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by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

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

The last time Sam met with his therapist, Scott Owen, the session was nothing more than an hour of Owen sexually abusing him, he told a Provo, Utah, courtroom this week. Sam remembers sitting in his car afterward, screaming as loud as he could.

“I could feel him all over my skin,” he said. “I could not believe this was happening.”

It was October 2017, and Sam had been seeing Owen for therapy for more than a year. A faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he was struggling with what he called “unwanted same-sex attraction.” Owen was a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church at that time, and Sam said Owen assured him that he had helped more than 200 men who felt similarly.

Instead, he said, Owen “meticulously leveraged” his two roles as a therapist and a church leader to assure him that the sexual touching during their sessions was key to helping him heal, learn how to accept intimacy and grow closer to God.

“He exploited my trust, he weaponized my faith and dismantled my confidence,” Sam told the courtroom. “What he did was not just unethical. It was calculated, predatory and destructive.”

Police began investigating Owen in 2023 only after The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reported on a range of sex abuse allegations against Owen, who had built a reputation over his 20-year therapy career as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of the LDS Church. Some of the men who spoke to The Tribune said their bishop in the faith referred them to Owen and used church funds to pay for sessions where Owen allegedly also touched them inappropriately.

Austin Millet at his home in Oregon. Millet is one of several men who told The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that Owen abused them during sessions paid for with funds from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Amanda Lucier for ProPublica)

In February, Owen pleaded guilty to three charges, admitting he sexually abused Sam and a second patient who also said he sought Owen’s help because he was struggling with his sexuality and Latter-day Saints faith. Owen also pleaded no contest in another case, saying prosecutors likely had enough evidence to convict him at a trial on an allegation that he had groped a young girl during a therapy session.

But the number of people who say that Owen harmed them is much larger — and they filled a Provo courtroom on Monday as Owen was sentenced to spend at least 15 years in prison.

One by one, they stood at a podium in court and told Owen how he had hurt them. Most were his patients, like Sam, a pseudonym to protect his identity from his community.

One man told the court Owen had abused him when Owen was a leader of a young men’s group organized by the LDS Church.

“He had sleepovers at his house,” Mike Bahr said. “I was there once, and I have lived in a nightmare since.”

Also speaking were family members of a man who had died by suicide, including his brother who said his sibling disclosed to him that Owen had abused him just days before he took his life.

And there was one of Owen’s own family members, his cousin, who alleges that Owen molested him on a family trip when he was a kid. After becoming more public with his own abuse allegations several years ago, James Cooper has worked to gather others who say his cousin victimized them.

James Cooper speaks during Owen’s sentencing hearing. Cooper is Owen’s cousin and alleges the man abused him when he was a child. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

He spoke about the dynamics that allowed Owen to hurt others for so long without repercussions.

“Certainly, we know how charismatic he is, and what it’s like to be a victim of sexual assault. The shame you carry. The guilt you carry,” he said. “The fear of Scott. The fear of not being accepted by your family, your society, your church. All those things are enormous factors.”

One woman spoke about Owen touching her inappropriately during therapy when she was 13 years old, in 2007. During the hearing, the only woman to have publicly accused him said Owen had made her feel like something was wrong with her. Now, she added, “He no longer holds power over me.”

When Owen, 66, was given a chance to speak, he said there was no excuse or rationale for what he had done.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “All I have to offer is what’s left of my life. And I hope that in offering those years, justice will have been met in some small fashion, and those who I have hurt can disconnect from me and move forward with their healing.”

Defense attorney Earl Xaiz said Owen did not want leniency from the judge but mentioned in court that his client had been sexually abused himself as a child and had struggled with his sexuality.

Fourth District Judge Kraig Powell sentenced Owen on Monday to 15 years to life in prison. Given Owen’s age and the nature of his crimes, both prosecutors and the defense agreed it is likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Powell became emotional as he handed down the sentence, telling Owen that he harmed not only those who spoke publicly on Monday, but all of those therapists and church leaders who are ethical and working to help people.

“Thousands and thousands of these people, I fear, will be affected by this terrible, abhorrent case,” the judge said.

Owen was sentenced to prison after he admitted he sexually abused patients during sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

While Owen gave up his therapy license in 2018 after several patients complained to state licensors that he had touched them inappropriately, the allegations were never investigated by the police and were not widely known.

Under a negotiated settlement with Utah’s licensing division, Owen was able to surrender his license without admitting to any inappropriate conduct, and the sexual nature of his patients’ allegations is not referenced in the documents he signed when he gave up his license. He continued to have an active role in his therapy business, Canyon Counseling, until The Tribune and ProPublica published their investigation.

Police interviewed more than a dozen former patients of Owen’s, all of whom reported that he touched them in ways they felt were inappropriate during therapy sessions. But Owen faced charges in connection with only three patients, because the type of touching that the other men alleged fell under parts of the criminal code that had a shorter window of time for prosecutors to file a case, called the statute of limitations. The crimes that Owen was charged with are all felonies that have no statute of limitations.

Both state licensors and local leaders in the LDS Church knew of inappropriate touching allegations against Owen as early as 2016, reporting by The Tribune and ProPublica showed, but neither would say whether they ever reported Owen to the police.

The church said in response to that reporting that it takes all matters of sexual misconduct seriously, and that in 2019 it confidentially annotated internal records to alert bishops that Owen’s conduct had threatened the well-being of other people or the church.

The church also said it has no process in place to vet the therapists its church leaders recommend and pay for using member donations. It is up to individual members, a church spokesperson has said, to “make their own decisions” about whether to see a specific therapist that their bishop recommends.

Michael, a former patient of Owen’s who agreed to be photographed but asked to be identified by only his first name, looks at his wife while speaking in court about the inappropriate touching he said happened in therapy sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

For some who accused Owen of abuse, Monday’s sentencing was the only chance they had to address Owen because charges could not be brought in their cases. That includes Michael, who asked to be identified by only his first name. He said he saw Owen for therapy on and off for about a decade, starting when he was 14. He read a letter to his younger self in court on Monday.

“I just learned on Thursday that we are beyond our legal opportunity to fix this problem,” he said. “And it broke my heart to learn that I can’t pursue a court case for you. … You’ll have to be strong. It’s going to be so hard, but you’re going to make it through.”

Editor’s note: Sam is identified only by a pseudonym because he requested anonymity. We have granted this request because of the risk to his standing in his community. The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica typically use sources’ full names in stories. But sometimes that isn’t possible, and we consider other approaches. That often takes the form of initials or middle names. In this case, we felt that we couldn’t fully protect our source by those means. We know his full name and have corroborated his accounts in documents and through interviews with others.

by Alec MacGillis

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The first time I saw Andrew Rabinowitz, it was in April 2017 at Baltimore District Court, where he was representing a property management company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. That day, the company had three cases against tenants at Dutch Village, one of the many large apartment complexes the Kushner Companies owned in the Baltimore area.

One tenant was a Morgan State University student facing struggles typical of residents in the Kushner complexes. She had given notice that she was moving at the end of March, having tired of the perpetually clogged toilet and the ceiling leak in her closet. But when she paid March rent via the automated system tenants had to use, the money somehow ended up with an adjacent Kushner complex, and the company started eviction proceedings — even though she had already signaled her intent to leave a few weeks later.

A sheriff’s deputy changed the locks on her door when she was out of town, preventing her from moving her things out. She got her keys back, but by then she no longer had access to a moving truck. The company was also after her for April’s rent, despite the fact that it had physically barred her from being able to move before April.

In court, Rabinowitz, a 33-year-old in a jacket and tie, spoke to the judge in a polished, even-keeled tone, in contrast to the student, who grew more agitated as the hearing went on. The judge sided with Rabinowitz, ordering the student to pay $471.23 for part of April’s rent.

When I approached Rabinowitz as he was leaving the courthouse, to ask about the company’s aggressive approach, he looked startled. “What’s the article regarding?” he said. “I’m not inclined to give a statement.”

The next day, he was back in court to defend the company against the student’s criminal complaint over the unfounded eviction. This time, he offered a deal: He agreed to let her stay, rent-free, until the end of May to give her time to move out, as long as she paid for April. Afterward, she asked Rabinowitz if he could make sure that the hot water would be turned back on. “I’m just the attorney,” he demurred. (The hot water stayed off.)

The next time I saw Rabinowitz in court was in February, almost eight years later. Kushner’s father-in-law was back in the White House. But Rabinowitz’s situation had changed. He was no longer demanding payment from beleaguered tenants. Instead, he was defending them.

I had learned of his dramatic career shift when I ran into him once in downtown Baltimore. But I needed to see it to believe it. So I tracked him down one midday at the Landlord and Tenant Branch of the District of Columbia Courts, where he now spends his days. As I spotted him, he was in a hallway speaking to a fretful older man who was seeking assistance. “Give me four minutes. Let me just go check and see if I can serve you,” Rabinowitz said, before ducking into the office of his new employer, Rising for Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction.

A moment later, after attending to the man, Rabinowitz came over to say hello. He still wore a tie, but now had long hair to go along with it. He was looking far less anxious than he had when I approached him back at the Baltimore courthouse. In fact, he was positively glowing.

So much has changed in this country and the world since 2017 — much of it, arguably, not for the better. I wanted to know: What had happened with Rabinowitz?

American culture is rife with glamorous depictions of high-stakes, high-paying Big Law firms, from “L.A. Law” to “Michael Clayton” to “Suits.” But there is a humbler realm more typically glimpsed via highway billboards and subway ads. This is the level at which millions of people encounter the justice system, for better or worse.

And this is the corner through which Rabinowitz entered the profession. He grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, outside Baltimore. His mother was dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Nursing; his father was chief of social work at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington. He attended Frostburg State University, in western Maryland. Interested in the law, he spent a couple years as a paralegal before heading to law school at Barry University in Orlando, Florida.

His aspiration was to become a criminal defense attorney, but the job he found after getting his degree was with Barry Glazer, a colorful Baltimore personal injury lawyer known for attention-getting ads. One script went like this: “I am sick and tired of these insurance companies telling you what good neighbors they are and how you’re in such good hands. If your car is totaled and you owe more than it’s worth, they give you the lesser amount and you continue to pay a finance company the difference. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Under pressure from the Bar Association, Glazer changed “pee” to “urinate.”

It was an eye-opening experience, the first time Rabinowitz had come into regular contact with people on the lower rungs of the social ladder — people with big problems but unable to afford big firms. He left after a couple years for a small defense practice because he wanted to pursue his original aspiration. This proved disappointing. Criminal law, he found, turned out to be less a stirring quest for justice and more an exercise in squeezing fees out of poor clients in desperate circumstances.

Rabinowitz started looking around again, in 2015, and joined Jeffrey Tapper, whose small firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills specialized in representing landlords large and small as they pursued tenants.

At first, Rabinowitz liked the work. Despite his natural introversion, he had come to enjoy being in court, in front of a judge. And in this new job, he was in court a lot — as many as 10 hearings per day.

He prided himself on being able to negotiate settlements, getting landlords to accept less than what they believed they were owed and working out payment plans with tenants. This was what he recalled of the case where I had first met him — that he had been able to work out a deal with the college student to give her an extra month to move out of the Kushner unit.

He even gave some tenants his phone number, urging them to call if they ended up falling behind again, so they could work something out before it landed them back in court. He wasn’t really sure what to think when, one day, he heard a judge say to a tenant, “Step into the hallway with Mr. Rabinowitz. He’s the fairest debt collector in town.”

To many people, “fairest debt collector” sounds about as noble as “kindest executioner.” But the label was apt. A couple of times, he appeared opposite Joe Mack, a tenant’s rights attorney whom he had gone to camp with as a kid. Mack recalled Rabinowitz persuading a judge that Mack’s client had failed to provide enough notice before breaking a lease and thus owed the landlord a sizable sum. Making the loss easier to take, Mack said, was that Rabinowitz had been respectful in the courtroom. “I can imagine,” Mack added, “that some other things he was doing might have been rougher.”

My eventual 2017 article laid bare the harsher reality of many of the cases involving the Kushner complexes. The company pursued one woman for several years for about $3,000, eventually having her wages garnished, even though she had received written permission to break her lease. A second woman ended up in court after moving out from a unit with maggots coming out of the living-room carpet and raw sewage flowing out of the kitchen sink. Yet another was pursued for about $4,000 even though she had written permission to move out of a unit with black mold.

After the article appeared, the Maryland attorney general filed suit against the Kushner company, which in 2022 settled with the state for $3.25 million, though the company did not acknowledge wrongdoing. In March, a group of former tenants won class-action status in their own lawsuit against the company. The company, which denied wrongdoing in the class-action case, did not respond to a request for an interview for this article. Over the years, the company has sold most of the properties ProPublica originally reported on.

Back in 2017, a company executive had responded to questions by saying that it had a “fiduciary obligation” to its investment partners to collect as much revenue as possible from tenants, and that its practices in doing so were “consistent with industry standards.”

Rabinowitz offers a similar defense. The Kushner approach was not noticeably different from other big landlords, he said: “They were all the same.” He had no particular feelings for the company itself, and he had never actually met Kushner or any other executives. “They’re so disconnected from the property,” Rabinowitz told me. “It’s just money for them.” But he was protective of his boss, Tapper, who he felt had treated him fairly. (Tapper died last year.)

Rabinowitz himself had not set foot inside the Kushner complexes. The sorts of poor upkeep described in the article did not figure much in the cases, he said. “I know most people wouldn’t want to live in housing like that,” he said, “but I remember driving past those communities and I don’t remember being like, ‘Those were horrible places.’”

He insists he did not regret his years working for the Kushners and other landlords. There was a system in place, and he had played a part in that system. “I honestly felt that if every attorney could have had the same philosophy and treated people fair and put people in the position to take control of their life,” he said, “then debt collectors wouldn’t be such bad people. They’d be assistants to people paying off their debts.”

Still, the article instilled an unease that only grew with time. He was almost always facing off against people who lacked their own attorney, in a state with laws that were unusually favorable to landlords. “It was like a heavyweight sparring featherweights over and over again,” he said. “That’s just not satisfying.”

His longtime partner started to notice that he was agitated on nights before trials; sometimes he’d even mutter things like “objection!” in his sleep. “She could tell my mind was in court, constantly,” he said. To try and escape the burden, he went whitewater kayaking on weekends.

Around this time, his parents were nearing retirement. Accolades poured in from people they had served over the years, at the nursing schools and the retirement home. One man was wheeled in on his hospital bed to thank Rabinowitz’s father. “When I saw all the people who came out, I realized they had so much impact on so many people’s lives,” Rabinowitz said. He paused. “And I’m just putting money into rich people’s pockets.”

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Maryland suspended evictions in March 2020, and, when the moratorium ended in 2021, it passed a law establishing (and funding) the right to an attorney for any tenant facing eviction.

Rabinowitz saw his chance. He applied for an entry-level opening in the Baltimore County office of Maryland Legal Aid. The organization recognized his experience and urged him to apply to be the supervisor of a staff of 20 in its newly expanded Baltimore City housing office. The job came with a “fairly significant” drop in pay, but he took it.

It wasn’t easy telling Tapper, who had recently offered to make him a partner in the firm before he retired. But Tapper understood. “I went to the enemy, on the one hand,” Rabinowitz said. “On the other hand, he was proud.”

The transition was awkward at first. Rabinowitz and his new colleagues at Legal Aid were occasionally facing off against a former colleague. And he could tell that some of his new colleagues were initially wary. After all, while many lawyers move from public-service roles to private practice, precious few head in the other direction. “People wanted to know if I was for real,” he said.

A few years later, Rabinowitz made his way to Rising for Justice, as director of the organization’s Tenant Justice Program. He now oversees four staff attorneys and a paralegal while supervising about nine law students from Georgetown University and the University of the District of Columbia.

It means a near-daily rail commute from Baltimore. But he likes working in the Washington court, which has such a nonconfrontational vibe that it makes do without bailiffs. The organization’s clients are grateful for the assistance, and he likes that it includes a social-service branch to help people find nonlegal help.

The law students assigned to him were surprised when they learned that their supervisor had once been on the other side. But they said it came in handy, too. “We get very emotional. It’s easy to get frustrated for your clients and wrapped up and involved,” said Savannah Myers, a Georgetown student, “and Drew has the unique perspective to say, ‘OK, well, this is what’s happening on your end, here’s probably what’s happening on the other end and here’s how you can proceed in the best way to help your client within the legal system.’”

One recent day, I watched in court as an older Ethiopian woman faced off against a landlord who was demanding back rent that she owed after having lost her job. The woman, who was using a walker, had an interpreter to assist her but no attorney. She tried to argue that the debt should be lowered because of a broken air conditioner and a problem with vermin in the rental.

After the judge, Sherry Trafford, ordered her to make monthly payments of $2,989 to the landlord, she also gently suggested that she seek out help from Rising for Justice in advance of the next hearing on her case.

“Where are they?” said the woman.

“It’s at the end of this hallway,” said Trafford.

The woman made her way slowly down, and it so happened that the person manning the intake desk at that moment was Andrew Rabinowitz. He welcomed her. “Do you have some court paperwork?” he asked through the interpreter, and then came back with a law student to assist her.

Later, Rabinowitz told me that it was poor housing conditions like the ones the woman was dealing with that were his ultimate goad these days. “That’s what motivates me,” he said. “I want people to have clean housing like mine.” Why had those conditions not registered so much with him back when he was on the other side? “I guess that stuff didn’t really get to me,” he said.

I was struck again by Rabinowitz’s reluctance to judge his earlier self. But there was no obscuring one effect of his new role. “I sleep well,” he said.

by Jesse Coburn

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Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

In a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Wednesday, Reps. Maxine Waters, Stephen Lynch and Emanuel Cleaver sharply criticized the agency for considering such experiments, given cryptocurrency’s volatility and vulnerability to fraud. The Democratic representatives, all members of the House Financial Services Committee, warned of repeating “the same mistakes of the past,” noting that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered in part by the proliferation of risky financial assets in the housing market.

“The federal government cannot allow under-regulated financial products to infiltrate critical housing programs, especially when they have already proven to be dangerous, speculative, and harmful to working families,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter is a response to reporting by ProPublica that the housing agency recently discussed taking steps toward using cryptocurrency. The article described meetings in February in which officials discussed incorporating the blockchain — and possibly a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin — into the agency’s work. The discussion at one meeting centered on a pilot project involving one HUD grant, but a HUD finance official in attendance indicated the idea could be applied much more expansively across the agency.

“We are looking at this for the entire enterprise,” he said in that meeting, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We just wanted to start in CPD,” he added, referring to HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. The office administers billions of dollars in grants to support low- and moderate-income people, including funding for affordable housing, homeless shelters and disaster recovery, raising the prospect that these forms of aid might one day be paid in an unstable currency.

Asked for comment on the letter, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett referred ProPublica to a prior comment by Turner, in which he said, “There’s no merit to it.” Lovett previously told ProPublica: “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin. Education is not implementation.”

It’s unclear how a crypto project would work. But HUD officials alluded to the possible use of stablecoins, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar or another asset. That is supposed to protect stablecoins from the wild swings in value common among bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, although such fluctuations have happened with stablecoins in the past.

The HUD proposal raised alarm among some officials, with one comparing the idea in internal discussions to paying grant recipients in “Monopoly money.” At best, one HUD staffer told ProPublica previously, the idea was a waste of time and resources; at worst it was a threat to the stability of the housing sector.

“It’s just introducing another unregulated security into the housing market as though 2008, 2009 didn’t happen,” the staffer said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis. “I don’t see any way this will help anything. I see a lot of ways this could hurt.”

The HUD official pushing the idea internally was Irving Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, a staffer said at one of the meetings. Dennis denied to ProPublica that HUD was considering any such experiment. He published a book in 2021 in which he wrote that HUD should use the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger most commonly used to record cryptocurrency transactions. Boosters of the technology depict it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks out of financial transactions and to make those transactions more transparent and secure. One such evangelist is Robert Judson, an executive at the consulting firm EY, who is listed in a document obtained by ProPublica as an attendee of one of the HUD meetings. Judson has written glowingly about the potential of blockchain to prevent aid money from being misused. (Dennis was previously a partner at EY.)

Judson and EY did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but Judson previously confirmed to ProPublica that EY had discussed the matter with agency officials.

In their letter, the three representatives requested extensive information from HUD about its consideration of crypto and the blockchain, including whether the agency had assessed the risks of using the technology. The House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to consider a bill Wednesday that would regulate stablecoins.

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Dan Keemahill, 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 2022, conservative groups celebrated a “great victory” over “wokeified” curriculum when the Texas State Board of Education squashed proposed social studies requirements for schools that included teaching kindergartners how Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.”

Another win came a year later as the state board rejected several textbooks that some Republicans argued could promote a “radical environmental agenda” because they linked climate change to human behavior or presented what conservatives perceived to be a negative portrayal of fossil fuels.

By the time the state board approved science and career-focused textbooks for use in Texas classrooms at the end of 2023, it appeared to be comfortably in sync with conservatives who had won control of local school boards across the state in recent years.

But the Republican-led state education board had not gone far enough for the conservative majority on the school board for Texas’ third-largest school district.

At the tail end of a school board meeting in May of last year, Natalie Blasingame, a board member in suburban Houston’s Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, proposed stripping more than a dozen chapters from five textbooks that had been approved by the state board and were recommended by a district committee of teachers and staffers.

The chapters, Blasingame said, were inappropriate for students because they discussed “vaccines and polio,” touched on “topics of depopulation,” had “an agenda out of the United Nations” and included “a perspective that humans are bad.”

In a less-publicized move, Blasingame, a former bilingual educator, proposed omitting several chapters from a textbook for aspiring educators titled “Teaching.” One of those chapters focuses on how to understand and educate diverse learners and states that it “is up to schools and teachers to help every student feel comfortable, accepted and valued,” and that “when schools view diversity as a positive force, it can enhance learning and prepare students to work effectively in a diverse society.”

Blasingame did not offer additional details about her opposition to the chapters during the meeting. She didn’t have to. The school board voted 6-1 to delete them.

Natalie Blasingame, a member of the Cypress-Fairbanks School Board, proposed cutting chapters from five textbooks. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

The decision to strip chapters from books that had already won the approval of the state’s conservative board of education represents an escalation in local school boards’ efforts to influence what children in public schools are taught. Through the years, battles over textbooks have played out at the state level, where Republicans hold the majority. But local school boards that are supposed to be nonpartisan had largely avoided such fights — they weighed in on whether some books should be in libraries but rarely intervened so directly into classroom instruction. Cypress-Fairbanks now provides a model for supercharging these efforts at more fine-grained control, said Christopher Kulesza, a scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“One of the things that would concern me is that it’s ideology pushing the educational standards rather than what’s fact,” he said.

The board’s actions send a troubling message to students of color, Alissa Sundrani, a junior at Cy-Fair High School, said. “At the point that you’re saying that diversity, or making people feel safe and included, is not in the guidelines or not in the scope of what Texas wants us to be learning, then I think that’s an issue.”

With about 120,000 students, nearly 80% of whom are of Hispanic, Black and Asian descent, Cy-Fair is the largest school district in Texas to be taken over by ideologically driven conservative candidates. Blasingame was among a slate of candidates who were elected through the at-large voting system that ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found has been leveraged by conservative groups seeking to influence what children are taught about race and gender. Supporters say the system, in which voters cast ballots for all candidates districtwide instead of ones who live within specific geographic boundaries, results in broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that it dilutes the power of voters of color.

First image: Cy-Fair’s administration building. Second image: People gather before a school board meeting. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Blasingame and others campaigned against the teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. Most of the winning candidates had financial backing from Texans for Educational Freedom, a statewide PAC that sought to build a “stronghold” of school board trustees “committed to fighting Critical Race Theory and other anti-American agendas and curriculums.” The PAC helped elect at least 30 school board candidates across the state between 2021 and 2023, in part because it focused on anti-CRT sentiment, said its founder, Christopher Zook Jr. “You could literally go out and say, CRT, you know, ‘Stop critical race theory in schools,’ and everyone knew what that means, right?” he said. “The polling showed that that messaging works.”

Shortly before Blasingame and two fellow conservatives won election in 2021, Texas lawmakers passed a landmark law that sought to shape how teachers approach instruction on race and racism. The law, which aimed to ban critical race theory, prohibits the “inculcation” of the notion that someone’s race makes them “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Blasingame made no mention of the law when she pushed to remove chapters about teaching a diverse student body, but pointed to it as the reason for her objection in text messages and an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune. Though Blasingame acknowledged that one of the chapters had “very good presentation on learning styles,” she said removing the whole chapter was the only option because administrators said individual lines could not be stricken from the book.

The textbook referred to “cultural humility” and called for aspiring teachers to examine their “unintentional and subtle biases,” concepts that she said “go against” the law. The school board needed to act because the book “slipped through” before the state’s education agency implemented a plan to make sure materials complied with the law, Blasingame said.

Blasingame recommended removing several chapters from a textbook called “Teaching.” The chapters included references to “cultural humility” and “unintentional and subtle biases,” which she believes are not permitted under state law, which specifies how topics concerning race can be taught. (Document obtained and sentences enlarged by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

State Board Chairman Aaron Kinsey, who is staunchly anti-CRT, declined to say if he thought the body had allowed textbooks to slip through as Blasingame suggested. Kinsey, however, said in a statement that contracts with approved publishers include requirements that their textbooks comply with all applicable laws. He did not comment on Cy-Fair removing chapters.

Cy-Fair appears to have taken one of the state’s most aggressive approaches to enforcing the law, which does not address what is in textbooks but rather how educators approach teaching, said Paige Duggins-Clay, the chief legal analyst for the Intercultural Development Research Agency, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that advocates for equal educational opportunity.

“It definitely feels like Cy-Fair is seeking to test the boundaries of the law,” Duggins-Clay said. “And I think in a district like Cy-Fair, because it is so diverse, that is actively hurting a lot of young people who are ultimately paying the cost and bearing the burden of these really bad policies.”

The law’s vagueness has drawn criticism from conservative groups who say it allows school districts to skirt its prohibitions. Last month, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Coppell school district in North Texas and accused administrators of illegally teaching “woke and hateful” CRT curriculum. The suit points to a secret recording of an administrator saying that the district will do what’s right for students “despite what our state standards say.” The lawsuit does not provide examples of curriculum that it alleges violates state law on how to teach race. In a letter to parents, Superintendent Brad Hunt said that the district was following state standards and would “continue to fully comply with applicable state and federal laws.”

Teachers and progressive groups have also argued that the law leaves too much open to interpretation, which causes educators to self-censor and could be used to target anything that mentions race.

Blasingame disputes the critique. A longtime administrator and teacher whose family emigrated from South Africa when she was 9 years old, she said she embraces diversity in schools.

“Diversity is people and I love people,” she said. “That’s what I’m called to do, first as a Christian and then as an educator.”

But she said she opposes teaching about systemic racism and state-sanctioned efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, saying that they overemphasize the importance of skin color.

“They seed hate and teach students that they are starting off behind and have unconquerable disadvantages that they will suffer all their lives,” Blasingame said. “Not only does this teach hate among people, but how could you love a country where this is true?”

The assertion that teaching diversity turns students of color into victims is simply wrong, educators and students told the news organizations. Instead, they said, such discussions make them feel safe and accepted.

One educator who uses the “Teaching” textbook said the board members’ decision to remove chapters related to diversity has been painful for students.

“I don’t know what their true intentions are, but to my students, what they are seeing is that unless you fit into the mold and you are like them, you are not valued,” said the teacher, who did not want to be named because she feared losing her job. “There were several who said it made them not want to teach anymore because they felt so unsupported.”

The board’s interpretation of the state’s law on the teaching of race has stifled important classroom discussions, said Sundrani, the student in the district. Her AP English class, a seminar about the novel “Huckleberry Finn,” steered clear of what she thinks are badly needed conversations about race, slavery and how that history impacts people today.

“There were topics that we just couldn’t discuss.”

by McKenzie Funk

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

The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

An ICE detainee waves from inside a bus that transported passengers to the airport before departing from Seattle’s Boeing Field on a GlobalX deportation flight in February. (Emily Schultz)

All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry.

Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify. But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legal filings, news accounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline.

A GlobalX post on Facebook recruiting flight attendants in March. Alexandria, Louisiana, is a hub for ICE Air. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica.)

But as the airline grew, more and more of its planes were filled with migrants in chains. Some flight attendants were livid about it.

Last year, an anonymous GlobalX employee sent an all-caps, all-staff screed that ricocheted around the startup. “WHERE IS THE COMPANY GOING?” the email asked. “YOU SIGNED A 5 YEAR CONTRACT WITH ICE? ... WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS BECOMING A PRESTIGE CHARTER AIRLINE?”

One flight attendant said he kept waiting for the sports teams his new bosses had talked about as he flew deportation routes. “You know, the NFL charters, the NBA charters, whatever the hockey one is …” he said.

A second said his planes’ air conditioning kept breaking — an experience consistent with at least two publicly reported onboard incidents — and their lavatories kept breaking, something another flight attendant reported as well. But the planes kept flying. “They made us flush with water bottles,” he said.

But the flight attendants were most concerned about their inability to treat their passengers humanely — and to keep them safe. (In 2021, an ICE spokesperson told the publication Capital & Main that the agency “follows best practices when it comes to the security, safety and welfare of the individuals returned to their countries of origin.”)

They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?

“They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” one said. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

“We have never gotten a clear answer on what we do in an ICE Air evacuation,” another said. “They will not give us an answer.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” a third said, before a deportation flight ends in disaster.

Lala didn’t think she had a chance at a flight attendant job. She hadn’t, in truth, remembered applying to GlobalX until a recruiter called to say the startup was coming to her city. “But I guess I did apply through LinkedIn?” she said. She’d been working an office job — long hours, little flexibility — and was looking for something new.

The job interviews were held at a resort hotel. The room was packed with dozens of aspirants when Lala showed up. After the first round, only about 20 were asked to stay. She couldn’t believe she was one of them. After the second round came a job offer: $26 an hour plus a daily expense allowance. Soon Lala got a uniform: a blue cardigan, a white polo shirt and an eye-catching scarf in cyan and light green.

For part of her Federal Aviation Administration-mandated four-week training, her class stayed in a motel with a pool at the edge of Miami International Airport. Just across the street, on the fourth floor of a concrete-clad office building ringed by palm trees, was GlobalX’s headquarters.

“In the beginning, we were told that because it’s a charter, it’s only gonna be elites, celebrities,” Lala said. “Everybody was really excited.”

But flying was not going to be all glitz. The real reason for having flight attendants is safety. GlobalX was certified by the FAA as a Part 121 scheduled air carrier, the same as United or Delta, and it and its crew members were subject to the same strict standards.

“We’re there to evacuate you,” one recruit told ProPublica. “Yes, we make good drinks, but we evacuate you.”

Lala’s class practiced water landings in the pool at the nearby Pan Am Flight Academy. They practiced door drills — yelling out commands, shoving open heavy exit doors — in a replica Airbus A320 cabin. They learned CPR and how to put out fires. They took written and physical tests, and if they didn’t score at least 90%, they had to retake them.

They were reminded, over and over, that their job was a vocation, one with a professional code: No matter who the passengers were, flight attendants were in charge of the cabin, responsible for safety in the air.

Lala’s official “airman” certificate arrived from the FAA a few weeks after training was done. She was cleared to fly, ready to see the world.

But what she would see wasn’t what she signed up for. The company was growing beyond glamorous charters. GlobalX was moving into the deportation business.

Her bosses delivered the news casually, she recalled: “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we got a government contract.’”

The new graduates were offered a single posting: Harlingen, Texas. Deportation flights were five days a week, sometimes late into the night. Lala went to Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and, for refueling, Panama.

A standard flight had more than a dozen private security guards — contractors working for the firm Akima — along with a single ICE officer, two nurses, and a hundred or more detainees. (Akima did not respond to a request for comment.) The guards were in charge of delivering food and water to the detainees and taking them to the lavatories. This left the flight attendants, whose presence was required by the FAA, with little to do.

“Arm and disarm doors, that was our duty,” Lala said.

The flights had their own set of rules, which the crew members said they learned from a company policy manual or from chief flight attendants. Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t walk down the aisles without a guard escorting you. Don’t sit in aisle seats, where detainees could get close to you. Don’t wear your company-issued scarf because of “safety concerns that a detainee might grab it and use it against us,” Lala said.

“You don’t do nothing,” said a member of another GlobalX class. “Just sit down in your seats and be quiet.” If a detainee looked at him, he was supposed to look out the window.

A chained detainee boards a GlobalX flight at Seattle’s Boeing Field in February. (Emily Schultz)

A rare public statement from the company about life aboard ICE Air came in a 2023 earnings call with GlobalX founder and then-CEO Ed Wegel, when he discussed the company’s work for federal agencies like ICE. GlobalX employees “essentially don’t do much on the airplane,” Wegel said. “Our flight attendants are there in case of an emergency. The passengers are monitored by guards that are placed on board the airplane by one of those agencies.”

Fielding a question about how GlobalX ensures passengers are treated humanely, Wegel continued: “There have been threats made to our crew members, and they’re especially trained to deal with those. But we haven’t seen any mistreatment at all.”

Flight attendants said they had little to do but sit in their jumpseats after delivering the preflight safety briefing in English to the mostly Spanish-speaking passengers. Above 10,000 feet, the two in the rear usually moved to passenger rows near the cockpit, then sat again. Some did crosswords. Others took photos out the window. On a deportation to Guatemala, one saw his first erupting volcano.

Lala had been scared before her first deportation flight, worried that violence might break out. But fear soon gave way to discomfort at how detainees were treated. “Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think that was right,” she said.

Some flight attendants, drawn to the profession because they liked taking care of people, couldn’t help but break protocol with passengers. “If they said ‘hola’ or something,” one said, “I’d say ‘hola’ back. We’re not jerks.”

Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)

While flight attendants were allowed to interact with the guards, the dynamic was uncomfortable. It came down to a question of who was in charge — and which agency, ICE or the FAA, ultimately held sway. (The FAA declined to comment on this story and directed questions to ICE.)

The guards often asked flight attendants to heat up the food they brought from home. They asked for drinks, for ice. “They treated us like we were their maids,” said Akilah Sisk, a former flight attendant from Texas.

“In their eyes, the detainees are not the passengers,” another flight attendant said. “The passengers are the guards. And we’re there for the guards.”

Some guards thumbed their noses at the FAA safety rules that flight attendants were supposed to enforce while airborne, multiple flight attendants recalled. “One reported me because I asked him to sit down in the last 10 minutes,” Sisk said. “But you’re still on a freaking plane. You gotta listen to our words.”

Flight attendants said that if they told guards to fasten seatbelts during takeoff or stow carry-ons under a seat, they risked getting reported to their bosses at GlobalX, who they said wanted to keep ICE happy. The guards would complain to the in-flight supervisor, Sisk said, and eventually it would get back to the flight attendant.

“We’d get an email from somebody in management: ‘Why are you guys causing problems?’” another flight attendant recalled. “They were more worried about losing the contract than about anything else.”

Nothing bothered flight attendants more than the fact that most of their passengers were in chains. What would happen if a flight had to be evacuated?

Most of the migrants crowding the back seats of ICE Air’s planes have not been, historically, convicted criminals. ICE makes restraints mandatory nonetheless. “Detainees transported by ICE Air aircraft will be fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons,“ reads an unredacted version of the 2015 ICE Air Operations Handbook, which was obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group.

The handbook allows for other equipment “in special circumstances, i.e., spit masks, mittens, leg braces, cargo straps, humane restraint blanket, etc.” Multiple lawsuits on behalf of African asylum-seekers concern the use of one such item, known as the Wrap, a cross between a straitjacket and a sleeping bag. A flight attendant said detainees restrained in the device are strapped upright in their seats or, if less compliant, lengthwise across a row of seats. Getting “burritoed, I call it,” the person said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigated the asylum-seekers’ complaints and found ICE lacked “sufficient policies” on the Wrap, but how the immigration agency addressed the finding is not publicly known. ICE responded to one lawsuit by saying detainees were not abused; it said another should be dismissed, in part because it was filed in the wrong place. The cases are pending.

Use of the Wrap continues. A video from Seattle’s Boeing Field taken in February shows officers and guards carrying a wrapped migrant into the cabin of a deportation plane.

A choppy video feed shows ICE officers and guards carrying a migrant in a full-body restraint into a GlobalX deportation plane at Seattle’s Boeing Field in February. (Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request)

Watch video ➜

Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.

To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.

Lala and others said no one told them how to evacuate passengers in chains. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.

The flight attendants are not alone in voicing concerns.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bobby Laurie, an airline safety expert and former flight attendant, called the arrangement on ICE Air flights “disturbing.”

“Part of flight attendant training is locating those passengers who can help you in an evacuation,” Laurie told ProPublica. That would have to be the guards. “But if they have to help you,” who is helping the detainees, Laurie wondered.

According to formal ICE Air incident reports reviewed by Capital & Main, the deportation network had at least six accidents requiring evacuations between 2014 and 2019. In at least two cases, both on a carrier called World Atlantic, the evacuations were led not by flight attendants but by untrained guards. Both took longer than 90 seconds, though not by much: two-and-a-half minutes for the first, “less than 2 minutes” for the next. But in a third case, it took seven minutes for 115 shackled detainees to escape a smoke-filled jet.

In one of the World Atlantic incidents, part of the landing gear broke, a wing caught fire and the smell of burning rubber seeped in, according to investigative records obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. In an email to ICE Air officials, an agency employee aboard the plane later wrote that flight attendants made no emergency announcements for passengers. The flight attendants simply got themselves out.

The ICE officer, guards and nurse were “confused on what to do and in which direction to exit during distress,” the officer wrote. He said that other than the flight crew, “no one has received any training on emergency evacuation situations.”

The University of Washington’s collection does not include findings or recommendations from ICE based on what happened, and ICE did not say what they were when asked by ProPublica. The National Transportation Safety Board said that after the accident, World Atlantic launched a campaign to reinspect landing gear, gave employees and contractors further training, and revised its procedures for inspections. The airline did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

An ICE Air flight was evacuated in Alexandria, Louisiana, in April 2018 after a piece of the landing gear failed upon touchdown. All detainees were helped off the plane by guards, according to emails to ICE officials from an agency employee who was on board. (Courtesy of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights)

Other reports obtained by the University of Washington mention fuel spills, loss of cabin air pressure and a “large altercation” on ICE Air after 2019 but no more evacuations, at least as of June 2022. More recent incidents that have been mentioned in the press include an engine fire last summer on World Atlantic and a failed GlobalX air conditioning unit that sent 11 detainees to the hospital with “heat-related injuries.”

The rare guidance some flight attendants said they received on carrying out ICE Air evacuations came during briefings from pilots. What they heard, they said, was chilling and went against their training.

“Just get up and leave,” one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. “That’s it. … Save your life first.”

He understood the instructions to mean that evacuating detainees was not a priority, or even the flight attendants’ responsibility. The detainees were in other people’s hands, or in no one’s.

When asked if they got similar guidance from pilots, three flight attendants said they did not, and one did not answer. Two more, like the first, said pilots gave them instructions that they took to mean they shouldn’t help detainees after opening the exit doors.

“That was the normal briefing,” said a flight attendant from Lala’s class. “‘If a fire occurs in the cabin, if we land on water, don’t check on the immigrants. Just make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off.’”

“It was as if the detainees’ lives were worthless,” said the other.

The day the girl collapsed on Lala’s flight, the pilot turned the plane around and they crossed back into the United States.

The flight landed in Arizona. Paramedics rushed on board and connected the girl to their own oxygen bottle. They began shuttling her off the plane. Her parents tried to join. But the guards stopped the father.

Shocked, Lala approached the ICE officer in charge. “This is not OK!” she yelled. The mom had seizures. The family needed to stay together.

But the officer said it was impossible. Only one parent could go to the hospital. The other, as Lala understood it, “was going to get deported.”

Most of the flight attendants who spoke with ProPublica are now gone from GlobalX. Some left because they found other jobs. Some left even though they hadn’t. Some left because the charter company, as it focused more and more on deportations, shut down the hub in their city.

Lala eventually left because of the little girl and her family, because she couldn’t do the deportation flights anymore. Her GlobalX uniform hung in her closet for a time, a reminder of her career as a flight attendant. Recently, she said, she threw it away.

She never learned whether the little girl lived or died. Lala just watched her mom follow her off the plane, then watched the dad return to his seat.

“I cried after that,” she said. She bought her own ticket home.

by Steve Mills

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.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced recently that it had returned to Nepal a sculpture that had been in its collection for at least a quarter century. Conspicuously left out of the press release: that the sculpture had been a gift from a wealthy Chicago donor.

That omission obscured a simmering controversy about whether Chicago philanthropists Marilynn Alsdorf and her husband, James, both of whom are dead, improperly built their collection of hundreds of South Asian works and why the Art Institute, which houses some of that collection in its Alsdorf Galleries, has been reluctant to return those works to countries with compelling claims for them.

The 12th-century sculpture the museum returned to Nepal is called “Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda” and is about 17.5 inches tall. The Art Institute said it was stolen from the Kathmandu Valley, although it’s unclear when the theft occurred or how or when the Alsdorfs acquired the piece.

It was among more than a dozen pieces identified by ProPublica and Crain’s Chicago Business in 2023 as having claims on them by other countries, including Nepal. At one time, each piece had belonged to the Alsdorfs, the investigation found.

The Art Institute devotes a page online to works that have been removed from its collection, a process museums call deaccessioning. But unlike other pages on its site about artwork or pieces on display, pages for deaccessioned items don’t include ownership information and, in this case, the listing doesn’t mention the Alsdorfs.

Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and a professor of art history who specializes in South Asian and Tibetan art and architecture, said the Art Institute is trying to have it both ways with the Buddha’s repatriation. It is seeking credit for having a provenance division and returning the Buddha, she said, but is not disclosing the involvement of its own donors.

“It looks proactive. They’re getting rid of a problematic object,” said Kerin. “But people will never know the full details of it. They are face-saving the Alsdorfs and their relationship with them and with all donors. They have a lot to lose.”

The Art Institute declined a request for an interview, but in response to written questions, a spokesperson said that it had followed a museum-wide policy on disclosing the history and ownership of deaccessioned objects. Once an object is no longer in the museum’s collections, it does not include the item’s provenance on its website — a practice some art historians criticize.

The investigation by the news organizations focused on an ornate piece called the Taleju necklace, an inscribed gilt-copper work embellished with semiprecious stones and intricate designs. A 17th-century Nepali king offered the necklace to the Hindu goddess Taleju.

Officials with the government in Nepal as well as activists have centered much of their attention on the necklace, which they believe was stolen during a period of political upheaval in the country. It remains prominently featured in the Alsdorf Galleries even though some say it is offensive to display such a sacred work in public.

Activists said that their frustration with the Art Institute applies to other pieces as well.

“It’s not only about the necklace,” said Sanjay Adhikari, a lawyer and secretary of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, an organization that seeks the return of a number of pieces taken from the country. “It’s about many other cultural properties out there. There’s a big frustration with the Art Institute of Chicago.”

The Alsdorfs, who lived in Chicago, were influential in the city’s art world, donating more than $20 million to the Art Institute over the course of their lives. James Alsdorf, the son of a Dutch diplomat and the owner of a business that manufactured glass coffee-making equipment, was chair of the museum’s board from 1975 to 1978. He died in 1990.

Marilynn Alsdorf was a trustee of the museum and president of its Woman’s Board. She exhibited her and her husband’s collection at the museum in 1997, and the Alsdorf Galleries opened in 2008. She died in 2019.

Controversy has surrounded the Alsdorfs’ vast collection for decades. In the 1970s, the Thai government sought the return of a stone carving, and, after a protest outside the museum, it was given back.

In 2002, a California man sued Marilynn Alsdorf to recover a Picasso painting called “Femme en Blanc,” or “Lady in White,” that he alleged had belonged to his grandmother before it was looted by the Nazis during World War II. Marilynn Alsdorf eventually paid the man $6.5 million in exchange for keeping the painting. She said she did nothing wrong in obtaining it.

Alsdorf’s son, Jeffrey, is listed in tax forms as the president of the Alsdorf Foundation, which gave the Art Institute a $40,000 educational grant or contribution as recently as 2023. Asked about the repatriation of the Buddha, he said, “I hope the deal goes through and everyone is happy with it.” Then he hung up on the reporter.

An official at the Embassy of Nepal in Washington said the deal had gone through and that she was present at a ceremony where the Buddha was handed over to Nepali officials. Several museum representatives took part in the ceremony and spoke about continuing to work with the Nepali officials.

The Art Institute spokesperson said in a statement that the museum is “committed to prioritizing provenance research across departments, which includes our Arts of Asia collection.” Over the last five years, the statement continued, the museum has created positions dedicated primarily to issues of provenance, including the role of executive director of provenance. The museum has previously said that many of the pieces the Alsdorfs donated were accepted and vetted under standards in place at the time.

The spokesperson said in the statement that the museum has returned two pieces in the past year from its permanent collection to their countries of origin and, over the past several years, has returned additional works that were on loan. The spokesperson didn’t provide details on those repatriations.

The Buddha, according to the statement, had been a “research priority” for the museum for several years. After obtaining new information about the sculpture, the Art Institute reached out to the government of Nepal in 2024 to begin the process of returning it to the country.

The museum appeared to draw a distinction between the return of the Buddha and the request from Nepal for the Taleju necklace’s return, saying: “The provenance of this object is separate from and not comparable to other objects in our collection.”

The spokesperson said in the statement that the museum had sent a letter to the government of Nepal in May 2022 asking for additional information about the necklace but that it was still waiting for a reply. Nonetheless, the museum said it has an “ongoing dialogue” with Nepali officials and will continue working with them. The embassy official did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the necklace or the museum’s request for additional information.

Adhikari, of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, said the Art Institute was intentionally making the process difficult for Nepal.

“I believe the burden of proof should be on the Art Institute of Chicago to prove that it belongs to them,” he said of the Taleju necklace. “This is a violation of our cultural rights.”

Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the Art Institute’s policy about objects it returns — the Buddha, for example — can make it harder for researchers to track an object’s provenance. It can also cast doubt on other objects in a collection.

“You don’t erase that history to save somebody a little embarrassment,” she said.

by Stephen Engelberg

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.

One thing I’ve learned over more than three decades of work as an investigative editor and reporter: There’s plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. The problem is finding it. Some things that look suspicious at first glance make sense when you understand how a system really works. And that understanding doesn’t come easily.

If you hope to identify serious shortcomings in an agency, ones that add up to many millions or even billions of dollars, you have to immerse yourself in the intricacies of, say, how Medicare pays for prescription drugs. Steeping yourself in such minutiae is inevitably a trial-and-error process in which insights emerge only after journeys down multiple initially promising avenues that lead to dead ends.

That really helps explain some of the well-publicized stumbles of Elon Musk and the team of cybercommandos at the Department of Government Efficiency who have taken a chainsaw approach to spending based on cursory examinations of federal government records. To give but one recent example: No, Social Security is not paying large sums of money to people who are over 150 years old. That finding, trumpeted by Musk, turned out to be a glitch in the Social Security Administration’s recordkeeping, not evidence of massive fraud by a zombie army of superseniors.

Despite the way it is sometimes depicted in movies and television, the work of investigative reporting moves slowly, with hours of boredom punctuated by moments of exhilaration that, sometimes, are undone by further research. It may look like the Internal Revenue Service is spending an outsize amount of money on hiring sophisticated auditors to handle complex returns. But as we pointed out recently, cutting those salaries will likely end up costing the government money in lost tax revenue.

I’ve never seen things work out as smoothly as they did in the pilot episode of the HBO series “The Newsroom,” in which a producer figures out in just a few hours the key corporate and government missteps that contributed to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The producer cracks the case because he has a friend who happens to both be sitting in BP’s control room and willing to relay newsworthy information in real time. I had my own front-row seat to how that very story was actually covered, and it took ProPublica reporters many months to puzzle out what was revealed in just minutes in the episode.

Because perfectly placed acquaintances and random invites to classified Signal chats are rare in real life, ProPublica relies on a more straightforward playbook for finding WFA (waste, fraud and abuse). It bears little resemblance to the approach deployed by Team DOGE against agencies like the Social Security Administration or U.S. Agency for International Development. Pro tip for chainsaw-wielders: You can almost never understand what’s happening inside a complex organization from your initial pass through records and documents.

Rather, that pass raises more questions than it answers about how and why an agency spends staggering sums of taxpayer money. To find the real answers, we look for the people who are most likely to know where the bodies are buried. Sometimes, that search turns up whistleblowers eager to tell us something scandalous. More often, we find sources who help us understand the real day-to-day work of an agency.

Another standard step in the search for WFA is a dive into reports by an agency’s inspector general or the General Accountability Office, an arm of Congress with deep expertise in examining federal agencies. The inspectors are independent, and their reports can be a rich source of reporting avenues to pursue. President Donald Trump complicated any prospects DOGE had of using this knowledge by firing 17 inspectors general who were responsible for some of the biggest budgets in the federal government, including the Pentagon and Social Security Administration.

As for the GAO, the head of the organization told Congress that his analysts have had little contact with DOGE. Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general, said the GAO has a list of reforms that could save the federal government $200 billion without laying off massive numbers of federal workers. Dodaro said staff cuts were an inefficient way to cut the budget since payroll costs are less than 10% of total spending.

One thing we often try to do when investigating possible government waste or malfeasance is obtain massive databases. DOGE seems to have chosen that route as its main means of finding savings, and it can work.

We are of course hampered by not having the president’s imprimatur. Our requests are shuffled off to Freedom of Information Act officers and come back months later, if we’re lucky.

Still, we have found some fascinating things buried in government records.

Years ago, we persuaded the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to release the names of the doctors prescribing drugs through the massive Medicare program that provides medications to seniors. It took us a while to understand what we were looking at, a process that was helped along by interviews with experts inside and outside of government.

Sorting through the tables and tables of data, we noticed that some doctors seemed to be writing impossibly large numbers of prescriptions. One Florida doctor had seemingly signed off on more than $4 million in medications, up from $282,000 the previous year. No one from Medicare had called to ask her about that; she only stumbled upon the fraud years later because of a mishap with the mail. (Two workers in her clinic later pleaded guilty to federal health care fraud and identity theft.) As we looked through the list of the most prolific prescribers, we confirmed that this type of prescription fraud was widespread. Medicare was not checking its own records for signs of abuse, missing chances to catch doctors or others who were robbing the government.

It was the quintessential case of WFA, combining at once waste, fraud, abuse and, yes, massive government inefficiency.

Things don’t always go as smoothly. Reporters often receive startling tips or notice surprising numbers in records and then learn there are perfectly clear explanations for what appeared shocking at first glance

The former head of U.S. Agency for Global Media, Amanda Bennett, described a recent instance of this phenomenon. The USAGM is responsible for overseas broadcasts like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Bennett resigned from her post soon after Trump was inaugurated.

Kari Lake, a reporter-turned-politician who Trump named as a special adviser to the agency, posted a video soon after arriving in which she pronounced herself “horrified” by the USAGM’s “shiny, brand-new beautiful skyscraper building that is costing you, the taxpayer, a fortune.”

Lake tweeted that the new building was absurdly luxurious, with Italian marble, leather furnishings and even a few waterfalls.

But as Bennett pointed out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lake’s account of WFA was far from complete.

Bennett said her agency was told in December 2020 that it would have to leave its FDR-era building by 2028. Bennett and her team began looking for a new office at precisely the right moment — commercial landlords in D.C. and elsewhere were essentially giving away downtown offices. The deal the agency negotiated included three years of free rent and $27 million in cash incentives from the building’s owner that could be used to upgrade the agency’s aging equipment. The furniture and Italian marble were donated by the previous tenant, a law firm, saving the government an additional $10 million. The annual rent for USAGM dropped from nearly $24 million to less than $16 million a year. Bennett said she left Lake a memo detailing the savings, which she estimated as $150 million over the life of the lease.

Lake nonetheless put out a press release that excoriated the agency for “obscene over-spending including a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-dollar lease for a Pennsylvania Avenue high-rise.”

“Waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant in this agency,” Lake wrote, asserting that USAGM had been penetrated by “spies, terrorist sympathizers and/or supporters” and that it had engaged in “eye popping self-dealing.”

She declared the agency “not salvageable” and announced a plan to end its operations immediately. Days later, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked that action. The case is pending.

If we were reporting out a story about possible excessive spending at the USAGM, I’m sure we would have found Lake’s allegations about its purportedly lavish quarters intriguing. But if we came across Bennett’s memo and it stood up to scrutiny, I would have spiked the story. Or maybe turned it into a piece about using misinformation to justify massive cuts at an agency that Trump has openly disparaged.

by Eric Umansky

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

Lawmakers and advocates have slammed New York City Mayor Eric Adams and called for changes in the wake of ProPublica’s investigation into a secretive, problematic police unit led by allies of the mayor.

ProPublica found that the mayor championed the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team despite a pattern of aggressive and often abusive policing flagged by department officials. An officer in the unit killed a motorcyclist after swerving his police car into him. A team commander punched and kicked a driver in the head. And another commander shoved a man into a car window after the man complained about being stopped for no apparent reason.

Two of the unit’s founders, who are close to the mayor, have their own problematic records.

One, Chief of Department John Chell, once shot a man in the back, killing him. While Chell argued he fired by accident, a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. The jury awarded the man’s family $2.5 million dollars. Chell did not respond to requests for comment.

The other CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, has been repeatedly found by the city’s police oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, to have engaged in misconduct, including pointing a gun at a motorcyclist and threatening to kill him. Daughtry was docked 10 vacation days for that. Daughtry did not respond to requests for comment. Adams recently made him deputy mayor for public safety.

State Sen. Jessica Ramos told ProPublica that Adams’ “reliance on cronyism makes New York City less safe.” She added, “People like Chell and Daughtry should have never been trusted with the authority they were given — and wouldn’t have been by a serious mayor. If we’re going to have a professional police department and real community policing, the rot needs to be cut out.”

Local civil rights organizations, meanwhile, demanded that the Community Response Team be shuttered. “It’s time to dismantle this unit,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union in a statement.

“The CRT is a dangerous unit, and ProPublica’s reporting shows it operates without accountability under the protection of a corrupt and compromised mayor,” said civil rights group LatinoJustice. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch “should disband this unit.”

The Community Response Team was started in the early days of Adams’ administration. It focused on so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in groups, which Adams had identified as a priority. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” Chell told a local TV station in 2023.

But Tisch may be reducing the role of the CRT. At a recent City Council hearing — held on the day ProPublica’s story published — the commissioner described how she is changing the NYPD’s approach to the quality-of-life issues that have long been the CRT’s focus.

Tisch said the department is shifting away from using centralized units such as CRT for these problems and moving instead to rely on local officers at precinct houses.

“Over the past several years, quality-of-life enforcement at the NYPD has been led by a unit called CRT,” Tisch said. “We are proposing to create a quality-of-life division at the NYPD so that we can make precinct commanders and the resources that they control responsible for quality-of-life complaints.”

Asked about the unit and the commissioner’s comments at a recent mayoral press conference, Adams offered support for the team.

“CRT is here,” the mayor said. “I support all my units. And if they don’t all stand up and do the job the way they’re supposed to do, those who don’t will be held accountable.”

Over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints alleging improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Another NYPD team with a similar size and mandate has had about half as many complaints.

The scrutiny of the CRT will almost certainly continue. One of the police department’s oversight agencies, the office of the inspector general for the NYPD, has been digging into the unit. The watchdog put out a report last fall criticizing the CRT’s “lack of public transparency” and “absence of clear rules.” A spokesperson said that the unit is still under investigation.

The role of the CRT was not the only reform related to ProPublica’s reporting that Tisch discussed in her recent testimony. The commissioner also said the NYPD has stopped its policy of throwing out misconduct cases without looking at the evidence. ProPublica investigated that practice last fall and found that the department ended hundreds of cases of alleged misconduct simply because it had received the referrals from civilian investigators within three months of a deadline for discipline.

The cases had already been investigated and substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board and were sent to the NYPD for disciplinary action. In one case, an officer punched a man in the groin, the oversight agency found. In another, officers tackled a young man and then wrongly stopped and searched him.

An NYPD spokesperson said the department has already begun processing such cases again.

by Jessica Lussenhop, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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.

Eleven days after 18-year-old Jesse Mickelson was gunned down in a South Minneapolis alley, homicide detectives returned to the home where Mickelson had been playing football moments before his murder. The detectives had good news to share, so Mickelson’s family and friends squeezed around the dining room table to hear it.

“We have made an arrest,” said Sgt. Robert Dale, the lead investigator. (Via “The First 48”)

Watch video ➜

“Yes,” someone said. “Thank you.”

Dale and his partner, Sgt. Christopher Gaiters, told the family they had arrested a suspect, a man witnesses said they saw firing from the back seat of a white Dodge Intrepid as it rolled down the alley. His name was Edgar Barrientos-Quintana, and the police had the 25-year-old in custody.

As the family members hugged one another and cried, Mickelson’s father stuck his hand out to Gaiters, then wrapped the detective in a hug.

“Thanks a lot, man,” he said quietly. “Thanks a lot.”

The scene in the grieving family’s dining room was captured in October 2008 by cameras for the A&E true crime reality television series “The First 48.” The premise of the show, as explained by a deep-voiced narrator, is that homicide detectives’ “chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.” In each episode of the program, which debuted in 2004 and is currently in its 27th season, camera crews follow along with police as they work to beat a clock that counts down in the corner of the screen.

The episode, titled “Drive-By,” tracked the detectives from the moment Mickelson’s family dialed 911 to the arrest of Barrientos-Quintana. Under moody, dark music punctuated by dramatic sound effects, Dale and Gaiters determined that Mickelson, a lanky high school senior with icy blue eyes, was “a pretty good kid” and the unintentional victim of a gang-related drive-by shooting. Based on interviews with witnesses, their faces blurred and voices distorted for TV, the detectives pieced together that “Smokey,” a nickname for Barrientos-Quintana recorded in a police database, was the shooter.

“Looks like we have our guy,” Gaiters says to the camera. (Via “The First 48”)

Watch video ➜

The episode aired in April 2009, about a month before Barrientos-Quintana went to trial.

In court, the case against Barrientos-Quintana that Hennepin County prosecutors presented built on the clean, conclusive narrative of the episode. Witnesses from rival gang cliques testified they either were in the car with Barrientos-Quintana when the crime occurred or saw him shooting at them.

The prosecutors also told jurors that Barrientos-Quintana’s alibi, that he’d been with his girlfriend at a grocery store across town before the murder, still allowed him time to get to the crime scene.

After a jury found Barrientos-Quintana guilty, reruns of the episode ended with a title card that read, “Edgar ‘Smokey’ Barrientos was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life without parole.”

Sixteen years later, that tidy narrative unraveled. Last year, the Minnesota attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit released a 180-page report concluding that Barrientos-Quintana's conviction “lacks integrity” and ought to be vacated. In November, Barrientos-Quintana — who always maintained his innocence and was never linked to the crime by any physical evidence — walked out of prison.

At a press conference led by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who made the decision to dismiss the charges, Barrientos-Quintana shifted back and forth on his feet and smiled nervously, the grey in his beard a notable difference from his appearance in “The First 48” episode.

“Happy to be out here,” was all that he offered to the reporters asking how he felt. “It’s the best week. And more to come.” Barrientos-Quintana, through his lawyers, declined an interview request.

Edgar Barrientos-Quintana served nearly 16 years in prison for a murder in Minneapolis before he was exonerated. (Amy Anderson Photography/Courtesy of the Great North Innocence Project)

The Conviction Review Unit report that ultimately convinced both Moriarty’s office and a judge that Barrientos-Quintana should be freed outlined dozens of issues with the investigation and trial, many of them hallmarks of wrongful convictions. Long, coercive interrogations. Improper use of lineup photos.

Both the report and the judge’s order also highlighted one unique issue: the role of “The First 48.”

“In the episode, events happened out of order, and Sgts. Dale and Gaiters staged scenes for the producers that were not a part of the investigation,” wrote Judge John R. McBride. “What is more, the episode failed to include other, actual portions of the investigation, painting a wholly inaccurate picture of how the MPD investigation unfolded.”

Conviction Review Unit attorneys concluded that police and prosecutors became locked into a narrative they did not deviate from. In essence, the unit alleged, instead of the case shaping the show, the show shaped the case.

“They said, ‘We got the right guy. We got him,’ before they knew or really looked into the existence of Edgar’s alibi,” said Anna McGinn, an attorney for the Great North Innocence Project who represented Barrientos-Quintana. “It’s on TV. I mean, that’s problematic.”

Barrientos-Quintana’s exoneration may be the first in the country related to the “The First 48,” but it is not the first time the program has found itself embroiled in controversy, though not necessarily because of its conduct. In 2010, for instance, “The First 48” was filming when a Detroit police SWAT-style team raided an apartment and an officer shot and killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. In Miami, a man featured on the show as the prime suspect in a 2009 double murder sat in jail for 19 months before the police finally determined he wasn’t responsible. In both cases, subsequent lawsuits accused the police of shoddy investigations and hasty decision-making in the service of creating good TV. Both cases ended in settlements — $8.25 million in Detroit — paid out by the cities, not “The First 48.”

“No one cared that my boy was killed, and the cops just rushed it for a damn show,” the father of one of the double murder victims told the Miami New Times.

Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys and city officials across the country have bemoaned their police departments’ decision to allow the show into active crime scenes to film officers investigating sensitive homicide cases. It’s even been raised as an issue by an attorney who represents a death row inmate in Tennessee.

“I wish that the city would never contract with ‘The First 48,’” remarked one New Orleans judge in 2015 after the show was accused by defense lawyers of lying about deleting raw footage of a triple murder investigation. “I hope in the future they would think through that.”

“The First 48,” like similar programs such as “Cops” and “Live PD,” is sometimes derided as “copaganda,” pro-law-enforcement entertainment that poses as documentary. But it’s popular enough that A&E frequently programs hours of reruns back to back. Fans discuss favorite episodes on a busy, dedicated Reddit channel.

While other police reality shows have also received negative attention and have been canceled after high-profile incidents, “The First 48” has largely avoided broader public scrutiny. Over the past two decades, the cities of Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans; Detroit; and Miami have ended their relationships with “The First 48” after the show’s presence snarled prosecutions or otherwise created problems.

Those severed partnerships seem to have done little to slow production of the show. Kirkstall Road Enterprises, the subsidiary of ITV that produces the show, simply moved on; the most recently released episodes were filmed in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Mobile, Alabama, although Mobile did not renew its contract in 2023 after complaints from defense attorneys.

Neither ITV nor ITV America responded to numerous requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. A spokesperson for A&E Network declined to comment.

Moriarty was Minnesota’s chief public defender the last time she tangled with “The First 48” on behalf of clients in 2016, and she is still dealing with fallout from the show in her first term as Hennepin County attorney.

“They are allowed to continue to do probably a great deal of damage without being discovered, without really having any consequences,” said Moriarty. “Hopefully, places where this is happening, the city, city council, mayor, whatever, could put a stop to it, and cities where it isn’t happening, they could be prepared when ‘First 48’ comes to their town.”

Photos of Jesse Mickelson are on display in his sister’s apartment. (Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica) “A False Narrative”

When Assistant Attorney General Carrie Sperling, the director of the Minnesota Conviction Review Unit, began her reinvestigation of the Barrientos-Quintana conviction, one of the first things she did was watch the episode of “The First 48” that featured his case. She was immediately alarmed.

“It’s a false narrative,” she said. “Investigators are just misrepresenting details about the case on TV.”

Barrientos-Quintana began reaching out for help with his conviction almost as soon as he got to prison. In 2011, he became one of a handful of inmates whose cases were accepted for review by the Great North Innocence Project, a nonprofit that investigates possible wrongful convictions in Minnesota and the Dakotas.

But his appeals went nowhere and, according to McGinn, the case was essentially dormant until the Minnesota attorney general’s office launched its Conviction Review Unit in 2021. Because the unit operates within a state law enforcement agency, its investigators had access to material Barrientos-Quintana’s lawyers said they never saw.

Sperling wanted to understand why detectives zeroed in on Barrientos-Quintana and left other potential suspects to the side. In Gaiters and Dale’s theory of the crime, Barrientos-Quintana was a member of the Sureños 13 gang and had recently gotten into a fight with a member of a rival clique called South Side Raza. The leader of that clique, nicknamed Puppet, lived across the alley from Mickelson’s house and may also have been seeing the same girl as Barrientos-Quintana.

Early on in the investigation, a student at Mickelson’s high school told police she’d heard that the shooter was named “either Smokey or Sharky.” Dale and Gaiters identified a 16-year-old boy known as Sharky, but for reasons the Conviction Review Unit report said are “not clear,” detectives decided that Sharky was an accomplice, while Barrientos-Quintana, or Smokey, was the shooter.

Assistant Attorney General Carrie Sperling, the director of the Minnesota Conviction Review Unit, reinvestigated the Barrientos-Quintana conviction. (Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica)

In the course of listening to hours of Gaiters and Dale’s original interviews with witnesses, Sperling was struck by how differently “The First 48” portrayed those conversations. According to the Conviction Review Unit report, about a half-dozen witnesses, some of them Mickelson’s friends and family and some from Puppet’s side of the alley, all agreed on one thing: The shooter was bald, “shiny bald” even. That fact is never mentioned in the episode, and footage of Barrientos-Quintana’s arrest and interrogation shows him with a full head of black hair.

“They show the video footage of Edgar being arrested at work, and he’s clearly not bald,” said McGinn. “That is an intentional omission, I believe, and that’s very misleading.”

At the time Mickelson was shot and killed, Barrientos-Quintana had an arrest record and had convictions for driving offenses and misdemeanor property damage, according to court records. He’d been affiliated with the Sureños 13 gang, but he told detectives he’d left that life behind and was working at a computer warehouse.

More importantly, perhaps, he told police he was with his girlfriend in a suburb on the other side of town the day of the shooting. In “The First 48,” Dale makes a phone call to a “family friend” of Barrientos-Quintana’s, a conversation that Dale implies has blown the alibi apart, leaving a four-hour window when Barrientos-Quintana could have committed the murder.

“It’s not looking so good for Smokey,” Dale says to the camera. (Via “The First 48”)

Watch video ➜

In reality, the 15-year-old girl Barrientos-Quintana was with on the day of the shooting was being questioned at the same time in a separate room. She told detectives repeatedly that Barrientos-Quintana had been with her the whole day at her home. When investigators suggested the pair couldn’t have spent the entire day indoors, the girl offered that at one point they’d left to go to the grocery store but had come straight back.

Toward the end of the episode, a distraught Barrientos-Quintana tells Dale, “Right now, I just want to get myself a lawyer.” In the episode, the interrogation stops, as if Barrientos-Quintana’s constitutional right to an attorney was immediately honored. But according to the Conviction Review Unit report, Gaiters and Dale ignored his requests for a lawyer and, at one point, a third officer told Barrientos-Quintana that the detectives would not listen to him if he kept asking for representation.

“The First 48” cameras were long gone when, months later, Gaiters and Dale obtained security camera footage of Barrientos-Quintana and the girl at the grocery store. The footage shows the pair together, smiling and walking toward the store’s exit, just before 6:20 p.m. The shooting took place roughly 33 minutes later and about 14 miles away, creating a narrow window of time for Barrientos-Quintana to part ways with the girl, change clothes and meet up with his supposed accomplices before witnesses first spotted the Dodge Intrepid behind the Mickelson home.

Security video from a grocery store showed Barrientos-Quintana shortly before Jesse Mickelson was shot and killed. (Obtained from the Great North Innocence Project by ProPublica)

“The First 48” episode about the case aired about two months after this new piece of evidence came to light. There is no mention of it in the program.

The security footage was far from prosecutors’ only challenge heading into the May 2009 trial. In preparation, according to the Conviction Review Unit report, prosecutors Susan Crumb and Hilary Caligiuri learned that Dale had been “playacting for a reality TV crew” and the defense might be able to use that revelation to undermine the testimony of Dale or Gaiters.

In addition, prosecutors told their supervisors in a memo that the show had edited footage of the investigation out of chronological order, generating an inaccurate depiction of what happened. As a result, only Gaiters testified.

Because the episode aired before trial and a key witness watched it, Crumb and Caligiuri scuttled plans to ask him to identify Barrientos-Quintana in court. All of this was revealed in the memo Caligiuri and Crumb wrote to their supervisors immediately following the trial to express their concerns about the city working with “The First 48,” the contents of which were never shared with Barrientos-Quintana’s defense attorneys.

Caligiuri, who is now a judge, is precluded from speaking to the press by the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct, according to a court spokesperson. Crumb, in an email response to questions from ProPublica, took issue with many of the characterizations in the Conviction Review Unit report but agreed that “The First 48” had been a problem.

She said the producers’ scripting for Dale was “innocuous” but could have caused problems for prosecutors in cross-examination. And she said a young witness became so afraid after seeing clips of the episode that he ran away from home and, even after police arrested him, refused to testify for prosecutors.

“Contrary to the CRU’s assertion, Barrientos-Quintana was not wrongfully convicted, as the Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed and as an unbiased review of the file and trial record would confirm,” Crumb, who is retired, said in the email.

“The filming of the First 48 created problems the defense used to try to sow doubt regarding the Defendant’s guilt,” she added. “If there was any ‘hindrance to the administration of justice’ in this case, it was only to the detriment of the prosecution, not the defense.”

At trial, Gaiters testified that when he re-created the route from the grocery store to the crime scene, it took 28 minutes, enough time for Barrientos-Quintana to commit the shooting with just minutes to spare. But that did not account for how the girl he was with got home, nor did it square with the claim by Sharky, who was by now one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses, that after he met up with Barrientos-Quintana in a park near Mickelson’s home, they “cruised around,” adding several minutes to the timeline. A private investigator hired by the defense testified that his re-creation of the route took him 33 minutes.

The man identified as Sharky could not be reached for comment.

Dale, who retired from the Minneapolis Police Department in 2023, declined to comment. Gaiters rose through the ranks of the department to become assistant chief of community trust. Through a department spokesperson, Gaiters declined to comment.

The Police Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions other than to confirm that it ended its relationship with “The First 48” in 2016. But ahead of Barrientos-Quintana’s release, Chief Brian O’Hara said publicly he supported Dale and Gaiters’ original investigation and was “concerned that a convicted killer will be set free based only upon a reinterpretation of old evidence rather than the existence of any new facts.”

The jury struggled to come to a verdict, at one point close to deadlocking with three members unwilling to convict, according to the Conviction Review Unit report. But after being allowed to review Sharky’s testimony, they found Barrientos-Quintana guilty. He was sentenced to life without parole.

In his order vacating the conviction, McBride wrote that the “colossal failures” and “ineptitude” of Barrientos-Quintana’s original lawyers were — on their own — grounds for a new trial. The Conviction Review Unit report also criticized his lawyers, saying they repeatedly failed to challenge many aspects of the prosecution’s case as well as Gaiters’ testimony.

Messages left for Barrientos-Quintana’s four pretrial and trial attorneys were not returned. According to the Conviction Review Unit report, in the years following the trial, one of the lawyers was disbarred, a second had his law license suspended for unethical behavior and a third, who dropped out of the case just before trial, was convicted of swindling a client. The fourth lawyer, the report said, has a clean disciplinary record but had passed the Minnesota bar just a month before trial.

According to McGinn, being featured on “The First 48” gave Barrientos-Quintana an added — and unwelcome — notoriety in prison. She said that although he is now free, he is distraught that, until recently, “The First 48” episode was still available in reruns on A&E and other channels, and was available for streaming.

“There’s been no statement that says, ‘Hey, we retract this,’ or ‘This is an inaccurate depiction of what actually happened that night that Jesse was killed,’” said McGinn.

A&E said last week that the episode is not currently available.

Journalism or Entertainment?

Kirkstall Road Enterprises, which was once known as Granada Entertainment USA and Granada America, enters into agreements with police departments sometimes without the knowledge or approval of other departments in city government. That’s one reason prosecutors and other officials have felt blindsided by the problems “The First 48” has caused them.

After 7-year-old Stanley-Jones was shot and killed by police in 2010 as “The First 48” cameras rolled, then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing said he was shocked to find out that his chief of police had agreed to embed a reality television crew with officers.

“That’s the end of that,” he reportedly told the chief before banning the practice.

Minneapolis police signed agreements to allow the program to film from 2007 to 2009 and then signed a new deal with the program in 2014. But the city ended its relationship with the show two years later, after legal fighting over the show’s raw footage delayed court proceedings and then-Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman slammed the program.

“‘The First 48’ is an entertainment device. It’s not a device seeking truth or justice,” Freeman said at the time. “It gets in the way of us doing our job, the defense doing their job. We wish the police would never have signed up for this.”

Freeman, since retired, did not respond to requests for comment.

Copies of contracts between police departments and Kirkstall Road Enterprises reviewed by ProPublica give producers broad access to investigations so long as they do not interfere with officers’ work. They also have creative control over the final product, though departments are allowed to review an episode before it airs. Police departments can request changes, but producers are not obligated to make them.

The contracts also show that Kirkstall Road Enterprises does not provide departments with any monetary compensation. Before ending its relationship with the show after nine years, the chief of the Miami police requested that the production company donate $10,000 for every Miami episode to the department’s charitable youth athletic league in order to continue filming. The show did not accept those terms.

There are benefits to law enforcement, like positive publicity and recruitment potential. Alabama police officials in Birmingham and Mobile said they believed the show helped them solve more murders.

After New Orleans ended its contract with the show, the head of the police union, the Police Association of New Orleans, told a reporter, “At a time when community relations are so fragile, locally and nationally, it was of enormous benefit to everyone to have an avenue open for the public to see what we do and how we do it.”

Although the New Orleans police ended their relationship with “The First 48” in 2016, they’re now participating in a new A&E program called “Homicide Squad New Orleans,” which began airing episodes this year.

Officers featured on “The First 48” also sometimes enjoy a degree of local celebrity. One Dallas detective became so well known that a suspect recognized him as soon as he walked into an interrogation room. A detective in Memphis, according to court filings, carried photos of herself to sign for fans of the program. Fan accounts on Instagram wish their favorite detectives happy birthday and track their promotions.

The biggest issue with the show for defense attorneys and prosecutors is access to the raw footage, especially in the days before body-worn cameras — footage that may not make the ultimate “The First 48” episode but could capture important conversations and some of the earliest images of the crime scene.

“It’s incredibly important for prosecutors and defense lawyers to have video of anything that pertains to the scene or witnesses,” said Moriarty.

But according to court documents, Kirkstall Road Enterprises instructs all of its field producers — employees “who act as producer, cameraman and sound technician all rolled into one,” according to an affidavit provided by the show’s senior executive producer — never to share raw footage with law enforcement. It is also the show’s practice to decline all subpoenas for footage using First Amendment arguments, citing state shield laws that protect journalists from turning over their reporting material. Prosecutors and defense lawyers have struggled to convince judges that the needs of the state or the defendants override those protections. The show also claims it is routine practice to destroy all raw footage after a completed episode is delivered to A&E.

But reporters and others say it’s important to protect their work from being seized by police and prosecutors, as well as to maintain their credibility and independence. In short, they don’t want to become, or even be seen as, arms of government. But Moriarty said she believes that, by embedding with police during an active investigation, “The First 48” occupies a gray area.

In 2016, when Freeman, the former Hennepin county attorney, was trying to get footage from “The First 48” in ongoing cases, he said that he found the show’s refusal to provide it problematic.

“If ‘The First 48’ tries to pull the mantle of the First Amendment around this and be sanctimonious — you know something, defendants have rights,” he said at the time. “And people want the truth.”

Later that year, the contract between “The First 48” and the city of Minneapolis expired and was not renewed. A spokesperson for the Minneapolis Police Department confirmed the end of the relationship and added that “MPD has transitioned away from formal contractual agreements with media partners and now engages with them on a case-by-case basis.”

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who dismissed the case against Barrientos-Quintana, is critical of how “The First 48” affects police investigations. (Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica) A Pivotal Scene

Looking back on the “The First 48” episode now, the Conviction Review Unit’s Sperling said one part bothers her most: the oddly performative scene with Mickelson’s family jammed around the dining room table with Gaiters and Dale.

Tina Rosebear, Mickelson’s 44-year-old half-sister, was present the night of the detectives’ visit, though she barely registered that a camera crew was filming; she was still in shock over the murder.

Rosebear, a personal care assistant and gas station clerk, took on a lot of responsibility in her family at an early age. She was more than an older sister to Mickelson, becoming his primary caregiver when he was 8 years old.

“I know that’s your son,” she remembers telling their mother when Mickelson died, “but that’s my baby.”

Before “The First 48” became more widely available, Rosebear kept multiple copies of the episode on DVD, labeled in Sharpie with the date of his death. She’s watched the episode dozens of times. Although she acknowledges some might find it strange, she said she gets a sense of comfort seeing the blurred shots of her brother’s body — the footage captured one of the last times she saw him in his “human form,” as she puts it, before he was zipped in a body bag and later reduced to the box of ashes she keeps on her bookshelf.

But Rosebear said it only took until Page 40 of the Conviction Review Unit report for her to realize that she and her family had been misled by the police — and also by “The First 48.”

“I feel like it was all done for the TV show,” she said. “But that was unfair to him, and that was unfair to us.”

Mickelson’s half-sister, Tina Rosebear, apologized to Barrientos-Quintana after he was freed and is concerned about the role “The First 48” played in the police investigation. “If their cameras behind the detectives in the investigations are going to hinder the rightful convictions,” she said, “then I don’t think they should be able to.” (Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica)

Rosebear attended the press conference announcing Barrientos-Quintana’s release. She’d seen him in court at his trial, but that was their first real meeting. She apologized to him on behalf of her family and gave him a hug.

“He gets to be with his family now, and now we can try to continue to heal with the loss of my brother now that everything was just ripped back open,” she told reporters.

The Conviction Review Unit report not only cleared Barrientos-Quintana, but it contained information that could theoretically point to the real gunman. But Rosebear isn’t sure she could handle going through the whole process again — another arrest, another trial.

Once a fan of “The First 48,” Rosebear said she now hopes that the program is shut down.

“Could they have did a better job if the TV show wasn’t involved? Probably,” she said. “Nobody knows now. Because it’s too late.”

Mariam Elba contributed research. Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu.

by Jessica Lussenhop

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 the A&E true crime reality television show “The First 48” comes to town, the police and sheriff’s departments that work with it do not receive financial compensation from the show. The benefits are more intangible: a chance to showcase and celebrate the work of a department’s officers, the opportunity to improve their image in the eyes of the public, and some acknowledgement for victims who might be overlooked by the media.

But the show’s two-decade history of filming in cities across the U.S. has also left a complicated trail of problems and municipal regret, as ProPublica has reported. Detectives have admitted that they’ve acted out scenes as the cameras rolled. Key developments in the investigations have sometimes not been shown or mentioned. Episodes sometimes aired before defendants went to trial, publicly disclosing information that potential jury members and witnesses would normally never hear in court.

What’s more, many law enforcement and legal experts wonder whether the mere presence of cameras changes how the police behave, twisting the truth for the sole purpose of a more engaging narrative.

“I don’t think that anyone would deny that having a camera when you’re doing a ride-along like that affects behavior,” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said in 2010, after a 7-year-old girl was shot and killed during a Detroit police SWAT-style raid “The First 48” was filming. “I think it’s not a good practice.”

Controversies like the one in Detroit have prompted at least a half dozen cities to cancel their contracts or end their relationships with “The First 48.” Dallas; Memphis, Tennessee; Mobile, Alabama; Minneapolis; and New Orleans, as well as other cities, have stopped working with the show, with some municipal officials heaping criticism on the program as they severed ties with it.

The show has not been found to have engaged in any misconduct.

“I don’t want an investigator spending even a minute essentially working for the camera instead of elements of the case,” Miami police Chief Jorge Colina said in 2018, five years after the city ended its relationship with the program. “It’s not worth the tradeoff.”

Representatives from Kirkstall Road Enterprises, ITV America and ITV, the companies that produce the program, did not respond to requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. A&E, the television network that airs “The First 48,” declined to comment through a spokesperson.

The show’s most recent seasons were filmed in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Mobile.

Once problems arise, these once enthusiastic and mutually beneficial partnerships between the police and reality television can turn into messy breakups. It can also take time for the problems involving “The First 48” to come to light, sometimes years after the episodes have aired and only after cases have wound their way through the courts.

Here’s how that has played out in three cities.

Mobile

In 2022, in a courthouse on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, a judge was trying to help defense attorneys determine if there were any fans of “The First 48” in the jury pool. The defendant in the case had been featured on an episode of the show that aired before his trial, and attorney Chase Dearman was concerned fans would be predisposed to find his client guilty.

“It is an extremely popular show, especially in the South,” Dearman said in an interview.

The judge instructed the assembled prospective jurors to stand if they were regular viewers of shows like “60 Minutes,” “20/20,” and “True Crimes.” Three jurors, then two, then two jurors again stood, respectively. Then he mentioned “The First 48.” Fourteen potential jurors rose to their feet.

“This is a more popular show. Okay,” the judge said, according to a transcript of the trial.

Dearman said that the show’s disclaimer, that “all suspects shown are presumed innocent until proven guilty,” is not enough to contend with human biases. “What do you think those jurors are going to do when they go home at night?” Dearman said. “They’re going to look it up and watch it.”

Dearman’s client was acquitted after two mistrials.

Mobile defense attorney Domingo Soto was also concerned when one of his clients was shown on the show before trial. “The cops decided a version of the truth from the very beginning and sold it to ‘First 48’ and more importantly sold it to themselves,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Mobile Police Department declined to comment on its involvement with “The First 48” as well as on the cases that involved the men whom Dearman and Soto represented.

In 2023, the city did not renew its contract with “The First 48.” James Barber, a former police chief and former city public safety director in Mobile and now chief of staff to the mayor, said the show helped shine a positive light on the “dedication and professionalism of our homicide investigators.”

“However, our most important focus is always public safety, and we saw that pre-trial coverage of criminal cases had led to litigation and legal challenges in other jurisdictions,” Barber said in a statement. “We did not want our work with any media partner to impact any criminal matter or create legal issues for the city.”

Dallas

Sometimes small narrative touches to “The First 48” episodes, perhaps inconsequential to the viewer, have major repercussions in real life. In 2013, a man named Arking Jones was interviewed by Dallas police about the murder of a suspected drug dealer, an investigation captured in the episode “Safe House.”

Jones told ProPublica that he had no idea he was being taped for the show and did not sign a consent form to appear on the program. He said he only learned he had been on “The First 48” after the episode had aired. Despite the show’s efforts to hide his identity by blurring his face and altering his voice, Jones said it was obvious to people who knew him that he was in the episode.

“I start getting all type of threats. They start coming by my mother’s house,” Jones said.

According to Jones, the worst part was that the episode was edited in a way to suggest he had become a police informant; Jones denied that he spoke with police voluntarily or that he was an informant. The threats to his life got so bad, he said, that he had to stop working. Court records show that Dallas police filed retaliation charges against several people for allegedly making threats to Jones and his family. Those charges never resulted in convictions, according to Jones.

In 2015, Jones was shot several times at a barber shop in an attack that also injured a bystander. He was hit in the chest and hip, and he said he now has a metal rod in his thigh. The man who shot Jones pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in retaliation and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

According to Dallas police reports, the shooting was motivated by Jones’ appearance on “The First 48.” Jones filed a lawsuit against Kirkstall Road Enterprises, claiming it acted negligently. In its response, attorneys for the show implied that Jones’ criminal history could have been the root cause of the attack and that his “sole claim of negligence is barred by the First Amendment.”

A judge dismissed the case and an appeals court upheld that decision.

“If we were to place the burden to prevent the kind of unforeseeable injury that befell Jones in this case on the media, the result would be a significant infringement on its Constitutional protections when reporting matters of public interest,” the appeals court wrote.

A&E removed Jones’ episode from its catalog. However, in the decade since the shooting, Jones said that his reputation has never recovered. He said he’s been attacked and robbed and, last year, his truck was shot up. He sent photos of the truck to a ProPublica reporter.

“Y’all looking at it just for good TV. You know, you’re not caring about innocent lives,” Jones said of the show. “My life is in a situation like, I’m dead. That’s how I see it. I’m dead. Because I can’t live life.”

The Dallas Police Department declined to comment. In 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that bans reality television shows from partnering with law enforcement. The law was named after Javier Ambler II, a Texas man who died after a high-speed chase and violent arrest, captured by a camera crew for “Live PD,” another A&E police reality series. “Live PD” was canceled in 2020.

Memphis

The immediate aftermath of one of the worst mass killings in Memphis history was captured by producers for “The First 48” for an episode named “Lester Street.” On March 3, 2008, police discovered the bodies of four adults and two children in a small brick house. Three other children survived the attack with serious injuries.

The investigation converged on Jessie Dotson, the brother of one of the victims, who confessed to detectives on camera that he committed the murders after a drunken fight. The episode aired before his trial, a concern District Attorney General Bill Gibbons raised in a letter to the police chief.

“Several judges have expressed to prosecutors in this office their concern that events of a pending criminal case are edited, taken out of sequence, and then aired nationally,” Gibbons wrote. “It is my hope that you will not renew the Memphis Police Department’s contract with ‘The First 48’ — a show that clearly airs potential evidence and information on pending criminal cases.”

The judge in the case did not allow the jury to watch edited footage of Dotson’s confession on “The First 48” because representatives of the show said they had already destroyed the raw footage. Dotson was convicted and sentenced to death. The city of Memphis ended its relationship with “The First 48” in 2008.

But the show has cast a long shadow over the case. In January 2024, Kelley Henry, a federal public defender representing Dotson, filed an appeal pointing out dozens of issues with the original investigation, among them that Dotson, who has “neurocognitive disorders,” was pressured into confessing, though he recanted shortly afterwards. She said that she believes “The First 48” influenced detectives to exert that pressure before the FBI was about to take over the case and that Dotson is innocent.

The Memphis Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. Dotson’s appeal is pending.

“It just really crystallized for me, just how dangerous these folks are and the pressure that they put on the cities and the prosecutors and the police departments to come up with a story,” Henry said. “It’s not necessarily that they’re malevolent, but their objectivity is compromised by the presence of those cameras.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Patricia Callahan

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Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.

A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”

But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”

ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.

“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”

For many years, the CDC hasn’t minced words on vaccines. It promoted them with confidence. One campaign was called “Get My Flu Shot.” The agency’s website told medical providers they play a critical role in helping parents choose vaccines for their children: “Instead of saying ‘What do you want to do about shots?,’ say ‘Your child needs three shots today.’”

Nuzzo wishes the CDC’s forecasters would put out more details of their data and evidence on the spread of measles, not less. “The growing scale and severity of this measles outbreak and the urgent need for more data to guide the response underscores why we need a fully staffed and functional CDC and more resources for state and local health departments,” she said.

Kennedy’s agency oversees the CDC and on Thursday announced it was poised to eliminate 2,400 jobs there.

When asked what role, if any, Kennedy played in the decision to not release the risk assessment, HHS’ communications director said the aborted announcement “was part of an ongoing process to improve communication processes — nothing more, nothing less.” The CDC, he reiterated, continues to recommend vaccination “as the best way to protect against measles.”

“Secretary Kennedy believes that the decision to vaccinate is a personal one and that people should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine,” Andrew G. Nixon said. “It is important that the American people have radical transparency and be informed to make personal healthcare decisions.”

Responding to questions about criticism of the decision among some CDC staff, Nixon wrote, “Some individuals at the CDC seem more interested in protecting their own status or agenda rather than aligning with this Administration and the true mission of public health.”

The CDC’s risk assessment was carried out by its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which relied, in part, on new disease data from the outbreak in Texas. The CDC created the center to address a major shortcoming laid bare during the COVID-19 pandemic. It functions like a National Weather Service for infectious diseases, harnessing data and expertise to predict the course of outbreaks like a meteorologist warns of storms.

Other risk assessments by the center have been posted by the CDC even though their conclusions might seem obvious.

In late February, for example, forecasters analyzing the spread of H5N1 bird flu said people who come “in contact with potentially infected animals or contaminated surfaces or fluids” faced a moderate to high risk of contracting the disease. The risk to the general U.S. population, they said, was low.

In the case of the measles assessment, modelers at the center determined the risk of the disease for the general public in the U.S. is low, but they found the risk is high in communities with low vaccination rates that are near outbreaks or share close social ties to those areas with outbreaks. The CDC had moderate confidence in the assessment, according to an internal Q&A that explained the findings. The agency, it said, lacks detailed data about the onset of the illness for all patients in West Texas and is still learning about the vaccination rates in affected communities as well as travel and social contact among those infected. (The H5N1 assessment was also made with moderate confidence.)

The internal plan to roll out the news of the forecast called for the expert physician who’s leading the CDC’s response to measles to be the chief spokesperson answering questions. “It is important to note that at local levels, vaccine coverage rates may vary considerably, and pockets of unvaccinated people can exist even in areas with high vaccination coverage overall,” the plan said. “The best way to protect against measles is to get the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.”

This week, though, as the number of confirmed cases rose to 483, more than 30 agency staff were told in an email that after a discussion in the CDC director’s office, “leadership does not want to pursue putting this on the website.”

The cancellation was “not normal at all,” said a CDC staff member who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal with layoffs looming. “I’ve never seen a rollout plan that was canceled at that far along in the process.”

Anxiety among CDC staff has been building over whether the agency will bend its public health messages to match those of Kennedy, a lawyer who founded an anti-vaccine group and referred clients to a law firm suing a vaccine manufacturer.

During Kennedy’s first week on the job, HHS halted the CDC campaign that encouraged people to get flu shots during a ferocious flu season. On the night that the Trump administration began firing probationary employees across the federal government, some key CDC flu webpages were taken down. Remnants of some of the campaign webpages were restored after NPR reported this.

But some at the agency felt like the new leadership had sent a message loud and clear: When next to nobody was paying attention, long-standing public health messages could be silenced.

On the day in February that the world learned that an unvaccinated child had died of measles in Texas, the first such death in the U.S. since 2015, the HHS secretary downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak. “We have measles outbreaks every year,” he said at a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump.

In an interview on Fox News this month, Kennedy championed doctors in Texas who he said were treating measles with a steroid, an antibiotic and cod liver oil, a supplement that is high in vitamin A. “They’re seeing what they describe as almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery from that,” Kennedy said.

As parents near the outbreak in Texas stocked up on vitamin A supplements, doctors there raced to assure parents that only vaccination, not the vitamin, can prevent measles.

Still, the CDC added an entry on Vitamin A to its measles website for clinicians.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that several hospitalized children in Lubbock, Texas, had abnormal liver function, a likely sign of toxicity from too much vitamin A.

Texas health officials also said that the Trump administration’s decision to rescind $11 billion in pandemic-related grants across the country will hinder their ability to respond to the growing outbreak, according to The Texas Tribune.

Measles is among the most contagious diseases and can be dangerous. About 20% of unvaccinated people who get measles wind up in the hospital. And nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications. The virus can linger in the air for two hours after an infected person has left an area, and patients can spread measles before they even know they have it.

This week Amtrak said it was notifying customers that they may have been exposed to the disease this month when a passenger with measles rode one of its trains from New York City to Washington, D.C.

by Annie Waldman, Ashley Clarke and Asia Fields

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We’re a team of reporters at ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization that holds powerful institutions accountable. We’re trying to learn more about how researchers and academics are being affected by the Trump administration terminating grants at the National Institutes of Health.

We would like to learn more about what the canceled research aimed to achieve and what has been lost due to the funding cut. Your insights can help us ensure our reporting is comprehensive and captures the real life impact of the current administration’s policies.

We’ve created a short survey for researchers affected by the grant terminations, and we would appreciate you sharing your experience. Please feel free to share this form with others who have been impacted. We take your privacy seriously — only ProPublica will read your responses. We will contact you if we wish to publish any part of them.

Filling out the form in the link below is the easiest, most efficient way to share information with us. You can also send us your responses via encrypted Signal message at 917-512-0201, or call us at 301-388-5405 if you prefer.

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by Megan O’Matz

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

Ten years ago, when Wisconsin lawmakers approved a bill to allow unlimited spending in state elections, only one Republican voted no.

“I just thought big money was an evil, a curse on our politics,” former state Sen. Robert Cowles said recently of his 2015 decision to buck his party.

As Wisconsin voters head to the polls next week to choose a new state Supreme Court justice, Cowles stands by his assessment. Voters have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from special interest groups, and record-setting sums of money have been spent to sway residents. What’s more, Cowles said, there’s been little discussion of major issues. The candidates debated only once.

“I definitely think that that piece of legislation made things worse,” Cowles said in an interview. “Our public discourse is basically who can inflame things in the most clever way with some terrible TV ad that’s probably not even true.”

More than $80 million has been funneled into the race as of March 25, according to two groups that have been tracking spending in the contest — the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy group that follows judicial races, and the news outlet WisPolitics. That surpasses the previous costliest judicial race in the country’s history, approximately $56 million spent two years ago on the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.

Money is pouring into this swing state election so fast and so many ads have been reserved that political observers now believe the current race is likely to reach $100 million by Tuesday, which is election day.

“People are thoroughly disgusted, I think, across the political spectrum with just the sheer amount of money being spent on a spring Supreme Court election in Wisconsin,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which has long advocated for campaign finance reform.

But the elected officials who could revamp the campaign finance system on both sides of the aisle or create pressure for change have been largely silent. No bills introduced this session. No press conferences from legislators. The Senate no longer even has a designated elections committee.

The current election pits former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, now a circuit court judge in conservative-leaning Waukesha County, against Susan Crawford, a judge in Dane County, the state’s liberal bastion.

Though the race technically is nonpartisan, the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama, has endorsed Crawford; the party has received financial support from liberal billionaire George Soros. On the other side, President Donald Trump posted a message on his social media platform on March 21 urging his supporters to vote for Schimel, and much of Schimel’s money comes from political organizations tied to Elon Musk.

The stakes are high. Whoever wins will determine the ideological bent of the seven-member court just two years after Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court and swung it to the liberals. With Protasiewicz on the court, the majority struck down state legislative maps, which had been drawn to favor Republicans, and reinstated the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots.

A Schimel victory could resurrect those and other voting issues, as well as determine whether women in the state will continue to be able to access abortion.

Two pro-Schimel groups linked to Musk — America PAC and Building America’s Future — had disclosed spending about $17 million, as of March 25. Musk himself donated $3 million this year to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In the final stretch of the campaign, news reports revealed that Musk’s America PAC plans to give Wisconsin voters $100 to sign petitions rejecting the actions of “activist judges.”

That has raised concerns among some election watchdog groups, which have been exploring whether the offer from Musk amounts to an illegal inducement to get people to vote.

On Wednesday night, Musk went further, announcing on X a $1 million award to a Green Bay voter he identified only as “Scott A” for “supporting our petition against activist judges in Wisconsin!” Musk promised to hand out other million-dollar prizes before the election.

Musk has a personal interest in the direction of the Wisconsin courts. His electric car company, Tesla Inc., is suing the state over a law requiring manufacturers to sell automobiles through independent dealerships. Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the race.

Also on Schimel’s side: billionaires Diane Hendricks and Richard Uihlein and Americans for Prosperity, a dark-money group founded by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. Americans for Prosperity has reported spending about $3 million, primarily for digital ads, canvassing, mailers and door hangers.

Campaign mailers sent to Wisconsin residents during the state’s Supreme Court election. (Photo collage edited for legibility and privacy by ProPublica. Obtained by ProPublica.)

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a union-supported electioneering group, has ponied up over $6 million to advance Crawford. In other big outlays, Soros has given $2 million to the state Democratic Party, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another billionaire, gave $1.5 million. And California venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, donated $250,000.

In Wisconsin, political parties can steer unlimited amounts to candidates.

State Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat and a minority leader, called the spending frenzy “obscene.”

“There’s no reason why campaigns should cost as much as they do,” he said.

Asked for comment about the vast amount of money in the race, Crawford told ProPublica: “I’m grateful for the historic outpouring of grassroots support across Wisconsin from folks who don’t want Elon Musk controlling our Supreme Court.”

Schimel’s campaign called Crawford a “hypocrite,” saying she “is playing the victim while receiving more money than any judicial candidate in American history thanks to George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and JB Pritzker funneling money to her campaign.”

Quizzed Monday by a TV reporter on whether he would recuse himself if the Tesla case got to the state’s high court, Schimel did not commit, saying: “I’ll do the same thing I do in every case. I will examine whether I can truly hear that case objectively.”

A decade after Wisconsin opened the floodgates to unlimited money in campaigns in 2015, some good government activists are wondering if the state has reached a tipping point. Is there any amount, they ask, at which the state’s political leaders can be persuaded to impose controls?

“I honestly believe that folks have their eyes open around the money in a way that they have not previously,” Nick Ramos, executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign spending, told reporters during a briefing on spending in the race.

A loosely organized group of campaign reformers is beginning to lay the groundwork for change. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign recently called a Zoom meeting that included representatives of public interest groups inside and outside of Wisconsin, dark-money researchers and an election security expert.

They were looking for ways to champion reform during the current legislative session. In particular, they are studying and considering what models make sense and may be achievable, including greater disclosure requirements, public financing and restricting candidates from coordinating with dark-money groups on issue ads.

But Republicans say that the spending is a natural byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which equated campaign spending with free speech and opened the spigots for big-money races.

“For the most part, we don’t really, as Republicans, want to see the brakes on free speech,” said Ken Brown, past chair of the GOP Party of Racine, a city south of Milwaukee. Noting he was not speaking for the party, Brown said he does not favor spending limits. “I believe in the First Amendment. It is what it is. I believe the Citizens United decision was correct.”

Asked to comment on the current system of unlimited money, Anika Rickard, a spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, did not answer the question but instead criticized Crawford and her funders.

Post-Reform Bill Opened Floodgates

At one point, Wisconsin was seen as providing a roadmap for reform. In 2009, the state passed the Impartial Justice Act. The legislation, enacted with bipartisan support, provided for public financing of state Supreme Court races, so candidates could run without turning to special interests for money.

The push for the measure came after increased spending by outside special interests and the candidates in two state Supreme Court races: the 2007 election that cost an estimated $5.8 million and the 2008 contest that neared $6 million, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

Candidates who agreed in 2009 to public financing and spending limits received grants of up to $400,000 for the race. The money came from the Democracy Trust Fund, which was supported by a $2 income tax check-off.

“​​Reformers win a fight to clean up court races,” the headline on an editorial in The Capital Times read at the time.

But the law was in place for only one election, in April 2011. Both candidates in the court’s general election that year agreed to take public funding, and incumbent Justice David Prosser, a conservative, narrowly won reelection. Then Republicans eliminated funding for the measure that summer. Instead, the money was earmarked to implement a stringent voter ID law.

By 2015, GOP leaders had completely overhauled the state’s campaign finance law, with Democrats in the Assembly refusing to even vote on the measure in protest.

“This Republican bill opens the floodgates to unlimited spending by billionaires, by big corporations and by monied, special interests to influence our elections,” Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, said in the floor debate.

Wisconsin is no longer cited as a model. Activists point to other states, including Arizona, Oregon and Rhode Island. Arizona and Oregon established disclosure measures to trace the flow of dark money, requiring campaign spenders to reveal the original source of donations. Rhode Island required ads to name not only the sponsor but the organization’s top donors so voters can better assess the message and its credibility.

Amid skepticism that Wisconsin will rein in campaign spending, there may be some reason for optimism.

A year ago, a proposed joint resolution in Wisconsin’s Legislature bemoaned Citizens United and the spending it had unleashed. The resolution noted that “this spending has the potential to drown out speech rights for all citizens, narrow debate, weaken federalism and self-governance in the states, and increase the risk of systemic corruption.”

The resolution called for a constitutional amendment clarifying that “states may regulate the spending of money to influence federal elections.”

And though it never came to a vote, 17 members of the Legislature signed on to it, a dozen of them Republicans. Eight of them are still in the Legislature, including Sen. Van Wanggaard, who voted for the 2015 bill weakening Wisconsin’s campaign finance rules.

Wanggaard did not respond to a request for comment. But an aide expressed surprise — and disbelief — seeing the lawmaker’s name on the resolution.

by Doug Bock Clark

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.

For years, North Carolina’s Republican-majority Legislature has taken steps big and small to wrench power from Democratic governors and the agencies under their control.

One move that didn’t get much attention — tucked into a 628-page budget bill four years ago — was to direct $15 million in funding for sexual assault victims away from Democratic-led agencies that had long overseen such money. The money instead would be funneled through the North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission, an obscure group that’s part of the state’s GOP-helmed courts system.

What happened next illuminates how efforts to consolidate power in one branch of government can help political insiders and hurt vulnerable populations. With President Donald Trump executing a similar but far more drastic power grab in Washington, the events in North Carolina provide a glimpse of the longer-term outcomes when a branch of government assumes unprecedented control.

The Human Trafficking Commission — which at that time was a two-person operation — was an unusual choice for distributing funding to the dozens of local service providers that assist survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. Prior to 2021, two state agencies had effectively carried out that task.

People who worked for the Human Trafficking Commission and for the Legislature warned their bosses that redirecting the funds could overwhelm the commission and harm survivors, according to multiple sources with knowledge of discussions. They said the commission was not equipped to handle more than $28 million in grants over two years, given that it previously had an annual budget of about $250,000.

This ultimately proved true, according to the commission’s former top grants administrator, Kathy Estrada.

“We just did not have the capabilities to do it,” said Estrada, who recalled informing her leadership repeatedly in 2024 that her staff was overwhelmed and underresourced, relying on makeshift Excel spreadsheets instead of industry-standard grants management software. “Even if we worked all day overtime, it was just impossible to get done.”

Staffers the state’s crisis centers told ProPublica that payments were delayed for months. The money was supposed to be allocated by June 2023, but in April of that year the Legislature revised the law to remove that deadline. The earliest initial installment for services to reach any of those 18 centers came in May, according to records ProPublica received from the commission. Some had to wait until February 2024. The majority are still waiting for their full funding.

Leaders of some of those centers say that, even today, the disruptions in funding continue to limit the services they can offer to women who come to them for urgent, potentially life-saving help.

The events at the Human Trafficking Commission are part of a pattern by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and judiciary to deprive elected Democrats of resources and powers. Shortly after Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor in 2016, lawmakers passed sweeping legislation that stripped him of various powers, including removing his ability to hire and fire over 1,000 key government positions. (Many of these changes were contested in court, and some were reversed.) Shortly after Democrat Josh Stein was elected to succeed Cooper last fall, the Legislature passed another law that stripped him and other Democratic officials of numerous powers, including control of the board that manages the state’s elections, which is now the subject of multiple lawsuits.

When lawmakers created the budget that redirected funds to the Human Trafficking Commission, they specifically set aside additional money for political allies. One particular faith-based group was prioritized in the budget bill to receive the most funding — $640,000. That group had been created by the former head of the state GOP about two months before its name showed up in the budget bill in 2021. By October 2024, the group had reported to the Human Trafficking Commission that it had helped only four victims, and its executive director said that at least three of those women had been given just food and gas and no long-term services. (The executive director told ProPublica that as of March 2025 the group had helped about two dozen victims.)

Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics at Catawba College, has studied the North Carolina Legislature’s power grabs over the past decade. He said the state’s Republican legislators have been “very willing to try new and innovative things based on simple power politics that may call into question basic principles of a democratic republic.” And he said such actions can have repercussions for a large swath of people in North Carolina.

“If elected officials are only working for their respective political bases, and citizens aren’t getting the benefits they are eligible for based on partisanship,” Bitzer said, “then public policy making has gone off the rails.”

Graham Wilson, the communications director for the court system and Human Trafficking Commission, said there wasn’t anything unusual about the Legislature sending money to the commission or making the commission “the legislatively mandated leader” in the state for funding anti-human-trafficking work. He also disputed that any payments were delayed. In response to ProPublica’s questions, he wrote that the recipients must comply with all terms of their grant agreement before the commission releases funds. He would not elaborate on whether or how recipients failed to comply with those terms.

“Our experience is that support for fighting human trafficking is nonpartisan in the legislature,” Wilson said, “as it is in the Judicial Branch.”

Ted Alexander, the North Carolina state senator primarily responsible for redirecting funds to the Human Trafficking Commission (Via North Carolina General Assembly)

Ted Alexander, the Republican state senator who was primarily responsible for empowering the Human Trafficking Commission, declined to comment for this story. He previously said the idea stemmed from his concern that Christian groups had too few resources compared to secular groups. To address that, the budget bill included money specifically for 25 mostly faith-based service providers, each cited by name.

“You look at these other groups, like Planned Parenthood and other groups out there, and they just, the money just pours in on those groups, and it makes me sick,” he said during a 2023 speech. “So we Christians, we’ve got to be able to support these kinds of organizations” that are “doing the Lord’s work.”

After accepting an award at a Human Trafficking Commission event in 2024, he declared, “Our goal was to help those organizations that are kind of low on the ground, that are trying to do God’s work” and “take them to a higher level.”

In May 2023, the leader of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center sent an email to the deputy director of the North Carolina court system warning that because the commission had been months late in releasing promised payments the center was in crisis.

“Absent an immediate disbursement of funds in the next 2 weeks our agency will furlough core services staff,” wrote Rachel Valentine, warning that victims would lose legal, medical, and housing services. She said that due to delayed payments her organization had to stop paying for a hotel for one human trafficking victim, after which the woman went back to her trafficker.

“I am speaking on the experience of my own agency, but I know there are at least a dozen” other domestic violence and sexual assault service providers “that are on the brink of outright crisis,” she wrote. “Any further delay will destabilize victim’s services in this state for years to come.”

Valentine had been appealing for months to get the funds. After her emails to commission staff went unanswered, she reached out in March to her Democratic state senator, who was unable to help her get the money. Emails show that it was only after she enlisted the help of a high-ranking GOP House member that the commission released the first payment, about $95,000 of $236,000, a few days before her May email warning of the coming crisis. But she still needed the rest of the funds that the Legislature had originally promised by the end of the next month.

The deputy director of the state court system wrote back to Valentine, “We are working to disburse” the remainder of the “funds as soon as possible and appreciate your patience.”

But no more funds had come by the fall, though they were supposed to be disbursed quarterly. Valentine made a personal loan to the crisis center to ensure that her staff was paid.

Ultimately, she had to cut two staffers, one who handled the cases of Black women and another who served the Latino community. After those positions were cut, the number of Black and Hispanic clients at the center dropped over the following six months by 76% and 63%, respectively, according to Valentine. She also had to cut a program educating over 1,300 Spanish-speaking participants in how to respond to sexual violence.

Wilson, the court system’s communications director, denied that “the timing of Commission grant disbursements has any causal relationship to internal OCRCC issues.” Wilson also suggested that if organizations did not get timely quarterly payments, it could have been because they weren’t in compliance with the terms of their grant. But emails between the commission and Valentine showed the director of the commission attributed delays to “an extremely heavy workload with grants and report reviewing” and explained that commission staff had long known that “this would be a heavy lift to start” the program.

Of 18 crisis centers whose employees ProPublica spoke with, all but three reported that they experienced delays in funding that harmed their work. The commission’s grants were supposed to help bridge recent dramatic decreases in federal funds for such agencies, which had already put them in precarious financial positions — but the delays ended up compounding some of the agencies’ woes.

In addition to Valentine, leaders of two centers said funding delays forced them to lay off employees who focused on minorities, resulting in severe drop-offs in those communities receiving services. One of them had to lay off so many staffers that it could no longer immediately evacuate women from unsafe situations, sometimes being unable to offer any help for days, according to its director. Other centers said they did not have to lay off staff but did have to cut services like therapy or paying for the first month of rent for women moving out of shelters.

Some of the faith-based groups singled out for funding also experienced payment delays. Brianna Racchini, the director of Triad Ladder of Hope, a faith-based provider, said she had been forced to cut her only employee the month after a Human Trafficking Commission grant failed to come through and some churches reduced their funding. Racchini also had to scale back other expenses, like paying for medical appointments or lawyers for the women.

“It is frustrating that funding wasn’t given at the time it was supposed to be given,” Racchini said.

Once Racchini was finally paid in the summer of 2024, she used the grant to cover medical debt for one woman. She said that ultimately she understood that the commission’s delays were because they were “drowning” due to administrative issues.

“They are still doing good work,” she said. “And we are going to partner with them whenever we can.”

When Valentine was finally paid out in November 2023, she decided that she would not seek more funding through the commission. She has not been able to afford to rehire the two positions she cut, and she says the Legislature’s decision to redirect the funds to the commission is part of the reason her agency now serves fewer survivors.

“When people are playing political games with the money, it might seem like small administrative choices, but it creates really malignant impacts,” Valentine said.

While organizations like Valentine’s were struggling to even get their emails answered by the Human Trafficking Commission, two organizations that were promised substantial funding from lawmakers were gearing up.

The Legislature had mandated in its budget bill that over $1 million be sent to two groups.

The first, Compassion to Act, describes itself as a “faith-based ministry” that had not reported taxable income or activity since 2016, when it had $28,006 in revenue. It was awarded $500,000. Alexander, the state senator who’d been instrumental in shifting power to the commission, has described his interest in the issue of human trafficking as having come from meeting the leader of Compassion to Act. He said the leader inspired him to realize that it was part of his job as a pro-life senator to help women in these situations.

Another $640,000, followed by an additional $100,000 in a subsequent bill, was directed to the North Carolina Institute Against Human Trafficking, a faith-based organization that had been created just two months before lawmakers named it in the bill. The paperwork to create the institute was filed by the former head of the North Carolina Republican Party and the chair of the NC Faith and Freedom Coalition, the state affiliate of one of the nation’s largest evangelical get-out-the-vote operations, which worked to elect Trump and other Republicans. The institute is led by Shannon Williams, the wife of the executive director of the NC Faith and Freedom Coalition, who is paid $70,000 a year, according to financial documents.

The institute and Compassion to Act also experienced delays in payments from the Human Trafficking Commission. In the summer of 2024, after paying the institute about $160,000, the commission temporarily paused the institute’s funding and initiated a review of its finances.

“The delay in funding has caused numerous victims of human trafficking to be continually victimized,” the institute wrote in its July 2024 report to the commission. In August 2024, the institute received another $160,000 from the Human Trafficking Commission. Nonetheless, in its October report, the institute said the delay in funding had forced it “to scale back operations.” By January 2025, records show that the Human Trafficking Commission had paid the institute over $500,000.

Compassion to Act also repeatedly criticized the commission for delays.

The funding directed to the Human Trafficking Commission was part of a massive shift in how the state Legislature was allocating money — and part of a pattern of legislators writing laws that direct funds to their political allies through grants or similar noncompetitive means.

According to the state budget office, there were 81 directed grants for about $17.5 million in the 2019-2020 fiscal year. That grew to 627 grants for $1.2 billion in the next full budget year, much of that from the influx of federal pandemic money. A federal grand jury is investigating $3.5 million sent to a domestic violence monitoring agency with political connections and little track record, The Raleigh News and Observer has reported. (No one has been charged.) Separately, a Republican ex-judge’s company was paid over $400,000 after the Legislature sent more than $50 million to two organizations seeking to bring the Olympics to North Carolina, the Assembly has reported.

After ProPublica first asked the Human Trafficking Commission in 2024 about delayed payments and financial management, it began working to rectify some of the problems it had been warned about for years, according to sources and records. In November, the court system completed a three-page internal audit of the commission that concluded that “all active grants adhere with applicable federal and state statutes and regulations.”

However, the commission has also taken numerous steps to block or obscure public information about its actions, including rejecting a 2024 monitoring visit by the state agency that oversees its spending of federal funds — becoming the only such entity to do so out of more than 90 of them, according to the state budget office. In records obtained by ProPublica, the court system argued the state agency lacked the authority to monitor the commission.

The vast majority of the commission’s millions of dollars had been flowing to the state from federal pandemic recovery funds. That federal money now has stopped. Some groups, like Valentine’s Orange County Rape Crisis Center, will continue to get funding from other state agencies, which disburse other federal funds. As for the commission itself, the Legislature in its most recent budget set aside $500,000 in permanent annual funding. The commission can give that money only to agencies working exclusively on human trafficking, which excludes groups like the Orange County Rape Crisis Center.

Valentine said it’s unfortunate that the significant sum of money that had been flowing through the commission didn’t do enough to help bolster groups like hers.

“There was an opportunity to use this funding to enhance services and increase collaboration” between traditional service providers and the human trafficking community, she said. “But that got lost.”

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

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

Utah legislators this session took aim at life coaches who harm their clients’ mental health, but the law that the governor signed Wednesday stops short of prescribing minimum standards or ethical guidelines for the burgeoning profession.

Anyone can call themselves a life coach, which, unlike being a mental health therapist, does not require any kind of education, training or license.

In Utah, one state agency found that dozens of life coaches are advertising their ability to treat mental health issues even though the vast majority are not trained or permitted to work as therapists. State licensors say they field an average of one complaint each month about life coaches.

The new law strengthens existing regulations that forbid anyone who isn’t a licensed therapist from treating mental health conditions. By clearly defining what only therapists are allowed to do, licensors can more readily cite and fine life coaches who treat mental health, according to state Sen. Mike McKell, the bill’s sponsor.

But the new law does not designate any money to immediately hire more investigators to probe potential problems.

An investigation last year by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica showed that about a third of the 43 Utah therapists whose licenses had been revoked or denied since 2010, or who allowed their suspended licenses to expire, appear to have continued to work in the mental health field. Some rebranded as “life coaches.”

McKell said the new law targets life coaches who had lost their therapist licenses because the state deemed them unsafe to work with patients.

Utahns have struggled to get mental health help, largely due to a shortage of available therapists, according to a recent report from the Utah Behavioral Health Coalition.

In that gap, life coaching has emerged as an unregulated alternative, according to the Utah Office of Professional Licensure Review. At the request of lawmakers, the state office studied life coaching and whether it should be licensed, and found that Utah life coaches advertise using more than 100 titles, including “executive coach,” “relationship specialist” and “soul-sourced consultant,” according to a November 2024 report.

State researchers looked at online advertisements for roughly 220 Utah life coaches and concluded that about 40% may be offering therapy. These coaches say they specialize in addressing mental health struggles, the state found, with some claiming the ability to “conquer” their client’s mental health conditions.

As part of the review, the state office also surveyed Utah’s therapists in an effort to better understand potential risks associated with life coaches. Of the more than 3,500 who responded, a third said they have had at least one client tell them that they were harmed by a life coach.

The state report quoted one unnamed therapist who described treating patients who had hired life coaches: “All 5 reported life coaches had them ‘deep dive’ into their trauma, which sent them into an emotional spiral and then did not provide them with any skills to cope with the emotional distress. 4 of them ended up being hospitalized with severe suicidal ideation.”

Sarah Stroup, a licensed therapist who is on the legislative committee for the Utah Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, said the new law is a starting point “in ensuring that Utahns are receiving ethical care.”

“Our goal from the beginning was to advocate for guardrails to be put in place so that life coaches weren’t providing mental health treatment,” she said, “and therapists who had lost their license couldn’t continue practicing under the guise of life coaching.”

A High-Profile Case of Abuse

Mental health professionals and some lawmakers have pushed for more stringent oversight of life coaches in Utah in the wake of the high-profile 2023 conviction of Jodi Hildebrandt, who is in prison for abusing the children of her life coaching business partner.

Hildebrandt was a licensed clinical mental health counselor, but she had removed references to being a therapist from her website and instead marketed herself as a life coach in the years prior to her conviction. One of her former clients previously told The Tribune and ProPublica that Hildebrandt had said she became a life coach as a way to get around the ethical rules therapists are required to follow. (Hildebrandt’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kevin Franke, the father of the children abused by Hildebrandt and his ex-wife, has advocated for more oversight of life coaches since the two women were sent to prison. He said he thinks there should be a state registry where the public can see whether a life coach has had complaints made against them or whether they were ever disciplined, and he hopes the state will eventually mandate standards for life coaches, including a code of ethics.

Kevin Franke, right, has called for more regulations governing life coaches after his ex-wife and their life coach were sent to prison for abusing two of his children. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

“I’m particularly concerned with life coaches who effectively impersonate a therapist or present themselves as some cheaper alternative to a licensed mental health professional,” he said.

While Utah legislators last year floated the idea of requiring life coaches to be licensed— something no other state in the country has done — the new law does not take that step. Utah’s Office of Professional Licensure Review found that licensing life coaches would be challenging given the wide-ranging services they offer and the ambiguity of the titles they use.

The new law, however, clarifies that only licensed therapists can present themselves as having the skills, experience and training to address mental illness and “emotional disorders.”

McKell, the Republican who sponsored the legislation, said that by better defining in state law what a therapist can do, he hopes that licensors can more easily penalize life coaches who harm their clients.

“Instead of trying to create regulation for life coaching, I am drawing this fence around mental health and what mental health professionals do at the exclusion of everyone else,” McKell said.

But some have questioned how effective the new law can be, given the small amount of money that is likely to be allocated to the effort.

The law creates an enforcement fund that will be collected from fines that the state’s licensing division issues to anyone who practices mental health therapy without a license. McKell said the fund signals to licensors that the Legislature wants them to take this issue seriously.

But previous reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica shows these types of citations are rare and unlikely to generate significant revenue: Over the last decade, the licensing department has cited just 25 people for “unauthorized practice” in the mental health field, according to a review of citations and other records. Those citations amounted to just over $10,000.

And last year, while licensors cited nearly 1,000 people, not a single new citation was given to anyone identified as working in the mental health field, according to a review of citations published monthly.

Melanie Hall, spokesperson for the Division of Professional Licensing, acknowledged that the law does not guarantee an influx of resources but said even a small amount of money could help fund social media campaigns to encourage the public to report bad behavior. If the fund grows larger, she said, that money could be used to conduct more investigations or pay for experts to weigh in on complex cases with high public harm.

At the same time, some Utah life coaches say the bill has already gone too far and could restrict their ability to help clients.

Heather Frazier, who advertises her expertise as a “parent-teen connection life coach,” said in a public hearing that restricting the treatment of “interpersonal dysfunction” to just therapists risks putting life coaches out of business. Life coaches can help struggling clients who don’t have a diagnosed mental illness learn how to better communicate with family members, she said.

“Without coaching, they will have to go to a therapist, which is already an overburdened, overworked part of our state,” Frazier said.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

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

Alaska’s Supreme Court has placed new limits on how long criminal cases can be postponed, part of an effort to reduce the time many criminal defendants wait to face trial in the state.

The court’s order, which takes effect May 12, directs state judges to allow no more than 270 days of new delays for criminal cases filed in 2022 or before. Court system data shows that about 800 active cases fall into that category, making each one more than 800 days old and counting.

The move to reduce delays follows an investigation by ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News that found some cases have taken as long as a decade to reach juries, potentially violating the rights of victims and defendants alike.

The time to resolve Alaska’s most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade. Victims rights advocates had long complained that judges rubber-stamped delays, particularly in Anchorage, where about half of the cases impacted by the Supreme Court order are pending. Some cases dragged on so long that victims or witnesses had died in the meantime.

In addition to capping the duration of delays, the state Supreme Court’s order says judges must explain why they’ve allowed any request for delay.

“It’s a positive step by the court to be able to work with the lawyers to move cases along,” said state Sen. Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, chair of the Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on pretrial delays in February.

Alaska Court System spokesperson Rebecca Koford said the new Supreme Court order, issued on March 12, tackles the “most pressing concern.”

The time needed to close out the oldest cases “is exceedingly long,” she said, “and we need to get them resolved.”

The Supreme Court order said judges in pre-2023 cases are to allow only 90 days of new delays at the request of the defense, 90 days for prosecutors and 90 days for “other periods of delay for good cause.”

Koford said that an example of why a case might be delayed for good cause would be when a witness is temporarily unavailable to testify. Additional efforts are in the works to reduce the time it takes cases to get to trial, she said.

“We do not view it as the solution; it is part of the solution,” Koford said.

Alaska criminal rules grant defendants the right to a trial within 120 days of being charged with a crime. Crime victims have the right to the “timely disposition” of their case under the state constitution.

The 120-day deadline is rarely met. One sexual assault case highlighted by the Daily News and ProPublica was filed in 2014 and has been delayed more than 70 times. That case has now been set for trial on April 1.

Several high-ranking state officials have spoken of the need to rein in delays since the news organizations highlighted the issue in January.

Chief Justice Susan M. Carney told state lawmakers on Feb. 12 that the court system was working to curb delays, noting recent news coverage of the issue. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing focused on pretrial delays later that month, when court system General Counsel Nancy Meade told legislators that the cases recently highlighted in news stories were unacceptable but were outliers among criminal cases.

“The time it takes to resolve cases now is certainly longer than it was 20 years ago. Nobody is happy about that,” Meade testified.

The new order signed by Carney and other Alaska Supreme Court justices said that a 2023 judicial order had led to “some decrease” in what the court characterized as “persistent backlogs.” The current order, the court said, “is intended to facilitate the further reduction in the time to disposition of these older criminal cases without undue delay.”

The order also addresses delays caused when attorneys fail to provide evidence to the opposing party in a timely manner. It says that judges should consider sanctions, including dismissing the charges, when prosecutors fail to provide evidence or banning the missing evidence from being used at trial.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

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

CARBONDALE, Ill. — I grew up off a gravel road near a town of 60 people, a place where cows outnumber people.

Southern Illinois University, just 40 miles north, opened up my world. I saw my first concerts here, debated big ideas in giant lecture halls and shared dorms with people who looked like no one I’d ever met. Two of my most influential professors came from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

SIU was the only four-year college within reach when I enrolled here in the fall of 2000 — both in miles and cost. And it set me on the path to who I would become. That’s why I accepted a job here teaching journalism two years ago. It is still a place of opportunity, but I was struck by how fragile it had become — a fraction of its former size, grappling with relentless enrollment and budget concerns.

Now, it faces new threats. The Trump administration has proposed cuts to research and labs across the country; targeted certain schools with diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and signed an executive order to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which manages student loans. State officials estimate that proposed funding reductions from the National Institutes of Health alone would cost SIU about $4.5 million.

In addition, conservative activists are on the lookout for what they deem “woke” depravity at universities. This is true at SIU as well, where students received emails from at least one conservative group offering to pay them to act as informants or write articles to help “expose the liberal bias that occurs on college campuses across the nation.”

Schools like SIU, located in a region that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump, may not be the primary targets of his threatened funding cuts, but they — along with the communities they serve — stand to lose the most.

There are nearly 500 regional public universities across the U.S., serving around 5 million students — about half of all undergraduates enrolled in public universities, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University. These institutions of higher learning span nearly every state, with many rooted in rural areas and communities facing high unemployment, childhood poverty and limited access to medical care. They play a vital role in lifting up struggling individuals — and in some cases, entire communities that could very easily die out without them.

While Trump’s actions have primarily targeted high-profile institutions like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, some regional schools are also under investigation for alleged racial discrimination tied to DEI programs. (So far, SIU hasn’t been named in any federal probes.)

“This is definitely one of those baby-in-the-bathwater moments,” said Cecilia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver, who is a lead researcher with the regional colleges alliance. While the administration has “a bone to pick with a particular type of institution,” she said, “there are all these other institutions that serve your community, your constituents.”

Students walk across the campus of SIU in Carbondale. Long challenged by declining enrollment and budget woes, SIU now faces the threat of deeper federal cuts. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

Regional schools like SIU tend to operate with fewer resources than their counterparts, relying on federal and state money to support both the students and the school. Greater shares of students rely on need-based federal financial aid like Pell Grants, low-cost student loans and subsidized student work programs.

And in terms of research, while attention goes to large, elite schools, hundreds of the schools spending at least $2.5 million on scientific studies — the threshold for qualifying as a research school — are regional public universities. SIU pumps $60 million annually into research. About a quarter of that money comes from the federal government.

At SIU, as at other regional universities, many research projects focus on overlooked issues in their own backyards. Here that means studying ways to help farmers yield stronger crops, to deal with invasive species in the waterways, and to deliver mental health care to remote schools.

“We are at a crossroads and facing a national crisis. It is going to have far-reaching consequences for higher education,” said Mary Louise Cashel, a clinical psychology professor at SIU whose research, which focuses on youth violence prevention among diverse populations, relies on federal funding.

Supporters of Trump’s proposed research funding cuts say schools should dip into their endowment funds to offset the recent cuts. But SIU’s $210 million endowment, almost all of it earmarked for specific purposes, is pocket change compared with Ivy League schools like Yale, which has a similar student population size but a roughly $41 billion endowment. At present, SIU faces a $9.4 million deficit, the result of declining enrollments and years of state budget cuts; there is no cushion for it to fall back on.

A mix of empty businesses and city buildings seen in a window reflection in downtown Carbondale. The university is the largest employer in the region. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

Intertwined with SIU’s fate is that of Carbondale, a town of 21,500 about 50 miles from the borders of Kentucky and Missouri. Since its founding in 1869, the university has turned Carbondale into a tiny cultural mecca and a powerful economic engine in an otherwise vast, rural region that has been battered by the decline of manufacturing and coal mining. Three decades ago, SIU and Carbondale felt electric: Lecture halls overflowed; local businesses thrived on the fall surge of students; The Strip, a longstanding student hangout, spilled over every weekend, music rattling windows into the early morning hours.

The “Dirty Dale,” as the town is affectionately known, still carries traces of its college-town energy, and SIU remains the largest employer in the region. But there’s an undeniable fade as the student population is now half the size it was in the 1990s. Some of the local anchor establishments along The Strip have vanished. Now, more cuts threaten to push the university, and the town that depends on it, to a breaking point.

Jeff Vaughn, a retired police officer who has owned Tres Hombres restaurant and bar in the heart of town for the past 10 years, says the school, though smaller, still has a huge impact on businesses’ bottom lines.

First image: Jeff Vaughn, center, has a drink with friends at Tres Hombres, his restaurant in Carbondale. Second image: Edwin Linson performs to a multigenerational crowd at Tres Hombres. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

“It’s dollar bills coming into the city” that wouldn’t be here otherwise, he said. “It’s the people who work there, the people going to school there — every part of it brings money into the city. A basketball game happens, people come into town and they usually go out to eat before the game.”

Even before the Trump administration began its cuts in academia, it was clear to regional leaders that the school and the community needed to do more. A 2020 report by a regional economic development agency issued a warning: “The region can no longer sit idle and let SIU tackle these issues on their own.”

DEI, a Survival Strategy?

The Rev. Joseph A. Brown at his home in Carbondale (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

The Rev. Joseph A. Brown, a professor of Africana studies at Southern Illinois University, calls federal orders on higher education “epistolary drones.”

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” Brown said, “and everybody’s running and ducking.”

Brown spoke by phone in late February, his oxygen tank humming in the background after a bout of pneumonia. While he was in the hospital, his inbox and phone were blowing up with panicked messages about the federal directive that schools eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

That’s because diversity also means something more in regional public universities: Many students at SIU come from families that are poor, or barely middle class, and depend on scholarships and mentorship to succeed. Paul Frazier, SIU’s vice chancellor for anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion, said the way DEI has been politicized ignores what it actually does: “Poor doesn’t have a color.”

But beyond helping students, DEI is also about the school’s survival.

In 2021, SIU Chancellor Austin Lane rolled out Imagine 2030 — an ambitious blueprint for rebuilding SIU Carbondale. It called for doubling down on research, expanding student success programs and, at its core, embedding diversity into how the university operates, including in the recruitment of students, hiring and training of faculty and staff, and creation of programs that offer extra help to students struggling to keep up in their classes. It also called for growing SIU’s enrollment to 15,000.

Paul Frazier, vice chancellor for anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion at SIU (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

SIU won’t reach that goal without targeted recruitment. “You can’t do that without bringing more of the largest-growing population, which is Latinx and Hispanic students,” Frazier said. “It’ll be like an old Western,” Frazier said of the risks of further eroding SIU. “It’ll be a ghost town.”

SIU is offering marketing materials in Spanish for the first time in years. Similar efforts are going into reigniting passion for SIU throughout Cook County, home to Chicago; near St. Louis, and in high schools close by.

While the plan was new, the desire to bring in students from a wide range of backgrounds was not. From the start, SIU grew against the grain by embracing diversity in a region that often didn’t.

In 1874, two Black women enrolled in the school’s first class. A few years later, Alexander Lane became SIU’s first Black male student and then its first Black graduate, according to research by an SIU history professor. Born to an enslaved mother in Mississippi, Lane graduated and became a teacher, then a doctor, then a lawmaker in the state Capitol. Today, a scholarship in his name helps students gain internships in state government.

Plywood covers a vacant business on The Strip in downtown Carbondale. Businesses have struggled as the student population declined. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica)

During World War II, SIU expanded to accommodate returning soldiers on the GI Bill. It designed parts of campus with accessibility in mind for wounded veterans in hopes of drawing students and boosting enrollment.

By 1991, the student body peaked at nearly 25,000. And even amid significant changes that hurt enrollment, by 2010 it still had 20,000.

Alexander Lane, born to an enslaved mother in Mississippi, graduated from SIU and went on to become a teacher, physician and lawmaker in the state Capitol. (The Broad Ax newspaper)

In the decade that followed, SIU lost nearly 9,000 students—a nearly 45% drop. A lot happened, but one decision proved fateful: Concerns had surfaced that SIU was enrolling underprepared Black students from inner-city Chicago and failing to support them. At the same time, the university wanted to reshape its image, positioning itself as a world-class research institution. Officials targeted a different type of student and stopped recruiting as heavily in Cook County.

This era also saw a state budget crisis, and high-level leadership churned amid constant drama. (The university had seven chancellors between 2010 and 2020.) Eventually, it wasn’t about pulling away from Cook County — it was about having no direction at all. And by the end of the decade, SIU had fewer than 12,000 students. By the time the chancellor unfurled Imagine 2030, it was clear that diversity — in all its forms — was the only path forward.

Clawing Its Way Back

It’s easy to destabilize a school. But restoring it? That’s a much harder challenge.

Still, recently, it has felt like SIU has been clawing its way back. There have been two straight years of enrollment gains, driven in part by an influx of students coming from Southern Illinois and again from Cook County, as well as by growing online programs. And in late February, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which ranks universities by research spending, elevated SIU to its “very high” Research 1 status. In academic circles, it’s a big deal — putting SIU on the academic research map and bestowing it a status symbol that helps recruit top faculty and students.

“It’s a great day to be a Saluki,” SIU President Dan Mahony said, referencing SIU’s canine mascot, at a February celebration of that promotion. Then there was a pop, and confetti rained down.

But the federal financial directives and cultural wars roiling higher education are, once again, unsettling the campus and wider community. Things escalated earlier this month when SIU became a new target for the right: A social media account known for targeting LGBTQ+ people and DEI initiatives, Libs of TikTok, posted about an SIU professor who had uploaded explicit photos of himself online. The post, about an openly gay School of Medicine professor who has been publicly critical of Trump, took off, racking up more than 3 million views and hundreds of shares and comments.

“LoTT INVESTIGATION: LGBTQ professor at a Public University posts extreme p*rnographic videos of himself m*sturbating ON CAMPUS,” it read.

His employee profile quickly disappeared from the school’s website, and within days, SIU officials announced he was no longer employed by the university; he was subsequently charged with two misdemeanor counts of public indecency, and an arraignment hearing is scheduled for late April. But the controversy made SIU, not just the professor, a target. The post also took SIU to task for promoting itself on a hiring website as an “anti-racist” community. “SIU receives tens of millions of dollars from the federal government. SIU is violating Trump’s EO and should be stripped of their federal funding,” it read, tagging Elon Musk’s cost-cutting federal Department of Government Efficiency.

The irony is high: While Carbondale, where the school is located, is a solidly blue island, it is surrounded by a conservative rural region hanging in the balance.

Across the nation, universities are eliminating or rebranding DEI offices to avoid federal scrutiny. SIU isn’t backing down.

“As a university, we need to stay the course,” Phil Gilbert, chair of SIU’s Board of Trustees and a longtime federal judge appointed by George H.W. Bush, said at a recent board meeting. “I can’t think of an institution more important to diversity, equity and inclusion than an educational institution, because education is the bridge to tomorrow for everyone.”

by Kavitha Surana and Cassandra Jaramillo

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

Texas Republicans have proposed changes to the state’s strict abortion ban they say would make clear that doctors can terminate pregnancies for serious medical risks without having to wait until a patient’s condition becomes life-threatening.

The legislation comes in response to a ProPublica investigation last fall that revealed how three Texas women died after they did not receive critical procedures during miscarriages. The reporting added to the testimonies and reports of dozens of women denied care during pregnancy complications and led to a statewide reckoning on the dire effects of the law.

The bill, which will have its first committee hearing in the state Senate today, represents a remarkable reversal for Republican leaders who had for years insisted no changes were needed. It was written by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of the original ban who said just four months ago that exceptions for medical emergencies were “plenty clear.” Texas’ governor and lieutenant governor have signaled support for the bill.

It is part of a wave of legislation responding to public pressure after ProPublica’s reporting revealed preventable maternal deaths in states with abortion bans. Bills that have the most traction have been filed and championed by the same Republicans who passed the bans and they have earned a mixed reception.

A bill in Kentucky, for instance, has drawn alarms from critics who cast it as a Trojan horse. It creates modest exceptions to the state’s near-total ban while redefining abortion in a way that advocates fear could greatly restrict patients’ access to critical procedures even in emergencies. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed the bill Tuesday, saying it failed to protect women or even clarify the state’s law, an action Republicans could vote to override this week.

The Texas bill however, has broader support and was written in consultation with Democrats, major anti-abortion groups, the Texas Hospital Association and the Texas Medical Association.

Some legal experts and reproductive health care advocates are calling it a significant step forward in a Republican-led state that has shown every sign of clamping down in support of its strict laws, even in the face of public outcry.

“We wish there was a lot more in the bill, but nothing that’s in the bill is bad,” said Bee Moorhead, executive director with Texas Impact, an interfaith-based coalition that sent 6,000 postcards to lawmakers, demanding change after ProPublica’s reporting.

“The basic point is that there are people who would die if this bill doesn’t pass, who would not die if it does pass,” she said.

The bill is intended to make it harder for prosecutors to win a case against a doctor who provided an abortion to a patient experiencing pregnancy complications. It no longer requires a patient’s condition to be “life-threatening.” Doctors can act if their “reasonable medical judgment” assesses a “serious risk to a major bodily function.” It also specifies that doctors do not need to wait until an emergency is “imminent” to terminate pregnancies.

“It goes a long way towards fixing the most serious problems with the Texas abortion law,” said Seth Chandler, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Others are skeptical that the changes would go far enough to reassure risk-averse hospitals and doctors. While the bill attempts to mitigate the criminal risk for providers handling pregnancy complications, it leaves intact the most powerful deterrent: steep penalties of up to $100,000 in fines, 99 years in prison and loss of medical license for those who violate the law.

It also leaves open the question of what constitutes a “serious risk.” Doctors previously told ProPublica the ban’s unclear language and stiff penalties have led to delays in care. In response to ProPublica’s reporting on preventable maternal deaths in Texas, 111 Texas OB-GYNs signed a letter blaming the deaths on the ban and urging lawmakers to “do something to make sure this never happens again.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which has represented 20 women suing the state after they were denied abortions and faced health risks, opposes the bill. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists declined to comment on the bill. Many doctors are adopting a wait-and-see stance.

ProPublica parsed through the language and ran it by six legal experts and six doctors to assess how likely the legislation is to save lives. While some expressed tempered optimism that legislators recognizing there was a problem, most said broader changes would be needed to guarantee the protection of patients.

“Too Many Women Have Died”

Texas’ abortion laws are among the strictest in the country. While the current laws have exceptions, they are written in a way that requires a patient’s condition to be “life-threatening” before receiving an abortion.

The result: Some doctors and hospitals have held back on treatments, waiting for the fetal heartbeat to stop or for patients to wind up in undeniable distress.

ProPublica has investigated three cases in which women in Texas died after doctors delayed care during miscarriages, finding that doctors have failed to provide critical procedures or delayed them while taking extra steps to record documentation, even when there was no fetal heartbeat and a patient’s condition was urgent.

Josseli Barnica was 17 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with an “inevitable” miscarriage at a Houston hospital in September 2021. Though her fetus was already pressing against her cervix, doctors waited 40 hours until the fetal heartbeat stopped to induce a delivery, putting her at serious risk of deadly infection. She returned to the hospital two days later with sepsis and died.

Nevaeh Crain, 18, also died from complications of sepsis after delays in care. In 2023, she was sent home from two hospitals while she showed signs of infection and then made to wait 90 minutes for a second ultrasound to confirm fetal demise as her organs were failing.

Sepsis has become a lot more common in these kinds of cases, ProPublica found, in a first-of-its-kind statewide analysis of hospitalizations for second-trimester pregnancy loss through 2023. After Texas banned abortion, sepsis rates spiked more than 50%.

In every preventable death in a hospital that ProPublica reported on, doctors did not perform procedures that are associated with abortion but are also critical for treating miscarriages.

As Porsha Ngumezi hemorrhaged in 2022, her doctor did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure, the standard way to empty the uterus that a dozen doctors told ProPublica would be the quickest way to stop the bleeding. She died, leaving behind a husband and two sons.

Supporters of the new legislation say it aims to prevent such outcomes.

Current law specifies that the woman must be suffering a “life-threatening” physical condition in order for doctors to intervene. The amendment strikes that phrase and says doctors can perform abortions if, using their reasonable medical judgment, they believe there’s a “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” or “risk of death.” (Like federal law, Texas law defines major bodily functions as systems including the body’s reproductive, digestive, bowel, bladder, respiratory and neurological processes.)

The bill also states it should be viewed as consistent with recent rulings from the Texas Supreme Court, which state that the risk to a woman’s life or major bodily function does not need to be “imminent” for doctors to provide abortions under the law. That’s the most important change in the new bill, according to Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University. She credited ProPublica’s reporting with pushing lawmakers to act.

“I think the GOP in Texas has been shamed a little bit by those stories,” she said. “If nobody is telling the stories of people with wanted pregnancies who are dying and suffering severe harm they can pretend that isn’t happening.”

The bill says an abortion may also be performed for ectopic pregnancies and for removing “a dead unborn child” after a miscarriage. It removes the “affirmative defense” that applied to certain exceptions in the civil code. That part of the law puts the burden of proof on the doctor to show the abortion was necessary — similar to claiming self-defense in a homicide case.

It seeks to insulate medical staff from being accused of “aiding or abetting” an abortion — so nurses and other colleagues don’t need to be afraid they could be prosecuted for participating in an abortion or discussing it.

Another part of the proposal says that the physician should try to preserve the fetus’ life but does not need to “alter or withhold” medical treatment if that delay poses a greater threat to the woman’s life or a major bodily function.

That is meant to show doctors that they can provide abortions for cases with known risks such as pre-viable premature rupture of membranes, or PPROM, when a patient’s water breaks before viability, even if the patient is still stable, said Amy and Steve Bresnen, two lobbyists involved in negotiating the bill for Texas Campaign for Mothers. The nonprofit, which has powerful Republicans on its advisory board, is focused on reproductive health.

Other changes specify that it’s not a violation of the law if a doctor provides a treatment to a pregnant patient and the fetus dies accidentally in the process. The Bresnens say these changes are intended to reassure physicians they shouldn’t delay treatments for other conditions, like cancer, out of fear they could be blamed for harming the fetus.

All of this should add up to a wide buffer for doctors in Texas to provide the same standard of care that major medical organizations recommend, the Bresnens said, because the exceptions will rely on the doctor’s “reasonable” judgment.

For prosecutors, “proving that no other reasonable physician would have done this is a high, high burden,” Steve Bresnen said.

Texas state Rep. Ann Johnson, a Democrat who signed on as a co-author of the bill, believes the amendment would give “all the tools in the medical toolbox” back to physicians.

“Do not delay, do not alter your treatment. Do not second guess it. Do exactly what you need to do to protect this woman,” Johnson said in describing the proposal.

At a press conference last week, Texas state Rep. Charlie Geren, a Republican sponsoring the legislation in the House, said the bill was the most important he has ever carried and acknowledged the toll of the abortion ban he and his colleagues passed four years ago.

“Too many women have suffered, too many women have died — if one woman has died, it’s too many and more have,” he said. “I have friends whose wives can no longer conceive because of the problems they went through with their first pregnancy and the delay that doctors faced in addressing the problem.”

“They Don’t Want to Run the Risk”

But the law hasn’t changed in the one way doctors most want it to: It can still effectively send them to prison for life if found guilty of a violation.

“The criminalization of medical decision-making makes the stakes different than it has ever been,” said Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN practicing in Texas. He was hopeful the bill might lead to some change, but warned, “I think people are still going to be overly cautious because of the severity of the potential outcome and the criminal penalties.”

ProPublica spoke with six OB-GYNs in the state who worried the amendments may not be enough to spur hospital systems to change their policies to make abortions more accessible for patients with medical risks. Besides leaving the threat of penalties in place, they noted that the amendment doesn’t explain what constitutes a “serious risk” to a major bodily function — the circumstance that would justify an abortion.

“It doesn’t really clear things up that much,” agreed Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and leading historian of the U.S. abortion debate. ”Hospitals are not advising doctors not to intervene just because they don’t understand the law — it’s that they don’t want to run the risk.”

The bill directs the State Bar of Texas and the Texas Medical Board to create courses to educate lawyers and doctors about when they can provide abortions under the exceptions. Both declined to comment on specifics. Doctors said it will be crucial to see what guidance comes out of that effort.

In South Dakota, a similar directive resulted in the state medical board collaborating with a professional association of doctors devoted to anti-abortion causes.

In any case, the changes in Texas law would still apply only to the narrowest of cases. Many doctors noted that Republicans have so far rejected efforts to make a broader health exception in the bill or include exceptions for fetal anomalies, rape or incest. The law still explicitly says a medical emergency can’t be based on any diagnosis that patients may harm themselves — effectively a ban on mental health exceptions.

Competing bills filed by Texas Democrats that have included some of those provisions so far have not received support from Republicans. Several Democrats have also filed legislation to better examine how the state’s abortion ban is affecting the maternal health crisis following ProPublica’s reporting.

Texas state Sen. José Menéndez introduced legislation to allow the state committee investigating maternal deaths to review deaths due to abortion, or a miscarriage if an abortion procedure or medication was administered. Currently, state law prohibits the committee from studying such deaths.

Another bill seeks to compel the state committee to report its findings to the CDC’s federal program tracking causes of maternal mortality. Both bills are currently pending in committee and have not been scheduled for a hearing.

Meanwhile, Texas Republicans continue to crack down on abortion in other ways. Another Republican bill filed by Hughes this session is aimed at stopping the flow of abortion pills through the mail as well as restricting online information about the procedure. And last week, the state charged a midwife and an associate with illegally providing abortions.

“I don’t think [the amendment] solves the larger problem of who can have an abortion and when they can have an abortion, and that it’ll be done in a timely manner for all those that need it,” Ogburn said. “There’s a lot of variables, which is why it’s really hard to legislate health care, and I think those decisions could be left to patients and their doctors.”

Ziva Branstetter contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Jake Pearson, Joel Jacobs and Byard Duncan

If you’ve ever felt scammed by a mortgage company, auto lender, credit reporting agency or other financial institution, you might have turned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for help. In recent years, millions of Americans have filed complaints with the agency. Sometimes they did so after a long, unsuccessful back-and-forth with customer service representatives. In other cases, a friend, family member or advocate referred them.

The number of complaints — about payday loans, debt collection practices and more — has been growing steadily. The federal agency fielded 2.7 million of them last year, and half of those resulted in some kind of relief for consumers, according to agency data.

A bar chart shows the annual complaints from 2012 to 2024. Each bar is below 1 million complaints through 2022. In 2023, the bar reaches 1.3 million complaints. In 2024, the bar reaches 2.7 million complaints.

But now, those who have recently submitted complaints, who were part of larger cases or who fall victim to scams in the future may no longer be able to turn to the agency. That’s because the Trump administration is moving to dismantle the CFPB while its leaders have dropped lawsuits against major companies like Capital One and Rocket Homes. (The companies lauded the decision to drop the lawsuits and said that they disputed the CFPB’s allegations.)

A legal battle over the agency’s future is ongoing, and some consumers are already feeling the effects. As ProPublica reported Wednesday, dozens of ongoing bureau probes are effectively frozen, potentially denying accountability and financial relief for untold numbers of consumers.

“The Bureau has gone dark,” one agency official put it in a recent court filing.

The fallout affects millions of Americans across the political spectrum, including those living in states that supported President Donald Trump’s election. In fact, consumers in a number of those states — such as Georgia, Florida, Nevada, Louisiana and Texas — file complaints to the agency at some of the country’s highest rates.

A cartogram of the United States depicts the number of complaints per 1,000 residents in each state using a color gradient. The darkest end of the gradient is labeled ">50" and the lightest end is labeled "0". The locations with the darkest color, indicating higher complaints per capita, are Florida, Georgia, District of Columbia and Delaware.

The result of the administration’s actions is widespread confusion both within and outside the bureau as to who is sifting through complaints about scams and whether the agency will have enough resources to help the people who filed them, including student borrowers, military service members, people looking to build credit and the elderly.

ProPublica wants to understand the fallout that might come from gutting the federal government’s consumer watchdog, and we need your help. Please fill out the form below if you or someone you know:

• Filed a complaint with the CFPB in the past year.
• Had problems with a company whose case the CFPB dismissed or stopped investigating.
• Were in touch with the CFPB regarding investigations or resolutions in the past year.
• Worked with communities that rely on CFPB’s resources.

We are also interested in connecting with you if you work or worked for the agency or for one of the financial institutions it regulates. If that’s you, please do not fill out the form below. Instead, text reporter Jake Pearson securely on Signal at 917-512-0276.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these responses for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of them.

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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.

Since the Trump administration moved to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month, the bureau has dropped nine lawsuits that it had brought on behalf of consumers.

The actions effectively freed major financial firms like Capital One and the mortgage giant Rocket Homes from the threat of consequences for their alleged significant wrongdoing, shocking consumer advocates and raising questions about the future of America’s consumer watchdog. For their part, when the cases were dropped, the companies lauded the decisions, with a bank spokesperson welcoming the dismissal of the case, “which we strongly disputed,” and Rocket Homes calling the suit an “empty claim.”

But the administration’s new hands-off approach to enforcement at the CFPB extends far beyond those public lawsuits. Behind the scenes, dozens of ongoing investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance are now frozen at the agency, potentially denying accountability and financial relief for untold numbers of consumers, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Under a stop-work order issued by the agency’s new leaders, CFPB investigators have been unable to press forward on probes into companies whose products and services are used by tens of millions of Americans, including Carvana, the online used-car retailer; Mr. Cooper, one of the country’s largest mortgage servicers; and CareCredit, a leader in medical credit cards, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matters.

The ongoing inquiries, the existence of which ProPublica is revealing for the first time, were at various stages of development, with subpoenas issued in most of them and companies submitting records in response. And while the nature of the alleged wrongdoing wasn’t clear in all cases, people familiar with the inquiries said several probes tracked closely with problems featured in the agency’s own recent public reports.

Last fall, for example, the CFPB examined automobile finance companies and found numerous problems with industry practices, including failing “to timely provide consumers with title after loan payoff,” which can result in drivers losing their cars after traffic stops and accidents. That issue is one of several at play in probes of Carvana and VW Credit Inc., said the people, who like others interviewed by ProPublica spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive bureau actions.

Carvana didn’t respond to multiple emails seeking comment and a spokesperson didn’t return a voicemail. Spokespeople for VW Credit haven’t responded to emails seeking comment and a spokesperson didn’t return a phone call.

If you or someone you know has recently sought help from the CFPB, please fill out this form.

The investigatory pullback worries consumer advocates who fear the agency is now poised to effectively walk away from years of work that undergirds civil actions — a decision that they say will ultimately neuter the government’s ability to enforce America’s consumer financial protection laws while signaling to companies that all business practices, no matter how pernicious, are fair game. The latest agency data shows that it takes an average of 35 months from opening an investigation to either filing a lawsuit or settling the case.

“What we’re seeing is a wholesale abandonment of consumer protection, leaving people to fend for themselves when credit card companies, banks, payday lenders and payment apps violate the law,” said Lauren Saunders, the associate director of the National Consumer Law Center.

Indeed, the freeze in enforcement has stalled probes into companies that had previously agreed to legal payouts to settle allegations that they’d harmed consumers, the people said. At least two such companies were under investigation for allegedly backsliding into similar problematic behavior, the people said, even after those businesses had struck deals: data furnisher Afni Inc., which in 2020 agreed to pay a $500,000 civil penalty and more accurately report information to credit reporting agencies, and the home improvement fintech company GreenSky, which in 2021 paid a $2.5 million civil penalty and agreed to stop making fraudulent loans.

Afni didn’t respond to an email seeking comment and a spokesperson didn’t return a voicemail. GreenSky declined to comment.

The enforcement freeze effectively halts the CFPB’s efforts begun under former President Joe Biden to police tech companies, some of which have donated millions to President Donald Trump, the people said. Among the firms under agency scrutiny are Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and Greenlight Financial Technology, the maker of a popular debit-card-for-kids app.

The inquiry into Meta was being watched closely as a test case for the agency’s expansion into regulating tech companies whose businesses intersect with financial services.

According to people familiar with the probe, the CFPB was looking into whether Facebook was, without users’ knowledge, improperly holding onto confidential financial information that users entered into loan applications advertised by businesses on the platform.

The company disclosed the existence of the CFPB inquiry to shareholders last fall, saying it disagreed with the bureau’s claims that its advertising practices had violated the consumer financial protection laws and believed “an enforcement action is unwarranted.” In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that he didn’t know what the agency’s initials stood for and said of the bureau’s inquiry that “we had organizations that were looking into us that were, like, not really involved with social media.”

“We’re not a bank,” he added. “But they kind of found some theory that they wanted to investigate, and it’s like, OK.”

Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Asked for comment, a spokesperson referred ProPublica to the company's September 2024 securities filing.

Another prominent Trump donor, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has similarly criticized the bureau’s efforts to oversee financial technology companies. Andreesen, whose firm was a major backer of Greenlight, told Rogan last November that the bureau works to “terrorize financial institutions, prevent fintech, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks.” He didn’t disclose his investment in Greenlight during the appearance.

The CFPB has been looking into allegations that the company wasn’t allowing kids immediate access to their money as it had advertised that it would, leaving some users unable to pay for purchases, the people said. Then, they said, the company allegedly failed to provide sufficient customer service.

Greenlight didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment sent to its media address, and the company’s general counsel didn’t respond to a voicemail or an email. Neither Andreessen, his assistant nor his venture capital firm’s press office responded to emails seeking comment, and his assistant didn’t return a voicemail.

The tech leaders’ criticisms mirror those of Elon Musk, the billionaire head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. He posted “Delete the CFPB” on his social media site, X, after Trump’s presidential victory in November and then, just over two months later, as DOGE workers were given access to the agency, he posted “CFPB RIP.” Between those posts, Musk’s X announced that it was getting into the mobile payments business via a partnership with Visa. That would put it squarely in the jurisdiction of the CFPB; the bureau said last fall it would also start supervising large technology companies that provide digital payments.

A spokesperson for DOGE didn’t respond to a request for comment. A voicemail left with the entity handling X’s payment services wasn’t returned. In an interview last month, Musk, when asked about how his business interests and government work may intersect, said, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”

Since Musk’s posts, the administration has sought to fire most of the more than 1,700 agency staffers, has canceled more than 200 contracts and has issued sweeping stop-work orders, court records show. Unionized employees sued the CFPB’s acting director, Russell Vought, last month to stop many of those moves, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked some of them. The court is expected to rule soon on what staffing levels the administration must maintain for the CFPB to meaningfully perform dozens of statutorily required functions that Congress built in when it created the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Amid the back-and-forth, Vought and Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer, have backed off some of their positions, permitting some work and undoing some of the canceled contracts, according to court records. The result, though, said people familiar with the bureau’s operations, is a highly micromanaged work environment.

Within the enforcement division, virtually all pending investigations have been brought to a near standstill. Except for attorneys working on seven ongoing lawsuits that Paoletta has permitted to move forward, investigators still can’t speak with lawyers representing companies that have been subpoenaed, interview witnesses or take other significant actions without first obtaining his approval, bureau emails reviewed by ProPublica show. One Feb. 10 directive from Paoletta threatened enforcement division employees with “insubordination” for working without approval. Some employees’ requests for permission to work have gone unanswered. Others haven’t logged onto their computers for days at a time.

When administrations change, it is not uncommon for agency leaders to evaluate existing work and shift priorities to align with the new president’s agenda. During Trump’s first administration, Mick Mulvaney, the CFPB’s acting director, ordered agency attorneys to write summaries to justify working on more than 100 open cases, The New York Times reported. No such mandate has been issued since Trump took office two months ago.

Neither the CFPB nor Paoletta responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

While some of the stalled cases involve companies with no prior enforcement history, like Meta, others have had past run-ins with the agency.

The mortgage servicer Mr. Cooper, for example, had previously agreed to pay $73 million to more than 40,000 borrowers as part of a 2020 settlement with the CFPB to resolve allegations that it had engaged in multiple servicing problems, including improperly increasing monthly loan payment amounts and foreclosing on borrowers after it had promised not to do so while they were in the process of resolving the loans.

The bureau’s current inquiry revolves around the company’s disclosure that the sensitive personal information of nearly 15 million people — what the company described in a 2023 securities filing as “substantially all of our current and former customers” — was hacked, people familiar with it said. The CFPB had publicly issued guidance a year prior warning companies that “inadequate security for the sensitive consumer information collected, processed, maintained, or stored by” companies subject to agency oversight can violate consumer financial protection laws.

The company didn’t respond to an emailed message seeking comment, and the chief legal officer did not respond to a call and email.

Likewise, Synchrony Financial, whose subsidiary CareCredit is one of the top three medical credit card issuers, agreed to pay $225 million in 2014 to resolve a bureau probe into discriminatory card practices. It was subpoenaed again in 2017 by the agency for information about credit cards it promoted that allowed consumers to defer paying interest, court records show. The deals can result in consumers owing huge sums of accrued interest all at once when the deferral period ends. The American Banker reported that that inquiry did not result in any enforcement.

CareCredit is now the subject of another inquiry that, according to people familiar with it, closely tracks with a bureau report from last summer that found consumers “frequently complained of healthcare providers misrepresenting the specifics” of medical credit card promotions. Consumers also said they were “pressured by healthcare providers to open a credit card while receiving treatment.”

A spokesperson said the company works closely with federal regulators but wasn’t aware of any CFPB enforcement actions. In a July 2023 earnings call, Synchrony CEO Brian Doubles said the company was “very proud of the CareCredit products that we offer."

The agency was also investigating Point, a major player in the so-called alternative mortgage industry, another sector that caters to vulnerable borrowers, people familiar with the investigation said.

Lenders offer an up-front payment in exchange for a percentage of the growth in the value of the home at a future date. The deals often result in huge balloon payments, and purchasers have complained “about the financing terms, surprise at the size of the repayment amounts, disputes about appraisal values” and other issues, according to a CFPB industry report issued five days before Trump’s inauguration.

A spokesperson for Point didn’t respond to an email or voicemail seeking comment.

If you or someone you know has recently sought help from the CFPB, please fill out this form.