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by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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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.

In a half-empty committee room in late April, one of Texas’ most powerful Republican state senators pitched legislation that would make it harder for immigrants in the country illegally to get jobs.

Her bill would require all employers in the state to use a free federal computer system, known as E-Verify, that quickly confirms whether someone has authorization to work in the United States. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham ticked off a handful of Republican-led states that mandate the program for all private companies and listed others that require it for most over a certain size. Yet Texas, which prides itself on being the nation’s toughest on illegal immigration, instructs only state agencies and sexually oriented businesses to use it.

“E-Verify is the most functional and cost-effective method the state of Texas can implement to stem the flow of illegal immigration, or those that are here not legally, to ensure that U.S. citizens and those able to work in the state of Texas are the ones who get the Texas jobs,” Kolkhorst told fellow senators, reminding them that the Business and Commerce Committee passed her nearly identical bill two years ago. (That proposal never made it to the Senate floor.)

No one spoke against the new legislation. Only one committee member, a Democrat, questioned it, asking if supporters would also favor an immigrant guest worker program. A handful of labor representatives called the bill a bipartisan priority, testifying that too many employers cut corners by hiring workers illegally at lower wages. The bill went on to sail through the committee and the Senate.

But then, like dozens of E-Verify bills over the last decade, the legislation died.

Texas’ top Republican leaders have built a political brand on the state’s hard-line stance against illegal immigration, pouring billions of dollars into Gov. Greg Abbott’s state border security initiative, including funding construction of a border wall and deploying state police to arrest migrants on a newly created offense for trespassing. This session, lawmakers voted to require most sheriff’s offices to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

Yet again and again the state’s conservative Legislature has refused to take what some Republicans call the single most crucial step to preventing immigrants from coming and staying here illegally: mandating E-Verify to make it more difficult for them to work.

Since 2013, GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced more than 40 E-Verify bills. Most tried to require the program for government entities and their contractors, but about a dozen attempted to expand the system to private employers in some capacity. With few exceptions, like mandating E-Verify for certain state contractors, Republican legislators declined to pass the overwhelming majority of those proposals.

This session, lawmakers filed about half a dozen bills attempting to require private companies to use the program. Kolkhorst’s legislation was the only one to make it out of either legislative chamber but eventually died because the state House did not take it up.

Given Texas leaders’ rhetoric on the border, it is a “glaring omission” not to more broadly require E-Verify as other GOP-led states have done, said Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that oversees E-Verify. At least nine majority Republican states — including Arizona, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina — require that most, if not all, private companies use the system. Abbott has frequently positioned Texas as harsher on immigration than each of them.

Still, that a private mandate made it further this session than ever before may illustrate the growing conflict in Texas between the pro-business side of the state’s GOP and Republicans who want to look tougher on immigration, said Melmed, who was a former special counsel on the issue to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

The resistance to E-Verify isn’t just about Texas Republicans’ reluctance to regulate business, Melmed said. It’s about how such a system could impact the state’s labor supply and economy.

An estimated 1.3 million Texas workers, more than 8% of the state’s work force, are here illegally, according to a 2023 analysis of U.S. census data by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. About a quarter of all construction workers in Texas lack legal status, for example, and the industry faces a critical labor shortage as a need for housing booms. Likewise, the state’s understaffed agricultural, restaurant and elder care sectors rely on workers here illegally.

“If you got serious about applying [E-Verify], you would create even worse problems” with labor shortages, said Bill Hammond, a GOP former state lawmaker who once led the Texas Association of Business. “Do you want to go to a restaurant and use paper plates because no one will wash dishes?”

Texas’ political leaders know this, Hammond said, but they don’t want to publicly acknowledge it.

A spokesperson for Abbott refused to say whether the governor supports mandating the program for private companies. However, when running for governor more than a decade ago, Abbott acknowledged that businesses had complained about instituting the system. At the time, he touted federal statistics that E-Verify was 99.5% accurate. State agencies, he said, could serve as a model before legislators imposed it on companies.

A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who as a senator unsuccessfully pushed legislation to hold employers accountable for hiring immigrants here illegally, did not return requests for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Speaker Dustin Burrows explain why the House refused to take up E-Verify. Kolkhorst declined repeated interview requests on her legislation.

State Sen. Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican who authored the first E-Verify bill that the Texas Legislature approved, said in an interview that his 2015 legislation did not go as far as he would have liked. He said that he agreed with Kolkhort’s private-company mandate.

“We need to enforce our immigration laws, both at the border and the interior of Texas, and E-Verify is an important component,” Schwertner said.

Some GOP lawmakers who pushed the issue this session faced “deafening silence” from many colleagues and impacted industries, said state Rep. Carl Tepper, a Lubbock Republican who filed two E-Verify bills.

Lawmakers and industry groups have a “misguided fear” about losing a portion of their workforce who are here illegally and whom they feel dependent on, he said. Although immigration enforcement is overseen by Congress, Tepper said that the state should do what it can to prevent such workers from coming to Texas by making it more difficult to hire them.

Even one of the state’s most influential conservative think tanks has supported more incremental E-Verify legislation, such as extending the state mandate to local governments. Doing so would be an “easier win” than requiring it for businesses, said Selene Rodriguez, a campaign director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Still, she said that the organization generally supports a broader mandate and is disappointed that Kolkhorst’s legislation failed.

E-Verify has been tricky for her group, Rodriguez acknowledged, because lawmakers have done so little over the years that it has had to prioritize what is “attainable.”

“Given the Trump agenda, that he won so widely, we thought maybe there’d be more appetite to advance it,” Rodriguez said. “But that wasn’t the case.”

She blamed “behind-the scenes” lobbying from powerful industry groups, particularly in agriculture and construction, as well as lawmakers who worry how supporting the proposal would influence reelection prospects.

A dozen prominent state industry groups declined to comment to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune on their stances relating to E-Verify.

E-Verify supporters admit the system is not a panacea. The computer program can confirm only whether identification documents are valid, not whether they actually belong to the prospective employee, and as a result a black market for such documents has surged. Employers, too, can game the system by contracting out work to smaller companies, which in many states are exempt from E-Verify mandates.

Even when states adopt these, most lack strong enforcement. Texas legislators have never tasked an agency with ensuring all employers comply. South Carolina, which has among the toughest enforcement, randomly audits businesses to see if they are using E-Verify, said Madeline Zavodny, a University of North Florida economics professor who studied the program for a 2017 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report. But South Carolina does not check whether companies actually hired immigrants here illegally, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Some states have carve-outs for small companies or certain employers that often rely on undocumented labor. North Carolina, for example, exempts temporary seasonal workers.

Immigrants here illegally contribute billions to the economy, said Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Much of the rhetoric over the issue is “using immigration as a wedge issue to rile up the base of voters who are concerned about cultural change, but at the same time not wanting to disrupt the economy too much.”

Expanding E-Verify, she said, is “not really in anybody’s interest.”

by Steve Suo

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The question was a simple one: Had Nike, the athletic apparel brand dogged by sweatshop allegations more than two decades ago, truly become a beacon of environmental stewardship and fair labor practices, as it claimed?

As editor for ProPublica’s Northwest team and a longtime Oregonian, I was as eager to know the answer as the Portland-based reporter who posed the question, Rob Davis.

Nike is woven into Oregon’s fabric. It’s one of the Portland area’s largest employers and one of the state’s few Fortune 500 companies. Nike’s headquarters in the Portland suburbs is a 400-acre complex of buildings, running paths and sports fields where fashion design and athleticism meet. At the University of Oregon, alma mater of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, buildings across the campus bear his name or the names of his relatives.

The trouble was that the answer to Davis’ question primarily lay across the Pacific Ocean. Although ProPublica is undaunted by stories that take time and, yes, money — see recent reporting by reporters Josh Kaplan and Brett Murphy from Gambia, for example — Davis first needed to prove to editors that an overseas trip would bring us a story that broke new ground.

One of our most important decisions early on was to partner with reporter Matthew Kish and his editors at The Oregonian/OregonLive, where Davis and I worked previously. Kish has covered Nike for more than a decade and knows the company as well as perhaps any reporter in the country.

Kish and Davis started reviewing public reports that Nike had put out over the past two decades and every news article they could find about the company’s efforts in the realm of social responsibility. Davis spoke by phone with labor advocates around the globe. He even found a few factory workers in Asia willing to talk in late-night (for them) video calls about their working conditions.

The nut that Davis and Kish couldn’t crack was Nike itself. The reporters told Nike’s public relations team about their interest. Might Nike staffers share what they were finding in factory audits or how they were ensuring compliance with Nike’s code of conduct? The PR people at various points provided some background information, including excerpts of past corporate reports, but the company chose not to make anyone available for on-the-record interviews at that stage.

(I also asked Nike last week to weigh in on the company’s interactions with Kish and Davis or about the stories they’ve written for this series; a Nike spokesperson declined to comment to me on the record.)

With layoffs hitting Nike last year, Kish and Davis had an opening to talk with insiders about one particular aspect of the company’s social responsibility efforts. Pursuing a tip, the two worked with research reporter Alex Mierjeski to compile a list of employees who had worked in sustainability roles. The reporters started knocking on virtual doors: about 100 of them. They established that Nike’s reorganization had taken a heavy toll on the workforce whose efforts included reducing the company’s carbon footprint.

This time, Nike responded by granting an interview with its chief sustainability officer, the only interview the company has given for this project to date during more than a year of reporting. It lasted 17 minutes. She said the company remained committed to sustainability and described its strategy as “embedding” the work throughout the company.

We published stories laying out the departures and one other development that seemed to go against Nike’s declared intent to help the planet: increasing emissions from its private jets.

Yet something remained missing from our reporting. The former sustainability workers spoke English. Many were based in Oregon. They had online presences. Understanding working conditions in Nike’s factories called for gaining a closer vantage point on the company’s far-flung foreign supply chain.

Davis zeroed in on one specific claim from Nike. The company has said that the factories for which it has data pay their workers, on average, 1.9 times the local minimum wage. It provided no breakdown of factories included in the calculation, and it wasn’t clear how widely pay might vary from the average. So Davis started requesting paystubs for workers across the globe. We hoped that even scattered data would help us test Nike’s math.

Paystubs trickled in. A handful of workers from a factory in Central America. More from Indonesia. A smattering from Cambodia.

Then, a breakthrough.

Davis received an Excel spreadsheet in English and Khmer, the language most widely spoken in Cambodia. It was a payroll ledger for Y&W Garment, which made baby clothing for Nike from 2022 to 2023. Davis could see every employee’s job title, age, hiring date, gender and pay amounts.

This was one factory in a supply chain made up of hundreds, 3,720 workers out of more than 1.1 million that Nike’s suppliers employ globally. But it was a uniquely comprehensive window. Quick calculations showed that only a tiny share of Y&W’s workforce — just 1% — made 1.9 times the minimum wage, the amount that Nike said was typical.

While Nike says contract factory workers for whom it has data earn 1.9 times their local minimum wage, a Y&W Garment factory payroll ledger shows many workers earning a base pay of $204 a month, Cambodia’s minimum wage last year. Even including bonuses and incentives, more than three-quarters of the factory’s employees earned close to the minimum wage. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights and redactions by ProPublica.)

Davis connected with a bilingual freelance journalist in Phnom Penh, Keat Soriththeavy, who tracked down some of the workers named in the payroll ledger. Now we had factory sources on the ground. We had someone to help Davis translate what they had to say. And we had our spreadsheet. I told Davis to book a ticket for January.

On a Sunday morning, less than a day after his plane landed in Cambodia’s capital, Davis met a group of workers on their only day off. After introductions through our hired translator, Davis pulled an iPad out of his travel bag and passed it around, asking whether the details of the digital payroll ledger were accurate.

One by one, each worker studied the entry by their name. “Correct?” Davis asked. Pause for translation.

“Yes.”

Around the table they went: Correct. Yes. Correct.

While Davis interviewed a garment worker in her home outside Phnom Penh, her neighbor, Phan Oem, came by. She had worked at Y&W Garment since 2012, the year it opened, and was happy to answer questions. She said she worked as many as 76 hours per week and sometimes was forced to work overtime. (Rob Davis/ProPublica)

Davis spent the rest of his 12-day visit traveling by tuk-tuk — a tiny three-wheeled taxi named for its puttering engine — to meet workers in small villages around Phnom Penh. Cambodian garment workers are typically on the clock at least six days a week, leaving limited free time to spend with family or a visiting journalist. Yet with Keat’s help, Davis managed to talk with a total of 14, some willing to be identified by name. They told him the money they made in a 48-hour work week wasn’t enough to live on and that they needed overtime to make ends meet.

First image: Davis while stopped for lunch along a highway outside Phnom Penh. Second image: Davis’ business card sits inside a tuk-tuk. (First image: Keat Soriththeavy. Second image: Rob Davis/ProPublica)

When workers began telling Davis that people fainted in the hot factory and needed to be treated at its clinic, he messaged me to gauge my reaction. I asked: Could he find a doctor who treated them? Very quickly, Davis got a phone number for a clinic staffer willing to talk. The medical worker helped us quantify the scale of the problem, telling Davis as many as 15 people a month became too weak to work in the hot months of May and June. (As used in Cambodia, the term “fainted” can describe becoming too weak to work.)

ProPublica photojournalist Sarahbeth Maney followed on Davis’ trail a month later. She documented, with intimate portraiture, the home life of people from a factory where base pay started at about $1 per hour.

Sar Kunthea, who packaged clothing at Y&W Garment, said she commonly worked two Sundays a month on top of her regular hours but still had to borrow money from friends a few times a year to stay afloat. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Nike did not answer detailed questions from Davis about wages or faintings, instead issuing a written statement. The company said it is “committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing” and that it expects suppliers “to continue making progress on fair compensation for a regular work week.”

Representatives of Y&W Garment and its Hong Kong parent, Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to Davis’ emails, text messages or phone calls. Haddad Brands, which Y&W workers told Davis served as an intermediary for Nike at the Phnom Penh facility, didn’t respond to emails asking about conditions there.

As Davis was drafting his story, President Donald Trump’s plan to raise tariffs on goods manufactured overseas sent Nike’s stock prices tumbling. One declared goal was to reverse the economic forces that drove Nike and others to make their products in places like Cambodia and not the U.S. It seemed, honestly, like Nike’s track record in the region might be losing relevance.

But experts told Davis and Kish, our reporting partner at The Oregonian, quite the opposite. Rather than bring jobs home, brands might simply squeeze their foreign suppliers for greater productivity.

It made the issues that drove Davis from the beginning as pressing as they have ever been. Had Nike lived up to its promises in Southeast Asia?

At one Cambodian factory, Davis’ tenacity brought us a simple answer: No.

Street vendors sell goods in front of the former Y&W Garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

by Hannah Allam

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When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.

His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Fugate’s profile picture on LinkedIn (Via Fugate’s LinkedIn page)

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Fugate at the Republican National Convention (Via Fugate’s Instagram account)

By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by J. David McSwane

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In February 2020, President Donald Trump’s first education secretary issued a memo to employees emphasizing the department’s policy “to ensure that diversity, inclusiveness, and respect are integral parts of our day-to-day management and work.”

“Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance,” Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the Department of Education. The memo ended with a call for employees to “actively embrace” principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

As part of that push, Quay Crowner was among the top education officials who enrolled in the “diversity change agent program.” Crowner thought little of it at the time. She had over two decades filled director-level human resources roles at several federal agencies, including the IRS and Government Accountability Office, and she’d participated in seminars on leadership and workplace discrimination. But five years later, as Trump entered office a second time, his administration’s tune on DEI had changed. Crowner was abruptly placed on leave under Trump’s executive order to dismantle DEI programs across the federal government.

As a longtime manager familiar with federal hiring and firing policies, Crowner, 55, believed she knew what it looked like to be unfairly targeted. Her current job as the director of outreach, impact and engagement at the Education Department was not connected to diversity initiatives. She said the only part of her responsibilities that could have been considered DEI was that her team guided students who’d had trouble navigating financial assistance applications; while most people who seek federal student aid are from disadvantaged backgrounds, her office was a resource for any and all and had no diversity mandate. She was not involved with hiring and retention efforts.

More troubling, she said, was that she was the only person on her team who had been let go, and her bosses refused to answer her questions about her dismissal. When she and colleagues from different departments began comparing notes, they found they had one thing in common. They had all attended the training encouraged under DeVos. They also noticed something else: Most of them were Black women.

“We are still just in utter shock that the public service we took an oath to complete … has fallen apart,” said Crowner, whose bills related to an injury and health issues are likely to mount as she loses her federal health care coverage.

“We never imagined that this would be something that would happen to us.”

Her experience is part of a largely untold story unfolding as Trump dismantles civil rights and inclusion programs across government: Many of those being forced out, like Crowner, are Black women who spent decades building a career of government service, only to see those careers shattered in a sudden purge.

ProPublica interviewed Crowner and two other career civil servants, all Black women, who are among the hundreds of fired federal employees represented in a legal action brought against the Trump administration. Filed in March with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board by legal teams including the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case contends the administration violated the First Amendment rights of employees by targeting them for holding views perceived as contrary to the Trump 2.0 doctrine.

What has received less attention is the suit’s claim that the administration also violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claim the DEI purge disproportionately affected those who aren’t white men.

Hard numbers documenting the demographics of those forced out by Trump are hard to attain. The Trump administration has provided little information on those being fired, and a revolving door of firings and reinstatements in some departments makes capturing formal figures even more challenging.

But a broad assessment of Trump’s firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Department’s staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities before Trump all but eliminated it.

Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data and the Times tracker. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.

Lawyers representing federal employees whose careers and families have been uprooted cite anecdotal evidence of disparate impact, a key ingredient in many successful civil rights claims.

“We have observed approximately 90% of the workers targeted for terminations due to a perceived association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are women or nonbinary,” said Kelly Dermody, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who have asked an administrative law judge to approve class-action status for the fired employees.

Nearly 80% of potential case plaintiffs are nonwhite, she said; most of that cohort are Black women.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Since reentering office, Trump has made clear his feelings about diversity programs, referring to them in an executive order as “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

Disparate Impact?

Ronicsa Chambers graduated from Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in 1990. Afterward, she got an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and landed a finance job with U.S. Airways, where she fell in love with aviation.

In 2005, she left the private sector to work in finance for the Federal Aviation Administration. She worked her way up the chain and, by 2019, helped create a program to address a lack of diversity in the agency by gaining the interest of graduates from historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.

In 2022, Chambers was named Air Traffic Manager of the Year. “I didn’t even know that non-air traffic controllers could get that award, and I was so proud,” she said. As titles in government do, hers changed in December 2024 as her team’s mission expanded to help FAA employees with issues such as providing accommodations so people with disabilities could do their jobs.

Then this January, she felt as though she’d been hit “in the face with a brick.” She was told on a video conference call that her FAA career was over. Though her work had involved DEI in the past, it was no longer in her title or her job description, and she said no one had asked her what her job entailed before she was removed.

She said she began moving through stages of grief but keeps coming back to anger because her team members — five Black women and one white man with a disability — were told they would be reassigned. She says they never were.

“As far as we know, we’re the only ones still on administrative leave,” she said, referring to those removed as part of Trump’s DEI executive order.

Ronicsa Chambers said she was told she and her team members would be reassigned after being let go from their jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration. They never were. (Schaun Champion for ProPublica)

It’s unclear if the FAA, whose workforce was largely spared due to recent airline safety concerns, has fired or even fired and rehired people in departments outside of Chambers’ team. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

The FAA has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57% white men compared with 4.4% Black women.

Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers’ case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, “harms the American people.”

“It takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us,” he said. “This is a lose-lose.”

Key to their case is the argument that minority workers were disparately impacted, a long-held civil rights theory at which Trump has taken direct aim. In April, Trump issued an executive order to broadly eliminate that doctrine from civil rights enforcement, one of many steps he’s taken to reverse the traditional role of the federal government in protecting individuals from issues such as housing and employment discrimination.

For instance, the Trump administration gutted the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which was tasked with ensuring equal treatment for students regardless of gender and race, and instead focused that office at targeting transgender athletes and their schools.

Lawyers and former employees say focusing on people who may have had some DEI training or job duties would cause greater harm to nonwhite employees. And historically, the federal government has been a prominent force in upward mobility.

“For a segment of Black America, the federal government has been crucial to stepping up,” said Marcus Casey, an economist and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.

Today, Black people make up about 18.6% of the federal workforce, larger than their percentage in the overall U.S. workforce, 12.8%, according to the Pew Research Center.

“So, you think about HBCU graduates, like Howard University, a lot of these people tell us the same story: ‘This is where I started. This is where I got my first internship,’” Casey said.

Upward Mobility

Sherrell Pyatt’s family story is quintessentially American.

Her great-grandfather served in the Vietnam War and, on his return, took a job in the U.S. Postal Service, a key employer in the story of upward mobility for middle-class Black families. His granddaughter, Pyatt’s mother, also found a career at the Postal Service. So, even though she would attain more education than the previous three generations, it seemed fitting that eventually Pyatt would find herself at the Postal Service.

Pyatt grew up in the Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough, but tested well enough to attend a private school. She became the first of her family to get a degree, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked to pay tuition. She got a master’s degree and worked at a nonprofit before landing a job in 2014 with the Postal Service, shaping policy as a government relations specialist.

While at USPS, she coordinated with Customs and Border Protection to stop drug shipments through the mail. That experience, as well as her fluency in Spanish, led her to a similar role at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While there, she was involved in immigrant removal operations as part of Trump’s first-term “zero tolerance” clampdown on border crossings. She next transferred to CBP, where she helped investigate deaths of migrants in federal custody and rampant racism in a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, both of her parents fell ill, and she moved to an Atlanta suburb to care for them. To make the move work, she transitioned to a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she worked as a supply chain analyst, ensuring that equipment such as medical masks made their way to U.S. hospitals. In early 2024, she moved yet again, to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates allegations of rights abuses lodged by both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Sherrell Pyatt had more than a decade’s worth of experience working for the federal government before her dismissal. (Rita Harper for ProPublica)

“My team was almost exclusively African Americans, and I think it’s just because of the experience of Black people in this country,” Pyatt said. “We seem to be more likely to go into those types of roles — one, because we have experience, and two, because of the passion to make a difference.”

In March, the Trump administration fired nearly all 150 employees in that office, including Pyatt. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about her firing.

“I think it was an easy target to get rid of people of color and people who fight for people of color,” Pyatt said. “It’s absolutely a way to attack people of color, people who are differently abled, people who don’t agree with what this administration is.”

Pyatt’s sudden loss of a career wrought instant consequences for her family. She was the primary breadwinner, but now her husband, who works for the Postal Service, provides the only income. They worry they won’t be able to make the mortgage payments on their home for the long run. Their three daughters, all middle school age, may no longer be able to attend their private Christian school or play softball.

Career federal employees like Pyatt are supposed to be able to petition for a transfer or receive preference in hiring at other agencies. Despite having worked for the federal government for more than a decade, at five agencies, including four Homeland Security posts, Pyatt says she’s faced nothing but silence.

“So it’s little things like that that this administration is doing that makes it really feel like they’re targeting people like me, people who love the country, come from a family that has served the country for generations, did what we were supposed to do,” Pyatt said through tears. “And it just doesn’t matter.”

by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica

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

The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for tribal colleges and universities by nearly 90%, a move that would likely shut down most or all of the institutions created to serve students disadvantaged by the nation’s historic mistreatment of Indigenous communities.

The proposal is included in the budget request from the Department of the Interior to Congress, which was released publicly on Monday. The document mentions only the two federally controlled tribal colleges — Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute — but notes the request for postsecondary programs will drop from more than $182 million this year to just over $22 million for 2026.

If Congress supports the administration’s proposal, it would devastate the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the colleges in Washington, D.C.

“The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges,” Rose told ProPublica. “They would not be able to sustain.”

ProPublica found last year that Congress was underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter-billion dollars per year. The Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, had never asked lawmakers to fully fund the institutions at the levels called for in the law, ProPublica found.

But rather than remedy the problem, the Trump administration’s budget would devastate the colleges, tribal education leaders said.

The Bureau of Indian Education, which administers federal funding for tribal colleges, and the Department of the Interior, the bureau’s parent agency, declined to answer questions.

Rose said she and other college leaders had not been warned of the proposed cuts nor consulted during the budgeting process. Federal officials had not reached out to the colleges by the end of the day Monday.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration has outlined a host of funding cuts related to the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations to tribes. The Coalition for Tribal Sovereignty said last month that the administration’s proposed discretionary spending for the benefit of Native Americans would fall to its lowest point in more than 15 years, which it viewed as “an effort to permanently impact trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.”

Congress passed legislation in 1978 committing to fund the tribal college system and promising inflation-adjusted appropriations based on the number of students enrolled in federally recognized tribes. But those appropriations have consistently lagged far behind inflation.

The colleges have managed, despite the meager funds, to preserve Indigenous languages, conduct high-level research and train local residents in nursing, meat processing and other professions and trades. But with virtually no money available for infrastructure or construction, the schools have been forced to navigate broken water pipes, sewage leaks, crumbling roofs and other problems that have compounded the financial shortcomings.

Tribal college leaders said they were stunned by the proposed cuts to their already insufficient funding and had more questions than answers.

“I’m shivering in my boots,” said Manoj Patil, president of Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska. “This would basically be a knife in the chest. It’s a dagger, and I don’t know how we can survive these types of cuts.”

Congress will have the final say on the budget, noted Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, the ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, whose New Mexico district includes three tribal colleges. Tribal colleges “are lifelines in Indian Country,” Leger Fernández said in a statement. “They provide higher education rooted in language, culture and community. These cuts would rob Native students of opportunity and violate our trust responsibilities.”

Other members of the House and Senate Indian Affairs committees did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not respond to a request for more information.

Monday’s budget release was the latest in a string of bad financial news for tribal colleges since President Donald Trump began his second term. The administration suspended Department of Agriculture grants that funded scholarships and research, and tribal college presidents spent the past week trying to fend off deep cuts to the Pell Grant program for low-income students. The vast majority of tribal college students rely on Pell funding to attend school.

Tribal colleges contend their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous education, resources, rights and assets. And they note that the institutions are economic engines in some of North America’s poorest areas, providing jobs, training and social services in often remote locations.

“It doesn’t make sense for them to (approve the cuts) when they’re relying on us to train the workforce,” said Dawn Frank, president of Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. “We’re really relying on our senators and representatives to live up to their treaty and trust obligation.”

But others noted they have spent years meeting with federal representatives to emphasize the importance of tribal colleges to their communities and have been disappointed by the chronic underfunding.

“It is a bit disheartening to feel like our voice is not being heard,” said Chris Caldwell, president of College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin. “They don’t hear our message.”

by Alec MacGillis

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

It’s a tough time for the rank-and-file tech worker or computer science graduate looking for a job. The Silicon Valley giants have laid off tens of thousands in the past couple years. The longstanding threat of offshoring persists, while the new threat of AI looms.

There is seemingly one reason for hope, which you won’t find in popular hiring websites like Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter. It’s exclusively in the help-wanted classifieds in printed newspapers. Every Sunday, metropolitan newspapers across the country are full of listings for tech jobs, with posted salaries sometimes exceeding $150,000. If you’ve got tech skills, it seems, employers are crying out for you, week after week.

One day this spring, I decided to test this premise. I set out with the classified pages from the most recent Sunday edition of The Washington Post, which were laden with tech job offerings in the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland.

First, I drove to the address given for one of the employers, Sapphire Software Solutions, whose ad said it was looking for someone to “gather and analyze data and business requirements to facilitate various scrum ceremonies for multiple business systems and processes.” I arrived at an office building in Ashburn, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport. But the receptionist in the appointed suite looked confused when I asked for Sapphire.

“This is virtual office,” she said, in a heavy Eastern European accent. “We have many kinds of virtual offices.” She gestured at a long filing-cabinet drawer that was open behind her, full of folders. “You must mail to them.”

From there, I drove 2 miles to another company advertising for help, Optimum Systems, whose address turned out to be an office park full of dental practices. But the office door said nothing about Optimum, instead carrying a sign for an accountant and a different tech firm. It was dark and empty.

And from there, I drove 6 miles to a company called Softrams, which was advertising for a “Full Stack Developer.” I walked into an office in a building that also housed a driving school. The reception area was empty. I called hello, and a woman appeared. I told her I was a reporter wanting to learn more about the listing. She was surprised and asked if she could read the ad in my hand. “I’ll check with the team and get back to you,” she said.

A few days later, after similarly mysterious visits to other offices, I reached the woman, Praveena Divi, on the phone. “This ad is for a PERM filing,” she said. “A filing for a green card.”

To anybody familiar with the PERM system, those words meant the ad was not really intended to find applicants. I had entered one of the most overlooked yet consequential corners of the United States immigration system: the process by which employers sponsor tech workers with temporary H-1B visas as a first step to getting them the green card that entitles them to permanent residency in the U.S. It is a process that nearly everyone involved admits is nonsensical, highly vulnerable to abuse, as well as a contributor to inequities among domestic and foreign tech workers.

Yet the system has endured for decades, largely out of public view. There is occasional debate over the roughly 120,000 workers from overseas who are awarded H-1B visas every year for temporary high-skilled employment. Last December, a tiff erupted between billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the one side, and MAGA champions including Steve Bannon, over the formers’ claims that H-1B workers are needed because the homegrown tech workforce is inadequate. But almost as quickly as it started, the spat vanished from the news.

There is even less attention given to what happens with these foreign workers — three quarters of whom are now from India — when many decide they want to stay beyond the six-year maximum allowed for an H-1B recipient (a three-year term can be renewed once). To qualify for a green card, workers must get their employers to sponsor them via the Permanent Labor Certification process, aka PERM. And to do that, employers must demonstrate that they made a sincere effort to find someone else — a U.S. citizen or permanent resident — to do the job instead.

What’s striking about this requirement is that, as a result of choices made by legislators 35 years ago, the effort to find a citizen is not expected at the front end, when employers are considering hiring workers from abroad. At that point, employers simply enter the lottery for H-1Bs, and if they get one, they can use it.

Only once a company has employed someone for five or six years and become committed to helping that person stay in the country permanently must the company show that it is trying to find someone else. It’s no surprise that the efforts at this point can be less than sincere.

This is where the newspaper ads come in. Under U.S. Department of Labor rules dating back to the era before the worldwide web, employers must post the job for which PERM certification is being sought for 30 days with a state workforce agency and in two successive Sunday newspapers in the job’s location.

This makes for a highly ironic juxtaposition: pages of print ads paid for by tech employers, many of them the same Silicon Valley giants that have helped eviscerate newspaper classifieds and drive down print newspaper circulation to the point that it can be hard even to find a place to buy a paper in many communities.

These columns of ads that are not really looking for applicants underscore the challenges facing American tech workers and the striking disparities in the current immigration landscape. While restaurants, meatpackers and countless other businesses now risk having workers targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tech employers have largely escaped Trump administration scrutiny for their use of foreign labor. Among the companies sponsoring many H-1B employees for green cards every year are ones aligned with President Donald Trump, such as Oracle, Palantir and Musk’s Tesla.

But the PERM system also takes a toll on its supposed beneficiaries, the temporary employees seeking permanent residency. Even after their PERM applications are approved, they must typically wait more than 10 years before getting a green card, a long wait even by the standards of the U.S. immigration system. In the interim, it can be hard for them to leave their sponsoring employers, which exposes them to overwork at jobs that often pay less than what their American counterparts receive.

Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, “Everyone in the industry knows it’s a joke.”

Divi, the manager at Softrams, was quite forthcoming about how PERM works at the 450-person company, whose largest client is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and which was bought last year by another company, Tria. She told me that Softrams had 69 employees on H-1B visas, had never hired another applicant during the PERM process and had received zero applicants from the latest ads.

I had a much harder time getting through to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn, whose website states that it’s “a leading provider of IT staffing solutions and services since 2011” and that it also has offices in the Northern California town of Dublin, plus Hyderabad, India. The company’s phone directory offers options for, among others, “recruiting” and “immigration.” When I chose the latter, I reached a man who sounded surprised by the call and said, “Give me some time.” I never heard back from him, so I called back days later and pushed the option for “recruiting.” This time, the person who answered hung up on me. Finally, I picked the option for human resources and reached a woman who told me to send an email. I did, and never heard back.

Fortunately, one can learn a lot about the PERM process from Department of Labor records, which list all of the roughly 90,000 PERM applications submitted every year. The 2024 list shows Sapphire with 51 applications — a striking number for a company that gives its size as 252 employees. The jobs include computer systems analysts offered $96,158, software developers offered $100,240 and web developers offered $128,731. All of the applications were approved by the government, as is true of virtually all applications under the PERM process.

The federal listings don’t list the names of the employees whom the companies are sponsoring for PERM certification, but they do show their nationalities and where they received their degrees. All but one of Sapphire’s 51 were from India; their degrees came from a mix of American institutions (among them the University of South Florida and University of Michigan-Flint) and Indian ones (among them Visvesvaraya Technological University and Periyar University.)

All of the Sapphire applications were advertised in The Washington Post. And all list the same immigration attorney, Soo Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I called and asked her about the company’s applications. Sapphire, she said, is “just one of the companies I do.” I inquired about the PERM process, and she demurred, telling me to ask AI instead.

I encountered similar resistance and intrigue when I made the rounds in a different metro area with a burgeoning tech sector: Columbus, Ohio. Here also, several of the job listings in The Columbus Dispatch led to empty or abandoned offices or to buildings that were mail-drops for dozens of companies.

When I sought out Vizion Technologies, which had listed three jobs, I found a single-story office park in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus. Vizion’s office, adjacent to that of a cleaning company, was empty, save for a Keurig machine and some magazines. I called the company’s number and asked the man who answered about the listings. “This is a PERM ad,” he said freely. But, he said, he would consider other applicants. Had any come across the transom? I asked. No, he said. “But you never know.”

After an unilluminating visit to another company, I headed to EDI-Matrix, which had advertised for software programmers. At the company’s small office, I met John Sheppard, a manager. He said the owner, Shafiullah Syed, was for the time being in India, where a quarter of the company’s 40 employees were based, and where 20 of the Ohio-based staff was from. The company, founded in 2008, provides tech support for state government and private-sector clients.

Were the ads in the Dispatch for PERM applicants? I asked. “Probably,” Sheppard said. “Our owner is a big believer in trying to find ways to help people.”

The story of how the PERM system — the full name is Program Electronic Review Management — came to be is a decadeslong tale of, depending on your perspective, misguided assumptions or self-interested machinations. Since the middle of the 20th century, temporary guest-worker programs had been on a separate track from employment-based permanent residency programs. It was difficult for guest workers to apply for permanent residency, a process that had long required employers to prove that they couldn’t find an American worker for the role.

But those separate tracks converged with the 1990 Immigration Act. Bruce Morrison, who helped draft the law as a Connecticut Democrat serving as chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, told me that the law’s goal was to constrict the use of temporary labor from abroad.

Previously, employers had been able to hire unlimited numbers of temporary skilled workers under vague language about “distinguished merit and ability.” The 1990 law created a new H-1B category that required a bachelor’s degree, established a cap of 65,000 visas per year and set a minimum wage level. Still, it spared employers from having to prove they couldn’t find U.S. workers for the job in question, on the logic that these were just temps filling a short-term role.

The hope, Morrison said, was to encourage employers to bring in skilled workers via the permanent residency pathway, on the theory that immigrants with green cards would, by being on stronger footing, be less likely to undercut wages for Americans than guest workers did.

Things worked out much differently. The law passed on the cusp of the Internet era as the job market was pushing toward shorter-term employment, especially in the tech world. A rapidly growing middle class in Asia was producing millions of tech workers eager to work in the U.S., especially English-speaking Indians.

And, crucially, the law allowed H-1B holders to apply for permanent residency.

Within just a few years, three-quarters of those applying for employer-based permanent residency were people who were already working for the employer in question, mostly on H-1Bs. Thus was created the backward situation of employers having to prove that they were looking for qualified applicants for a role that they had already filled with the person they were sponsoring. Their recruitment efforts were “perfunctory at best and a sham at worst,” wrote the Department of Labor’s office of inspector general in a scathing 1996 report.

The report found that there had been more than 136,000 applicants for 18,011 PERM openings that it examined, but that only 104 people were hired via advertisements — less than 1% — and those hirings were almost accidental. (The companies kept the foreign workers they were sponsoring, but came across a tiny smattering of qualified Americans, whom they also hired.) “The system is seriously flawed,” the report stated. “The programs are being manipulated and abused.”

In the years that followed, the demand for H-1B visas surged, due partly to the demand for Indian tech workers to assist with the Y2K threat and to the tech-bubble burst prompting companies to seek lower-wage workers. Under pressure from the tech industry, the government raised the cap for several years, as high as 195,000 visas annually, between 2001 and 2003.

This exacerbated a bottleneck already in the making: Tens of thousands of H-1B holders, many from India, were now seeking permanent residency as their visas neared expiration, but under the law, no single nationality could receive more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards awarded in a given year. Workers who had been approved for permanent residency could remain on extended H-1Bs while they waited for their green card, but this was an unstable limbo that further swelled the ranks of H-1Bs.

In 2005, the Department of Labor tried to address at least one part of the pipeline, the delays in approving employees for permanent residency. It introduced the new PERM process, which allowed employers simply to attest that the position in question was open to U.S. workers, that any who applied were rejected for job-related reasons and that the offered pay was at least the prevailing wage for that role. Employers also had to submit a report describing the recruitment steps taken and the number of U.S. applicants rejected. It was at this point that the print advertising requirement was clarified as two successive Sunday newspapers.

It became quickly apparent how easy it was for employers to game the system. Many advertised completely different positions in the newspaper ads compared to their own websites. Some directed applicants to send resumes to the company’s immigration lawyers rather than to human resources.

A viral video captured the absurdity. At a 2007 panel discussion, an immigration lawyer, Lawrence Lebowitz, laid out the mission in startlingly candid terms: “Our goal here of course is to meet the requirements, No. 1, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal. And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. In a sense, that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here.”

The video caused a flurry of outrage, yet the system has survived to this day, largely unchanged, protected by congressional dysfunction and the interests that are served by the status quo, the tech industry and the immigration law bar.

Advocacy groups representing American tech workers have attacked the system repeatedly, challenging the notion that H-1Bs are bringing in the world’s “best and brightest” by pointing out that the program makes no attempt to identify exceptional talent beyond requiring a bachelor’s degree, relying instead on a lottery to award the visas. The real appeal of H-1Bs for employers, worker advocates say, is that they can pay their holders an average of 10% to 20% less, as several studies have found to be the case, which has helped suppress tech wages more broadly.

Yet the advocacy groups have struggled to mobilize sustained opposition. There was talk during the Obama administration of reforming PERM, but it fizzled amid the failure of broader immigration reform during his second term.

In 2020, the Department of Labor’s inspector general issued another critical report, calling attention to PERM’s vulnerability to abuse. It noted that when the department did full audit reviews of applications, which it did for 16% of them, it wound up rejecting a fifth of them, far more than the mere 3% that were rejected during the standard review. That suggested that many faulty applications were slipping through. “The PERM program relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria,” it concluded.

As for the newspaper ad requirement, the report noted with understatement, “Available data indicates newspapers are becoming a less effective means of notifying potential applicants in the U.S. about job opportunities. … U.S. workers are likely to be unaware of these employment opportunities due to the obsolete methods required.”

Since that report, there have been two notable bids for accountability. In December 2020, the Department of Justice filed suit against Facebook, alleging that the company was discriminating against U.S. citizens by routinely reserving jobs for PERM applicants. In a settlement nearly a year later, Facebook, which had denied any discrimination, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination and conduct more expansive recruitment for slots in PERM applications.

In 2023, the DOJ announced a similar settlement with Apple, which also denied any discriminatory behavior but agreed to pay up to $25 million in back pay and civil penalties, conduct more expansive recruitment, train employees in anti-discrimination requirements and submit to DOJ monitoring for three years.

And yet, the PERM process carries on, with its own ecosystem. One firm, Atlas Advertising, offers the specific service of advertising jobs intended for PERM applicants. “Expertly place your immigration ads in leading newspapers, ensuring compliance and targeted reach for PERM certification,” Atlas urges potential customers.

I searched in vain for defenders of the process — major tech lobby groups either declined to comment or didn’t return my calls. Theresa Cardinal Brown has lobbied on immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Immigration Lawyers Association, but she, too, was critical of PERM. “Even if you are trying to sponsor someone who is already on the job, you have to act as if you aren’t,” she said. “Increasingly, this jury-rigged system isn’t working for anyone.”

Among those now decrying the system the most sharply is Morrison, the former Democratic congressman who helped write the 1990 law. In 2017, he told “60 Minutes” that H-1B “has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans.”

Morrison, who is now a lobbyist, was even more outspoken when I talked with him. He noted the H-1B caps have grown in recent years. The 65,000 cap laid out in 1990 no longer includes the thousands renewed every year, and there are an additional 20,000 visas for people with graduate degrees and 35,000-odd exemptions for universities, nonprofits and research organizations. This adds up to about 120,000 new H-1Bs per year. Meanwhile, the per-country cap for employer-based green cards last year was 11,200. The backlog of workers and family members awaiting green cards, mostly Indians, has swelled to more than 1 million, creating a vast army of what Morrison and others call “indentured” workers who are at the mercy of their employers.

“It’s fair to say that no American has ever gotten a job due to the certification system,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t do what it should do.”

One day, after many more hang-ups on calls to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn and 51 PERM applications on last year’s Department of Labor list, I finally reached one of their managers, Phani Reddy Gottimukkala.

I asked him whether the company had gotten any responses to its recent ads in The Washington Post. “That will be taken care of by the immigration department,” he said. More broadly, he said the PERM process was working well for the company. “Everything is fine because we have very strong attorneys working for us.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

This article was produced by WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, a 2023 ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Richard L. Bean, the longtime superintendent of the East Tennessee juvenile detention center that bears his name, abruptly announced Friday that he will be stepping down. His decision to retire came the day after the Knox County mayor said he had lost confidence in Bean’s leadership.

Bean, 84, has been superintendent of the juvenile detention center since 1972. A 2023 investigation from WPLN and ProPublica found the facility was using solitary confinement more than other detention centers in the state. Sometimes the children were locked up alone for hours or days at a time. That kind of confinement was also used as punishment, in violation of state law.

At the time, Bean broadly defended the practices at the facility, saying he wished he had more punitive abilities and that people who pushed back didn’t understand what was necessary.

After the story ran, the head of the detention center’s governing board told local TV station WBIR that he thought the Bean center was “the best facility in the state of Tennessee.”

Renewed scrutiny on the detention center began last week when Bean dismissed two employees, including the facility’s only nurse. The nurse’s termination was first reported by Knox News, and the mayor described her dismissal as “retaliation” because she had reported to state investigators significant issues with medical care at the facility, which she said went unchecked and unaddressed by Bean.

On Wednesday, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and juvenile court Judge Tim Irwin wrote a letter to Bean demanding he reinstate both employees. Irwin is a nonvoting member of the center’s governing board of trustees but selects one of its three voting members.

“These dismissals may well lead to lawsuits against you and the county,” the letter reads, “which could cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The following day, Jacobs wrote a letter to the governor calling for immediate state intervention and detailing issues with medication in the facility going missing, errors with medication reporting and “even medication going to the wrong detainees.”

In a public video statement, Jacobs said he had “no confidence that these issues will be addressed with the center’s current leadership or the governing board that oversees the Bean juvenile detention center.” He called for the Knox County Sheriff’s Office to take over operation of the center but said he has limited power to intervene.

By Friday, Bean announced that he would leave his post as superintendent in two months after he gets the facility “shipshape,” according to a press release. He did not respond to requests for comment but said in the press release that his last day will be Aug. 1.

During WPLN and ProPublica’s investigation of the Bean center, documents revealed that state officials repeatedly had put the Bean center on corrective action plans and had documented its improper use of seclusion yet continued to approve the center’s license to operate without the facility changing its ways.

“What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder,” Bean told WPLN during a 2023 visit to the facility. “You don’t have a problem if you do that.” Most of the children in the Bean center are not in for murder and instead are awaiting court dates after being charged with a crime.

When asked if he was worried he might get in trouble for the way he was running the facility, Bean said, “If I got in trouble for it, I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it.”

by Max Blau

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

The mother of an Arizona man who died after being unable to find mental health treatment is suing his health insurer, saying it broke the law by publishing false information that misled its customers.

Ravi Coutinho, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, bought insurance from Ambetter, the most popular plan on HealthCare.gov, because it seemed to offer plenty of mental health and addiction treatment options near his home in Phoenix. But after struggling for months in early 2023 to find in-network care covered by his plan, he wasn’t able to find a therapist. In May 2023, after 21 calls with the insurer without getting the treatment he sought, he was found dead in his apartment. His death was ruled an accident, likely due to complications from excessive drinking.

Coutinho was the subject of a September 2024 investigation by ProPublica that showed how he was trapped in what’s commonly known as a “ghost network.” Many of the mental health providers that Ambetter listed as accepting its insurance were not actually able to see him. ProPublica’s investigation also revealed how customer service representatives and care managers repeatedly failed to connect Coutinho to the care he needed after he and his mother asked for help. The story was part of a yearlong series, “America’s Mental Barrier,” that investigated the ways insurers employed practices that interfered with their customers’ ability to access mental health care.

The lawsuit, filed on May 23 in Maricopa County by Coutinho’s mother, Barbara Webber, accused the insurer Centene, along with the subsidiary that oversaw her son’s plan, Health Net of Arizona, of publishing an “inaccurate and misleading” provider directory. The suit also accused the companies of breaking state and federal laws, including ones that require directories to be kept accurate.

The errors in the Ambetter directory gave Coutinho a false impression about the kinds of mental health care that were actually available, the lawsuit said. According to the lawsuit, the failure to correct those errors concealed the fact that Centene companies had provided insufficient services through the Ambetter plan.

The lawsuit draws upon the findings of ProPublica’s investigation, summarizing Coutinho’s repeated attempts to find a therapist in Ambetter’s network and to get Centene representatives to connect him with a mental health provider that he could actually see.

The lawsuit also describes how Arizona insurance regulators had previously informed Health Net of Arizona that it had failed to maintain accurate provider directories. Health Net of Arizona promised to correct the errors. Regulators did not fine the insurer and declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about whether the Centene subsidiary addressed their concerns.

Centene and Health Net of Arizona didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the lawsuit. ProPublica previously reached out to Centene and Health Net of Arizona more than two dozen times and sent them both a detailed list of questions. None of their media representatives responded.

One of the 25 largest companies in America, Centene and its subsidiaries have been accused in past lawsuits of purposefully misrepresenting the number of in-network providers by publishing inaccurate directories. Centene lawyers have previously denied such claims in two of the bigger cases, in Illinois and California. Both cases are ongoing.

The top trade group for the industry, AHIP, has told lawmakers that companies contact in-network providers to ensure the listings are accurate. AHIP also stated that the companies could correct inaccuracies faster if providers did a better job updating their listings. Providers have told ProPublica, however, that insurers don’t always remove their names from insurer lists when they officially request to leave their networks.

Mel C. Orchard III, a partner with The Spence Law Firm who is representing Webber, told ProPublica that he intended to bring the case before a jury to hold Centene accountable for negligence and consumer fraud. The lawsuit does not state a specified amount that Webber is seeking in damages.

“Ravi is an example of the abject failure of the insurance industry to do what it’s supposed to do — and that is to insure us in times when we need them the most,” Orchard told ProPublica. “Instead they prey upon our vulnerabilities; that is what happened in this case.”

Watch a live performance of Max Blau’s investigation of Ravi Coutinho’s death, performed by actors Oscar Isaac, Kathryn Erbe and Bill Camp, produced by Theater of War Productions and presented by WNYC.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

The Connecticut Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed the most significant reform to the state’s towing policies in decades, a measure lawmakers said would help protect drivers from predatory towing.

House Bill 7162 overhauls the state’s century-old towing statutes and comes in response to an investigation by the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that showed how state towing laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of drivers. It takes several steps to make it harder to tow vehicles from private property and easier for drivers to retrieve their vehicles after a tow.

The bill, which passed the House of Representatives last week with wide bipartisan support and little debate, sailed through the Senate on a 33-3 vote.

“It’s reform that ensures transparency, it ensures fairness and accountability, but does all of this without undercutting the essential work that ethical and professional tow operators do each and every day for us, keeping our roads safe and our properties accessible,” said Transportation Committee Co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford. “We’ve learned over the years, and particularly over the last year due to some investigative reporting, of some particularly egregious circumstances.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont said the governor plans to sign the bill into law.

Republican Sen. Tony Hwang, ranking member of the Transportation Committee, also spoke in favor of the bill. The bill got about a half hour of debate ahead of passage, and there were no comments in opposition.

Hwang, who represents Fairfield, said the bill strikes the right balance between the interests of towers and consumers.

“I want to acknowledge that our press had an important part to bring out transparency and some of the bad actions, and I think in this bill we address some of those issues,” Hwang said. “We took measures to ensure that there is due process, and what has been discovered to have occurred in a criminal action, I believe, should never, ever happen again, to undermine the trust that we have to have in this process.”

Connecticut’s law allows tow companies to begin the process to sell vehicles after just 15 days. CT Mirror and ProPublica found that it is one of the shortest windows in the nation, and that the law has particularly impacted people with low incomes. Reporters spoke with people who said towing companies required them to pay in cash or wouldn’t allow them to get personal belongings out of their vehicles. Many couldn’t afford to get their towed vehicles back and lost transportation or jobs because of it.

After weeks of negotiations, lawmakers said they came to a compromise with the towing industry. Two bills were merged to include massive reforms to towing procedures from private property and rate increases for highway tows that typically follow car accidents.

The bill that passed and would take effect Oct. 1 requires tow companies to accept credit cards and doesn’t allow them to tow vehicles immediately just because of an expired parking permit or registration. Vehicles can’t be towed from private property without notice unless they’re blocking traffic, fire hydrants or parked in an accessible spot.

Under the bill, towing companies can still start the sales process for vehicles worth $1,500 or less after 15 days, but they would now have to take more steps to give the owner a chance to claim the vehicle. The Department of Motor Vehicles would be required to check whether the driver filed any complaints about the tow before approving the sale, and the tower would have to send a notice ahead of the sale to the registered owner and lienholders via certified mail, with receipts of delivery.

The actual sale couldn’t go through until 30 days after the tow.

The bill also requires that towers take at least two photos before they tow a vehicle — one of the violation that resulted in a tow and another of any damage to the vehicle. Cohen said this would help determine if vehicles had any missing parts before the tow, a seeming nod to the news organizations’ story about a DMV employee who the agency’s investigators found schemed with a towing company to undervalue vehicles and sell them for thousands in profit. (The employee denied he did anything wrong, and the agency ultimately took no action in that case.)

The bill also establishes a working group to study how to handle proceeds from the sales of towed vehicles. State law requires that towing companies hold profits in escrow for a year in case the vehicle owner claims them, then remit that money to the state. But CT Mirror and ProPublica found the DMV never set up a system for that process to occur.

Additionally, it calls for the DMV to work with the state’s attorney general to develop a consumer bill of rights on towing.

Tow companies have to be available after hours and on weekends to allow people to get their vehicles or personal property. In a story published this month, CT Mirror and ProPublica reported that tow truck companies sometimes hold onto people’s belongings to pressure them into paying their towing fees.

Under the new law, drivers will be allowed to retrieve their belongings from their vehicles, even if they haven’t paid the towing fees. State regulations currently allow vehicle owners to retrieve only “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.”

Cohen listed many of the issues outlined in the news outlets’ reporting as “some of the worst abuses of predatory towing practices.”

Timothy Vibert, president of Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said the industry initially opposed the bill because towers believed it would impede their ability to tow cars and clear traffic. He also said towers weren’t involved enough in the original draft. But they worked with lawmakers on the bill over several weeks, and he issued a statement in support this week.

“The people of Connecticut deserve safety, accountability and transparency when their cars are towed, and so do the people who work for Connecticut’s towing companies who risk our lives every day to make our roads safe,” Vibert said. “We all need clear, easy-to-follow rules.”

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera commended the House and Senate.

“The DMV fully supports this initiative, as it not only enhances the framework for fair and equitable enforcement of towing laws but also provides a clear path forward for our agency to advance these efforts,” Guerrera said in a statement.

Cohen said that the bill aims to “fix a broken process,” and that lawmakers had worked on some aspects of it for years before the bill passed.

News of the bill’s passage brought relief to Melissa Anderson, who was featured in a CT Mirror and ProPublica story after her car was towed and sold from her Hamden apartment because of an expired parking permit.

The bill requires a 72-hour grace period before a car can be towed for an expired parking sticker to allow people time to get a new one.

“I’m glad we made a difference,” Anderson said. “This is going to help a lot of people.”

The bill next heads to Lamont’s desk.

“The Governor appreciates all the work that went into this legislation, which provides greater protections for the public and their vehicles,” Lamont’s spokesperson, Rob Blanchard, said in a text message. “He plans on signing the legislation once it reaches his desk.”

by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

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

The former operator of one of the largest HomeVestors of America franchises has agreed to plead guilty to federal wire fraud in connection with a sprawling Ponzi scheme targeting people who believed they were investing in his real estate empire.

Federal prosecutors in Texas identified 80 victims defrauded of nearly $40 million by Charles Carrier since 2018. Though Carrier agreed to plead guilty to only one count of felony wire fraud involving one $200,000 transfer, he admitted to the broader scheme as part of the deal and agreed to pay restitution — the amount of which has yet to be determined.

The charge also carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence and the possibility of millions of dollars in fines. A federal judge will decide the sentence.

Carrier owned Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, one of the most successful franchises in the HomeVestors chain, which is known for its “We Buy Ugly Houses” slogan. HomeVestors terminated Carrier’s franchise in October 2024, after receiving a tip that he had been defrauding investors. It has since sued him for infringing on the company’s assiduously protected trademark. Carrier has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

In a story published this month, ProPublica detailed how Carrier bilked millions of dollars from scores of investors across Texas, including both wealthy businesspeople and older adults of more modest means who depended on the investment income for daily expenses. According to new court documents, losses to individual investors range from $35,000 to $11.6 million. The plea agreement was filed in court two weeks after the article was published.

Carrier took loans from investors to finance his house-flipping business, initially using the money to buy and renovate older houses to sell for a profit. Carrier promised each loan would be secured by an ownership interest in a house and that he would pay 8%-10% interest in monthly installments over the course of the loan.

For many years, investors received reliable monthly payments. In 2018, however, Carrier started taking out multiple loans on individual properties, sometimes providing investors with deeds he never recorded and racking up debt far beyond the value of the houses, according to court documents. Carrier also admitted to forging signatures and notary stamps so he could sell properties without notifying the investors or paying off their notes, according to court documents. Carrier admitted to using investor money to “pay personal credit card balances, business operating expenses and interest obligations to earlier investors,” according to court documents.

The fact that Carrier’s plea deal contains only a single charge left some victims even more angry.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Ron Carver, who lost $300,000 and whose father lost $200,000 before he died. “They will let him plead out and he might get a slap on the wrist.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office said they can’t comment on a pending case.

Carrier’s lawyer, Tom Pappas, said it wasn’t Carrier’s “intention to defraud anybody of their money.”

“Pretty much all of his money was put into his business to try and make it successful so investors would be successful,” Pappas said, adding that Carrier didn’t fund a lavish lifestyle. Without providing details, Pappas said changes in the real estate market “overtook” Carrier and “the thing just got away from him.”

Although Carrier agreed to plead to only one count, the entirety of the fraud identified by prosecutors will be considered by the judge during sentencing.

Pappas said Carrier is “committed to repaying every investor every dollar he can to make them whole.” Pappas said he expects the restitution will likely be “much lower” than the $40 million in losses identified by prosecutors, as the lawyers are wrangling over the value of the investors’ losses. In February, Carrier signed an asset liquidation agreement allowing prosecutors to oversee the sale of his remaining properties, with the proceeds going toward restitution.

Pappas said he expects Carrier will serve time in prison.

“Depending on the amount of the loss, there’s a strong possibility he may go to jail,” he said. “But again, we are doing everything we can to make everybody as whole as we can.”

by Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melissa Sanchez and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News

Leer en español.

The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.

President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.

The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.

As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.

We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.

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. It’s also co-published with Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), a coalition of Venezuelan online media outlets, and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), a Venezuelan investigative online news organization.

ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.

The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.

Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.

Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.

When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.

Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.

We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.

They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.

Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.

First image: Colmenares’ mother, Marianela Solórzano, and sister at their home in Venezuela. Second image: Photos of Colmenares as a child in Venezuela. (Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.

“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”

The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.

John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.

The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.

Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.

Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.

Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.

But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”

Jeff Ernsthausen of ProPublica contributed data analysis. Adriana Núñez and Carlos Centeno contributed reporting.

by Jeremy Kohler

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

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.

In Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before; one made abortion in the state legal again, while the other created an employee sick leave requirement.

GOP lawmakers in Alaska and Nebraska also have moved to roll back sick leave benefits that voters approved last year, while legislators in Arizona are pushing new restrictions on abortion access, despite voters six months ago approving protections.

At the same time, Republican leaders in Florida, Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, North Dakota and South Dakota have approved efforts to restrict citizen-led ballot initiatives or are considering measures to do so, essentially trying to make it harder for voters to change laws outside legislatures.

In some cases, legislators aren’t just responding to measures that voters approved; they’re acting shortly after citizen-led efforts failed but came too close for comfort, such as an abortion-rights initiative in Florida, which in November fell just short of the 60% of votes needed to pass and loosen the state’s ban on the procedure.

Republican elected officials across these states make strikingly similar arguments: They say the initiative process is susceptible to fraud and unduly influenced by out-of-state money. What’s more, they say that they, as elected officials, represent the true will of the people more than ballot initiatives do.

In his opening speech on the first day of Utah’s legislative session in January, Senate President Stuart Adams urged lawmakers to push back against citizen-led ballot initiatives, warning that “unelected special interest groups outside of Utah” were using the process to “override our republic” and “cast aside those who are duly elected.”

Utah lawmakers then passed a law tightening the process. They required initiative sponsors to detail how their proposal would be funded and, if it makes the ballot, pay for costly publication of the ballot language in newspapers across the state — potentially adding $1.4 million in expenses. They also voted to put a 2026 measure before voters that would require a 60% supermajority for any tax-related initiatives.

The battle between direct democracy and representative government isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been the domain of just Republicans. Democrats have done the same thing, although perhaps not with the same frequency, when voters have taken steps they had campaigned against.

What’s different now, political observers say, is that the tension has reached a new level. State lawmakers, primarily Republicans the past few years, are routinely trying to undermine voter majorities.

“This is very much connected to the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen across the country,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a nonprofit that tracks and supports ballot measures across the 26 states and the District of Columbia that allow some form of direct democracy. “They can’t win fairly, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants.”

In Missouri, overturning the will of voters has almost become the legislature’s main business. Lawmakers wasted no time moving to undo a constitutional amendment that legalized abortion up to fetal viability, advancing a new measure to place another amendment on the ballot that would ban it again.

They also moved to repeal a sick leave requirement and portions of a minimum wage increase, which had also passed through the initiative process but which Republicans have said are harmful to businesses.

The bill has gone to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has indicated that he will sign it.

In addition, Missouri lawmakers passed, and the governor signed, a new law that limits the ability of courts to intervene when the legislature writes ballot language for proposed constitutional amendments.

Critics say the law opens the door to misleading ballot language, giving politicians and partisan officials more power to frame initiatives in a way that could mislead voters. Kehoe said in a statement that the law “streamlines complex procedures while protecting the rights of every Missourian.”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, has supported multiple failed efforts to change the state’s initiative process — he’d prefer a 60% threshold rather than a simple majority, as it is now — and backed the sick leave repeal and the amendment to restore Missouri’s abortion ban.

“We’ve been elected in a representative republic to see to the needs of the people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Missouri State Rep. Brian Seitz reviews a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion at the state Capitol in April. (David A. Lieb/AP Photo)

State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City and the House minority leader, recalled that one of her first fights as a lawmaker was over the expansion of Medicaid, which voters approved in 2020 but Republican lawmakers refused to fund the following year.

“They thought they were being clever — and of course, the courts told them they are not clever. They had to fund it,” Aune said. “But I’ve seen this nearly every year I’ve been here, and this year has been the absolute worst.”

In response to lawmakers’ efforts, a new campaign called Respect Missouri Voters is recruiting volunteers to collect signatures for a statewide ballot measure in November 2026. The measure would bar lawmakers from overturning voter-approved initiatives or undermining the citizens’ ability to use the initiative process.

In several states, Republican legislators are trying to change the initiative petition process by imposing stricter rules on who can collect signatures and how petitions are submitted and raising the threshold for passing amendments. They are also trying to limit out-of-state funding, shorten signature-gathering windows and give themselves more power to rewrite or block voter-approved measures.

Arkansas is one example of where this is playing out. Last year, abortion rights supporters turned in more than 100,000 signatures for a ballot measure that would have loosened the state’s near-total abortion ban. But the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the proposal from making the ballot, deciding that organizers had made a technical error in how they submitted paperwork for a portion of the signatures that had been collected by paid canvassers.

This year, state Sen. Kim Hammer, a Republican from Benton, led a push to pass a series of laws aimed at the ballot initiative process. They place requirements on petition circulators and signers, including mandates that the signer read the ballot title in the presence of a canvasser or have it read to them, that canvassers ask signers to show photo ID and that they inform signers that petition fraud is a crime. They also expand state oversight, giving officials more power to disqualify petitions.

The League of Women Voters of Arkansas has filed a lawsuit challenging some of the new laws, along with existing restrictions, arguing that they violate the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester said in a statement that they were “basic, commonsense protections, and we look forward to fighting for them.”

Hammer said he’s concerned that outside groups are using Arkansas as a testing ground for policy changes, and he wants to prevent that by keeping the ballot process “as pure as possible.”

“They drop the rock in the state, and it just ripples out from there,” he said in an interview. “So it’s to the benefit of abortionists and to the benefit of the marijuana industry and others to be able to do whatever they have to do to get a foothold.”

Republican Sen. Kim Hammer, left of center, answers questions about proposed laws that would alter the citizen-initiated ballot measure process during an Arkansas Senate committee hearing in February. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies direct democracy, said it wasn’t long ago that voters might punish a candidate for opposing a popular policy — like raising the minimum wage or expanding health care.

But that connection has largely been severed in the minds of voters, he said. Today, many voters experience a kind of cognitive dissonance: They support abortion rights or paid sick leave at the ballot box but continue voting for politicians who oppose those policies.

They don’t see the contradiction, he said, because partisanship has become more about team loyalty than policy.

Smith said the disconnect is reinforced by gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts, which are drawn to favor Republican candidates and help maintain their supermajority control. They can override or ignore voter-backed initiatives with little political risk.

Direct democracy in the United States took root during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in the West and Midwest, where newer states had less entrenched political structures and were more open to reform. These regions were often skeptical of centralized power, and reformers pushed for tools like the initiative and referendum to give citizens a way to bypass political machines and corporate influence.

The first state to adopt the initiative process into its constitution was South Dakota in 1898. Now it’s one of the states where legislators are trying to undermine it.

Most East Coast and Southern states never adopted initiative processes at all. Their constitutions didn’t allow for it, and lawmakers have shown little interest in surrendering power to voters through direct legislation. Some academics have argued the process is barred by Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires states to produce governments by electoral processes.

While efforts to override or undermine voter-approved initiatives are now almost exclusively driven by Republicans, Democratic-controlled legislatures have also tried to rein in direct democracy when it clashed with their priorities.

After California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 to limit property taxes — and later Proposition 209 in 1996 banning affirmative action — Democrats sought ways to blunt or undo their impact through legislation and legal challenges.

In the mid-2000s, Colorado Democrats began pushing to restrict the initiative process after a wave of conservative-backed measures passed at the ballot box. A key example was Amendment 43, a 2006 initiative placed on the ballot by citizen petition, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” It passed with 55% of the vote and effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned such bans in 2015.

In 2008, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would have made it harder for people to petition to change the state constitution. The measure, also backed by some Republicans, failed at the polls. But in 2016, voters approved a citizen-initiated measure that raised the bar for constitutional amendments by requiring signatures from every state senate district and a 55% supermajority to pass. More recently, Democrats have sought to overturn Colorado’s “taxpayer bill of rights,” which voters enacted through initiative petition in 1992. The measure prohibits tax increases without voter approval. Democrats have argued the law may be unconstitutional because it strips the legislature of its budgetary authority.

But most of the states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives are Republican-controlled, which means the fight over direct democracy is often playing out in red states. At the center of the GOP argument is the claim that voter initiatives are driven by outside influence and funding. Smith called it “hypocrisy.”

“If you ask lawmakers to not take any outside contributions when they are running for office, they would find every reason under the sun to oppose it,” he said.

Efforts to change the initiative process have themselves drawn heavy outside funding. In August 2023, Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. The measure also would have made it harder to place initiatives on the ballot by requiring signatures from at least 5% of voters in all 88 counties.

Backers claimed the changes were needed to protect the constitution from out-of-state special interests — but the campaign itself was funded mostly by $4 million from conservative Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein.

Just three months later, Ohio voters returned to the polls and approved a new Issue 1 — this time a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights up to fetal viability. It passed with nearly 57% of the vote.

In 2006, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to raise the threshold for future amendments to 60% — but the measure itself passed with just 57.8% of the vote, a margin that wouldn’t meet the standard it created.

That irony came into sharp focus in 2024, when a ballot measure to protect abortion rights received 57% of the vote — more support than a similar measure in Missouri, which passed with just under 52% — yet failed in Florida due to the supermajority rule.

After the election, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers began pushing for even tougher restrictions on the process, pointing to a report issued by the governor’s administration alleging “widespread petition fraud” in the push for the abortion rights measure. The governor signed a law prohibiting felons, non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents from serving as petition circulators; limiting the number of signed petitions a volunteer can collect before being required to register as an official canvasser and requiring signers to write either the last four numbers of their Social Security or driver’s license number on petitions.

In response, several groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the new restrictions. Florida Decides Healthcare, which is working to place a Medicaid expansion initiative on the 2026 ballot, has argued that the law imposes vague and punitive restrictions that chill political speech and civic engagement. The state has not yet responded to the lawsuit; the lead defendant, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think that what happens here is being watched and copied,” Mitch Emerson, executive director of Florida Decides Healthcare, said in an interview. “And if these attacks on democracy work in Florida, they’ll spread.”

by Jake Pearson

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

What Happened: Three Democratic senators asked the Justice Department and other federal authorities to investigate whether members of the Department of Government Efficiency helping to downsize federal agencies violated conflict of interest laws by holding stocks in companies that their agencies regulate.

The letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Jack Reed cited ProPublica reporting on how one such aide assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped oversee the mass layoffs of the agency’s staff while holding as much as $715,000 in stocks that bureau employees are prohibited from owning.

What They Said: The DOGE aides’ cases “underscore what appears to be a pervasive problem with Elon Musk and DOGE employees trampling ethics rules and laws to benefit their own pockets at the expense of the American public,” the lawmakers said in the letter.

Warren and Reed sit on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Wyden is the ranking member of the chamber’s Committee on Finance.

The letter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Office of Government Ethics and three inspectors general with jurisdiction over the CFPB, Treasury and IRS to investigate the DOGE aides' finances, including whether they’d appropriately divested from any conflicted holdings, and their specific work at the agencies. “The American people deserve answers regarding whether their own interests may have been undermined by Trump Administration officials that acted in violation of federal ethics laws,” the letter said.

Background: In recent weeks, ProPublica reported that at least two DOGE aides assigned to the CFPB helped coordinate mass layoffs at the agency while maintaining financial arrangements that experts have said either are or appear to be conflicts of interests. In the case of Gavin Kliger, ProPublica reported that ethics attorneys at the bureau warned the 25-year-old software engineer that he could not hold onto his stocks and also participate in major agency actions. Days later, he nevertheless helped oversee the layoffs of nearly 90% of the CFPB’s staff — an action that one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Response: The DOJ declined comment. Neither the Treasury Department, the IRS, DOGE nor the CFPB responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the OGE said the agency doesn’t comment on “situations in specific agencies.” Kliger didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. The White House has previously said that “these allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission.” It added that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.”

Why It Matters: The Trump administration has repeatedly tested the boundaries of mixing personal and public business, from the president’s own foray into the cryptocurrency industry to Elon Musk’s dual roles as both DOGE’s founder and a major federal contractor. (Musk announced Wednesday that he’s leaving the administration.)

The lawmakers’ letter adds to a growing chorus of good-government groups that have called for an outside investigation into Kliger’s actions at the CFPB. Federal prosecutors can bring charges against government workers who violate the criminal conflict of interest statute, an offense that’s punishable with a fine of up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison. But one expert previously told ProPublica that’s unlikely to happen under Trump, as the administration “greatly deprioritized public integrity, ethics and public corruption as issues for them.”

by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

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

A Chattanooga, Tennessee, public charter school has agreed to pay the family of an 11-year-old boy $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming that it wrongfully reported the student to police for an alleged threat of mass violence.

The incident happened at the beginning of the school year when Junior, who is autistic, overheard two students talking. (We are using a nickname to protect his privacy.) As Junior later described it, one asked if the other was going to shoot up the school tomorrow. Junior looked at the other student, who seemed like he was going to say yes, and answered yes for him. Students then reported that Junior had threatened to shoot up the school.

Administrators said he could return to school the next day, but hours later, a sheriff’s deputy tracked him down at a family birthday dinner and handcuffed him in the restaurant parking lot.

ProPublica and WPLN News wrote about the case last October as part of a larger investigation into a new law in Tennessee making threats of mass violence at school a felony.

According to the settlement, Chattanooga Preparatory School also agreed to implement training on how to handle threats of mass violence at school, including reporting only “valid” threats to police and differentiating between “clearly innocuous statements” and “imminent” violence.

A federal judge will hold a final hearing on the settlement on July 1. According to the family’s lawyer, this is the first known monetary settlement in a case challenging this law. Chattanooga Prep did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the news organizations.

Junior’s mother, Torri, said the settlement is “bittersweet.” He still gets fearful when he sees police cars, reminded of the evening he was taken to juvenile detention. We are only using Torri’s first name at her request, to prevent her son from being identifiable. His case was dismissed in juvenile court in December.

But Torri said she is happy that employees at the school will get training on how to do better in the future.

Junior with his mother, Torri (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

“I don’t want anyone — any child, anyone, any parent — to go through it or witness it,” she said. “Other kids will be more protected if they are ever put in that situation.”

Junior’s lawyers argued in the lawsuit that the school was at fault for reporting him to police as though he had made a valid threat, while knowing he had not. “Instead of reporting only valid threats of mass violence to police, Chattanooga Prep reports all threats to law enforcement regardless of validity,” an amended version of the lawsuit against the school reads. The school did not file a response to the legal complaint.

During the last legislative session, advocates for children with disabilities testified about problems with the law — but lawmakers did not alter the existing statute. Instead they added another similar statute to the books, which could open the door for children to be charged with harsher penalties.

The family’s lawyer, Justin Gilbert, said he hopes this settlement will force lawmakers to pay attention and make necessary changes to the law.

“Monetary figures — for better or for worse — can be a driver for policy change, and sometimes legislators can react to that, school districts can react to that,” Gilbert said. “Then that results in a deeper look at the settlement terms and what kind of training is necessary to hopefully prevent these kids from being arrested and expelled unnecessarily.”

by Hannah Allam

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

Under the watchful gaze of security guards, dozens of people streamed through metal detectors to enter Temple Israel one evening this month for a town hall meeting on hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

The cavernous synagogue outside of Detroit, one of several houses of worship along a suburban strip nicknamed “God Row,” was on high alert. Police cars formed a zigzag in the driveway. Only registered guests were admitted; no purses or backpacks were allowed. Attendees had been informed of the location just 48 hours in advance.

The intense security brought to life the threat picture described onstage by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the recipient of vicious backlash as a gay Jewish Democrat who has led high-profile prosecutions of far-right militants, including the kidnapping plot targeting the governor. Nessel spoke as a slideshow detailed her office’s hate crimes unit, the first of its kind in the nation. She paused at a bullet point about working “with federal and local law enforcement partners.”

“The federal part, not so much anymore, sadly,” she said, adding that the wording should now mention only state and county partners, with help from Washington “TBD.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said at the hate crimes and extremism town hall at Temple Israel. (Brittany Greeson for ProPublica)

Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.

The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the ground, security officials and extremism researchers say, federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence is gone, leading to a state-level scramble to preserve efforts no longer supported by Washington, including hate-crime reporting hotlines and help with identifying threatening behavior to thwart violence.

This year, ProPublica has detailed how federal anti-extremism funding has helped local communities avert tragedy. In Texas, a rabbi credited training for his actions ending a hostage-taking standoff. In Massachusetts, specialists work with hospitals to identify young patients exhibiting disturbing behavior. In California, training helped thwart a potential school shooting.

Absent federal direction, the fight against violent extremism falls to a hodgepodge of state efforts, some of them robust and others fledgling. The result is a patchwork approach that counterterrorism experts say leaves many areas uncovered. Even in blue states where more political will exists, funding and programs are increasingly scarce.

“We are now going to ask every local community to try to stand up its own effort without any type of guidance,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an anti-violence advocacy group that works with state health departments.

Federal agencies have pushed back on the idea of a retreat from violent extremism, noting swift responses in recent domestic terrorism investigations such as an arson attack on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and a car bombing this month outside a fertility clinic in California. FBI officials say they’re also investigating an attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members outside a Jewish museum in Washington in a likely “act of targeted violence.”

Federal officials say training and intelligence-sharing systems are in place to help state and local law enforcement “to identify and respond to hate-motivated threats, such as those targeting minority communities.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” said a spokesperson. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.” The DOJ is open to appeals, the spokesperson said, and to restoring funding “as appropriate.”

In an email response to questions about specific cuts to counterterrorism work, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is keeping promises to safeguard the nation, “whether it be maximizing the use of Federal resources to improve training or establishing task forces to advance Federal and local coordination.”

Michigan, long a hotbed of anti-government militia activity, was an early adopter of strategies to fight domestic extremism, making it a target of conservative pundits who accuse the state of criminalizing right-wing organizing. An anti-Muslim group is challenging the constitutionality of Nessel’s hate crimes unit in a federal suit that has dragged on for years.

In late December, after a protracted political battle, Michigan adopted a new hate crime statute that expands an old law with additions such as protections for LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities. Right-wing figures lobbed threatening slurs at the author, state Rep. Noah Arbit, a gay Jewish Democrat who spoke alongside Nessel at Temple Israel, which is in his district and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Arbit acknowledged that his story of a hard-fought legislative triumph is dampened by the Trump administration’s backsliding. In this political climate, Arbit told the audience, “it is hard not to feel like we’re getting further and further away” from progress against hate-fueled violence.

The politicians were joined onstage by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and is working with several states to update their strategies. She called Michigan a model.

“The federal government is gone on this issue,” Miller-Idriss told the crowd. “The future right now is in the states.”

Michigan state Rep. Noah Arbit, center, speaks alongside Nessel, left, and extremism scholar Cynthia Miller-Idriss during the town hall at Temple Israel. (Brittany Greeson for ProPublica) “The Only Diner in Town”

Some 2,000 miles away in Washington state, this month’s meeting of the Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force featured a special guest: Bill Braniff, a recent casualty of the Trump administration’s about-face on counterterrorism.

Braniff spent the last two years leading the federal government’s main office dedicated to preventing “terrorism and targeted violence,” a term encompassing hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and political violence. Housed in the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships treated these acts as a pressing public health concern.

Part of Braniff’s job was overseeing a network of regional coordinators who helped state and local advocates connect with federal resources. Advocates credit federal efforts with averting attacks through funds that supported, for example, training that led a student to report a gun in a classmate’s backpack or programs that help families intervene before radicalization turns to violence.

Another project helped states develop their own prevention strategies tailored to local sensibilities; some focus on education and training, others on beefing up enforcement and intelligence sharing. By early this year, eight states had adopted strategies, eight others were in the drafting stage and 26 more had expressed interest.

Speaking via teleconference to the Seattle-based task force, Braniff said the office is now “being dismantled.” He resigned in March, when the Trump administration slashed 20% of his staff, froze much of the work and signaled deeper cuts were coming.

“The approach that we adopted and evangelized over the last two years has proven to be really effective at decreasing harm and violence,” Braniff told the task force. “I’m personally committed to keeping it going in Washington state and in the rest of the nation.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not address questions about the cuts but said in an email that “any suggestion that DHS is stepping away from addressing hate crimes or domestic terrorism is simply false.”

Since leaving government, Braniff has joined Miller-Idriss at the extremism research lab, where they and others aspire to build a national network that preserves an effort once led by federal coordinators. The freezing of prevention efforts, economic uncertainty and polarizing rhetoric in the run-up to the midterm elections create “a pressure cooker,” Braniff said.

Similar discussions are occurring in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, according to interviews with organizers and recordings of the meetings. Overnight, grassroots efforts that once complemented federal work have taken on outsized urgency.

“When you’re the only diner in town, the food is much more needed,” said Brian Levin, a veteran extremism scholar who leads California’s Commission on the State of Hate.

Levin, speaking in a personal capacity and not for the state panel, said commissioners are “pedaling as fast as we can” to fill the gaps. Levin has tracked hate crimes since 1986 and this month released updated research showing incidents nationally hovering near record highs, with sharp increases last year in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim targeting.

The commission also unveiled results of a study conducted jointly with the state Civil Rights Department and UCLA researchers showing that more than half a million Californians — about 1.6% of the population — said they had experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, such as assault or property damage, in the last year.

Prevention workers say that’s the kind of data they can no longer rely on the federal government to track.

“For a commission like ours, it makes our particular mission no longer a luxury,” Levin said.

Hurdles Loom

Some state-level advocates wonder how effectively they can push back on hate when Trump and his allies have normalized dehumanizing language about marginalized groups. Trump and senior figures have invoked a conspiracy theory imagining the engineered “replacement” of white Americans, as the president refers to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump uses the “terrorist” label primarily for his political targets, lumping together leftist activists, drug cartels and student protesters. In March, he suggested that recent attacks on Tesla vehicles by “terrorists” have been more harmful than the storming of the Capitol.

“The actions of this administration foment hate,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, told a meeting last month of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. “I can’t say that it is solely responsible for hate activity, but it certainly seems to lift the lid and almost encourages this activity.”

A White House spokesperson rejected claims that the Trump administration fuels hate, saying the allegations come from “hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing organizations.”

Another hurdle is getting buy-in from red states, where many politicians have espoused the view that hate crimes and domestic terrorism concerns are exaggerated by liberals to police conservative thought. The starkest example is the embrace of a revisionist telling of the Capitol riots that plays down the violence that Biden-era Justice Department officials labeled as domestic terrorism.

The next year, citing First Amendment concerns, Republicans opposed a domestic terrorism-focused bill introduced after a mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.

A white supremacist’s rampage through a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 — the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history — prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a domestic terrorism task force. And in 2020, responding to a string of high-profile attacks including the Parkland high school mass shooting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a targeted violence prevention strategy.

The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.

Still, gaps will remain in areas such as hate crime reporting, services for victims of violence and training to help the FBI keep up with the latest threats, said Miller-Idriss, the American University scholar.

“What feels awful about it is that there’s just entire states and communities who are completely left out and where people are going to end up being more vulnerable,” she said.

Cautionary Tale From Michigan

On a summer night in 1982, Vincent Chin was enjoying his bachelor party when two white auto workers at a nightclub outside of Detroit targeted him for what was then called “Japan bashing,” hate speech stemming from anger over Japanese car companies edging out American competitors.

The men, apparently assuming the Chinese-born Chin was Japanese, taunted him with racist slurs in a confrontation that spiraled into a vicious attack outside the club. The men beat 27-year-old Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. He died of his injuries four days later and was buried the day after his scheduled wedding date.

Vincent Chin (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Asian Americans’ outrage over a judge’s leniency in the case — the assailants received $3,000 fines and no jail time — sparked a surge of activism seeking tougher hate crime laws nationwide.

In Michigan, Chin’s killing inspired the 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Act, which was sponsored by a Jewish state lawmaker, David Honigman from West Bloomfield Township. More than three decades later, Arbit — the Jewish lawmaker representing the same district — led the campaign to update the statute with legislation he introduced in 2023 and finally saw adopted in December.

“It felt like kismet,” Arbit told ProPublica in an interview a few days after the event at Temple Israel. “This is the legacy of my community.”

But there’s a notable difference. Honigman was a Republican. Arbit is a Democrat.

“It’s sort of telling,” Arbit said, “that in 1988 this was a Republican-sponsored bill and then in 2023 it only passed with three Republican votes.”

Some Republicans argued that the bill infringes on the First Amendment with “content-based speech regulation.” One conservative state lawmaker told a right-wing cable show that the goal is “to advance the radical transgender agenda.”

Arbit said it took “sheer brute force” to enact new hate crimes laws in this hyperpartisan era. He said state officials entering the fray should be prepared for social media attacks, doxing and death threats.

In the summer of 2023, Arbit was waylaid by a right-wing campaign that reduced his detailed proposal to “the pronoun bill” by spreading the debunked idea it would criminalize misgendering someone. Local outlets fact-checked the false claims and Arbit made some 50 press appearances correcting the portrayal — but they were drowned out, he said, by a “disinformation storm” that spread quickly via right-wing outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News. The bill languished for more than a year before he could revive it.

In December 2024, the legislation passed the Michigan House 57-52, with a single Republican vote. By contrast, Arbit said, the bill was endorsed by an association representing all 83 county prosecutors, the majority of them Republicans. Those who see the effects up close, he said, are less likely to view violent extremism through a partisan lens.

“These are real security threats,” Arbit said. “Shouldn’t we want a society in which you’re not allowed to target a group of people for violence?”

by Emily Schwing, KYUK

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

NEWTOK, Alaska — A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Faith Carl, 7, checks on plants on the windowsill at the home of Frieda and Phillip Carl, her grandparents. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs built the school there.

At the time, elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.

“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” he said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.

First image: Tiny homes in Mertarvik, Alaska. Second image: Connor Queenie watches television in the home of Andy Patrick, a Mertarvik elder. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed.

But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation, and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.

“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” he said.

An aerial view of Mertarvik (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.

According to the inspection performed last year, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.

“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.

His inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”

There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, the tribal health consortium and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik has a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.

As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. Last spring, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.

The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it’s working closely with the Newtok Village Council and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “NVC does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”

That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.

Francis Tom lives in one of the homes built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”

Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.

“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”

Mead said the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.

The Government Accountability Office, however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.

“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”

In 1996, after decades fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.

First image: The former Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Newtok. Second image: The school in Mertarvik is still under construction with a projected finish date of fall 2026. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.

“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” she said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”

Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.

The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016 but ceded control to the BIA three years ago after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.

Walter Tom and Dionne Kilongak harvest a ring seal and walrus while their 2-year-old son plays with their dog, Pobby. Tom and his family live in a tiny home in Mertarvik that is intended to be temporary. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience on Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.

According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.

Francis Tom, the council member, said outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”

First image: The Carls’ home has mold, leaks and other structural issues. Second image: Photographs of life in Newtok adorn their refrigerator. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.

HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.

In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.

Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said winds bring water into her house.

“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” she said.

With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls.

Like most people in these houses, he said he hopes they’ll be fixed, but he’s unsure where to turn.

“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” he said.

A home in Mertarvik at night (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

by Rob Davis

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

When police used stun batons to hit garment workers seeking a $14 monthly raise from a Nike factory in Cambodia in 2013, reportedly leading one pregnant woman to miscarry, Nike said it was “deeply concerned.”

The following year, when Cambodian police opened fire and killed four garment workers during widespread demonstrations over low wages, Nike and other brands sent the government a letter expressing “grave concern.”

In 2018, after the government curbed union rights, Nike and other brands again protested, this time in a meeting with government officials. An industry representative described the companies in a news release as “increasingly concerned.”

A year later, another letter: “We are concerned.”

Despite the varying shades of corporate concern, Cambodia continued descending deeper into authoritarian governance, and the size of Nike’s contract workforce there kept going up.

While Nike has been shrinking its footprint in China, its presence in Cambodia has grown, from about 16,000 factory workers in May 2013, to nearly 35,000 in 2019, to more than 57,000 as of March. Today, Cambodia is the athletic apparel giant’s third-largest supplier of garments other than shoes, nearly overtaking its clothing production in China.

Other Western brands have also continued expanding in Cambodia. The country’s garment exports climbed from $4.9 billion in 2013 to $9.3 billion in 2022, according to World Bank data.

Along the way, labor leaders have been jailed; opposing politicians have gone into exile and been arrested or killed; journalists have been locked up and killed; and independent media outlets have been shuttered by the government.

Sabrina Manufacturing workers gather at their union headquarters in Phnom Penh while protesting for higher wages at the Nike supplier in 2013. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

The curbs on unions and free speech are in tension with Nike’s code of conduct, which recognizes workers’ rights to join trade unions and participate in union activities without interference. In countries that restrict union rights, Nike says factories must have an effective grievance process that allows employees to voice concerns over working conditions without fear of retaliation.

Nike’s continued growth in Cambodia underscores the level of political and labor repression the company has been willing to tolerate in countries that provide inexpensive labor — letters of concern notwithstanding.

“A lot of brands have been signing letters for years as a substitute for real pressure, real change,” said Jason Judd, executive director of Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.

Brands increasing their orders from Cambodia while raising concerns about labor rights are “obviously mixed messages,” Judd said. “And one message, the purchase order, has a lot more weight than the other. Until those are credibly threatened, the government has no reason to act.”

Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, was targeted last year after his organization published a report identifying gaps in factory oversight. The government began auditing the legal aid group; Khun faced a criminal complaint that he said his lawyer had been unable to see.

Khun Tharo (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Khun told ProPublica that brands often speak up about worker rights because of prodding by civil society groups or the ire voiced by trading partners.

For Nike and other brands, “it’s about protecting their market and accessibility and also credibility. That’s all,” Khun said. Without pressure on brands to take action, he said, “they will not do it. They will just start to ignore it.”

Nike did not respond directly to written questions from ProPublica about its expansion in Cambodia amid the country’s intensifying political repression. Instead, it said in a statement: “We continue to engage with suppliers, industry organizations and other global stakeholders to develop broad-based approaches to help mitigate longer-term impacts.”

Labor rights are tenuous in Cambodia. The U.S. State Department said in a 2023 human rights report that “significant and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association” exist in Cambodia and that the government “failed to effectively enforce laws that protected union and labor rights.” Human Rights Watch said in a 2022 report that the government’s repression of independent unions had only intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Former Khmer Rouge battalion commander Hun Sen led Cambodia from 1985 until handing control to his son, Hun Manet, in 2023. Hun Sen was brazen in his public dismissals of threats from the West over its assault on labor rights and civil society, said Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at Australia’s University of New South Wales, Canberra. The threats included warnings from Europe, U.S. lawmakers and international clothing brands.

The Cambodian government yielded just enough to avoid the full force of economic sanctions, Thayer said.

He pointed to an episode in which the European Commission threatened to end tariff exemptions for Cambodian exports over concerns about human rights and labor abuses. Hun Sen directed the country’s courts to quickly decide cases pending against union officials, Thayer said, leading to suspended sentences for some and dropped charges for others.Instead of following through on its threat, the European Commission imposed a scaled-down set of trade restrictions.

Brands, including Nike, have had some influence. After workers were killed while protesting for higher wages in 2014, brands supported increasing the minimum wage. The Cambodian government eventually established a process to annually negotiate wage increases.

A spokesperson for Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training said the incidents that led foreign brands to raise concerns with the government were “old,” misleading and had been politicized. The spokesperson did not respond to subsequent questions after a reporter noted that the most recent incident happened within the last year.

Ken Loo, a spokesperson for the Cambodian garment industry’s trade association, said thousands of unions are registered in the country. “I do not agree with your presumption that there is a repressive environment here in Cambodia,” he said. “Individual incidents do not make up the whole story.”

Many of Cambodia’s unions are government-aligned groups that Human Rights Watch has called “instant noodle” unions because they take less time to make than a cup of noodles. Independent unions have long been under assault there, according to American, European and other labor rights observers.

Yang Sophorn, president of the independent Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions, was threatened in a July 2020 letter from the country’s labor ministry after joining workers who protested outside a garment factory, Violet Apparel. The factory had closed suddenly during the pandemic.

The former Nike supplier went on to become the subject of a long-standing dispute between labor advocates and Nike over wages that workers said they were still owed. Ramatex, Violet Apparel’s parent company, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Nike has said publicly it’s found no evidence to support the allegations.

Yang Sophorn (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

In its 2020 letter, the government told Yang that she was breaking the law by inciting workers and pressuring the closed factory to pay its employees. The letter said the labor ministry might dissolve her independent union, which represents more than 5,000 workers who make clothes in Nike factories. (The Cambodian labor ministry did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment about the letter.)

The labor leader had already received a suspended criminal sentence. The government said she instigated protests over wages, which occurred in 2013 and 2014. That conviction was eventually vacated in what Human Rights Watch said was an effort to placate European officials threatening Cambodia’s trade access.

Yang told ProPublica she was not scared by the Cambodian government’s threats against her and her union. “If they still want to dissolve it,” she said of the union, “let it be.”

Yang said she welcomes investments by Nike and other brands because they provide more jobs for people in her country. But she said workers need good wages, the right to assemble and protections when factories close without paying them. “If they just come to exploit our workers, I don’t want them,” she said.

Nike has prided itself on the story of its turnaround since co-founder Phil Knight acknowledged in 1998 that its products had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.”

One former senior Nike executive, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely about their former employer, said the company had expanded in Cambodia to help diversify its supply chain. The executive said Nike and other brands’ presence had benefited workers in Cambodia and other countries where it manufactures.

“Nike has clearly stated that the rule of law and respect for labor rights are significant factors in where the company decides to place orders,” the executive said.

But, the person said, “Are things imperfect, and are there a lot of screwups? Absolutely. Are we concerned when Vietnam or Cambodia takes steps backward? Of course.”

After Nike last year underwent $2 billion in cost cutting that disproportionately targeted its sustainability staff, including people working on foreign factory oversight, the former executive said they worried that Nike’s cuts had affected the company’s ability to engage with its stakeholders in the countries where its factories operate.

Nike was silent last year when Cambodian authorities cracked down on the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the legal aid group. The government launched what was described as a “national security audit” of the organization, also known as CENTRAL, after it reported on oversight gaps by a United Nations-backed factory watchdog.

Two industry groups, one of which counts Nike as a participant, wrote to the government on July 12 saying they had “serious concerns” that the audit’s only purpose was retaliation, condemning it “in the strongest possible terms.”

Nineteen major clothing companies — from Adidas to VF Corp., owner of the North Face brand — followed up Sept. 10 with a joint letter protesting Cambodia’s assault on the group, also saying they had “serious concerns.” Nike did not sign that letter.

“A vibrant civil society, guaranteed in part by freedom of speech, is a key part of what makes Cambodia an important sourcing partner for the apparel and footwear industry,” the companies said.

Nike did not explain why it was not a signatory when asked by ProPublica.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said with the steady deterioration in workers’ rights in Cambodia and President Donald Trump’s cuts to U.S. foreign aid, Western apparel companies have an imperative to speak up in Cambodia.

“Nike and other brands sourcing from Cambodia have an interest in ensuring that organizations like CENTRAL continue to exist and can speak about labor rights issues,” Lau said.

Khun, the CENTRAL staffer, said he knew the Nike employee who focused on corporate social responsibility in Cambodia, but he said she left the company within the last year. Khun said he didn’t know whether anyone had replaced her. (She did not respond to ProPublica, and Nike did not respond to questions about her departure.)

CENTRAL this year faced a new government problem. When Trump began to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development in January, CENTRAL and two other groups received notice that they were losing $1.5 million in funding promised for a project intended to document human rights violations and counter Cambodia’s repression.

Less than two months later, the Trump administration attempted to gut Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, some of the only news sources available in Cambodia’s native language that reported on the country’s authoritarian turn. Former Prime Minister Hun Sen praised Trump’s “courage,” posting an image from 2017 of the two men shaking hands and smiling.

Trump was giving a thumbs up.

After Donald Trump attempted in 2025 to gut federally funded agencies that published news about Cambodia’s political repression, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s longtime leader, shared photos of himself meeting the U.S. president in 2017. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Keat Soriththeavy and Ouch Sony contributed reporting and translation.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state.

The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters. It will require school districts, beginning in the 2027-28 school year, to report to the state how often they involve police in student matters each year and to separate the data by race, gender and disability. The state will be required to make the data public.

The legislation comes three years after a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” revealed that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirted the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances.

“The Price Kids Pay” found that thousands of Illinois students had been ticketed in recent years for adolescent behavior once handled by the principal’s office — things like littering, making loud noises, swearing, fighting or vaping in the bathroom. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

From the House floor, Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago, thanked the news organizations for exposing the practice and told legislators that the goal of the bill “is to make sure if there is a violation of school code, the school should use their discipline policies” rather than disciplining students through police-issued tickets.

State Sen. Karina Villa, a Democrat from suburban West Chicago and a sponsor of the measure, said in a statement that ticketing students failed to address the reasons for misbehavior. “This bill will once and for all prohibit monetary fines as a form of discipline for Illinois students,” she said.

The legislation also would prevent police from issuing tickets to students for behavior on school transportation or during school-related events or activities.

The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the legislation. The group said in a statement that while school-based officers should not be responsible for disciplining students, they should have the option to issue citations for criminal conduct as one of a “variety of resolutions.” The group said it’s concerned that not having the option to issue tickets could lead to students facing arrest and criminal charges instead.

The legislation passed the House 69-44. It passed in the Senate last month 37-17 and now heads to Gov. JB Pritzker, who previously has spoken out against ticketing students at school. A spokesperson said Wednesday night that he “was supportive of this initiative” and plans to review the bill.

The legislation makes clear that police can arrest students for crimes or violence they commit, but that they cannot ticket students for violating local ordinances prohibiting a range of minor infractions.

That distinction was not clear in previous versions of the legislation, which led to concern that schools would not be able to involve police in serious matters — and was a key reason legislation on ticketing foundered in previous legislative sessions. Students also may still be ordered to pay for lost, stolen or damaged property.

“This bill helps create an environment where students can learn from their mistakes without being unnecessarily funneled into the justice system,” said Aimee Galvin, government affairs director with Stand for Children, one of the groups that advocated for banning municipal tickets as school-based discipline.

The news investigation detailed how students were doubly penalized: when they were punished in school, with detention or a suspension, and then when they were ticketed by police for minor misbehavior. The investigation also revealed how, to resolve the tickets, children were thrown into a legal process designed for adults. Illinois law permits fines of up to $750 for municipal ordinance violations; it’s difficult to fight the charges, and students and families can be sent to collections if they don’t pay.

After the investigation was published, some school districts stopped asking police to ticket students. But the practice has continued in many other districts.

The legislation also adds regulations for districts that hire school-based police officers, known as school resource officers. Starting next year, districts with school resource officers must enter into agreements with local police to lay out the roles and responsibilities of officers on campus. The agreements will need to specify that officers are prohibited from issuing citations on school property and that they must be trained in working with students with disabilities. The agreements also must outline a process for data collection and reporting. School personnel also would be prohibited from referring truant students to police to be ticketed as punishment.

Before the new legislation, there had been some piecemeal changes and efforts at reform. A state attorney general investigation into a large suburban Chicago district confirmed that school administrators were exploiting a loophole in state law when they asked police to issue tickets to students. The district denied wrongdoing, but that investigation found the district broke the law and that the practice disproportionately affected Black and Latino students. The state’s top legal authority declared the practice illegal and said it should stop.

by Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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American diplomats in at least two countries have recently delivered internal reports to Washington that reflect a grim new reality taking hold abroad: The Trump administration’s sudden withdrawal of foreign aid is bringing about the violence and chaos that many had warned would come.

The vacuum left after the U.S. abandoned its humanitarian commitments has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest, according to State Department correspondence and notes obtained by ProPublica.

The assessments are not just predictions about the future but detailed accounts of what has already occurred, making them among the first such reports from inside the Trump administration to surface publicly — though experts suspect they will not be the last. The diplomats warned in their correspondence that stopping aid may undermine efforts to combat terrorism.

In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April. The world’s largest humanitarian food provider, the WFP projects a 40% decrease in funding compared to last year and has been forced to reduce food rations in Malawi’s sprawling Dzaleka refugee camp by a third.

To the north, the U.S. embassy in Kenya reported that news of funding cuts to refugee camps’ food programs led to violent demonstrations, according to a previously unreported cable from early May. During one protest, police responded with gunfire and wounded four people. Refugees have also died at food distribution centers, the officials wrote in the cable, including a pregnant woman who died under a stampede. Aid workers said they expected more people to get hurt “as vulnerable households become increasingly desperate.”

“It is devastating, but it’s not surprising,” Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and member of the National Security Council during Democratic administrations, told ProPublica. “It’s all what people in the national security community have predicted.”

“I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world,” Schwartz added. “It keeps me up at night.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a State Department spokesperson said in an email: “It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human.”

The spokesperson also said that “an overwhelming majority” of the WFP programs that the Trump administration inherited, including those in Malawi and Kenya, are still active.

But the U.S. funds the WFP on a yearly basis. For 2025, the Trump administration so far hasn’t approved any money in either country, forcing the organization to drastically slash food programs.

In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before, the WFP’s Kenya country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica. The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day.

“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pledged to restore safety and security around the world. At the same time, his administration, working alongside Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, swiftly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling thousands of government-funded foreign aid programs they considered wasteful. More than 80% of USAID’s operations were terminated, which crippled lifesaving humanitarian efforts around the world.

Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has said that DOGE’s cuts to humanitarian aid have targeted fraudulent payments to organizations but are not contributing to widespread deaths. “Show us any evidence whatsoever that that is true,” he said recently. “It’s false.”

For decades, American administrations run by both parties saw humanitarian diplomacy, or “soft power,” as a cost-effective measure to help stabilize volatile but strategically important regions and provide basic needs for people who might otherwise turn to international adversaries. Those investments, experts say, help prevent regional conflict and war that may embroil the U.S. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition,” Jim Mattis, who was defense secretary during Trump’s first administration, told Congress in 2013 when he led U.S. Central Command.

Food insecurity has long been closely linked with regional turmoil. But despite promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving operations would continue amid widespread cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has terminated funding to WFP for several countries. Nearly 50% of the WFP’s budget came from the U.S. in 2024.

Since February, U.S. officials throughout the developing world have issued urgent warnings forecasting that the Trump administration’s decision to suddenly cut off help to desperate populations could exacerbate humanitarian crises and threaten U.S. national security interests, records show. In one cable, diplomats in the Middle East communicated concerns that stopping aid could empower groups like the Taliban and undermine efforts to address terrorism, the narcotics trade and illegal immigration. The shift may also “significantly de-stabilize the transitioning” region and “only serve to benefit ISIS’ standing,” officials warned in other correspondence. “It could put US troops in the region at risk.”

Embassies in Africa have delivered similar messages. “We are deeply concerned that suddenly discontinuing all USAID counter terrorism-focused stabilization and humanitarian programs in Somalia … will immediately and negatively affect U.S. national security interests,” the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia, wrote in February. USAID’s role in helping the military prevent newly liberated territory — “purchased at a high cost of blood and treasure” — from getting back into the hands of terrorists “is indisputable, and irreplaceable,” the officials added.

The embassy in Nigeria described how stop-work orders had caused lapses in oversight that put U.S. resources at risk of being diverted to criminal or terrorist groups. (A February whistleblower complaint alleged USAID-purchased computers were stolen from health centers there.) And U.S. officials said the Kenyan government “faces an impending humanitarian crisis for over 730,000 refugees” without additional resources, as local officials struggle to confront al-Shabaab, a major terrorist threat in the region, while also maintaining security inside the country’s refugee camps.

In early April, Jeremy Lewin — an attorney in his late 20s with no prior government experience who is currently in charge of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance and running USAID operations — ordered the end of WFP grants altogether in more than a dozen countries. (Amid outcry, he later reinstated a few of them.) The State Department spokesperson said the agency was responding on Lewin’s behalf.

In Kenya, the WFP expects a malnutrition crisis after rations are cut to a fourth of the standard minimum, Landis said. She is also concerned about the security of her staff, who already travel with police escorts, given the likelihood that there will be more protests and that al-Shabaab might make further incursions into the camps.

In order for the U.S. to deliver its usual food aid to Kenya by the end of the year, it needed to be put on a boat already, Landis said. That has not happened.

A nurse evaluates a child for malnourishment at a WFP-supported health clinic in Turkana County, Kenya, in April 2025. (Courtesy of World Food Program/Kevin Gitonga)

In recent days, South Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia have begged a visiting government delegation from the U.S. not to cut food rations any further, according to a cable documenting the visit. Aid workers in another group of camps in North Africa reported that they expect to run out of funding by the end of May for a program that fights malnutrition for 8,600 pregnant and nursing mothers.

Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, Malawi has been a relative beacon of stability in a region that’s seen numerous civil wars and unrest in recent decades. Yet in early March, officials there warned Washington counterparts that cuts to the more than $300 million USAID planned to provide to the country in aid a year would dramatically increase “the effects of the worsening economy already in motion.”

At the time, 10 employees from a USAID-funded nonprofit had recently shown up unannounced at USAID’s offices in the capital Lilongwe asking for their unpaid wages after the U.S. froze funding. The group left without incident, and it’s unclear if they were paid, but officials reported that they expected countries around the world would face similar issues and were closely monitoring for “increased risks to the safety and security of Embassy personnel.” (Former employees at another nonprofit in a nearby country also raided their organization “out of desperation for not being paid,” according to State Department records.)

An hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, Dzaleka is a former prison that was transformed into a refugee camp in the 1990s to house people fleeing war in neighboring Mozambique. In the decades since, it has ballooned, filling with people running from conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The camp, which was built to hold around 10,000, is now home to more than 55,000 people.

A woman goes door to door selling secondhand clothes in the Dzaleka refugee camp. (African Media Online/Alamy Stock)

Iradukunda Devota, a refugee from Burundi, came to Malawi when she was 3 and has lived at Dzaleka for 23 years. She now works for Inua Advocacy, which provides legal services and advocates on behalf of refugees in the camp. She said tension is high amid rumors that food and other aid will be cut further. Since 2023, the Malawi government has prohibited refugees from living or working outside the camp, and there has already been an increase in crime and substance abuse after food was cut earlier this year. “This is happening because people are hungry,” Devota told ProPublica. “They have nowhere to turn to.”

Now, the Malawi government is likely to close its borders to refugees in response to the funding crisis and congestion in Dzaleka, the WFP’s country representative told the State Department, according to agency records.

Diplomats continue to warn the Trump administration of even worse to come. The WFP expects to suspend food assistance in Dzaleka entirely in July.

“The WFP anticipates violent protests,” the embassy told State Department officials, “which could potentially embroil host communities and refugees, and targeting of UN and WFP offices when the pipeline eventually breaks.”

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at +1 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at +1 408-504-8131.

ProPublica

ProPublica announced Wednesday it’s joining a cross-industry effort to explore how artificial intelligence technologies can responsibly contribute to the work of investigative journalism. As part of the program, ProPublica will hire an engineer for the two-year fellowship. The program is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and will include four other newsrooms: The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Baltimore Banner and Arizona State University’s NEWSWELL.

At ProPublica, the engineer will explore how machine learning might help its award-winning engagement reporting group, which powers many of our most ambitious, crowdsourced investigations. From callouts and tip lines to citizen-fueled science, these reporters gather leads and evidence from communities around the country. We’re eager to explore how large language models can help us evaluate, categorize and route incoming tips more efficiently — ensuring they reach the right journalist, faster.

“We believe these technologies have the potential to help our journalists and our readers find needles in the haystack,” said Ben Werdmuller, senior director of technology. “We’re excited to explore what’s possible in ways that align with our values and standards.”

As part of the program, the participating news organizations will work collaboratively with one another and the broader news industry to share what they learn, product developments, case studies and technical information needed to help replicate their work in other newsrooms.

The goal of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship is to help local news publishers leverage new AI technology to build sustainable businesses. The program launched in October 2024 with $10 million in support from OpenAI and Microsoft — each awarding $2.5 million in direct funding and $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits.

“The Lenfest Institute is proud to partner with OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the AI Collaborative and Fellowship program. The five publishers joining the program are leaders in the field, and we look forward to sharing what they learn with the rest of the industry,” said Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich. “Together with Open AI and Microsoft, the Institute is committed to exploring ethical uses of AI to advance sustainable solutions for local news.”

About ProPublica ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 150 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 16 George Polk Awards.

About The Lenfest Institute for Journalism  The Lenfest Institute creates solutions for the next era of local news by investing in sustainable business models at the intersection of local journalism and community in Philadelphia and nationwide.