to appear. A spat with a Mexican president — much less any threat of conflict on the immigration front — is not a backdrop they’d like to see for a 2024 presidential election.

López Obrador’s attacks from the palace podium have been personal and vituperative. So here are a few facts. Golden has been reporting on Mexico for three decades, first as The New York Times bureau chief in Mexico City and then as an investigative reporter for the Times and ProPublica. He began working on this story months ago, and the details emerged only from dozens of interviews and internal documents.

López Obrador has advanced multiple theories about how this story came to be. This week, he suggested that Golden was somehow in cahoots with the discredited former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whom he covered in the early 1990s. While Golden did have good sources inside the government in those days, he also produced dozens of deeply reported stories about the explosion of the drug trade under Salinas, the growing shadow of Mexican corruption and the failure of the United States to deal effectively with either problem. That work continued during the tenure of Salinas’s chosen successor, Ernesto Zedillo, whose administration also complained about stories that exposed allegations of high-level corruption.

Some in Mexico have speculated around the fact that similar stories about drug traffickers’ contributions to the 2006 campaign appeared in three foreign outlets simultaneously. Surely, they argue, that is clear circumstantial evidence of a coordinated U.S. campaign to leak information that might undermine the Mexican government.

The truth, as it so often is, is far more mundane. Early in our reporting, we realized that a respected U.S. news organization, InSight Crime, was pursuing the same allegations. Sometimes we collaborate — or compete — in such circumstances. In this case we agreed with Insight Crime that we would each work independently to produce the most thorough and careful stories we could, but coordinate our publication date. We delayed publication and rewrote our stories in order to address a request from the DEA that we not name any confidential government sources.

As sometimes happens, though, a Mexican reporter who writes for the German outlet Deutsche Welle published her own account of the donations and named Soto as a DEA source. With that information public, InSight Crime and ProPublica went ahead and included it in our stories.

Within hours, López Obrador was assailing all three reporters as “vile slanderers.”

The tactic of attacking reporters who reveal uncomfortable truths is as old as democracy itself. But the advent of social media has taken the power of attacks on journalists to new heights. Politicians like López Obrador can now use their platforms to say whatever they want about a reporter and then stand back as armies of friends and bots amplify the message across the internet.

That experience can be difficult for American reporters. But it is a deadly serious business in Mexico, where journalists who investigate organized crime and official corruption are killed with impunity. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 100 Mexican reporters, editors and photographers have been killed just since 2010. The 13 killed in 2022 represented an all-time high.

We hope López Obrador will grant us an interview, but we will continue to write about Mexican corruption and U.S. policy either way.

by Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois

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

Kaleigh Rogers was in crisis when she checked into a state-run institution on Illinois’ northern border two years ago. Rogers, who has cerebral palsy, had a mental health breakdown during the pandemic and was acting aggressively toward herself and others.

Before COVID-19, she had been living in a small group home; she had been taking college classes online and enjoyed going out with friends, volunteering and going to church. But when her aggression escalated, she needed more medical help than her community setting could provide.

With few viable options for intervention, she moved into Kiley Developmental Center in Waukegan, a much larger facility. There, she says she has fewer freedoms and almost nothing to do, and was placed in a unit with six other residents, all of whom are unable to speak. Although the stay was meant to be short term, she’s been there for two years.

The predicament facing Rogers and others like her is proof, advocates say, that the state is failing to live up to the promise it made in a 13-year-old federal consent decree to serve people in the community.

Rogers, 26, said she has lost so much at Kiley: her privacy, her autonomy and her purpose. During dark times, she cries on the phone to her mom, who has reduced the frequency of her visits because it is so upsetting for Rogers when her mom has to leave.

The 220-bed developmental center about an hour north of Chicago is one of seven in the state that have been plagued by allegations of abuse and other staff misconduct. The facilities have been the subject of a monthslong investigation by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica about the state’s failures to correct poor conditions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The news organizations uncovered instances of staff who had beaten, choked, thrown, dragged and humiliated residents inside the state-run facilities.

Advocates hoped the state would become less reliant on large institutions like these when they filed a lawsuit in 2005, alleging that Illinois’ failure to adequately fund community living options ended up segregating people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from society by forcing them to live in institutions. The suit claimed Illinois was in direct violation of a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision in another case, which found that states had to serve people in the most integrated setting of their choosing.

Negotiations resulted in a consent decree, a court-supervised improvement plan. The state agreed to find and fund community placements and services for individuals covered by the consent decree, thousands of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities across Illinois who have put their names on waiting lists to receive them.

Now, the state has asked a judge to consider ending the consent decree, citing significant increases in the number of people receiving community-based services. In a court filing in December, Illinois argued that while its system is “not and never will be perfect,” it is “much more than legally adequate.”

But advocates say the consent decree should not be considered fulfilled as long as people with disabilities continue to live without the services and choices that the state promised.

Across the country, states have significantly downsized or closed their large-scale institutions for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities in favor of smaller, more integrated and more homelike settings.

But in Illinois, a national outlier, such efforts have foundered. Efforts to close state-operated developmental centers have been met with strong opposition from labor unions, the communities where the centers are located, local politicians and some parents.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in Chicago is scheduled in late summer to decide whether the state has made enough progress in building up community supports to end the court’s oversight.

For some individuals like Rogers, who are in crisis or have higher medical or behavioral challenges, the state itself acknowledges that it has struggled to serve them in community settings. Rogers said she’d like to send this message on behalf of those in state-operated developmental centers: “Please, please get us out once and for all.”

“Living Inside a Box”

Without a robust system of community-based resources and living arrangements to intervene during a crisis, state-operated developmental centers become a last resort for people with disabilities. But under the consent decree agreement, the state, Equip for Equality argues, is expected to offer sufficient alternative crisis supports to keep people who want them out of these institutions.

In a written response to questions, Rachel Otwell, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Human Services, said the state has sought to expand the menu of services it offers people experiencing a crisis, in an effort to keep them from going into institutions. But Andrea Rizor, a lawyer with Equip for Equality, said, “They just don’t have enough to meet the demand.”

Rebekah Zienty, an active treatment administrator, helps Rogers play a piano, one of the few activities she enjoys, at Kiley Developmental Center. (Taylor Glascock, special to ProPublica)

For example, the state offers stabilization homes where people can live for 90 days while they receive more intensive support from staff serving the homes, including medication reviews and behavioral interventions. But there are only 32 placements available — only four of them for women — and the beds are always full, Rizor said.

Too many people, she said, enter a state-run institution for short-term treatment and end up stuck there for years for various reasons, including shortcomings with the state’s discharge planning and concerns from providers who may assume those residents to be disruptive or difficult to serve without adequate resources.

That’s what happened to Rogers. Interruptions to her routine and isolation during the pandemic sent her anxiety and aggressive behaviors into overdrive. The staff at her community group home in Machesney Park, unsure of what to do when she acted out, had called the police on several occasions.

Doctors also tried to intervene, but the cocktail of medications she was prescribed turned her into a “zombie,” Rogers said. Stacey Rogers, her mom and legal guardian, said she didn’t know where else to turn for help. Kiley, she said, “was pretty much the last resort for us,” but she never intended for her daughter to be there for this long. She’s helped her daughter apply to dozens of group homes over the past year. A few put her on waitlists; most have turned her down.

“Right now, all she’s doing is living inside a box,” Stacey Rogers said.

A housing unit at Kiley Developmental Center (Taylor Glascock, special to ProPublica)

Although Rogers gave the news organizations permission to ask about her situation, IDHS declined to comment, citing privacy restrictions. In general, the IDHS spokesperson said that timelines for leaving institutions are “specific to each individual” and their unique preferences, such as where they want to live and speciality services they may require in a group home.

Equip for Equality points to people like Rogers to argue that the consent decree has not been sufficiently fulfilled. She’s one of several hundred in that predicament, the organization said.

“If the state doesn’t have capacity to serve folks in the community, then the time is not right to terminate this consent decree, which requires community capacity,” Rizor said.

Equip for Equality has said that ongoing safety issues in these facilities make it even more important that people covered by the consent decree not be placed in state-run institutions. In an October court brief, citing the news organizations’ reporting, Equip for Equality said that individuals with disabilities who were transferred from community to institutional care in crisis have “died, been raped, and been physically and mentally abused.”

Over the summer, an independent court monitor assigned to provide expert opinions in the consent decree, in a memo to the court, asked a judge to bar the state from admitting those individuals into its institutions.

In its December court filing, the state acknowledged that there are some safety concerns inside its state-run centers, “which the state is diligently working on,” as well as conditions inside privately operated facilities and group homes “that need to be addressed.” But it also argued that conditions inside its facilities are outside the scope of the consent decree. The lawsuit and consent decree specifically aimed to help people who wanted to move out of large private institutions, but plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the consent decree prohibits the state from using state-run institutions as backup crisis centers.

In arguing to end the consent decree, the state pointed to significant increases in the number of people served since it went into effect. There were about 13,500 people receiving home- and community-based services in 2011 compared with more than 23,000 in 2023, it told the court.

The state also said it has significantly increased funding that is earmarked to pay front-line direct support professionals who assist individuals with daily living needs in the community, such as eating and grooming.

In a statement to reporters, the human services department called these and other improvements to the system “extraordinary.”

Lawyers for the state argued that those improvements are enough to end court oversight.

“The systemic barriers that were in place in 2011 no longer exist,” the state’s court filing said.

Among those who were able to find homes in the community is Stanley Ligas, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the consent decree. When it was filed in 2005, he was living in a roughly 100-bed private facility but wanted to move into a community home closer to his sister. The state refused to fund his move.

Today, the 56-year-old lives in Oswego with three roommates in a house they rent. All of them receive services to help their daily living needs through a nonprofit, and Ligas has held jobs in the community: He previously worked in a bowling alley and is now paid to make public appearances to advocate for others with disabilities. He lives near his sister, says he goes on family beach vacations and enjoys watching professional wrestling with friends. During an interview with reporters, Ligas hugged his caregiver and said he’s “very happy” and hopes others can receive the same opportunities he’s been given.

First image: Stanley Ligas, 56, lives with three roommates at his home in Oswego, Illinois. Second image: Ligas’ clinical mentor, Nicholas Czech, helps prepare snacks. (Taylor Glascock, special to ProPublica)

While much of that progress has come only in recent years, under Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration, it has proven to be vulnerable to political and economic changes. After a prolonged budget stalemate, the court in 2017 found Illinois out of compliance with the Ligas consent decree.

At the time, late and insufficient payments from the state had resulted in a staffing crisis inside community group homes, leading to escalating claims of abuse and neglect and failures to provide routine services that residents relied on, such as help getting to work, social engagements and medical appointments in the community. Advocates worry about what could happen under a different administration, or this one, if Illinois’ finances continue to decline as projected.

“I acknowledge the commitments that this administration has made. However, because we had so far to come, we still have far to go,” said Kathy Carmody, chief executive of The Institute on Public Policy for People with Disabilities, which represents providers.

While the wait for services is significantly shorter than it was when the consent decree went into effect in 2011, there are still more than 5,000 adults who have told the state they want community services but have yet to receive them, most of them in a family home. Most people spend about five years waiting to get the services they request. And Illinois continues to rank near the bottom in terms of the investment it makes in community-based services, according to a University of Kansas analysis of states’ spending on services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Advocates who believe the consent decree has not been fulfilled contend that Illinois’ continued reliance on congregate settings has tied up funds that could go into building up more community living options. Each year, Illinois spends about $347,000 per person to care for those in state-run institutions compared with roughly $91,000 per person spent to support those living in the community.

For Rogers, the days inside Kiley are long, tedious and sometimes chaotic. It can be stressful, but Rogers told reporters that she uses soothing self-talk to calm herself when she feels sad or anxious.

“I tell myself: ‘You are doing good. You are doing great. You have people outside of here that care about you and cherish you.’”

by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel

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This article is produced in collaboration with The Texas Tribune and the PBS series FRONTLINE. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and from FRONTLINE.

After a teenage gunman killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in 2018, Texas lawmakers mandated that all school police officers receive training to better prepare them for the possibility of confronting a mass shooter. The law, which required that such training occur only once, didn’t apply to thousands of state and local law enforcement officers who did not work in schools.

Four years later, officers who descended on Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, a vast majority of whom were not school police, repeatedly acted in ways that ran contrary to what active shooter training teaches, waiting 77 minutes to engage the gunman. An investigation published in December by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in May 2022 did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had, many received such instruction only once in their careers, which at least eight police training experts say is not enough.

As part of the investigation, the news organizations conducted a nationwide analysis to examine active shooter training requirements and found critical gaps in preparedness between children and law enforcement. While at least 37 states require active shooter-related drills in schools, typically on a yearly basis, no states mandate such training for officers annually.

Instead, decisions about active shooter training are often left to individual school districts and law enforcement departments, creating a patchwork approach in which some proactively provide such instruction and others do not.

The month after the news organizations’ investigation was published, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office released a scathing report that detailed a slew of failures during the Robb Elementary response. While visiting Uvalde, he told reporters that law enforcement agencies should immediately prioritize active shooter training.

The federal report recommended that officers receive eight hours of such instruction annually. Only Texas, however, comes close to meeting the Department of Justice’s suggested standards, according to the newsrooms’ nationwide analysis. Last year, the state mandated that all officers, not just school police, take 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

About a dozen states also increased training requirements after the Uvalde shooting, but many continue to fall short of what police training experts say is needed.

The gaps in training requirements begin before officers’ first day on the job.

While police academies in nearly every state require some form of active shooter training, five states — California, Georgia, Ohio, Washington and Vermont — do not require it for all recruits. A spokesperson for the police standards agency in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Vermont police standards agency said the police academy curriculum is being reviewed but she could not comment on whether it will expand active shooter training to all officers. Officials with police standards agencies in the other three states said they are considering adding active shooter training to their police academy curriculum.

Once officers graduate from police academies, the lack of training requirements becomes more pronounced.

Only two states — Texas and Michigan — have laws that require active shooter training for all officers once on the job. While Texas requires recurring instruction, training in Michigan is given once after officers graduate from police academies. Some states mandate active shooter training one time in a particular year, leaving out officers who were not employed at the time. Other states require training only for school police, as Texas did before the Uvalde shooting, and only two of them — Illinois and Mississippi — require it more than once.

Source: State laws and regulations compiled by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE.

While a majority of states require frequent active shooter-related drills in schools, 13 don’t require such instruction. They include Colorado and Connecticut, which had two of the worst mass shootings in history: the 1999 Columbine school massacre and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Spokespeople for the school safety departments in both states said districts are conducting drills despite the absence of a state mandate but did not provide records that confirm their assertions.

Active shooter training can be expensive, but state lawmakers should commit to providing the necessary instruction if they want law enforcement to be better prepared for a mass shooting, police training experts said. John Curnutt, assistant director at Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, said Uvalde is a “horrible example” of when training was needed but hadn’t been practiced enough.

“There’s a higher price that’s paid than the one that we probably could have paid upfront to get ready for it,” Curnutt said.

The table of information below is best viewed on our website.

View the rest of this table on our website. Source: State laws and regulations compiled by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. Information is current as of December 2023.

About This Research

To confirm the most up-to-date active shooter training requirements for law enforcement and schools across the country as of 2023, we contacted education departments and law enforcement standards agencies in every state. We examined both state laws and regulations.

In our analysis of schools, we included all mandated lockdown and active shooter drills, though some education departments said other types of drills can help prepare students and staff as well. In addition to the 37 states that explicitly require active shooter-related drills, we noted several others that have laws mandating safety drills but allow districts to decide which types of drills to conduct. We did not include those in our total count because the options could range from active shooter drills to earthquake drills.

For law enforcement, we collected information about how many hours of active shooter training are required for recruits going through police academies and for officers once they are on the job. We also asked for statewide data showing how many officers had taken such courses, but few states could provide that information. While we included only states’ current training mandates, four states — Alabama, North Carolina, Maine and Pennsylvania — required officers to train in a particular year but then not again, meaning that only those who were employed at that time received the one-time instruction.

by Seth Freed Wessler

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Despite the blaring siren from a security guard’s phone, Rogelio Ramon was still half asleep just after 6 on a January morning, sitting where he’d slept on a red chair in an East Flatbush, Brooklyn, church. Across from him in the crowded sanctuary, a half-dozen West African men recited the Quran on the chancel and a man from China talked with a woman on WhatsApp. Ramon, who is from Venezuela, put on the snug-fitting winter parka he’d found in a donation bin and walked out into the biting cold to figure out where to pass the day. It would be nearly 14 hours until another church, an hour and a half away by subway in Harlem, would take him in.

Ramon had already spent a week crisscrossing the city in search of a safe place to lay his head. During his first month in New York he lived in a shelter, but he couldn’t stay. The city recently began limiting single adult migrants to a 30-day stay with an option to reapply for another 30 days, though the wait to get back in can be lengthy. New York hastily launched its new migrant reception system in the spring of 2022, and since then more than 170,000 people have passed through it. As with Ramon, some of them came on free buses from Texas, ending up in New York not because it was their chosen destination but because they had no other option. Many were part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s initiative to funnel people entering the country into liberal cities and to export the stresses and tensions of the southern border into farflung parts of the country. New York is an attractive landing place because it is the only major U.S. city that’s required, pursuant to a four-decade-old consent decree, to provide a shelter to anyone in need.

But the arrival of more and more newcomers, often with no family or community waiting to absorb them, has taxed its shelter system, and it has forced a conflict over the future of the long-contested right-to-shelter rule, raising questions about how generous the city can and should be as migrants continue to arrive.

“The unfortunate reality is that we’ve been getting hundreds of people a day every day for nearly two years,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams, said. “We’re out of space and we’re out of money.” Officials recently estimated that the arrival of migrants will cost the city more than $10 billion over three years, and Adams has repeatedly called on the state and federal government to send more aid. The 30-day limits on an initial stay (60 days for families) have been a “success story,” Mamelak says, as a way to “nudge people into the next phase of their journey.” She said that only about a quarter of people who reach the shelter limit end up reapplying. “The goal is always self-sufficiency.”

Newly arrived immigrants come to a Brooklyn shelter where they will be housed for a month. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera, special to ProPublica)

But immigration and housing advocates say the system has left people waiting in untenable conditions for a new bed.

“The city is using the 30-day-limit and the reticketing process to make people miserable and hope they go away,” said Kathryn Kliff, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project, which is in mediation with the city over the shelter requirement. Kliff acknowledges that the spike in recent arrivals has created new challenges for the city. But in years of city efforts to modify the requirements of the consent decree, single adults have never before been subjected to 30-day limits or left to wait for days on end in chairs or church pews to be assigned another bed. According to the city, the average wait time for single adults to be reassigned a shelter bed is eight days. Some wait weeks.

New York City has taken measures to limit the number of people who end up sleeping on the streets and in trains while they wait for a bed, subcontracting a handful of churches and mosques to provide floor space or a pew to hundreds of people each night. Ramon slept in four different houses of worship, scattered on the edges of the vast city. He says that because he now spends his days waiting to be told where he can sleep that night, looking for food and riding the train from one church to another, he hasn’t had time to find work. “I can’t get a job because I have to go to the place to find out where to sleep,” Ramon said of his daily cycle. “You can’t get out of it.”

Ramon had arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in early December. His niece and her children, who’d crossed with him into El Paso, Texas, took a bus to Chicago, where they had a friend. Ramon told border authorities that he, too, would be going to Chicago, and they assigned him a court date there in September. But the only free bus he was able to board in Texas was to New York. The city has offered to pay the costs to transport migrants elsewhere. But Ramon has come to realize that Chicago might be worse. “I can’t get to Chicago because I wouldn’t have a place to live there,” Ramon said. “Here at least there’s something.”

To reapply for a stay in a shelter, migrants travel to a city building in Manhattan’s East Village. The processing center issues each person a number that’s written on a wristband. When their number comes up, they’re supposed to get a bed. One night during a snowstorm, soon after he’d reached the 30-day limit, Ramon tried to sneak back into the shelter after a fight at a church left him rattled. But, he says, the shelter told him that he had to leave. Ramon tipped over an orange road construction drum and pushed his long, skinny torso in as far as he could. He stayed there until morning.

On his fourth night out of the shelter, Ramon left the processing center carrying a small drawstring bag packed with a blanket, an extra T-shirt, a toothbrush and a worn manila envelope of immigration papers. Though he knew the next church wouldn’t accept anyone until 8 p.m., he didn’t know what else to do after riding the train aimlessly for hours, so he tried the church anyway. He plodded along the snowy sidewalk, climbed up a flight of stone church stairs and peered through the padlocked metal gate into a row of cloisters. Nobody was there or at the next gate that led into an old cemetery. He decided to ride the train for a few more hours.

Ramon returned just before 8 p.m. Behind him in line, a Guinean man named Omar who’d spent 30 days in shelter and 11 nights in churches and mosques, said in French: “We don’t really bathe. We get to these churches at 8 p.m. and we stay until 6 a.m. when they kick us out, and we don’t wash.” A 64-year-old Peruvian man said sleeping on the hard floor made his back hurt but was better than sleeping on the train or on the street, which he’d done for several nights. Ramon found a spot on the floor and lay on the blue blanket that a man at the Randall’s Island shelter had given him a few weeks before.

Migrants wait in line at a church in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera, special to ProPublica) A church in East Flatbush offers a place for people to sleep. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera, special to ProPublica)

In the morning, after the church turned the lights on and as he prepared to leave again, Ramon met another Venezuelan man, a 46-year-old former customs officer named Giovanni Larez, who seemed to have a handle on how to get food and find a place to shower.

The two men left the church before sunrise. Ramon followed Larez to the Port Authority bus terminal, where Larez had learned they could wash in a bathroom. They sat on the floor against the wall in the terminal for an hour until an officer started telling others sitting nearby to leave, so they rode the train downtown to the city’s processing center in the East Village. The worker gave them the address of a different church, the one in East Flatbush. They walked in circles and then rode the train for several more hours until they arrived at the new church.

Larez, who has braces from the days when he had money and time for an orthodontist, showed me a video of himself riding on top of a Mexican freight train, passing through the desert on his way north, and a photo of his hands and knees covered in bandages from when he jumped off a train to run from Mexican authorities who chased him and others off the trains. “This is not the hardest thing I’ve been through,” he said of his shuffle through the shelters and churches. He explained that he expects to be able to pay rent soon, when it warms up and he can get some real employment (he worked two days clearing debris on a construction site but hasn’t found anything since). He also said he plans to get through his court date in June and then move to Phoenix with a work permit.

Ramon, left, and Giovanni Larez, both Venezuelans who arrived recently in New York City, met in a church where they were sleeping on the floor while they waited for city shelter beds to become available. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera, special to ProPublica)

On a Sunday morning, the two men rode the train to a corner in central Brooklyn where someone from a church drops a bag of sandwiches on the sidewalk every afternoon. Then they went in search of the next church where they’d sleep.

The following Wednesday afternoon, the men returned to the East Village processing center. The city had still not reached the numbers written on their wristbands. They stood in the rain in the park with a hundred or so other men and women, many wearing cheap plastic ponchos they’d gotten inside. Someone from a nearby bakery delivered a paper bag of end-of-the-day baguettes and other baked goods. Men bounded toward the bag and took what they could. As they did, the bag broke, wet from the rain, and cookies and pastries fell to the ground. The men backed up, most returning to the lampposts and trees they rested on. And then, one after another stepped forward to pick up the cookies from the ground.

Larez wears a wristband with the number he was assigned to mark his place on the waiting list for a shelter bed. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera, special to ProPublica)

By Thursday, Ramon and Larez’s numbers had reached the front of the queue, but they were told there were no available shelter beds. They came back the next day and were told the same thing. They went back to the corner for sandwiches and then to a church to sleep. They came back to the processing center on Saturday and Sunday and were again told there were no beds. Though city officials say that wait times for adult men seeking readmission to shelters for migrants averaged around eight days, it had already been 13 days for Ramon and 12 for Larez.

On Sunday afternoon, nine days after they started traveling the city together, Ramon and Larez got separated on the train. Larez looked for Ramon at the East Village center but didn’t find him. “I guess he decided to go his own way,” Larez said.

Every day since losing his spot in the shelter, Larez traverses the city looking for a place to sleep. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera, special to ProPublica)

Three days later, the city’s processing center finally assigned Ramon a new bed for 30 more days. He put his winter coat back on and rode the train to a shelter.

by Andy Kroll

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On Feb. 8, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Donald J. Trump v. Norma Anderson et al, a case that could swing a presidential election in a way not seen since Bush v. Gore a quarter-century earlier.

The crux of Trump v. Anderson boils down to this: Should a former commander in chief be disqualified from seeking the presidency again if he engaged in insurrection?

The answer to that question — and even the premise of the question itself — has sparked furious debates among lawyers, law professors and historians. Many of those disputes revolve around two contested subjects: the definition of insurrection, and the true meaning of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That amendment — passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868 — is probably best known for its first section, which stated that all Americans should receive equal protection under the law. But the amendment’s third section took up a different issue: what to do with former members of the Confederacy who had “engaged in insurrection” — or had given “aid or comfort” to insurrectionists — and now wanted to hold elected office in the government they had fought against.

More than 150 years later, a constitutional fix crafted with Jefferson Davis in mind is being used to argue that former President Trump is ineligible to be president again. There is no clear precedent in the case. The text of the 14th Amendment’s third section is confusing and vague. The range of potential decisions by the high court is vast. But whatever the court decides, the ruling will have enormous implications for American democracy.

How Did We Get Here?

Last September, six Colorado voters — four registered Republicans and two independents — filed a lawsuit that said Trump was disqualified from appearing on Colorado’s 2024 Republican primary ballot because he’d engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and thus, under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, could no longer seek the presidency.

After months of legal wrangling, the case went before the Colorado Supreme Court. A majority of the panel, in a 4-3 decision, stunned the country by concluding that Trump had engaged in insurrection, that his fiery rhetoric was not protected speech under the First Amendment and that Trump could not appear on the ballot in Colorado’s primary. Shortly afterward, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued an order that piggybacked on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision and ruled that Trump would not appear on the primary ballot in Maine either. Meanwhile, several other states, including California, have determined that he can remain a candidate.

Soon afterward, lawyers representing Trump formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the Colorado court had mistakenly excluded Trump from the ballot. On Jan. 5, the high court agreed to hear the case on a sped-up timetable.

The Colorado and Maine decisions have ignited a debate about the true meaning of the 14th Amendment. They have also put the U.S. Supreme Court in the position of potentially deciding whether Trump can remain on the ballot across the country in the 2024 election.

The 14th Amendment bans insurrectionists from serving as a “Senator or Representatives in Congress,” “electors of President and Vice President,” or in “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State.” There is no direct mention of the presidency. It applies to anyone who took the oath of office to defend the Constitution, including anyone who was “an officer of the United States.” One camp of legal scholars argues that it would be nonsensical and inconsistent with the intent of those who drafted the amendment to say that it excluded the presidency.

Under that logic, the amendment would have banned former Confederate President Davis from running for county clerk or state representative after the Civil War — but not for commander in chief of the country that Davis had tried to overthrow. As one respected scholar, Indiana University law professor Gerard Magliocca, testified in the Colorado case, “It would have been odd to say that people who had broken their oath to the Constitution by engaging in insurrection were ineligible to every office in the land except the highest one.”

Other scholars say the omission of the presidency from the 14th Amendment is so glaring that it can be read as an intentional decision. “It’s very strange to name the Senate and House but not the president,” said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, characterizing this position. “If you list a bunch of things and you omit one thing, you probably did it on purpose.”

What the U.S. Supreme Court Could Do

When the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear a case, the justices sometimes narrow the set of questions to be argued, drilling down on what they see as the core issues. In Trump v. Anderson, the court has not done that, at least not yet. There are as many as seven discrete questions that the court could consider before issuing a ruling.

Those questions include: Did Trump engage in insurrection? Does Colorado law allow for the removal of a candidate from the ballot? Does the 14th Amendment cover presidents?

It’s possible, of course, that the high court affirms the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, effectively disqualifying Trump from holding the presidency again. Many legal scholars and longtime court watchers say that is the least likely outcome given the consequences such a decision would have for American democracy.

It’s more likely, experts say, that a majority of the justices settle on a narrower decision that results in Trump remaining on the ballot.

Five or more justices could find that the 14th Amendment does not, in fact, cover the presidency. They could say that Colorado law does not give the secretary of state the right to remove Trump from the ballot. They could say the state court’s finding about the meaning of insurrection is incorrect and send the case back to Colorado for more fact-gathering.

Another competing camp of lawyers and law scholars has argued that Congress has a role to play — namely, that it must first pass legislation authorizing the disqualification of a candidate under the 14th Amendment before a court or a secretary of state can remove that candidate, as Colorado and Maine have done. These scholars point to Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which states that Congress has the authority to enforce the language of the amendment.

“This could be read as a requirement that there be some kind of congressional action before the section goes into effect,” said Samuel Issacharoff, a New York University law professor who has written about the 14th Amendment. Under this theory, Issacharoff said, Congress would need to pass a bill approving the procedure for Trump’s removal from the ballot before a ban could go into effect — a highly unlikely possibility with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

But the arguments around Trump and the 14th Amendment don’t break along ideological or partisan lines. Legal scholars have argued that applying the legal philosophies of “originalism” and “textualism” to the 14th Amendment leads to the conclusion that Trump should be disqualified from seeking the presidency again. They especially point to the “aid or comfort” language to argue that Section 3 applies to Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. All six of the high court’s conservative justices have said that they adhere to such judicial philosophies.

David French, a conservative evangelical lawyer, New York Times columnist and Trump critic, recently wrote that the strongest arguments for applying Section 3 to Trump are “all text and history, the essence of originalism,” adding that “it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump.”

A Risk of “Catastrophic Political Instability”

What legal scholars do agree on is the dizzying number of possible rulings the Supreme Court could issue given the many questions at play. “If you drew a decision tree with little branches, there are so many permutations here,” said UCLA law professor Rick Hasen.

Most alarming to scholars such as Hasen is the possibility that the Supreme Court rules in a way that doesn’t settle the question of Trump’s eligibility but instead punts that decision to a later date.

The court could say that the 14th Amendment shouldn’t be applied to party primaries, only general elections. If that were to happen, then the same plaintiffs could file a nearly identical lawsuit later this year if and when Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, arguing that he shouldn’t appear on the November ballot. That would mean the Supreme Court could in theory rehear the case and decide his eligibility after tens of millions of people had voted for Trump in dozens of primaries and caucuses.

“It risks disenfranchisement and chaos,” Hasen said. “Disenfranchisement for all of those people who would vote for a candidate ultimately found to be disqualified, and chaos especially if it gets punted to the political branches.”

In an amicus brief in the Trump v. Anderson case, Hasen, Ohio State law professor Ned Foley and longtime Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg lay out a chilling scenario in which the court deferred to Congress on the question of Trump’s eligibility. If Trump were to win the presidential election and Democrats were to win control of Congress, then those Democratic lawmakers could, in theory, vote to disqualify Trump in January 2025 if they believe he engaged in insurrection, as many Democrats have said they do.

“What would it mean for a Democratic Congress to say, ‘Donald Trump can’t serve even though he won?’” Hasen said. “To me, that’s a recipe for potential political violence.”

by Marcus Baram, Documented

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New York lawmakers proposed three new bills last week that would make it difficult for wage theft violators to conduct business in the state.

The legislation would bolster the power of state agencies to crack down on wage theft by stripping violators of their liquor licenses or business licenses, as well as issuing stop-work orders against them.

The legislation was prompted by reports of rampant wage theft against New York workers, including two investigations published by Documented and ProPublica. The stories revealed that more than 127,000 New Yorkers have been victims of wage theft during a recent five-year period, but that the New York State Department of Labor was unable to recover $79 million in back wages owed to the workers.

The stories were based on an analysis of two databases of wage theft violations obtained from the U.S. and New York Labor departments. The databases provided previously unreported details on how much money had been stolen from workers and also shed light on which businesses had committed wage theft.

“We knew from our conversations with labor and from our constituent service caseload that wage theft is a chronic problem,” said Sen. Jessica Ramos, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation. “We did not have the data to understand the scale of the issue in New York state until the ProPublica and Documented series came out last year. Having this reporting as a tool set us up to put this package together and focused our attention on” the capacity of the Department of Labor.

The legislation — dubbed the “wage theft deterrence package” by lawmakers — includes three bills, which are co-sponsored in the State Assembly by Assemblymembers Kenny Burgos, Harvey Epstein and Linda Rosenthal.

The first, S8451, would empower the New York State Liquor Authority to suspend liquor licenses for bars and restaurants that the Department of Labor has determined owe more than $1,000 in back wages to their workers. According to Documented and ProPublica’s analysis, more than $52 million has been stolen from people working in restaurants in New York, more than in any other industry. The amount of back wages accounted for more than 25% of all reported wage theft in the state. Similar measures have been successful in other parts of the country, including Santa Clara County in California, which has recovered $110,000 for workers since 2019.

The second bill, S8452, would enable the Department of Labor to place a stop-work order on any business that has a wage theft claim of at least $1,000. This approach has proven successful in other states, such as New Jersey, which temporarily shut down 27 Boston Market restaurants and eventually recovered more than $630,000 in back wages for 314 workers. Boston Market did not respond to a request for comment.

The third bill, S8453, allows the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to suspend a business’s certificate of authority — which allows it to collect sales tax and conduct business — in cases where wage theft exceeds $1,000.

The three bills include a provision that allows employers to avoid the punishments if they resolve their wage theft claims within 15 days.

Ramos’ office told Documented and ProPublica that it’s too early to gauge the level of support among other lawmakers for the bills, which were introduced Wednesday. But Ramos and Rosenthal, a Democrat who represents the Upper West Side and the Clinton neighborhood in Manhattan, wield considerable clout in the Legislature, as they chair powerful committees — the Labor and Housing committees, respectively. And the bills have the support from the state Department of Labor, according to Ramos’ office.

“Each year, more than $1 billion is stolen from the pockets of hardworking New Yorkers by unscrupulous employers, often targeting the workers with the fewest resources to fight back,” Rosenthal said. “If businesses refuse to do the right thing and pay their workers what they are owed, New York State should hold them to account.”

The bills were praised by worker advocates and urban studies academics, including James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. “These bills are needed to put more teeth into New York’s enforcement efforts,” Parrott said. “We owe it to hard-working low-wage workers and law-abiding employers.”

by Paul Kiel

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A key congressional committee is pressuring billionaire Harlan Crow for answers after investigators turned up additional evidence that he misrepresented his yacht as a business to score a tax break.

The inquiry is part of the ongoing congressional investigations of Justice Clarence Thomas’ gifts from billionaires. Crow was perhaps Thomas’ greatest patron, often hosting the justice on his private jet and his 162-foot yacht, the Michaela Rose.

ProPublica reported last July that Crow had taken millions in questionable tax deductions related to his yacht. In a letter Monday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore. asked Crow to justify those deductions, especially in light of new information turned up by his committee.

“Any effort to mischaracterize a yacht used as a pleasure craft as a business is a run of the mill tax scam, plain and simple,” Wyden wrote.

Drawing on the trove of leaked tax data that was the basis of our “Secret IRS Files” series, ProPublica reported that, from 2003 to 2015, Crow and his father reported nearly $8 million in net losses from operating the ship, with about half flowing to Harlan Crow.

In response to an inquiry about the letter, Crow’s office said in a statement: “Mr. Crow engages professional accounting firms to prepare his tax returns and complies with tax law in good faith. Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless and defamatory.” Crow will respond to the committee to “correct the record,” it said.

Yacht owners who regularly lease out their ships can write off losses related to chartering, but ProPublica could find no evidence of the Michaela Rose being chartered. In fact, former crew members said the ship was used solely by Crow’s family, friends and executives of his company, along with their guests.

Congressional investigators found the same thing when they spoke to former crew members, Wyden wrote. One crew member noted that the ship didn’t even have “the appropriate registrations” to operate commercially. The letter says the committee’s inquiry “casts fresh doubt on the validity of reported deductions from purported yacht charter losses” and “raises serious concerns regarding the tax treatment of Mr. Crow’s luxury assets.”

The committee’s investigators were able to confirm that the ship lacked the proper registrations. “Michaela Rose is not legally licensed to be chartered out for the transportation of passengers for hire in the United States and is only registered as a pleasure boat for Mr. Crow’s personal use,” Wyden wrote. The ship is flagged in the United Kingdom, but there, too, the registration has long been for a “pleasure yacht.” In both countries, a commercial registration is required for chartering and comes with additional costs and regulations.

Meanwhile, not only has Crow represented to the IRS that the boat is used commercially, but, in a bid to obtain a trademark for the Michaela Rose name and icon, his company argued the same to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In his letter, Wyden noted that it is a crime to deliberately mislead either agency.

Wyden’s investigation into Crow’s gifts to Thomas first launched after ProPublica’s story last April detailing that relationship. Since then, the Senate Finance Committee and Crow have exchanged multiple letters, with Crow generally refusing to provide more detail about the gifts and travel. Similar exchanges between Crow and the Senate Judiciary Committee resulted in that committee authorizing a subpoena to Crow last November.

Wyden’s latest letter asks Crow to reply to a list of questions about Crow’s use of the yacht by the end of February.

by Anjeanette Damon

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When Sarah Lee Hooper’s mail-in ballot for Nevada’s presidential primary arrived last month, the Las Vegas Republican was utterly confused.

The candidate she wanted to vote for, Vivek Ramaswamy, wasn’t included. Neither were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and, most notably, former President Donald Trump. The only name she recognized was former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

“What the heck? This is weird,” she remembered thinking. “Are they trying to convince people Nikki is the only option?”

A quick internet search turned up the answer: The Nevada Republican Party opted to eschew the state-run presidential primary on Feb. 6, in favor of running its own caucus two days later, which will decide who wins Nevada’s delegates to the national GOP convention. Presidential contenders who participate in the primary are prohibited by the party from also being candidates in the caucus.

While legal, the party’s decision to host a competing nominating contest in the state has confused and angered GOP voters.

Hooper had no idea there would also be a caucus or that Ramaswamy opted to participate in it instead of the primary before dropping out of the race.

“If you don’t want me to be a conspiracy theorist, then be transparent,” Hooper said. “Send me all of the information at once.”

Since Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, supporters have cultivated an ecosystem of confusion around election processes through unfounded claims of voter fraud, demands for paper ballots and hand counts, and state-by-state efforts to subvert the 2020 results.

Leaders of the caucus effort are among those who tried to keep Trump in power. Three caucus overseers face felony charges for their roles in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Others running the caucus have been on the vanguard of those pushing unfounded election fraud allegations in the state.

These Republicans claim the caucus will serve as a model for how to run a more secure election — a claim disputed by election experts who note the drastic differences between a caucus, which attracts a fraction of the electorate to decide a single race, and elections, where many more voters cast ballots for local, state and federal offices.

The primary election is run by state election officials and adheres to Nevada’s voting laws — which allow for mail-in ballots, early voting and same-day registration. The Nevada Republican Party’s rules for its caucus reflect some GOP leaders’ efforts to limit voting. Participation requires registering as a Republican 30 days in advance, arriving at a set location and time, and presenting identification.

The confusion created about how elections work, including fraud allegations and now around how Nevada will choose who it backs in the Republican primary, has provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories and misinformation to take hold, experts say, causing a greater share of voters to distrust election results and democratic institutions.

“It does make the misinformation environment more dangerous,” said Gowri Ramachandran, deputy director of elections and government for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program. “These information gaps about voting, how it works, that sort of thing, can get filled in by incorrect information.”

“It’s clear from Jan. 6 that when that kind of misinformation spreads, it has a negative impact on people’s trust in elections and willingness to abide by the results,” she added. “It’s had a negative effect on democracy over the years.”

Confusion Over Competing Contests

When primary ballots absent Trump’s name began hitting mailboxes, Republicans across the state reacted with angry bewilderment.

Some thought he had been kicked off the ballot by a court because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, as happened in a Colorado case that is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. (A judge in Nevada rejected a similar challenge.) Others latched on to a false rumor that an inept campaign staffer forgot to file paperwork to get Trump on the ballot. Voters also wondered whether they could participate in both contests, or if casting a primary ballot and caucusing would constitute an illegal attempt to vote twice. (Nevada’s attorney general and secretary of state have assured voters they are free to participate in both.)

“I haven’t heard anybody who is happy with this unless they are with the state party and the county parties,” said Assemblywoman Danielle Gallant, R-Las Vegas, who has spent recent weeks explaining the situation to her constituency of mostly older voters.

The Nevada Republican Party’s decision to force candidates to forgo the primary if they wanted to be included in the caucus will likely hand the state’s 26 convention delegates to the former president. (At this point only one other obscure candidate remains in the caucuses.) It also foreclosed on any of Trump’s opponents building momentum from a strong showing in the state’s primary even as the field has shrunk since Iowa and New Hampshire, leaving Haley and a handful of lesser-known contenders.

Trump’s allies in the state, including Nevada’s popular Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, have urged GOP voters who participate in the primary to mark “none of these candidates” on the ballot rather than vote for a candidate. They hope to avoid Haley emerging with a larger vote total in the primary than Trump receives in the caucus, a possibility because more voters are expected to cast a ballot in the primary than attend the caucus.

In a Jan. 27 campaign visit to Las Vegas, Trump urged supporters to skip the primary entirely, describing it as a “con job” and a “meaningless event.” The caucus, he said, “is the right way and the legitimate way.”

“Don’t go on Tuesday, Feb. 6,” he told the crowd. “Don’t do it. Don’t use the mail-in ballot.”

“We Will Deliver You 100% of the Delegates”

Because of the primary-caucus confusion, candidates and the national political press have largely ignored Nevada’s “First in the West” contests despite the state’s early spot on the presidential nominating calendar. Trump is the only candidate to visit the state more than once since August.

Democrats have worked since 2007 to establish Nevada as an important early primary state. The effort was spearheaded by the late U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who used caucuses as a party-building exercise. Since then, both parties have held early caucuses with varying success at making them relevant and competitive.

A couple of years back, that looked to be changing. With the caucus process coming under fire for hindering participation, the Nevada Legislature passed a law in 2021 to create this year’s presidential preference election. Although that effort was led by Democratic lawmakers, Republicans had tried years earlier without success to swap the caucus for a primary.

The Nevada GOP rejects the notion that by holding a caucus it has rigged this year’s contest for the former president. But Trump has been actively preparing to secure the nomination for the past year, including courting party insiders across the country. Those efforts extended to Nevada. Early last year he wooed GOP leaders — including Nevada Republican Chairman Michael McDonald, National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid and Bruce Parks, chairperson of the second-largest county party — at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

McDonald, DeGraffenreid and Jim Hindle are under indictment for acting as fraudulent electors for Trump in his effort to overturn the 2020 election — charges to which they’ve pleaded not guilty and are arguing to have dropped. Hindle, as Storey County clerk, is responsible for administering elections, putting him in the novel position of overseeing parts of both the primary and the caucus.

“I’m just doing the job I was elected to do,” Hindle said.

Despite claims of neutrality, McDonald has referred to Trump as the “next president of the United States.” At Trump’s January rally, McDonald stated his intentions more explicitly, referring to Trump simply as “the president.”

“When I talked to the president, I said, ‘I guarantee you Nevada will show up and we will deliver you 100% of the delegates for the state of Nevada to Donald J. Trump,’” he said.

While the caucus favors Trump, the party was transparent with Republican voters and GOP presidential candidates in creating it, McDonald argued.

McDonald blamed the state’s lack of a voter identification requirement for the party’s decision to run a caucus, saying Republican voters don’t trust the system without it.

Parks, chairperson of the party in Washoe County, home to Reno, has also been a leading voice in promoting unfounded election fraud allegations. Under his leadership, the county party adopted a resolution in 2022 declaring Joe Biden’s presidency to be illegitimate. Trump endorsed Parks in his reelection bid for county party chair last year, which Parks described as “one of the proudest moments of my life.”

In an interview with ProPublica, Parks said the party’s central committee decided not to participate in Nevada’s new presidential preference primary election because it wants to demonstrate what he contends is the proper way to run an election: required identification, paper ballots and hand-counting with results reported on the same day.

“There was much discussion — the pros and cons were weighed and measured — and in the end, the people decided we are going to do a caucus because it is more secure and more transparent than a universal mail-in system that does not require ID,” he said.

“Anybody who wants to observe is welcome to,” he said before catching himself. “Let me rephrase that: Anybody who is a Republican and can participate in the process is welcome to observe.”

Until ProPublica raised the issue with the state party, Parks said he wouldn’t allow the news media into Washoe County sites. Now, he said he will allow a few reporters into a single caucus site. McDonald said each county’s chairperson decides whether reporters can observe the proceedings. In the past, reporters have not been barred from observing caucuses held by either party in Nevada.

When asked why the GOP was changing its policy, Parks said, “For obvious reasons. There seems to be a shortage of honest reporters. We’re not going to open the doors and allow a particular narrative to be put out there that is not truthful. That is just not going to happen.”

Anyone who disagrees with the way the caucuses are being run can register with the party and keep an eye on things themselves, he said. “You want to make sure everything is above board? Get involved. Most importantly, change your registration and become a Republican,” he said.

Counting caucus results is not the same as counting election results, Ramachandran said. Hand-counting an election with hundreds of thousands of voters and dozens of races is neither efficient nor accurate.

“It’s really important when people are looking at those issues not to make the mistake of comparing apples to oranges,” she said.

Unknown Impact on the General Election

How the confusion and resulting disinformation from the presidential nominating process will influence general-election voter behavior is difficult to forecast. Ramachandran said it’s challenging to study how disinformation affects turnout.

“It’s hard to know who’s been subjected to that confusion or has become susceptible to misinformation, and it’s really hard to tie that to impact on turnout or specific candidates,” she said.

Gallant, who is running for reelection to the Assembly this year, isn’t so sure. Beliefs about unfounded voter-fraud accusations kept Republican voters home in 2020, she said, describing it as “oops, we screwed up.” Polling has backed that up, with surveys showing claims of fraud have made Republicans less likely to vote.

“We’ve done a lot of reeducation around that,” Gallant said, referencing the national party’s “Bank Your Vote” campaign that now encourages Republicans to vote early and by mail.

Jeremy Hughes, a Republican political consultant who is not involved in any of the presidential campaigns this year, said too much is being made over the caucus confusion.

“Donald Trump would have won the primary and he will win the caucus, so the mode of voting isn’t going to matter,” he said. “I have zero concern with it affecting voting behaviors.”

by T. Christian Miller

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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico demanded an apology from President Joe Biden after a ProPublica story disclosed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had found evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides accepted donations of around $2 million from a drug cartel in 2006.

In a press conference on Thursday, López Obrador denounced the accusations as “slander” and threatened to curtail U.S.-Mexican cooperation on drug trafficking and immigration issues.

He also accused ProPublica reporter Tim Golden, the author of the article, of being a “pawn” and “a mercenary in the service” of the DEA.

López Obrador said the ProPublica story was part of a media campaign against him by the DEA and the State Department to damage his political party ahead of the presidential election on June 2.

“President Biden should find out about this, because how are we going to be sitting at the table talking about the fight against drugs if they or one of their institutions is leaking information and harming me,” López Obrador said.

“If they have no evidence, they have to apologize,” he said.

López Obrador’s demand comes at an especially sensitive time for the Biden administration, as it seeks to clamp down on the millions of immigrants who have crossed the southern U.S. border in search of asylum. A recent poll showed that immigration has surpassed inflation as the top issue in the presidential race.

The White House, the DEA and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica published its findings on Tuesday, about the same time that two other news outlets, InSight Crime and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, reported on the DEA investigation.

ProPublica said the article was independently produced and reported, noting that it had repeatedly sought comment from the López Obrador administration before publication.

“We shared a detailed summary of our findings with President López Obrador’s spokesperson more than a week before we published, and he chose not to comment,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief. “The president has had a lot to say since then, but none of his remarks has identified a single inaccuracy or factual error.”

ProPublica’s article reported that several informants told DEA agents that operatives in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign for president accepted money from the Beltrán Leyva drug mafia. In return, the traffickers were told that a future government would give them a say in naming an attorney general, the informants said. López Obrador did not win that election, but he was voted into office in 2018. As president, he has backed away from confrontation with organized crime groups and scaled back counternarcotics cooperation with the United States.

The DEA investigation — which included testimony from a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did not establish that López Obrador knew of or approved the donation. However, it found substantial evidence that one of his closest aides had agreed to the arrangement. The investigation was shut down, and no charges were ever filed. Among the reasons, officials in the Department of Justice were concerned that the investigation would be perceived as the United States interfering in Mexico’s politics, ProPublica found.

López Obrador is barred from running for reelection. His party’s candidate is currently leading the race, according to opinion polls. The leading opposition candidate has seized on the accusations.

Golden has written extensively about corruption in Mexico’s government, including a 2022 article about the DEA arrest of former Defense Minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda. The charges against him were dismissed after Attorney General William Barr decided the case was too politically charged to pursue, ProPublica found.

The DEA has a long history of investigating politicians in other countries for drug trafficking. The Associated Press reported this week that the agency spent years running covert operations in Venezuela to build drug cases against some of its leaders.

by Mary Hudetz

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U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii demanded on Thursday that museums and universities move more swiftly in repatriating Native American remains and belongings plundered from Indigenous burial sites.

“Give the items back. Comply with federal law. Hurry,” Schatz, a Democrat who chairs the Committee on Indian Affairs, said in a speech from the Senate floor. He urged institutions to devote more resources to fulfilling tribes’ repatriation requests under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Lawmakers expected the 1990 federal law to result in museums relinquishing all Native American remains to tribes within a decade. But as ProPublica’s Repatriation Project showed last year, some museums stalled or actively resisted tribes’ repatriation requests under NAGPRA.

Institutions have a moral obligation to return human remains to tribes, Schatz said.

“The theft of hundreds of thousands of remains and items over generations was unconscionable in and of itself,” he said. “But the legacy of that cruelty continues to this day because these museums and universities continue to hold onto these sacred items in violation of everything that is right and moral — and importantly, in violation of federal law.”

Out of more than 600 museums nationwide that must comply with the law, 10 hold about half of the nearly 100,000 Native American remains stored in collections across the country, ProPublica’s analysis of federal data found.

Schatz singled out those institutions in his speech as he reiterated concerns expressed in an April letter that he and a dozen other senators sent — citing ProPublica’s reporting — to the Ohio History Connection, Harvard University and three other institutions that held the greatest number of Indigenous remains subject to NAGPRA.

Since the passage of NAGPRA, Schatz said Thursday, museums had wrongly characterized items as “culturally unidentifiable,” a label that until this year institutions had been allowed to use in federal records to say they could not determine which tribe could rightfully claim pieces in their collection. Museums also borrowed collections from one another “so they can never actually be held responsible for them” and engaged with Indigenous communities “as little as possible,” he said.

Schatz’s remarks come at a pivotal moment in the long push by Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians to reclaim museum holdings taken from ancestral sites.

Following the launch of ProPublica’s Repatriation Project last year, many museums vowed to improve their repatriation records amid the renewed scrutiny. The University of California, Berkeley, which until this fall reported holding more Native American remains than any other institution, filed a federal notice in late October confirming its commitment to repatriate more than half of the remains of the 9,000 Native American ancestors it held.

The Ohio History Connection, which federal data shows now has the largest collection of unrepatriated human remains subject to NAGPRA, said it has also taken steps toward repatriating to tribes. In 2023, a new state law was passed at the urging of the museum to remove potential barriers to repatriation and allow land to be set aside for reburying the ancestral remains of Native Americans.

Overall, in 2023 museums and universities repatriated more ancestral remains and sacred objects to tribal nations than in any prior year during the three decades since NAGPRA’s passage, transferring ownership of the remains of an estimated 18,800 Native American ancestors.

This past month, new federal regulations took effect, setting a series of deadlines over the next several years for museums to consult with tribes and update inventories. The regulations also require museums to obtain consent from tribes before exhibiting funerary items or sacred objects or subjecting Native American remains and belongings to scientific study.

In the past week, some of the nation’s largest and most prominent museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Field Museum in Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, announced that they will close exhibits or remove sensitive Native American items from display — at least temporarily — as they assess their compliance with the law.

“I feel like it’s like we’re opening a new chapter,” said Meranda Roberts, a citizen of the Yerington Paiute Tribe in Nevada and visiting professor of art history at Pomona College who previously worked at the Field Museum.

In addition to conducting a review of exhibit items, Harvard said it would begin to pay for tribal representatives to travel to the Peabody Museum for the repatriation of ancestral remains and items. Such visits typically happen after months or even years of meetings to determine whether a museum will grant a tribe’s repatriation request.

“We recognize that Tribes face many barriers to the reburial of ancestors but hope that providing these funds will help lessen the burden,” Harvard’s Peabody Museum wrote on its website.

(In November, ProPublica reported that the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Mi’kmaq, collectively known as the Wabanaki tribal nations, in present-day Maine, spent three decades asking Harvard to repatriate ancestral remains for reburial.)

Rosita Worl, who has a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard and is president of Sealaska, a nonprofit that promotes and supports Indigenous cultures in southeast Alaska, said the university’s decision to fund travel signifies a “good gesture,” but it doesn’t go far enough in addressing the intense work required by the repatriation process.

“It takes a lot of work, you know, to initiate a repatriation claim,” she said.

Schatz on Thursday acknowledged museums’ recent progress in complying with NAGPRA, including Harvard funding travel.

Schatz said repatriation is a necessary step in restoring justice for Native people who for centuries had “everything stolen from them — their lands, their water, their languages and even their children.” (For decades, many Native American children were forcibly removed from their communities and sent to boarding schools.)

“A big part of that unrelenting, inhumane policy was that the remains of Native ancestors and culturally significant items were also taken from them. Not with permission, but by force. Not discovered, but stolen,” Schatz said.

by Rob Davis

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In the 1990s, Oregon’s powerful timber industry used its influence to win a series of tax cuts that have cost local governments a cumulative $3 billion. Once-vibrant communities were left struggling to pay for basic services without the taxes that once came from logging the valuable forests that surround them.

Now the industry is in line for another tax break, thanks to a key ally.

With the costs of fighting Oregon’s wildfires climbing, the timber industry worked with policymakers behind closed doors to develop legislation that would reduce what industrial forest owners pay for protecting their cash crop from flames. Timber lobbyists not only helped write the bill, they even helped write a top lawmaker’s talking points.

When the Oregon Legislature opens a monthlong session Monday, lawmakers in the nation’s top lumber-producing state will weigh a bill proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a Portland Democrat running for state treasurer. Steiner, one of the state’s top budget writers, wants taxpayers to pay $7 million more annually for fighting fires so timber and ranching interests can pay less.

Her rationale: fairness. She says wildfires affect everyone, not just timberland and ranchland owners. Steiner told lawmakers at a Jan. 10 hearing that “we wanted to be sure that we came up with a solution that reflected the fact that this is a statewide problem.”

Meanwhile, a competing effort would do the opposite: raise taxes on timber. Democratic Sen. Jeff Golden’s bill would restore some of the income lost when lawmakers slashed taxes on the industry in the 1990s, which sapped money for libraries, prosecutors and sheriff’s patrols in communities where trees are harvested.

Steiner said she expected Golden’s plan to get “a robust public hearing,” but she also voiced concerns.

Oregon is one of a handful of states that place no limit on how much corporations or anyone else can give to political campaigns, and the timber industry has for years donated more to lawmakers in the state than anywhere else in the nation, a 2021 analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

Timber companies also harvest more trees and pay less in taxes in Oregon than in neighboring Washington state, state analyses have shown.

Records show that timber companies and their trade groups have given Steiner $24,000 since 2020, most recently a $1,000 December donation from Weyerhaeuser, a major forestland owner. Golden’s financial disclosures list only one check from a timber company in his career, and the records show he gave the $500 to a nonprofit focused on restoring forests.

Steiner told ProPublica that her bill — cosponsored by one other Democrat and two Republicans — had nothing to do with campaign contributions and that Oregon’s history of cutting timber taxes is “only partially relevant to this particular conversation.”

“You can make an argument that we’re letting them off easy, or that we’re giving them the big tax break,” Steiner said. “And I’m gonna say, I don’t know, you may be right. It’s a bigger conversation.”

A 2020 investigation by ProPublica, Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Oregonian/OregonLive revealed how the timber industry wielded its influence to win the 1990s tax cuts even as timber harvests soared and local jobs disappeared with dramatic advances in automation.

Steiner said she hadn’t read the investigation. Golden has repeatedly cited the news organizations’ findings as essential reading.

The Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds that now control much of Oregon’s private timberland “seem to be taking so much natural wealth out of Oregon forests,” Golden said, “without the corresponding benefit to communities and workers that traditional Oregon-based timber companies offer.”

Golden and seven Democratic cosponsors want a measure added to the November ballot that would raise taxes on timber companies by between $75 million and $110 million a year and partially restore what counties once received. Some of the new money would go to wildfire protection and protecting drinking water supplies that are threatened by logging.

He would also eliminate the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, a tax-funded agency that the news organizations found operated for years as a de facto lobbying arm of the industry. (The institute did not respond to a request for comment about the legislation.)

Other lawmakers have tried to tackle these issues before and failed.

State Rep. Paul Holvey, a Eugene Democrat, has been introducing bills to restore logging taxes for a decade. “Getting the Legislature to stand up and understand this issue and recognize the impact it’s having on our communities, our budgets and just across the board,” Holvey said, “it’s always been a challenge.”

During the 2021 legislative session, lawmakers set out to increase taxes on logging but ended up temporarily cutting them instead.

In heavily forested Polk County, west of Salem, cuts to Oregon’s tax on the value of timber took away more than $100 million in revenue over the years, the news organizations found.

Jeremy Gordon, one of three Polk County commissioners, said his county has to ask voters to approve new levies every five years just to afford basic public services like 24/7 sheriff’s patrols, jail staff and district attorneys. Golden’s proposed tax would allow the county to drastically reduce what taxpayers are asked to spend.

“That would be a big chunk of our public safety levy,” Gordon said. “I mean, that would be significant.”

On the other hand, Gordon is not enthusiastic about Steiner’s proposal because it pushes more firefighting costs — which include the cost of protecting the industry’s trees — onto taxpayers.

The head of a tax watchdog group also said she was taken aback by what Steiner put forward. “I think that Sen. Steiner was rolled by the industry,” said Jody Wiser, president of Tax Fairness Oregon.

“It absolutely makes no sense that legislators would go along with it,” Wiser said. The timber industry has “massive tax breaks already. They absolutely should not be getting additional tax breaks.”

The bill contains a complex variety of tax changes. But on the whole, it reduces costs for big timber and ranchland owners and raises them for Oregon income tax payers and people who own homes in the woods, among others. If the legislation passes, the state’s general fund alone would take a $7 million hit.

Weyerhaeuser, a publicly traded $24 billion real estate investment trust with 1.4 million acres of forestland in Oregon, participated in a private working group that agreed on Steiner’s proposal.

Betsy Earls, a Weyerhaeuser lobbyist, helped craft a two-page “talker” for Steiner that described how the bill’s cost shifts would create a system that is “stable and equitable.” Earls’ role in crafting the talking points was first reported by the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

Kyle Williams, a lobbyist for the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, an industry group whose funders include Weyerhaeuser, sent the talking points to Steiner on Nov. 28, according to an email that Steiner’s office provided. Weyerhaeuser donated $1,000 to Steiner’s campaign less than three weeks later.

“We support candidates in our operating areas across the country, and across the political spectrum,” a Weyerhaeuser spokesperson said.

Steiner said the industry’s donations had no effect on her position.

“I have a reputation as somebody who does her homework, works really hard to take a balanced approach, and that’s why entities across the political spectrum are so comfortable contributing to my campaign,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Oregon Forest & Industries Council said the trade group had not yet seen Golden’s bill and had no comment.

Golden and Steiner are refining the details of their bills as lawmakers prepare for their monthlong session. But Golden wants to see his plan on the ballot in a presidential election year, when turnout is typically higher.

Staff advisers to Gov. Tina Kotek also worked on plans for promoting Steiner’s bill, emails provided by Steiner show. A “communications strategy” document called for the governor’s staff to brief Kotek and get her support.

A spokesperson for the governor, Elisabeth Shepard, said Kotek’s staff only provided “technical support” to the group working on Steiner’s bill. Shepard declined to comment on the apparent contradiction.

Asked whether the governor supported Steiner’s proposal or Golden’s, Shepard said the governor “looks forward to reviewing any legislation on this matter that makes it to her desk.”

Tony Schick of Oregon Public Broadcasting contributed reporting.

by Umar Farooq

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Over the last decade, police departments across the U.S. have spent millions of dollars equipping their officers with body-worn cameras that record what happens as they go about their work. Everything from traffic stops to welfare checks to responses to active shooters is now documented on video.

The cameras were pitched by national and local law enforcement authorities as a tool for building public trust between police and their communities in the wake of police killings of civilians like Michael Brown, an 18 year old black teenager killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Video has the potential not only to get to the truth when someone is injured or killed by police, but also to allow systematic reviews of officer behavior to prevent deaths by flagging troublesome officers for supervisors or helping identify real-world examples of effective and destructive behaviors to use for training.

But a series of ProPublica stories has shown that a decade on, those promises of transparency and accountability have not been realized.

One challenge: The sheer amount of video captured using body-worn cameras means few agencies have the resources to fully examine it. Most of what is recorded is simply stored away, never seen by anyone.

Axon, the nation’s largest provider of police cameras and of cloud storage for the video they capture, has a database of footage that has grown from around 6 terabytes in 2016 to more than 100 petabytes today. That’s enough to hold more than 5,000 years of high definition video, or 25million copies of last year’s blockbuster movie “Barbie.”

“In any community, body-worn camera footage is the largest source of data on police-community interactions. Almost nothing is done with it,” said Jonathan Wender, a former police officer who heads Polis Solutions, one of a growing group of companies and researchers offering analytic tools powered by artificial intelligence to help tackle that data problem.

The Paterson, New Jersey, police department has made such an analytic tool a major part of its plan to overhaul its force.

In March 2023, the state’s attorney general took over the department after police shot and killed Najee Seabrooks, a community activist experiencing a mental health crisis who had called 911 for help. The killing sparked protests and calls for a federal investigation of the department.

The attorney general appointed Isa Abbassi, formerly the New York Police Department’s chief of strategic initiatives, to develop a plan for how to win back public trust.

“Changes in Paterson are led through the use of technology,” Abbassi said at a press conference announcing his reform plan in September, “Perhaps one of the most exciting technology announcements today is a real game changer when it comes to police accountability and professionalism.”

The department, Abassi said, had contracted with Truleo, a Chicago-based software company that examines audio from bodycam videos to identify problematic officers and patterns of behavior.

For around $50,000 a year, Truleo’s software allows supervisors to select from a set of specific behaviors to flag, such as when officers interrupt civilians, use profanity, use force or mute their cameras. The flags are based on data Truleo has collected on which officer behaviors result in violent escalation. Among the conclusions from Truleo’s research: Officers need to explain what they are doing.

“There are certain officers who don’t introduce themselves, they interrupt people, and they don’t give explanations. They just do a lot of command, command, command, command, command,” said Anthony Tassone, Truleo’s co-founder. “That officer’s headed down the wrong path.”

For Paterson police, Truleo allows the department to “review 100% of body worn camera footage to identify risky behaviors and increase professionalism,” according to its strategic overhaul plan. The software, the department said in its plan, will detect events like uses of force, pursuits, frisks and non-compliance incidents and allow supervisors to screen for both “professional and unprofessional officer language.”

Paterson police officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

Around 30 police departments currently use Truleo, according to the company. In October, the NYPD signed on to a pilot program for Truleo to review the millions of hours of footage it produces annually, according to Tassone.

Amid a crisis in police recruiting, Tassone said some departments are using Truleo because they believe it can help ensure new officers are meeting professional standards. Others, like the department in Aurora, Colorado, are using the software to bolster their case for emerging from external oversight. In March 2023, city attorneys successfully lobbied the City Council to approve a contract with Truleo, saying it would help the police department more quickly comply with a consent decree that calls for better training and recruitment and collection of data on things like use of force and racial disparities in policing.

Truleo is just one of a growing number of such analytics providers.

In August 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department said it would partner with a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and several other universities to develop a new AI-powered tool to examine footage from around 1,000 traffic stops and determine which officer behaviors keep interactions from escalating. In 2021, Microsoft awarded $250,000 to a team from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania to develop software that can organize video into timelines that allow easier review by supervisors.

Dallas-based Polis Solutions has contracted with police in its hometown, as well as departments in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kinston, North Carolina, and Alliance, Nebraska, to deploy its own software, called TrustStat, to identify videos supervisors should review. “What we’re saying is, look, here’s an interaction which is statistically significant for both positive and negative reasons. A human being needs to look,” said Wender, the company’s founder.

TrustStat grew out of a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the U.S. Defense Department, where Wender previously worked. It was called the Strategic Social Interaction Modules program, nicknamed “Good Stranger,” and it sought to understand how soldiers in potentially hostile environments, say a crowded market in Baghdad, could keep interactions with civilians from escalating. The program brought in law enforcement experts and collected a large database of videos. After it ended, Wender founded Polis Solutions, and used the “Good Stranger” video database to train the TrustStat software. TrustStat is entirely automated: Large language models analyze speech, and image processing algorithms identify physical movements and facial expressions captured on video.

At Washington State University’s Complex Social Interactions Lab, researchers use a combination of human reviewers and AI to analyze video. The lab began its work seven years ago, teaming up with the Pullman, Washington, police department. Like many departments, Pullman had adopted body cameras but lacked the personnel to examine what the video was capturing and train officers accordingly.

The lab has a team of around 50 reviewers — drawn from the university’s own students — who comb through video to track things like the race of officers and civilians, the time of day, and whether officers gave explanations for their actions, such as why they pulled someone over. The reviewers note when an officer uses force, if officers and civilians interrupt each other and whether an officer explains that the interaction is being recorded. They also note how agitated officers and civilians are at each point in the video.

Machine learning algorithms are then used to look for correlations between these features and the outcome of each police encounter.

“From that labeled data, you’re able to apply machine learning so that we’re able to get to predictions so we can start to isolate and figure out, well, when these kind of confluences of events happen, this actually minimizes the likelihood of this outcome,” said David Makin, who heads the lab and also serves on the Pullman Police Advisory Committee.

One lesson has come through: Interactions that don’t end in violence are more likely to start with officers explaining what is happening, not interrupting civilians and making clear that cameras are rolling and the video is available to the public.

The lab, which does not charge clients, has examined more than 30,000 hours of footage and is working with 10 law enforcement agencies, though Makin said confidentiality agreements keep him from naming all of them.

Much of the data compiled by these analyses and the lessons learned from it remains confidential, with findings often bound up in nondisclosure agreements. This echoes the same problem with body camera video itself: Police departments continue to be the ones to decide how to use a technology originally meant to make their activities more transparent and hold them accountable for their actions.

Under pressure from police unions and department management, Tassone said, the vast majority of departments using Truleo are not willing to make public what the software is finding. One department using the software — Alameda, California — has allowed some findings to be publicly released. At the same time, at least two departments — Seattle and Vallejo, California — have canceled their Truleo contracts after backlash from police unions.

The Pullman Police Department cited Washington State University’s analysis of 4,600 hours of video to claim that officers do not use force more often, or at higher levels, when dealing with a minority suspect, but did not provide details on the study.

At some police departments, including Philadelphia’s, policy expressly bars disciplining officers based on spot-check reviews of video. That policy was pushed for by the city’s police union, according to Hans Menos, the former head of thePolice Advisory Committee, Philadelphia’s civilian oversight body. The Police Advisory Committee has called on the department to drop the restriction.

“We’re getting these cameras because we’ve heard the call to have more oversight,” Menos said in an interview. “However, we’re limiting how a supervisor can use them, which is worse than not even requiring them to use it.”

Philadelphia’s police department and police union did not respond to requests for comment.

Christopher J. Schneider, a professor at Canada’s Brandon University who studies the impact of emerging technology on social perceptions of police, said the lack of disclosure makes him skeptical that AI tools will fix the problems in modern policing.

Even if police departments buy the software and find problematic officers or patterns of behavior, those findings might be kept from the public just as many internal investigations are.

Because it’s confidential,” he said, “the public are not going to know which officers are bad or have been disciplined or not been disciplined.”

by Jessica Lussenhop

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A pair of U.S. senators introduced a bill Thursday that aims to curtail the misuse of a home buying agreement known as contract for deed, a potentially predatory practice that has targeted immigrant communities.

The Preserving Pathways to Homeownership Act of 2024, introduced by Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn. and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., would require states to enact laws that provide additional protections for home buyers and discourage exploitative behavior by sellers.

“It makes me so angry that people who are trying to pursue the dream of owning their own home” and that “those individuals would be exploited by these unscrupulous sellers, purely to make money off of them,” Smith said in an interview this week. “I mean, it’s just so outrageous.”

The senators drafted the bill in response to a 2022 investigation by ProPublica and Sahan Journal that identified a rising market in Minnesota for home sales using contracts for deed, an installment payment agreement made between the seller and the buyer without the involvement of a bank. While proponents say the contracts create a path to homeownership for those without good credit or substantial work histories, critics say that in Minnesota and other states, the deals lack key consumer protections.

Contract-for-deed sellers in Minnesota marketed their services directly to members of the Somali Muslim community. Many practicing Muslims avoid paying or profiting from interest, which effectively shuts them out of the traditional mortgage market.

In recent years, investors began promoting the contracts for deed as an “interest free” purchase agreement by first buying houses using traditional mortgages, then reselling them to contract buyers — often for tens of thousands of dollars above market price. The deals were frequently fast-tracked and conducted without the involvement of a lawyer and without an inspection or appraisal of the property.

Somali homebuyers told Sahan Journal and ProPublica that they were duped into contracts they did not understand, with exorbitant down payments and lump sums of hundreds of thousands of dollars due at the end of five-year contract terms. Housing rights advocates say immigrant homebuyers who lack financial literacy and may not read or speak English fluently are easy targets for unscrupulous sellers. Under Minnesota state law, buyers in default can be evicted in as little as 60 days and lose everything they’ve put into a purchase, leaving sellers free to flip the property to a new buyer.

The article sparked concern not only from lawmakers, but from law enforcement. The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation last year into whether sellers broke the law by targeting minority buyers or using deceptive tactics. That investigation is ongoing, according to Mark Iris, the assistant attorney general leading the inquiry. In a previous Senate subcommittee hearing on the contracts — also known as land installment contracts or land contracts — Smith characterized the deals as “designed to fail.”

If passed, the legislation from Smith and Lummis would standardize laws surrounding contracts for deed on residential properties, which vary widely from state to state. It would not apply to commercial or agricultural real estate sales, and sellers who used the property as their primary residence in the previous two years would likewise be exempted. The latter is an attempt to exempt contracts between, say, parents and an adult child.

The bill would require all contracts be filed by the seller with a recorder of deeds office within five days of their signing, a step that is not currently mandated in all states and would provide a “basic level of sunshine on the process,” said Smith. A lack of documentation can result in exploitative practices, like selling the same property multiple times.

The bill would also require that if a buyer defaults, they and the seller must go through state foreclosure procedures that apply to traditional mortgages. Such protections typically allow residents to remain in a home for a period of time before they must vacate. Smith said that there’s also interest in the House on a companion bill.

“It's kind of like a basic level of safety and consumer protection that ought to be available for everybody who is engaging in a purchase through a contract for deed,” she said.

Ron Elwood, supervising attorney at the Legal Services Advocacy Project, the policy advocacy arm of Legal Aid in Minnesota, said the legislation is also intended to create a “built-in speed bump” to discourage sellers who act in bad faith. He said he is working with state legislators on a “complete overhaul” of Minnesota contracts for deed law.

That effort is being authored by Rep. Hodan Hassan and Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, both Democrats who represent districts in south Minneapolis; according to Elwood, legislation will be introduced this session. Hassan and Mohamed did not respond to requests for comment.

Jeff Scislow, a real estate agent who has sold homes to many Somali clients using contract for deed, said he supports a requirement that all contracts be recorded but has reservations about adding a foreclosure process in cases of default. He said Minnesota has a six-month period before homeowners must vacate when they don’t need to make payments.

Because contract-for-deed sellers often take out a mortgage to purchase a home before selling it, Scislow wrote in an email, the prospect of an extended period of nonpayment “would heighten the risk for sellers and likely dissuade many from engaging in contract-for-deed transactions.” If the current 60-day cancellation period were extended, he added, it “could limit opportunities for buyers, especially those with poor credit, insufficient tax return history, or those seeking alternatives to traditional financing.”

But Farah Mohamed, owner of Gurisan Realty and a member of the Minneapolis Area Realtors’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, said lack of regulation has allowed the market to go too far in the Somali community. One of the most troubling things he’s seen is how contracts have been promoted as “halal” by local religious leaders, making it difficult for buyers to separate the transactions from their religious principles.

Mohamed said he was approached by an investor seller to recruit buyers from his largely Somali clientele, but he refused. He is working to educate community leaders about the pitfalls of the contracts, but said he has encountered resistance. “Once you start in a religious place,” he said, “it’s tough to kill it.”

by Adriana Gallardo and Duaa Eldeib, design by Zisiga Mukulu

This story contains photos of stillborn babies.

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

Every year, more than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. end in a stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks of pregnancy or more. For the past two years, ProPublica has been examining the failures that have led to the stillbirth crisis. While other wealthy countries have reduced their stillbirth rates, the U.S. lags behind. Black women are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth.

More than 200 people shared their stories with ProPublica. Over and over, they told us about the costs of failing to prioritize stillbirth prevention.

Many mothers neared or reached their due date only to be told their babies had died in their wombs.

We invited 60 families to share their baby’s name. This memorial — which highlights some of their stories — concludes with a list of all 60 names.

We offered parents the following prompts:

You were …

You made me …

You gave me …

In some cases, multiple families expressed the same feelings following a stillbirth. We grouped those submissions together to underscore the power of those responses.

Visit ProPublica.org to experience the full interactive memorial.

A Memorial for the Children Lost to Stillbirth

Each day in the U.S., about 60 babies are stillborn. Here, families share their child’s name and their lasting legacy.

You were perfect.

Several families referred to their babies as “perfect” and reflected on the profound impact their babies had on their lives.

Caleb Marcus Lens

— Jill and Josh Lens, Caleb’s parents, pictured with Hannah (left) and Gretchen

Stillborn in 2017 at 37 weeks Cooper Allen Dunlap

— Lexi and Joey Dunlap, Cooper’s parents

Stillborn in 2022 at 40 weeks Emilia Madeleine Rose Clough

— Charmel and Daniel Clough, Emilia’s parents

Stillborn in 2017 at 33 weeks Amelia Claire

— Caroline Kercheval and Renzo Barrientos, Amelia’s parents

Stillborn in 2020 at 34 weeks in 2020 Mason Joseph Bode

– Laura and Travis Bode, Mason’s parents

Stillborn in 2023 at 40 weeks

Despite the fatalistic acceptance that some babies just die, ProPublica found that not all stillbirths were inevitable. A lack of research and awareness creates significant barriers to better understanding and preventing stillbirths.

But even with these failings, there’s hope. The National Institutes of Health in March released a report listing a series of steps national and local agencies can take to lower the stillbirth rate. Congress is considering two stillbirth-prevention bills to help address the country’s stillbirth crisis. One has passed in the Senate. Parents continue to fight for change.

You made me a mother.

In response to the prompt “You made me,” many women said their babies made them a mother. Here are some of their entries:

D.J. Anderson

– Alishia Anderson, D.J.’s mother, pictured with Derrek Anderson

Stillborn in 2016 at 28 weeks Hank Justice Felker

– Allie Felker, Hank’s mother

Stillborn in 2020 at 31 weeks Giles Jones

– Ava Jones, Giles’ mother, pictured with Gregory Jones Jr.

Stillborn in 2019 at 39 weeks Lily Josephine Parncutt

– Janel Parncutt, Lily’s mother

Stillborn in 2023 at 34 weeks C.J. Spivey Hunsberger

– Ashley Spivey, C.J.’s mother

Stillborn in 2020 at 31 weeks Rhoan Osborne Bailey

– Erica Bailey, Rhoan’s mother

Stillborn in 2020 at 39 weeks Baby Beet Kessler

– Shanley Peterson, Baby Beet’s mother

Stillborn in 2021 at 36 weeks

The grief of a stillbirth is difficult to fully capture. It can last a lifetime. People who’ve lost a pregnancy often experience a crushing guilt, wondering if they could have done anything to save their baby. In some cases, their pain is followed by anger at a health care system that did not educate them on the risks of stillbirth, monitor them closely enough or listen to them when they said something felt wrong.

Mental health experts often advise parents grappling with grief to focus on a moment or a memory that gives them comfort. Some choose an image that makes them think of their baby or that highlights a milestone like a birthday or what would have been the first day of school. Others take walks at places they had envisioned visiting with their babies.

Visit ProPublica to experience the full immersive and interactive memorial. This feature provides an opportunity to read heartfelt tributes from families who have shared their stories. Join us in honoring the names of 60 stillborn babies.

Development by Jason Kao. Photo editing by Peter DiCampo.

by ProPublica

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The secretary of veterans affairs, Denis McDonough, visited a clinic in Chico, California, last week and personally pledged to address concerns about inadequate staffing in the VA facility’s mental health unit.

His visit came after a ProPublica investigation revealed serious lapses in the psychiatric care two veterans received at the clinic. After years of struggling to get adequate treatment, and in the midst of mental health crises, the veterans shot and killed their mothers within days of each other in January 2022. The ProPublica story grew out of an inquiry by the VA’s inspector general that examined the agency’s shortcomings in one of the deaths.

At the time of the shootings, the clinic hadn’t had a full-time, on-site psychiatrist in five years, and many of the telehealth providers had recently stopped seeing Chico patients. Clinic employees told ProPublica they had begged regional leaders for help, but the federal health system was slow to respond. The former site manager told ProPublica she had warned colleagues, “We are going to kill someone.”

On Thursday, McDonough, who previously served as White House chief of staff and principal deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration, held a roundtable discussion with front-line mental health workers as well as top leaders from the VA’s regional office in Northern California.

“This is an important opportunity for us to learn really important lessons, and part of my learning today was to come up here to meet with our team to hear directly from them what their experience is right now and what I need to do to make sure that I’m the best possible partner for them,” he told a local news reporter after the meeting. “In that regard, this was a very, very helpful event.”

McDonough said he assured employees “that they would not be unheard in their concerns” and that the VA would “continue to make progress on staffing issues.”

If you or someone you know needs help:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741
• If you are a veteran, call the Veterans Crisis Line: 988, then press 1

“We have a very fast-growing veteran population here in Chico,” he added. “We have to make sure that we are growing commensurate with that population so that they can get the timely access to care and the timely access to benefits that they have earned. We’re making progress on that, but there’s still more work to be done, and we will not rest until we get it done.”

In a statement about the visit, VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said, “we take the issues raised by the VA’s inspector general and ProPublica extremely seriously, and we appreciate the oversight — which helps us better serve our nation’s Veterans.”

Hayes declined to say anything more specific about the actions McDonough intends to take.

ProPublica examined the case of Julia Larsen, a 29-year-old woman who was honorably discharged from the Navy in 2016. Upon returning home to California, Larsen was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from combat and military sexual trauma. She began experiencing psychotic symptoms soon after.

Marty Larsen displays a photo of his daughter Julia, which he keeps in his wallet. The photo was taken around the time of her boot camp graduation, just before deployment. (Loren Elliott for ProPublica)

Larsen sought help at the Chico clinic for several years, she told ProPublica and her medical records show. But she said the providers were too busy for talk therapy and focused instead on medications. In late 2021, a virtual nurse practitioner Larsen had never seen prescribed her two drugs that can trigger psychotic or manic symptoms when taken together. It isn’t clear which, if either, she took.

In January 2022, on a morning when Larsen was experiencing an extreme mental health crisis, a nurse at the Chico clinic mistakenly instructed Larsen’s mother to bring her in for an assessment. But the virtual nurse practitioner who was on call was booked and had no time for a consultation, violating VA rules that require patients to be seen in such situations. In addition, a social worker who was supposed to assess Larsen failed to follow protocols and sent her home.

Later that night, the sound of a far-off explosion frightened Larsen and prompted her to fire her handgun several times inside her parents’ home. One bullet pierced her mother in the thigh, damaging a large blood vessel and fatally wounding her.

Larsen’s case was the subject of a February 2023 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General, which found the Chico clinic had failed to manage her medication, provide same-day access to care and assess her risk of violence. Larsen was later committed to a state-run forensic psychiatric hospital.

Andrew Iles, an Air Force veteran who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, also struggled to get consistent treatment at the clinic, ProPublica found. His providers changed repeatedly. He was sometimes assigned to a pharmacist instead of a psychiatrist or psychologist.

A photo of Andrew Iles at boot camp is pictured at the home of his older sister, Ashley Hill. The family moved to Texas for a fresh start after Iles killed his mother. (Loren Elliott for ProPublica)

Over time, Iles’ delusions grew more extreme, and he came to believe his immediate family was trying to kill him. He shot his mother in January 2022, killing her in the home they shared.

After ProPublica’s investigation was published, Iles, 35, was found not guilty by reason of insanity. As a result, he will be committed to a state psychiatric hospital instead of facing prison time.

In a press release announcing the case’s resolution, the local district attorney, Michael L. Ramsey, linked to and cited ProPublica’s reporting, saying it showed Iles “had difficulty establishing consistent care with a mental health provider through the VA.”

In addition to the two cases, ProPublica analyzed more than 300 studies conducted by the agency’s inspector general over the last four years. The analysis found repeated failures in mental health care, some of which had fatal consequences.

Andrew’s older sister, Ashley Hill, said this week that she was disappointed the VA hadn’t reached out to her family directly or published an inspector general’s report on her brother’s case.

“If this leads to some kind of change,” she said of the secretary’s visit to Chico, “that’s the best thing my family can hope for.”

by Vianna Davila

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

For years, an elite team of lawyers at the Texas attorney general’s office went toe-to-toe with some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, on a mission to weed out fraud and abuse in the Medicaid system.

And the team was wildly successful, securing positive press for the attorney general’s office and bringing in money for the state — lots of it. In a little more than two decades, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has helped recover a whopping $2.6 billion. Of that, $1 billion went to the state’s general fund, which pays for critical services like education and health care.

The cases the team handled weren’t necessarily the kind to rouse the conservative base of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gained prominence for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for regularly suing the Biden administration. But still, they were legal victories Paxton touted amid a host of scandals that have dogged him since he was first elected in 2014.

“Paxton Recovers $26 Million for the State of Texas, Medicaid Program,” read one 2021 press release from his office, after the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division settled with the pharmaceutical manufacturer Apotex for reporting high drug prices to the state’s Medicaid program.

He praised the team again last fall, a couple of months after state senators acquitted him in a widely watched impeachment trial in which Paxton faced allegations of corruption and bribery.

“Our Civil Medicaid Fraud Division has done an outstanding job holding these pharmaceutical companies accountable,” a November news release quoted Paxton saying, about a lawsuit his office had filed against pharmaceutical giants Pfizer Inc. and Tris Pharma Inc. The suit accuses the companies of giving an ADHD drug to children on Texas Medicaid, despite evidence the substance had failed quality control tests. (Pfizer said in a statement it believes the state’s case has no merit; a spokesperson for Tris said the company does not comment on pending litigation.)

But over the last year, the team of lawyers responsible for pursuing this and other big lawsuits like it has shrunk to its smallest size since Paxton took office.

Nearly two-thirds of the lawyers who were on the team a year ago have quit. Despite some replacements, the division is down from 31 attorneys last January to 19 at the beginning of this year, according to an analysis of staffing records by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Together, those departing lawyers represented a combined 180 years of experience with the attorney general’s office.

The Number of Attorneys in the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division Decreased Sharply in 2023 Source: Texas Office of the Attorney General

The departures followed the ouster of the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division’s longtime and beloved chief, Raymond Winter, in November 2022. What precisely led to his departure was not made clear to his team. A December 2022 email from an associate deputy attorney general to the agency’s head of human resources, obtained by the news organizations, said Winter was notified that “a decision was made to change leadership” in the division. Winter was given the option to take a demotion and serve in either the agency’s Transportation Division or its Law Enforcement Defense Division. He instead chose to retire, the email said.

However, a former attorney from the division said agency higher-ups told Winter if he didn’t resign or take the demotion, he’d be fired. The attorney, like the multiple former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorneys interviewed for this story, asked ProPublica and The Texas Tribune not to use their name for fear of professional retaliation.

The news organizations spoke to 10 attorneys who worked in the division with Winter. They said his ouster came as a shock. Months earlier, Winter had received a $5,000 bonus “for consistently performing at a level of excellence,” a manager wrote, according to his employee file, which the news organizations obtained through a public information request. Gov. Greg Abbott has since appointed Winter to be the state’s inspector general.

Several attorneys said the exodus that followed Winter’s ejection is a sign of a state agency at a crisis point. The 19 lawyers who left the division last year constitute a significantly higher number than the seven who departed in 2022, one of whom moved to another unit within the attorney general’s office, the news organizations found.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests or written questions.

Paxton’s agency has been beset by operational struggles in recent years. Last year, ProPublica and the Tribune reported on Paxton’s repeated refusals to defend state agencies in court. Austin-based television station KXAN disclosed how dysfunction in the office’s Crime Victims’ Compensation unit has resulted in significant payment delays to crime survivors. The Associated Press has covered the agency’s decision to drop human trafficking and child sexual assault cases because investigators lost track of a victim, as well as numerous other attorneys quitting because of internal dysfunction.

Paxton himself has been the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit filed by his former lieutenants, as well as a securities fraud investigation ongoing since before he was elected attorney general. Paxton recently moved to settle the whistleblower lawsuit, saying he no longer contests the facts, as part of his ongoing effort to avoid testifying in the case. He has pleaded not guilty in the securities fraud case, which is set to go to trial in April.

The attorney general has so far survived these personal and professional challenges, becoming even more emboldened since his impeachment acquittal in September. Days after his reinstatement, he publicly pledged to help unseat some of the lawmakers who voted to impeach him and has supported numerous primary challengers to sitting Republican legislators.

The personnel losses in the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division carry a different consequence because it is one of the departments at the attorney general’s office that generates money. In fiscal year 2000, the team’s first in existence, lawyers there helped bring in a little more than $5 million in recoveries. A decade later, the division regularly had years when it helped bring in more than $100 million. In fiscal year 2012, when Abbott was still attorney general, the division helped recoup more than $400 million in wasted Medicaid dollars. (The civil division is distinct from the attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which conducts criminal investigations into fraud and abuse allegations against Medicaid health care providers.)

Besides the money that went to the state general fund, Paxton’s office also benefited, getting to keep a portion of attorney’s fees from its cases, money that goes to the agency as a whole. In fiscal year 2023, the division helped collect more than $14 million in those fees, almost triple the Civil Medicaid Fraud division’s annual budget, according to records ProPublica and the Tribune obtained through a public information request. The previous year, Civil Medicaid Fraud collected more in attorney’s fees than all other attorney general divisions combined.

Without the full crop of lawyers, achieving those kinds of wins will be significantly harder, former lawyers for the division said.

“When a lawyer who’s been there for years and has handled multiple lawsuits and built relationships with the feds, with other states, all of that — when that walks out the door, you start over, and that is not easily regained,” said Margaret Moore, a former Travis County district attorney who previously worked in the division under Winter.

Medicaid fraud cases can take years to complete, and money from legal settlements coming in this year is most likely the result of cases investigated and litigated under Winter’s leadership, a former attorney said. So it is too soon to know how the division’s ability to secure financial settlements will be affected by the loss of so many experienced attorneys. Last fiscal year, however, the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division opened only 56 cases, the lowest number since at least 2013, according to a review of annual reports jointly issued by the attorney general’s office, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Office of Inspector General. The next lowest number of civil Medicaid fraud cases filed in that time frame was 73, in fiscal year 2022.

Winter declined to be interviewed for this story. The Office of Inspector General, which he now leads, regularly works with the attorney general’s Civil Medicaid Fraud unit on investigations. In a statement, Winter called the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division a “valued partner” and said that together they will “continue to aggressively fight Medicaid fraud using all available tools under the law.”

Medicaid fraud litigation is complex and requires a sharp understanding of state and federal law. The attorneys regularly take on big pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets. Often, the state faces off against multiple white-shoe law firms in a single case.

Another former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney, who left the division last year, predicted it could take a decade to rebuild the unit because of the institutional knowledge that was lost.

“As a Texas citizen who happens to know more about the shady things that pharmaceutical companies and other entities do because of my job, I do feel less safe as a citizen knowing that CMF is not what it used to be and does not have the ability to hold those entities accountable in the way that they were,” she said.

A Close-Knit Team

Winter was the kind of hands-on leader who inspired uncommon admiration among his staff. In his earlier life, he’d been a member of Texas A&M University’s storied Corps of Cadets, then a paratrooper in the Army National Guard, all experiences that seemed to drive home his “team first” philosophy.

And it was a close-knit team in Civil Medicaid Fraud.

In 1999, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, now a U.S. senator, started the unit as a small section inside the agency’s Elder Law and Public Health Division with the goal of stopping abuse of the Medicaid program. To do so, lawyers in the unit would use a state law passed in 1995 that empowered the attorney general’s office to prosecute fraud within the Medicaid system, a state and federal program that provides health care to financially needy individuals.

When Winter first started working on Medicaid fraud cases in 2000, there were only two other people on the team. They had few resources. Cynthia O’Keeffe, who was hired to work for the unit two years later, remembered a defense attorney asking her to send something to him by overnight mail. She told him she couldn’t because her team’s overnight mailing budget was already used up for the year. “He lost his mind,” she remembered. “He thought I was lying to him.”

But that quickly began to change. In 2000, Texas became the first state in the country to go after a pharmaceutical company for improperly reporting drug prices to the Medicaid program, according to a press release the attorney general’s office issued in 2013. This and subsequent lawsuits highlighted how pharmaceutical companies would sometimes misrepresent the prices of their products to the Medicaid program.

In 2003, the Civil Medicaid Fraud unit settled with Dey Inc. for $18.5 million in a drug-pricing case related to albuterol sulfate, which is used to treat asthma. At the time, O’Keeffe couldn’t fathom being part of a settlement for that much money. Then the next year, the division settled another drug-pricing case, this time with Schering-Plough Corp., for $27 million.

As the settlements grew, so did the unit’s reputation across the country, said Lelia Winget-Hernandez, a lawyer who previously worked with the attorney general of Virginia.

Texas Medicaid fraud attorneys were always willing to help and provide Winget-Hernandez guidance when she called with questions about pursuing similar Medicaid fraud lawsuits in her state. “I know they say Texas leads the way and don’t mess with Texas. That [Civil Medicaid Fraud] unit exhibited that all the time,” Winget-Hernandez said.

By 2007, Winter was the unit’s acting chief. The following year, Abbott, who was the state’s attorney general from 2002 to 2014, made it its own division.

The Civil Medicaid Fraud Division landed some of its biggest headlines when its attorneys joined a whistleblower lawsuit against health care behemoth Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary ​​Janssen Pharmaceutical LLC. The lawsuit accused the companies of fraudulently marketing the schizophrenia drug Risperdal for use in children and adolescents, including those on the Texas Medicaid program, though the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration had not yet approved it for pediatric patients. The Food and Drug Administration had also sent warning letters to the company over the years about its marketing practices and failures to disclose data to doctors about possible side effects of the drug. In children, those included diabetes, permanent uncontrollable movement disorders and the growth of lactating breasts in boys, O’Keeffe said.

The case went to trial in January 2012. In her opening statement to the court, O’Keeffe accused the companies of having engaged in a “systematic looting” of the state’s Medicaid program.

After roughly a week of the plaintiffs’ case, Johnson & Johnson agreed to settle for $158 million, the state’s largest ever Medicaid fraud recovery from a single defendant at the time. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson admitted no wrongdoing.

Tommy Jacks, one of the private attorneys who worked on the case alongside the attorney general’s office, said in a recent interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that it was clear the important role Winter played for his team.

He “led by example, and was just completely trusted by the individuals who worked in the division,” Jacks said.

The team’s successes were a calling card for top-tier legal talent. The Civil Medicaid Fraud unit attracted law school stars and experienced private attorneys willing to take pay cuts in order to work for the state and for a mission they believed in, O’Keeffe said. “They wanted to come and work for us because we were on the right side of cases,” O’Keeffe said. “It was complex, high-profile work, and we were incredibly successful.”

When Abbott was still attorney general, job candidates sometimes asked in interviews about the politics of the agency and how that affected their work. “And we would say, ‘Hey, Greg Abbott doesn’t let that get to us,’” O’Keeffe said.

In November 2014, Abbott was elected governor. To replace him as attorney general, voters chose Paxton, another Republican and a state senator from McKinney.

Growing Pressure

Paxton’s first election didn’t initially change things in Civil Medicaid Fraud. The team kept securing settlements, and there was still a sense of a separation between the agency’s day-to-day operations and the politics, said Susan Miller, who led the division’s investigative unit from 2007 until 2020. She and her fellow attorneys didn’t have many interactions with Paxton, which was typical of the office.

The atmosphere started to shift sometime after Paxton was elected for a second term in 2018.

The differences were small at first. O’Keeffe, who also became a deputy chief in the unit, recalled higher-ups in the attorney general’s office asking her to meet with a woman whose health care company the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division was investigating, though lawyers had not yet decided whether to pursue the case in court. The woman wanted to know why lawyers were looking into her business. “She made it very clear she wanted me to back off,” O’Keeffe said.

Ultimately, nothing came of the interaction, and O’Keeffe said she doesn’t believe a case was ever filed against the woman’s company. Still, she couldn’t believe leadership at the attorney general’s office would even call such a meeting in the first place because of the potential precedent it could set. Lawyers don’t meet directly with potential defendants because it could influence the course of a case or investigation and because “it gives the person who’s being investigated the impression they are in charge, not you,” O’Keeffe said.

“I thought, ‘Greg Abbott would have never let this happen. John Cornyn would have never let this happen,’” O’Keeffe recalled.

Previously, the team had felt free from political pressure, Miller said. The lawyers were working for Republican attorneys general yet were still able to take on big business. Under Paxton, however, she said the higher-ups started asking more questions about certain cases the attorneys chose to pursue and how long they took. “We had to start justifying things more,” Miller said. O’Keeffe noticed Winter being cut out of discussions about certain matters and that executives weren’t always heeding his legal advice — partly, she believes, because he wasn’t in Paxton’s inner circle.

O’Keeffe left the agency in fall 2019, followed by Miller in August 2020. Shortly after, several of Paxton’s top deputies went to the FBI alleging the attorney general had misused the office in trying to aid his friend and donor, real estate investor Nate Paul. Paul, who now faces multiple charges in federal court that include making false statements to financial institutions, has denied bribing Paxton and pleaded not guilty to the charges.

One of the whistleblowers, David Maxwell Jr., later told Texas House of Representatives investigators that anyone who’d been close to him became a target at the agency — and that included Winter.

Former Texas Ranger David Maxwell Jr. testifies during Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial in the state Senate last year. (Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune)

Maxwell, a former Texas Ranger, had been the attorney general’s director of criminal law enforcement. Part of Winter’s job with the state, separate from his leadership of the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division, was to defend Maxwell’s ratings of law enforcement officers who were terminated from the attorney general’s office.

Paxton ultimately fired Maxwell and gave him a general discharge, according to court filings, which indicates some kind of work performance problem or disciplinary issue. When Maxwell challenged the rating, wanting to upgrade to honorable discharge, the attorney general’s office asked Winter to defend its decision. Winter declined, according to Maxwell’s February 2023 interview with the House investigators, which was included in exhibits released ahead of Paxton’s impeachment trial. “He refused, and so they fired him,” Maxwell said, according to a transcript of that interview.

Maxwell declined an interview request for this story.

“Paxton has totally devastated the agency with good people that he’s gotten rid of because the criteria to get hired in the executive level is to plead your allegiance to him, not to the agency or not to the law,” Maxwell told the investigators.

Ultimately, Paxton fired four other whistleblowers. Another three of them quit, among them Paxton’s second in command, First Assistant Jeff Mateer. In the aftermath of his top deputies reporting him, Paxton “hired a whole new executive crew,” whistleblower Mark Penley told House investigators, “and sealed off access to the executive floor.”

Among Paxton’s new lieutenants was Brent Webster, a private practice lawyer the attorney general hired to replace Mateer as first assistant. Webster had previously come under scrutiny when working in Williamson County, where he was accused of failing to serve citations in dozens of asset forfeiture cases. Webster told the Austin American-Statesman in 2017 he did so because the office was short-staffed and so he prioritized criminal cases.

His first day with the state, Webster kicked out one of the other whistleblowers, Blake Brickman, from a meeting with Paxton, a lawsuit filed by the whistleblowers alleged. Later, Webster went to Brickman’s office escorted by an armed officer. Other employees complained that the armed officer “was an unprecedented attempt by Mr. Webster to intimidate senior members of OAG staff,” according to an internal whistleblower complaint filed by Brickman in October 2020 that was a precursor to the lawsuit he and others later pursued. Webster has never publicly addressed these allegations.

Unlike his predecessor in the first assistant role, Webster was far less enamored with Winter and his team, according to one attorney who used to work with the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division. Other officials in the agency suspected Webster didn’t appreciate any level of pushback on his ideas, the attorney said. But Winter was direct, the attorney said, and wouldn’t necessarily hold back his legal opinion about a case if he thought it necessary to share it.

Webster did not respond to requests for comment.

Winter did his best to shield the division from politics and turmoil in the executive offices, several attorneys said. But in 2022, the attorney general’s office and the Civil Medicaid Fraud Division joined a whistleblower lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, alleging the sexual health organization had improperly received Medicaid reimbursements while Texas’ challenges to its use of those funds were underway. Two attorneys interviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune said there were disagreements between Winter and the higher-ups about what legal approach to take on the $1.8 billion lawsuit, which threatens to bankrupt Planned Parenthood nationally. Planned Parenthood has called the lawsuit meritless.

One of the attorneys told the news organizations that in the months leading up to Winter’s ouster, there was a building sense of scrutiny, pressure and interference coming from the top of the organization, particularly when it came to the Planned Parenthood litigation. Executives were extremely focused on the case, a lot of resources were devoted to it and the entire tone of the division changed for the worse as a result, the attorney said.

The team kept trying to do its work. Then, in mid-November 2022, a handful of Paxton’s top deputies called the Civil Medicaid Fraud attorneys into a room. Word had already spread that Winter had been pushed out. The deputies confirmed the news. The room filled with an icy silence, but the anger was palpable, attorneys present said.

“Anyone who was being honest with themselves in the moment knew things were about to be really bad,” another former Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney said.

No One Was Safe

Winter’s departure was a seismic event. If he wasn’t safe, some of the division attorneys agreed, no one was.

By January 2023, six attorneys from the division resigned, three of them on the same day. Four more announced in February that they were quitting. The rest of the departures trickled in throughout the subsequent months and included an investigator, a legal assistant and an office manager. After Paxton’s acquittal but before year’s end, another three attorneys quit.

These reductions will hurt the division’s ability to detect Medicaid waste, said Charles Silver, the McDonald chair in civil procedure at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

“That’s the only effect it can possibly have,” Silver said. “The number of potential cases out there greatly exceeds the ability of either the states’ AG departments or the federal government to police it all.”

Some of the departing lawyers followed Winter to his new job at the Office of Inspector General. Others retired or went to work for other state offices.

Now, there are only a handful of attorneys left in the division with experience litigating Medicaid fraud cases.

And the resignations haven’t stopped. On Jan. 17, another Civil Medicaid Fraud attorney quit.

by Alec MacGillis

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Tara Polansky and her husband were torn about where to enroll their daughter when they moved back to Columbus, Ohio, a year and a half ago. The couple, who work for a nonprofit organization and a foundation, respectively, were concerned about the quality of the city’s public schools and finally decided to send her to Columbus Jewish Day School. It was a long drive out to the suburbs every day, but they admired the school for its liberal-minded outlook.

So Polansky was startled when, in September, the school wrote to families telling them to apply for taxpayer-funded vouchers to cover part of the $18,000 tuition. In June, the Republican-controlled state government had expanded the state’s private-school voucher program to increase the value of the vouchers — to a maximum of $8,407 a year for high school students and $6,165 for those in lower grades — and, crucially, to make them available to all families.

For years the program, EdChoice, targeted mostly lower-income students in struggling school districts. Now it is an entitlement available to all, with its value decreasing for families with higher incomes but still providing more than $7,000 annually for high school students in solidly middle-class families and close to $1,000 for ones in the wealthiest families. Demand for EdChoice vouchers has nearly doubled this year, at a cost to Ohio taxpayers of several hundred million additional dollars, the final tally of which won’t be known for months.

That surge has been propelled by private school leaders, who have an obvious interest: The more voucher money families receive, the less schools have to offer in financial aid. The voucher revenue also makes it easier to raise tuition.

“The Board has voted to require all families receiving financial assistance … to apply for the EdChoice Program. We also encourage all families paying full tuition to apply for this funding,” read the email from the Columbus Jewish Day School board president. She continued: “I am looking forward to a great year — a year of learning, growing, and caring for each other. Let’s turn that caring into action by applying for the EdChoice Program.”

Polansky bridled at the direction. She had long subscribed to the main argument against private school vouchers: that they draw resources away from public education. It was one thing for her family to have chosen a private school. But she did not want to be part of an effort that, as she saw it, would decrease funding for schools serving other Columbus children. Together with another parent, she wrote a letter objecting to the demand.

“For this public money to go to kids to get a religious education is incredibly wrong,” she told ProPublica. “I absolutely don’t want to pull money out of an underfunded school district.”

For decades, Republicans have pushed, with mixed success, for school voucher programs in the name of parental choice and encouraging free-market competition among schools. But in just the past couple of years, vouchers have expanded to become available to most or all children in 10 states: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. The expansion has been spurred by growing Republican dominance in many state capitals, U.S. Supreme Court rulings loosening restrictions on taxpayer funding for religious schools, and parental frustration with progressive curricula and with public school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the expanded programs are experiencing high demand, which voucher advocates are taking as affirmation of their argument: that families would greatly prefer to send their children to private schools, if only they could afford them.

But much of the demand for the expanded voucher programs is in fact coming from families, many quite affluent, whose children were already attending private schools. In Arizona, the first state to allow any family to receive public funding for private schools or homeschooling, the majority of families applying for the money, about $7,000 per student, were not recently enrolled in public school. In Florida, only 13% of the 123,000 students added to the state’s expanded school-choice program had switched from public school.

In Ohio, the effects of the move toward looser eligibility in recent years was clear even prior to last summer’s big expansion: Whereas in 2018, fewer than a tenth of the students who were newly receiving vouchers that year had not attended a public school the year before, by 2022, more than half of students who were new to EdChoice were already in private schools.

That ratio will climb much higher in Ohio, now that the vouchers are available for families at all income levels and private schools are explicitly telling parents to apply. The surge in applications this school year has been so dramatic that it’s nearing the total enrollment for all private schools in the entire state.

At St. Brendan’s the Navigator, on the other side of the Columbus beltway from the Jewish Day School, the missive arrived on the last day of July. The letter, signed by the Rev. Bob Penhallurick, called the expanded vouchers a “tremendous boon to our school families and Catholic education across Ohio” and said that all families were “strongly encouraged to apply for and receive the EdChoice scholarship.” He noted that, depending on their income level, families could receive up to $6,165 for each child — nearly covering the $6,975 tuition. “Even a small scholarship is a major blessing for you, the school, and the parish,” he wrote.

And then he added, in italics, that if a family did not apply for the vouchers, “we will respect that decision,” but that “supplemental financial aid from the parish in this case will require a meeting” with either himself or another pastor at the school.

Asked about the directive and parents who might have been reluctant to comply, Columbus diocesan spokesperson Jason Mays said, “Parents are not required to apply for EdChoice.” Asked about the EdChoice expansion’s effect on enrollment, he said, “We expect to see continued growth and demand in the upcoming school year.”

At Holy Family School near Youngstown, the directive arrived a few days later, on Aug. 3. “As you are aware, ALL students attending Holy Family School will be eligible for the EdChoice Scholarship. We are requesting that all families register their child/ren for this scholarship as soon as possible,” wrote the school’s leadership. And then it added in bold: “It is imperative that you register for EdChoice for each of your students. We are waiting to send invoices until your EdChoice Scholarship has been awarded.”

In an interview at the school, Holy Family principal Laura Parise said the push to apply for EdChoice had succeeded. “One hundred percent of our students are on it,” she said. “We made it that way — we made our families fill out the form, and we’re going from there.”

Parise said that some families had been reluctant to apply, but that the school told them that if they did not do so, they could not qualify for any of the school’s discounts from its $5,900 tuition, such as the ones Holy Family offers to second and third children from the same family. If parents still needed additional help beyond the vouchers, they could request it.

She said the school was not yet planning to raise tuition beyond what was already scheduled. “We didn’t want to take advantage of the situation,” she said. For now, she said, the state revenue that replaces some financial aid costs will simply make it possible for the school to spend more on other things. “We might be able to allocate some funds for other things curriculum wise to raise academics,” she said.

The expanded vouchers have not affected enrollment much yet, she said, since they had been made available after most families had already made school decisions for this year. “The true sign will come next year,” she said. “Our families from the previous year were coming anyway. We’ll see what happens next year, if we have an increase.”

Since private-school vouchers launched in Ohio nearly three decades ago, there has been a debate over who their true beneficiaries are. Then-Gov. George Voinovich, a Republican who had been mayor of Cleveland, pushed for the creation of a voucher program in that city in 1995, selling it as an outlet for disadvantaged families seeking an alternative to the city’s troubled schools.

But, within three years, while the program had grown to 4,000 students, private-school enrollment had grown by only 300, suggesting that most participating families were already enrolled in private schools. By 2001, the share of Black students among voucher recipients in Cleveland was 53%, below the 71% ratio of Black students in public school.

The program was the first in the nation to provide public money for tuition at religious schools, and by 2000, virtually all Cleveland voucher recipients were using them at a religious private school (mostly Catholic) rather than secular ones. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected a challenge to the Cleveland vouchers; the court ruled that because the vouchers could be used for religious or nonreligious schools, they did not violate the constitutional prohibition against a state favoring religion. In the years that followed, vouchers spread to more districts around the state, taking on the name EdChoice. Initially, they were targeted at families in other districts deemed to be failing, but a decade ago, the state legislature — whose Republican majorities are buttressed by highly gerrymandered districts — made them available to lower-income students across the state.

Then came last year’s big expansion, eliminating income limits and raising the value of the vouchers. It offers major benefits even to many solidly middle-class families: A family of four at 451% of the poverty level, or $135,300 in household income, will receive $5,200 per year for a K-8 student and $7,050 per year for a high school student.

In the 2022-23 school year, before the expansion, EdChoice cost $354 million, on top of the $46 million for the Cleveland program, according to the state education department. That was already more than quadruple what EdChoice had cost a decade earlier.

The recent surge in applications will propel the price tag far higher. With the state still processing applications and accepting them until the end of June, it has not yet reported the total cost of the expansion, but in August legislative analysts projected that it would cost the state an additional $320 million for this school year. The EdChoice line item is folded within the state’s overall budget for K-12 education, which is roughly $13 billion, and the EdChoice line item is not capped: The more families apply, the more it will cost.

The program’s expansion in recent years has prompted another lawsuit, filed in 2022, this one from a coalition of 250 school districts. The suit argues that the vouchers worsen segregation, since private schools can choose their students (an analysis found that as of November, 90% of the new voucher recipients were white, far above the statewide share of white students, which is about two-thirds); that they violate the state Constitution’s bars against religious control of public school funds (the vast majority of EdChoice funds go to Christian schools); and that the vouchers undermine the Ohio Constitution’s promise of an adequate education for all by leaching money from public schools. Last month, a judge denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case, rejecting the state’s claims that the plaintiffs lacked standing and that all the claims have previously been decided by the state and U.S. supreme courts.

The leaching from public schools happens in two ways. Since public school funding formulas are based on enrollment, every student who uses a voucher to leave public schools means less money for them. But even if few students make that switch and most vouchers go to students already in private schools, the lawsuit’s supporters say, the soaring cost of the vouchers inevitably leaves less money in the state education budget for public schools.

“It’s soon going to be a billion dollars annually, and it’s coming right out of the school funds,” said William Phillis, the director of the coalition that filed the lawsuit and a former assistant state school superintendent. “It’s just an egregious violation of the Constitution.”

State Senate President Matt Huffman, a Republican from western Ohio who has led the push to expand vouchers, is blunt in his defense: Yes, the vouchers cost the state more money now, but they will save it money over time as families opt out of public schools, reducing the need to fund them. “In the long run, the taxpayer saves a lot of money," he said in an interview last fall. “I hope more people take advantage [of EdChoice] if they want to.”

Aaron Churchill, the research director at the Ohio branch of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education-reform think tank, said that even if more vouchers are going to families already enrolled in private school, those vouchers are still supporting school choice. These families have been paying taxes for years and not availing themselves of the schools those taxes paid for, he said, and it’s only fair that at least some of that money go toward the education they chose for their children.

“It does follow the basic principle that when we talk about funding education, we’re funding students, regardless of the choice their parents make,” he said. “These dollars are for the kids, regardless of whether it’s the public or private sector.”

Polansky, the Columbus Jewish Day School mother, found an ally in Micah Berman, a fellow parent of a third grader. “One of the reasons we went to this school is because it does have a strong emphasis on teaching students about caring for the broader community and in particular caring for those that have more needs,” he said. “And the idea that you would be putting some pressure on families to accept these vouchers that in effect take money out of school districts that need it strikes me as problematic and in conflict with that.”

Together, they penned a three-page letter to the school leadership. “We chose to send our children to CJDS in large part because of its commitment to tikkun olam, the Jewish obligation to build a better and more equitable world,” they wrote. “The Board’s policy: (1) puts pressure on CJDS families to betray their own values by requiring them to seek out vouchers that they may be morally and ethically opposed to in order to obtain any financial aid; and (2) sends a message to the parents, the public, and other private and public schools that CJDS endorses and is willing to benefit from the EdChoice program, even though the program runs counter to core Jewish values and basic tenets of social justice.”

They added, “We recognize that the Board has a responsibility to ensure the financial sustainability of CJDS and that doing so is no easy task … . But CJDS needs to live its values in the course of doing so.’”

Soon after they sent the letter, school leaders lifted the requirement that families on financial aid apply for the vouchers. But Polansky worried that the order had already had its desired effect in spurring applications. “Even though it was rescinded, my sense is that a lot of the damage was already done,” she said.

Berman said that many parents still may miss the broader picture. “It’s easy not to think of the systemic impact when you’re thinking about individual families or individual schools,” he said. “My fear is that this is sort of the point: to make this as attractive as possible for families to take more of the money, because it increases the incentive to keep taking money from the schools that need it.”

The school’s interim director, Rabbi Morris Allen, responded to inquiries with a brief statement: “We are aware of all Ohio educational guidelines. We work continually to ensure that our school can provide its unique pluralistic and accessible education to any student who desires to benefit from our Jewish vision and mission.”

Visits to both CJDS and St. Brendan to ask other parents what they made of the voucher debate, in the parking lot during school drop-off and pickup, were unsuccessful: At both schools, administrators (and a heavily armed guard at CJDS) came outside to tell this reporter to vacate the premises. Regardless of how much public funding the schools receive, they are, after all, private.