ProPublica

Last week, the Federal Bureau of Prisons posted a video of Deputy Director Josh Smith vowing to “make the BOP great again.” The seven-minute clip echoes the promises of change agency leaders have repeated in video announcements for months as the BOP struggles with a staffing crisis and budget shortfalls.

As a reporter covering the federal prison system, I want to know: How’s that going?

It has been a chaotic year in the Bureau of Prisons. The same day Trump took office, the agency director was fired. Then, bonuses were canceled. The union contract was scrapped. Dozens of prisoners and prison staff told me about shortages of basic needs, from toilet paper to food. And hundreds of exhausted officers have left, many lured away by better pay at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as I reported last week.

The same day my story published, the agency posted another video of Smith, this time announcing a plan to boost the BOP ranks by bringing back “significantly enhanced” retention incentives and offering one-time bonuses, paid for in part, he said, from savings from the canceled union contract.

“Now we’re all back working as one team,” he said. “Everything’s not going to get fixed immediately. But the hard work has started, and, thanks to President Trump, we are building a bureau where every staff member is proud to serve.” 

The announcement riled union officials. In an email to members, union leaders wrote that the video was “designed to create a narrative that the union was the problem” and that canceling the contract somehow “fixed” it.

I’ve been investigating the federal prison system for years, and I’m going to report on what comes next. I’m especially interested in tips about the leadership’s priorities, contracting and budget decisions, and concerns about wrongdoing or abuses of power. And I’m always interested in any documents or data you can share to paint a fuller picture of what’s going on inside the bureau. 

At ProPublica, we appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. I am gathering these stories for the purposes of my reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. I may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but I promise to read everything you submit. 

If you are a current prison employee or you have particularly sensitive information to share, you can contact me directly through Signal at KeriB.123.

The post Do You Work at a Federal Prison? Help ProPublica Investigate the Federal Prison System appeared first on ProPublica.

In the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of thousands of pregnant women were wheeled into hospitals where they fought for their lives and the lives of the babies they carried.

It took the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until August 2021, eight months after the first vaccine was administered, to formally recommend the COVID-19 shot for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. The CDC had found that pregnant women with COVID-19 faced a 70% increased risk of dying, compared with those who weren’t. They also faced an increased risk of being admitted to the intensive care unit, needing a form of life support reserved for the sickest patients, and delivering a stillborn baby. In recommending the vaccine, the CDC assured them that the shot was safe and did not cause fertility problems.

ProPublica examined the harm caused by the delay in rolling out and endorsing the vaccine for pregnant mothers. Federal officials at the time told us that they wanted to ensure “an abundance of evidence” before issuing guidance.

But a surprising turn of events this summer reversed that guidance.

In May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary and a longtime vaccine critic, announced on X that “the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from @CDCgov recommended immunization schedule. Bottom line: it’s common sense and it’s good science. We are now one step closer to realizing @POTUS’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.”

The next month, Kennedy fired all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with a selection of hand-picked members. The committee has since shifted its guidance, encouraging people to decide on their own whether to get the shot and to consider individual risk factors.

Doctors and national medical organizations said the new guidance from the CDC has caused confusion among patients and could put pregnant women and their babies at risk of severe illness or hospitalization.

“COVID-19 infection during pregnancy increases the risk of preterm birth, preeclampsia, and stillbirth,” read a statement from the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

The organization, as well as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s leading professional organization for OB-GYNs, reiterated their recommendations that all those who are pregnant or breastfeeding receive the updated vaccine and booster, regardless of the trimester they’re in.

ProPublica found that though unvaccinated women faced devastating risks, the COVID-19 vaccine had been commandeered by disinformation and doubt. Pharmaceutical companies and government officials had not ensured that pregnant women were included in the early development of the vaccine, despite federal guidance on how to safely include pregnant and breastfeeding people in biomedical research.

The HHS’ communications director, Andrew G. Nixon, defended the federal government’s actions, saying in a statement: “ACIP’s recommendation applies to all individuals six months and older. It includes an emphasis that the risk-benefit of vaccination in individuals under age 65 is most favorable for those who are at an increased risk for severe COVID-19 and lowest for individuals who are not at an increased risk, according to the CDC list of COVID-19 risk factors.”

Pregnancy is listed as a condition that can increase risk.

In the midst of the backlash against the CDC’s guidance, a recent Harvard University study highlights a new risk of COVID-19 during pregnancy. In a rare look at the children of women who contracted COVID-19 while pregnant, the study found that they may be at increased risk for autism and other neurodevelopmental diagnoses by age 3.

Researchers, who followed the children via their medical records from birth through their toddler years, observed some initial developmental delays at 12 months and again around 18 months, said Dr. Andrea Edlow, one of the study’s senior authors and an OB-GYN at Harvard Medical School.

“We were seeing speech and motor delays, but we really didn’t know if they were going to be persistent or evolve into other diagnoses like autism, or if children were maybe going to catch up,” Edlow said. “But that, unfortunately, hasn’t been the case.”

Edlow treated many pregnant patients during the pandemic, including some who experienced a life-threatening condition known as a cytokine storm. They often had high fevers and severe inflammation for several days. The condition, she remembers thinking, couldn’t be good for the placenta or the developing fetal brain.

Edlow and her team studied more than 18,000 live births to mothers who delivered between March 2020 and May 2021. Of those, more than 800 had been diagnosed with COVID-19. What surprised them was that 16.3% of those babies received a neurodevelopmental diagnosis by three years, compared with 9.7% of the babies who were not exposed to COVID-19 in utero. That was a statistically significant finding. During the period covered by the study, the CDC had not yet come out with its formal recommendation for pregnant women to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and as such, most of the mothers were unvaccinated.

The children of mothers who contracted COVID-19 in the third trimester, a critical time for fetal brain development, and boys had an even higher risk. The male placenta and fetal brain, the researchers wrote, are more susceptible to a mother’s immune response to COVID-19 and other infections.

“I know it’s alarming,” Edlow said.

The researchers, she said, are not out to stoke fear. While the risk of autism is increased, Edlow said, the overall risk still remains low. The study underscores the importance of monitoring children born to mothers who had COVID-19 while pregnant for neurodevelopmental conditions.

Edlow encouraged pregnant women to do everything they can to avoid getting COVID-19, including wearing masks, avoiding crowded indoor spaces and getting vaccinated and boosted.

“COVID is a real problem that poses risk to the mom in pregnancy and to the child,” she said. “And it’s still worth preventing, even at this point.”

Dr. Naima Joseph worries about how the reversal of the COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for pregnant patients will affect the health of the country, particularly its most vulnerable residents, women and children.

She remembers standing in line during the pandemic to get her COVID-19 vaccine when her husband, who is also a doctor, turned to her.

“Are you sure you should be doing this?” he asked.

Joseph, a maternal fetal medicine doctor at Boston Medical Center who serves on ACOG’s Immunization, Infectious Disease, and Public Health Preparedness Expert Work Group, paused. She was pregnant with twins. Like so many mothers, what she cared about most in this world was protecting her babies, but she also treated many pregnant patients sick with COVID-19 who spent months fighting for their lives from a hospital bed. Some died or lost their babies.

“Yes,” she replied to her husband before getting the shot.

The post Amid Confusing CDC Guidance About Vaccines, Study Highlights New Risk of COVID-19 During Pregnancy appeared first on ProPublica.

As the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet intensified in June, a nurse in Portland, Oregon, left work one midafternoon and drove to a nearby detention facility to voice his opposition. Federal agents had set off smoke grenades, driving away many protesters at the front of the facility, but Vincent Hawkins lifted his megaphone anyway.

“You should stop and think about what you’re doing!”

The shot came seconds later, a silver projectile launched through the small facility’s closed gate, hitting him in the face. The tear gas canister shattered his glasses, ripped apart his brow, crushed against his eye and concussed him. In video footage, the projectile can be seen bouncing off his face and arcing back toward the unknown Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fired it.

Hawkins, a 25-year veteran of the emergency room, was rushed to one, bleeding and wondering if he’d ever see through his left eye again. A frequent demonstrator, he knew the risks. He’d seen friends struggling to breathe through toxic chemical clouds, others pelted with pepper balls. But Hawkins was undeterred.

“I have things to say,” he said. “And if it means being wounded to do it, then here I am.”

The 55-year-old said he’d be blind in one eye if not for the shielding effect of his glasses. He’s regained most of his vision but suffers from dizziness and vertigo, sometimes causing him to miss work.

Vincent took a less lethal to the eye. He’s says he’s an ER nurse. Protesters call him an ambulance.

— Suzette Smith (@suzettesmith.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T00:41:57.628Z

Since President Donald Trump’s administration launched high-intensity immigration sweeps this year, federal agents have routinely countered protestors using crowd control weapons — rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tear gas and pepper balls. They’ve fired on American citizens and noncitizens alike in ways that some experts say might be criminal.

The so-called less lethal weapons are designed to break up mobs engaged in dangerous behavior or deter would-be assailants who pose a threat. They aren’t intended to kill. But research has shown the weapons can cause devastating injuries or death. Federal guidelines generally prohibit agents from targeting the head, neck, throat or spine when firing projectiles like rubber bullets or pepper balls.

ProPublica and FRONTLINE conducted dozens of interviews at protest scenes, reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and photographs, and analyzed some 50 video-recorded incidents in which immigration agents and officers used these weapons in the last five months. That review found more than two dozen cases in which officers deployed the weapons in ways that appear to flout the government’s own rules, including by aiming at someone’s head, spine or groin and deploying chemical agents at moving vehicles or near children.

In Southern California, federal law enforcement fired pepper balls and rubber bullets at people’s heads and backs at least five times, and at least once at a man’s groin, records and interviews show. In Oakland, California, an unarmed pastor who posed no obvious threat was blasted in the face with pepper powder. In Chicago, where more than a dozen people reported being indiscriminately pelted with pepper balls, entire blocks were enshrouded in tear gas, forcing people from their homes. A religious leader was targeted in his head with pepper balls.

Christy Lopez, a former senior civil rights litigator at the Department of Justice, said many of the bystander and news videos she’s seen show “clearly excessive, unreasonable force” that her former office would have investigated as potential crimes.

“They are clearly violating people’s rights,” said Lopez, who now teaches at Georgetown Law. “It’s probably criminal, and it should be investigated as such.”

“I don’t say that lightly,” added Lopez, who led investigations into misconduct and excessive force at police departments including Los Angeles, Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri. “This is a very different situation than anything we’ve seen in the past in terms of just the routine and really brazen use of force in violation of people’s rights.”

Co-published With

Rohini Haar, an ER doctor and University of California, Berkeley professor who studies crowd control weapons, told ProPublica that Hawkins’ assault in Portland was “absolutely” a misuse of tear gas because it was fired at his head when he posed no obvious threat. For a 2023 policy paper published by Physicians for Human Rights, Haar and her team analyzed peer-reviewed medical literature to identify more than 100,000 instances of people wounded by tear gas since 2015; the researchers found more than 5,000 serious injuries, including 14 deaths of people struck by military-grade gas canisters.

Haar said Americans are witnessing a “far more dangerous use of these weapons” in recent months, despite calls for clearer use-of-force policies following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the nationwide protests it spurred.

“You’re going to see a lot more injuries,” she said.

In a statement to ProPublica, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said its ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers show “incredible restraint” but sometimes must use force as they “put their lives on the line to arrest murderers, rapists, and gang members.”

ICE and CBP personnel “are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves,” the statement said. “Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”

Even when used correctly, manufacturers acknowledge these weapons can be lethal. As Defense Technology, a Wyoming company that makes the type of canister that struck Hawkins, discloses on many of its wares: “THIS PRODUCT MAY CAUSE SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH TO YOU OR OTHERS.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Aggressive Campaign

Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, a 30-year veteran of CBP, has orchestrated many of the most aggressive immigrant roundups across the country.

When forces under Bovino’s command began rounding up suspected undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles in June, vocal demonstrations followed. In response, his troops used tear gas and rubber bullets in ways that drew rebuke from a California federal judge.

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino leads federal agents in pushing back protesters from a driveway used by transports carrying detained people at an ICE processing facility in Illinois in October. Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times/Redux

On June 7, a Homeland Security agent shot a local reporter in the head with a rubber bullet as the journalist covered a fierce protest at a Home Depot in Los Angeles County, causing a concussion.

In ensuing days, federal personnel repeatedly fired crowd control munitions at media members, protesters and bystanders. The Los Angeles Press Club and a union representing journalists sued the Department of Homeland Security.

“DHS agents have consistently used these weapons to suppress First Amendment protected activity when they faced no meaningful threat of violence,” the suit said. “Despite common perceptions that alleged ‘crowd control’ weapons are harmless, each of these weapons — including, and especially, chemical weapons and projectiles — can cause significant and long-lasting health harms.”

In early September, U.S. District Judge Hernán D. Vera issued an order restricting the use of crowd control weapons and requiring “at least two separate warnings” before agents or officers deployed them. Enforceable only in the Central District of California, which covers much of coastal Southern California, the order also barred agents from firing tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades at the public and shooting rubber bullets or other projectiles “at the head, neck, groin, back, or other sensitive areas, unless that person poses an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury.” That order went further than existing policies at DHS, specifically prohibiting firing on journalists and requiring law enforcement to give clear dispersal orders and allowing crowds to leave before deploying weapons.

DHS appealed, saying the ruling “micromanages how DHS agents respond to violent riots.” The appeal is pending.

Bovino has defended his officers, calling their use of the weapons “exemplary.” Yet allegations of misuse have followed his forces to other cities.

Midway Blitz

After Los Angeles, Bovino took his troops to Chicago. There, he led Operation Midway Blitz — an aggressive campaign of roving immigration sweeps that included the siege of an entire apartment building.

Those apprehended during the blitz were taken to a detention facility in a nondescript industrial park in Broadview, a Chicago suburb. Small demonstrations had been held there for years, but they exploded in size as ICE and CBP officials rushed hundreds of detainees through the suburban streets to jail and possible deportation.

Federal agents and officers turned again to crowd control weapons.
Raven Geary, co-founder of Unraveled, an independent news operation in Chicago, was covering a protest at the Broadview detention facility in late September when a federal agent shot her in the face with a pepper ball, causing her left cheek to bleed and bruise.

Raven Geary, co-founder of an independent news operation in Chicago, was shot in the face with a pepper ball by a federal agent. Raven Geary/Unraveled

“It was this very sudden, horrible pain,” said Geary, who was carrying two large cameras and wearing a press badge. Then she realized she was covered in a powder containing the active ingredient in hot peppers. “You’re coughing, you are sneezing, you are wheezing, it can be hard to see.”

Leigh Kunkel, a demonstrator, also got pelted. “The crowd was not doing anything,” she said, yet the pepper balls came flying at them.

Agents shot her in the back of the head and the nose. “I’m incredibly lucky that he didn’t hit me 2 inches higher,” she said. “I could have lost an eye.”

Federal Agents Fire “Less Lethal” Weapons at Protesters

Federal agents firing crowd control weapons during a protest at a Broadview, Illinois, detention facility in September, where journalist Raven Geary was shot in the face with a pepper ball. Steve Held/Unraveled

Kunkel and Geary became plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to curb the use of force by federal forces in the Chicago area.

As part of that lawsuit, a nearby resident and mother named Autumn Hamer told a judge how she swung by the facility in the early morning to see peaceful protestors chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Federal officers on the roof intermittently fired rubber bullets and pepper balls into the crowd, she said. A flash-bang grenade landed next to her, causing disorientation and a ringing in her ear.

At a subsequent protest, she saw a projectile tear through an acoustic guitar a woman was playing. The agents fired tear gas, Hamer said, making her choke. As Hamer and others tried to move from the barricaded front of the facility toward fresh air on another street, she told ProPublica and FRONTLINE, they found themselves getting shot through a side barricade, as though agents had flanked them to box them in.

“It all felt cruel,” Hamer told reporters. She noted that the pepper ball launchers are similar in design to recreational paintball guns. “I have teenage boys, so when I look at [agents], I’m like, … are you pretending that you’re in a video game right now?”

Federal Judge Sara Ellis sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a temporary restraining order that barred immigration agents from targeting journalists and using crowd control weapons unless there is a serious threat to public safety.

Still, Bovino’s agents continued to use the weapons. One Chicago resident captured a video that looks like it could have come from a video game.

Enrique Bahena wore camera-equipped Meta glasses to a protest in Chicago’s Little Village, a largely Latino neighborhood. Bahena said he was with a group of activists who were loudly — but nonviolently — confronting Border Patrol agents. “Everyone was just telling them to get out,” he recalled.

Bahena’s camera glasses captured a first-person view of a Border Patrol agent pointing a pepper ball launcher at him, just feet away. In the video, the agent fires at his throat, sending up a cloud of noxious smoke.

On Nov. 6, Ellis, the federal judge for the Northern District of Illinois nominated by former President Barack Obama, said from the bench that “the use of force shocks the conscience,” before ordering dramatic changes in how federal forces use crowd control weapons.

DHS decried her ruling as “an extreme act by an activist judge that risks the lives and livelihoods of law enforcement officers.”

“Rioters, gangbangers, and terrorists have opened fire on our federal law enforcement officers, thrown rocks, bottles, and fireworks at them, slashed the tires of their vehicles, rammed them, ambushed them, and they have destroyed multiple law enforcement vehicles,” a department statement read.
DHS appealed. Last week, a panel of three Republican appointees sided with the government, temporarily blocking her ruling and saying Ellis’ limitations on officers went too far — so much so, the judges wrote, that they “resembled federal regulation.”

Federal agents target protesters with “less lethal” weapons at an ICE building in Oregon in October. Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

Ellis criticized Bovino for an October incident in which he threw a tear gas canister at community members in the Little Village neighborhood. Bovino claimed he’d been attacked by a rock-throwing assailant, forcing him to deploy the gas for his own protection. Ellis said “video evidence disproves this. And he ultimately admitted he was not hit until after he threw the tear gas.”

Bovino did not respond to a request for comment made through DHS.

A DHS official said personnel working under Bovino enjoy a sense of “impunity” when it comes to uses of force. “These events keep happening because of the lack of accountability by CBP,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. “And there’s usually no repercussions for agents or officers because federal prosecutors rarely prosecute agents for excessive force.”

“We Come in Peace”

On the morning of Oct. 23, a green-and-white Border Patrol truck lurched through a crowd of protestors gathered on the Oakland, California, waterfront. The demonstrators had converged after learning that federal agents would be using a nearby Coast Guard base to launch a wave of immigration raids.

Masked Border Patrol agents popped out to disperse people who’d enveloped the vehicle with signs and chants. Hoping to calm the tension, a local pastor named Jorge Bautista joined the crowd to pray.

Videos show an agent exiting the truck, marching toward the pastor and pointing a large-caliber weapon at his face.

“I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way he’s going to shoot this thing at me,’” Bautista recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘He’s just using this to scare me. It’s not going to work.’ And the moment I realized he was close enough to hear me, I said, ‘We come in peace.’”

As he said those words, the agent pulled the trigger, striking Bautista with an object that dispersed what bystanders believed was pepper powder. Videos show Bautista struggling to breathe as his eyes and skin burned beneath toxic granules. The unidentified agent calmly returned to the truck.

Jorge Bautista, right, was shot in the face in Oakland in October by a Border Patrol agent who fired a powder that made his skin burn and made it hard to breathe. David Bacon

Bystanders poured liquid on his face. He kept his eyes shut and wound up in the hospital for treatment of scrapes and bruises on his chin and neck.

“No one should be assaulted for being out there protesting,” said Bautista, who said he intends to sue DHS.

“You would figure they would be trained to de-escalate situations, right? Instead of going straight for using some kind of weapon to assault somebody,” the pastor said.

The post Trump’s Immigration Forces Deploy “Less Lethal” Weapons in Dangerous Ways, Skirting Rules and Maiming Protesters appeared first on ProPublica.

The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles has fired a longtime employee nearly five years after investigators found he used his position to garner steep discounts on cars he bought from a towing company, according to a termination letter obtained last week.

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica reported in March on the accusations against Dominik Stefanski and the DMV’s failure to take action against him or the towing company. The story was part of a larger series about how Connecticut’s towing laws have come to favor tow truck companies over vehicle owners and how the DMV’s lack of oversight has allowed abuses in the system. The DMV investigated Stefanski for over a year beginning in 2020 but didn’t fire him until early November, months after the news organizations’ story.

According to the 2020-21 DMV investigation, when employees of D&L Auto Body & Towing in Berlin, Connecticut, went to the main DMV office in nearby Wethersfield, they would make eye contact with Stefanski, who would then allow them to cut the slow-moving DMV lines. In exchange for this favor, the report said, D&L employees would allow Stefanski to select vehicles that had been towed by the company weeks or months before. D&L would then undervalue the cars on DMV forms, investigators said, allowing Stefanski to buy them cheaply and resell them for a profit.

In total, DMV investigators found that from 2015 to 2019, D&L sold 15 vehicles to an investment firm owned by Stefanski, who had worked for the agency since 1999 and was then a document examiner in the DMV’s main office. In one case, Stefanski bought a Cadillac for $1,000 and sold it for $17,500. The car was eventually sold by another company for $23,250.

In 2020, DMV investigators recommended that Stefanski be criminally charged for the scheme they alleged made him thousands of dollars, and they completed an arrest warrant. A prosecutor decided not to file charges, however, citing “prosecutorial discretion” and “insufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The prosecutor suggested the DMV could handle the matter internally.

But the DMV did not discipline Stefanski or issue fines against D&L in the years after the investigation. The agency declined to comment on the firing and declined to answer specific questions about the investigation.

Stefanski was placed on paid administrative leave in March, two business days after the story was published. He earned just over $72,000 annually. The Nov. 6 termination letter notes that he was fired for misconduct “when you used your position for financial gain.” 

Stefanski said he has appealed and anticipates having a hearing next month. In an interview with reporters earlier this year, Stefanski maintained that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Reached by phone last week, Stefanski said that after the news organizations published the article, he had a hearing in which he presented evidence, including a check he received as a loan to buy one of the vehicles. He said the check proves he paid more for the vehicle than the warrant indicated.

The state rejected Stefanski’s argument.

“The agency did not find that the information presented provided any basis to mitigate the contemplated penalty of dismissal,” the termination letter said.

A D&L official declined to comment on the firing but said previously in a statement that the manager working with Stefanski was fired and that the company is working with the DMV “to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again.”

“The company’s manager at the time acted on his own and thought he was doing the right thing by selling in-operable cars,” the statement said. According to investigators, many of the cars were in good condition.

Stefanski said his union is helping him with the appeal, but he declined to give details until it is over.

Read More

How a Connecticut DMV Employee Made Thousands by Selling Towed Cars

Logan Williams, a representative of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 4, which represents DMV workers, said the union can’t comment on the specifics of the case but that the rights of workers “derive their strength from the integrity of due process.”

“Every Union exists to defend this process and our members’ rights,” Williams said in a statement. “Whenever discipline is handed down in the workplace, our union has an obligation to ensure that the process is followed and that our members have access to due process.”

Stefanski said no one at the DMV indicated why he was being fired close to seven years after the incidents and five years after DMV investigators learned what was happening.

“They didn’t give me an explanation. They actually didn’t give me nothing,” Stefanski said.

The post Connecticut DMV Fires Employee Who Made Thousands Selling Towed Cars appeared first on ProPublica.

It was Friday, June 6, and the rent was due. As soon as she finished an errand, Imelda Carreto planned on joining her family as they gathered scrap metal to earn a little extra cash. Her fiancé, Julio Matias, and 15-year-old nephew, Carlos, had set out early, hitching a trailer to the back of their beat-up gray truck.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Carreto’s phone rang. It was Carlos, telling her an officer with the Florida Highway Patrol had pulled over the truck on Interstate 4 near Tampa. The stated reason: cracks in their windshield. But Carreto was worried. She knew Florida police were collaborating with federal immigration authorities. Her fiancé was undocumented. She says she rushed to the scene and made it there just before the immigration officers.

As she feared, Matias had been detained. But to her surprise, so had Carlos. He was just a kid. (ProPublica is only identifying Carlos by his first name because he is a minor.) Carlos was in high school. He’d been living in the United States for over two years and was working toward applying for legal status to stay long term. The government had given her, a legal resident, custody of him. Now he was in handcuffs. Why would they take him too?

Carreto didn’t carry any proof that she had custody of the boy. She had left it in another car in her rush. She recalls officers saying her nephew would likely be released to her in a few days once she presented the proper documents. Before they drove him away, Carlos started to tear up. Carreto told him, “Don’t cry. I don’t know how, but I’ll get you back. Understand?”

A cracked windshield, a waiting officer, a forgotten document: The new family separations often start in the most mundane ways.

Seven years ago, during the first administration of President Donald Trump, children were taken from their families the moment they crossed the border into the United States. Under a policy of zero tolerance for illegal crossing, Customs and Border Protection officers detained adults while children were sent into the federal shelter system. The aim: to deter other families from following. But after widespread public outcry and a lawsuit, the administration ended it.

Today, family separations are back, only now they are happening all across the country. The lawsuit against the zero tolerance policy resulted in a 2023 settlement that limits separations at the border, but it does not address those that occur inside the country after encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Advocates fear the administration is conducting the new separations for the same reasons as before: to deter new immigrants from coming and to terrify those who are here into leaving.

Since the start of this year, some 600 immigrant children have been placed in government shelters by ICE, according to government data. That figure, which has not been previously reported, is already higher than the tally for the previous four years combined. And it is the highest number since recordkeeping began a decade ago.

ProPublica pieced together additional information for around 400 children sent to shelters by examining state and federal records and conducting dozens of interviews with current and former government officials, advocates, attorneys and immigrant families.

Around 160 of the cases that we learned about involved child welfare concerns, which current and former officials say is typical of the children ICE has sent to shelters in the past. These cases include instances of kids who were encountered alone inside the country or were considered potential victims of domestic abuse or trafficking, or instances where minors or the adults they were with had been accused of committing a crime.

But in a majority of the cases we examined, kids ended up in shelters in ways government officials say they never would have in the past: after routine immigration court hearings or appointments, or because they were at a home or a business when immigration authorities showed up to arrest someone else.

In South Carolina, a Colombian family of five went to a government office for a fingerprinting appointment, only to have the parents detained while the children — ages 5, 11 and 15 — were sent into the shelter system for four months. In South Florida, a 17-year-old from Guatemala was taken into custody because officers couldn’t make contact with his dad after a traffic stop; his dad is deaf. In Maryland, a 17-year-old from Mexico ended up in a shelter after making a wrong turn onto military property.

In around 150 cases, children were taken into federal custody after traffic stops. The trend is especially noticeable in states like Florida, where thousands of state and local police, including highway patrol, have been deputized to enforce immigration laws.

“What’s happening to kids now is like many small zero tolerances,” said Marion “Mickey” Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center. This and other changes affecting immigrant children are “adding up to a huge trauma.”

Most of the cases we found involve teenagers, and many of them had been in the United States for years. In those cases, being sent to a shelter can mean separation not only from their families but from schools, friends, churches, doctors and daily routines.

Once children are in shelters, the government is making it harder and harder for relatives or other adults who act as sponsors to get them back. The average length of stay has grown to nearly six months, up from one month during the presidency of Joe Biden, public data shows.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a written statement that the Biden administration released immigrant kids to sponsors too quickly and without proper vetting, sometimes into unsafe situations. “The Trump Administration is ensuring that unaccompanied minors do not fall victim to the same dangerous conditions,” Jackson said.  

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, speaking for ICE, said the agency “does not separate families” and instead offers parents the choice to have their children deported with them or to leave the children in the care of another safe adult, consistent with past practices. 

Asked about Carlos’ detention in Florida, McLaughlin said that traffic stops by officers trained to partner with ICE have prevented abuse of immigrant children and “resulted in arrests of human traffickers, abusers, and other criminals.”

ProPublica found no evidence of Carreto or Matias, her fiancé, being accused or convicted of serious crimes. Carreto had been found guilty of driving without a license at least twice and had gotten a speeding ticket. Matias pleaded guilty to a 2011 taillight infraction. He now has an ongoing case for driving without a license from the traffic stop with Carlos, and he has been returned to Guatemala.

Shelter Network Turned on Its Head

What is happening now is not what the system was set up for.

The nation’s network of roughly 170 federal shelters for “unaccompanied” immigrant children is run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The office is tasked with temporarily housing vulnerable children who cross the border alone, holding them in the least restrictive setting possible until they can be released to a sponsor in the United States. Typically that means placing kids with a parent or other family member. The office finds and vets the sponsors and is required to release children to them without delay. Once kids are out, they can apply to remain here permanently.

Under Biden, when border crossings surged to record highs, around 470,000 children were released to sponsors after going through the shelter system. Republicans said the releases incentivized smugglers to endanger kids on the long journey north and encouraged parents to send their children across the border alone.

The White House called the previous administration’s sponsor-vetting process “abysmal,” and said that many records pertaining to minors released under Biden “were either fraudulent or never existed to begin with.” 

Biden officials deny these claims. But some kids have indeed ended up working in dangerous jobs.

The Trump administration has placed former ICE officials in charge of the refugee resettlement office and has made it a priority to locate children who were released from custody in previous years. To facilitate the effort, ICE plans to open a national, 24-hour call center meant to help state and local officials find them. The government says it says it has already checked on more than 24,400 children in person, and it cited more than a dozen examples of sponsors and immigrant minors arrested for crimes ranging from murder to drug trafficking, rape and assault. One of the cases the White House highlighted was of a 15-year-old Guatemalan girl the government says was released in 2023 to a man who falsely claimed to be her brother and allegedly went on to sexually abuse her.

Under Trump, the government has introduced new vetting requirements, including expanded DNA checks, fingerprinting for everyone in the sponsor’s household and heightened scrutiny of family finances. 

In response to questions from ProPublica, the refugee resettlement office said it was legally required to care for all unaccompanied kids who came through its doors and defended the new vetting process. “The enhanced sponsorship requirements of this administration help keep unaccompanied alien children safe from traffickers and other bad, dangerous people,” a spokesperson said. 

Because so many children are now being sent into shelters in ways they hadn’t been before, though, lawyers and advocates worry the administration’s efforts have another motive: to more broadly target and deport immigrant kids and their families. They also say the new requirements are creating so much fear that some undocumented family members are hesitant to come forward as sponsors.

Around half of the kids that ICE sent into the shelter system this year have been there before. When they arrived years ago, after crossing the border alone, they were released as soon as possible. This time, back in the system, they’re languishing.

“I think that they’re using a clearly vulnerable, clearly sympathetic population in a way that sends a powerful message to literally every other population,” said Jen Smyers, who was an official at the Office of Refugee Resettlement during the Biden administration. “If they’re going to go after these kids who have protections and say we care about them, and then treat them like this, that shows everyone that no one is safe.”

This month, attorneys suing the government over its treatment of children in the shelter system recovered a government document being provided to unaccompanied minors who cross the border. It warns them that if they do not choose to leave the country within 72 hours they will “be detained in the custody of the United States Government, for a prolonged period of time.” The document also warned that if the person who sought to sponsor the minors was undocumented, they would be “subject to arrest and removal” or to criminal penalties for “aiding your illegal entry.”

Customs and Border Protection told ProPublica that the document is used to ensure immigrant children “understand their rights and options.”

There have already been cases of prospective sponsors who have shown up at government offices for in-person interviews and been detained for being in the country illegally, said Marie Silver, a managing attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago.

“They are using the kids as bait, and then the kids are stuck,” Silver said. “They are creating unaccompanied children this way.”

Separation in the Sunshine State

In Florida, we found two dozen kids arrested in traffic stops who went on to spend weeks or months in federal shelters. Some are still there.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s Republican majority have spent years crafting policies that allow local police officers to seamlessly operate as federal immigration enforcers. They aim to be a model for how states can help the Trump administration “reclaim America’s sovereignty.”

Across Florida, almost 5,000 officers — even those from its Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission — are empowered to detain people over their immigration status and to call in federal authorities to come pick them up. ProPublica obtained state data revealing that Florida police have arrested at least 47 children on federal immigration charges since late April, with the Florida Highway Patrol leading the tally.

In cases like that of Carlos, children were sent to a federal shelter despite having a parent or legal custodian caring for them. Five current and former federal officials said this could be a violation of ICE’s own policy. The policy dictates that officers should let primary caregivers like Carreto take them home or find a safe place to send them. (It does not clearly require caregivers to show any documentation.) If they can’t find a safe place, or if there are signs the child is in danger, officers are supposed to alert local law enforcement or child-welfare officials and wait for them to arrive.

Florida has its own laws governing how state and local officers should interact with children. If a kid is found alone or in danger, state police must call a hotline run by Florida’s Department of Children and Families. The call is supposed to trigger a process in which state judges review any decision to place a child in the care of someone other than their family within 24 hours.

It’s not clear if Florida officers are calling the state hotline when encountering immigrant children. But it is clear that this year they have often called ICE.

State police contacted immigration officials directly about Carlos, Florida records show. Carlos went into federal custody without a state shelter hearing, according to his attorney, who said the same thing has happened to three other clients following traffic stops.

State Rep. Lawrence McClure, the Republican who introduced legislation this January that supercharged Florida’s cooperation with ICE, promised during debate on the bill that nothing would change about how the state treated immigrant children. McClure did not respond directly to questions from ProPublica about the transfers to ICE.

Boundaries between state and federal policy “are being blurred” in an “unprecedented way,” said Bernard Perlmutter, co-director of the University of Miami’s Children and Youth Law Clinic.

The collaboration with local police in Florida and elsewhere comes as ICE has worked increasingly with other federal agencies that may have their own policies for handling encounters with kids.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, DeSantis’ press secretary emailed a list of more than a dozen links from the video platform Rumble in which the governor speaks about immigration enforcement, writing: “Governor DeSantis has made immigration enforcement a top priority to keep Florida communities safe.”

Other state officials, including from the Florida Highway Patrol and Department of Children and Families, either did not respond or declined our requests for comment on the state’s partnership with ICE and its impact on immigrant children.

It was Florida’s cooperation with federal authorities that landed Carlos in the federal shelter system this June — his second time there.

In December 2022, Carlos, then 13 years old, came to the United States from Guatemala, where his single mother made him work or beg for money, according to court records. He thought he would be better off in the U.S. with her sister, according to records provided by his attorney. He made the journey without his parents, the documents say. 

After he crossed near Donna, Texas, he was picked up by border agents and spent three weeks in a federal shelter before being released to his aunt. Carreto said she had no idea Carlos was making the journey until she received a 2 a.m. phone call from immigration authorities. She welcomed the boy into her sprawling Guatemalan American family and insisted that he go to school.

Two and a half years into his stay with Carreto came the traffic stop.

Carlos was first taken across the state to the Broward Transitional Center, a for-profit detention facility operated by the GEO Group, an ICE contractor. He was transferred later in the day to an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter in Tampa run by Urban Strategies, another government contractor, records show. The GEO Group declined to comment and referred ProPublica to ICE. Lisa Cummins, president of Urban Strategies, wrote in an email: “We remain deeply committed to the care and well-being of the children we serve.”

Carreto launched into weeks of confusing phone calls and paperwork to get her nephew back. She had to send in a 10-page application. She turned over information about her finances, her adult son’s finances, her lack of criminal history. She submitted samples of her DNA. She sent photos of the smoke alarms in her house.

Shortly after Carlos was detained, Carreto said, immigration officers paid an unannounced visit to her home. Her son Ereson, who is 18, says federal agents came onto the property without permission and asked if any immigrants were living there. The visit scared the family.

Carreto’s daughters eventually managed to pinpoint Carlos’ location by asking him over the phone to name landmarks he could see, then searching for them on Google. In video calls home, Carreto said, Carlos was visibly sad. She said he sometimes skipped meals. “Why are they keeping me here?” she recalled him asking, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Carreto visited the offices of Homeland Security Investigations in Tampa with three of her children. She said agents asked how much she paid to have Carlos smuggled across the border and how much she was getting paid to try to get him out of detention. They threatened her with federal charges if she didn’t tell the truth, she said.

“I told them that nobody is paying me,” she said. “I’m doing this because he’s my nephew. He’s like a son to me.”

Carlos was released after two and a half months.

He was one of the lucky ones: His aunt was a legal resident who had custody of him, and the family had the resources and determination to fight for him.

The government this year has moved to slash legal services for children and offered cash to kids who give up their cases and go home. (The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s statement to ProPublica said it is fully complying with a court order requiring that minors be provided with legal representation.) Attorneys who represent children said they have seen a spike in cases of self-harm and behavioral problems as kids lose hope of being released.

Of the kids that ProPublica learned about, around 140 were still stuck in federal shelters as of last month. Close to 100 were ordered to be deported or had signed papers agreeing to leave the country.

The post ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record. appeared first on ProPublica.

In recent days, five U.S. senators and two representatives requested documents from the Department of Homeland Security and a formal investigation into how a firm closely tied to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ended up receiving money from a $220 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign.

The demands came in response to a ProPublica story this month that revealed that the Republican consulting firm had been secretly working on the ads, which star Noem. The company, called the Strategy Group, has long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. Its CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS.

Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.

“The public deserves to know that government officials are not using taxpayer dollars to enrich themselves and their friends on the backs of hardworking Americans,” four Senate Democrats on the homeland security committee wrote in a letter to the DHS inspector general. They called for the inspector general to investigate whether DHS officials had violated federal laws and contracting regulations “designed to prevent self-dealing.” 

The senators who signed the letter were Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.; Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.; and Andy Kim, D-N.J. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., separately sent his own letter to the inspector general.

In their own letter, Reps. Bennie Thompson and Robert Garcia — the ranking members of the House homeland security and oversight committees — demanded copies of all communications between Noem and her aides and “anyone associated with the Strategy Group” or the Delaware LLC. They wrote that they intended to investigate Noem for “lining your friends’ pockets at the taxpayer’s expense.”

Other Democrats in Congress have also criticized Noem for the ad deal. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for Noem to resign following the ProPublica report. “This is what corruption looks like,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett said at a congressional hearing. “They’re stealing money from the American people’s pockets and depositing it into their bank accounts.”

ProPublica found that the Strategy Group’s undisclosed work for DHS included running a shoot for a recently aired ad that featured Noem on horseback at Mount Rushmore, delivering a message to immigrants. Among the firm’s ties to Noem: It played a central role in her last gubernatorial campaign in South Dakota, and it has worked closely with Noem’s top aide at DHS, Corey Lewandowski. The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by Tricia McLaughlin; McLaughlin is married to the CEO of the Strategy Group, Ben Yoho.

Multiple federal contracting experts previously told ProPublica that the extensive ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.

Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore 

Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin previously told ProPublica, “I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself.” She added, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”

DHS did not address questions about the calls for an IG investigation. In a statement, the agency reiterated its response to the original story, saying that DHS does its contracting “by the book” and that the agency is not involved in the selection of subcontractors. 

A spokesperson for the DHS inspector general told ProPublica that as a matter of policy, it does not confirm or deny investigations.

The Strategy Group did not respond to questions. 

Read More

Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts

The post Lawmakers Call for Probe of How Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Got Piece of $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts appeared first on ProPublica.

Just last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined a bipartisan chorus of governors in denouncing a Biden administration plan they said would strip states of powers guaranteed to them under federal law.

The plan would have transferred Air National Guard units from six states to the U.S. Space Force, the newly created military branch, stoking concerns about federal overreach and the erosion of governors’ control over their own guard forces. Texas wasn’t among the affected states, but Abbott made his opposition unmistakable in an open letter to the president.

He called the plan an “intolerable threat that would set a “dangerous precedent.”

“I strongly oppose any attempt to sideline governors when it comes to their respective National Guards,” he wrote.

A year later, Abbott helped Donald Trump do just that. He said that he “fully authorized” the president’s plan to send Texas National Guard members to Illinois and Oregon to protect federal law enforcement personnel who are executing immigration laws. Those states’ governors vigorously objected, saying such action was an unnecessary escalation that interfered with state sovereignty.

Abbott defended the deployment on Fox News. The president, he said, has the authority to mobilize guard members to preserve public safety.

“President Trump and I have a good, longstanding working relationship, and there is a substantive reason behind that,” Abbott said. He added that he and the president were “operating very closely aligned on ensuring that our country is going to be safe.”

Abbott, the leader of the largest state led by Republicans, has emerged as one of Trump’s most important allies as the president tests the limits of executive power. While governors often align with their parties’ presidents, Abbott’s support for Trump’s expansion of federal powers is a striking departure from his own historical and ardent defenses of state sovereignty.

That, constitutional experts say, sets a risky example that may be difficult to reverse.

“What he’s doing is short-term gain for his political positions, and Texas’ political positions, but not for Texas as a state moving forward,” said Georgetown University Law Center professor Victoria Nourse. “You might like this president, but you’re not necessarily going to like what happens to Texas with the next one.”

There are myriad examples of Abbott bending his views on state sovereignty to accede to the wishes of the new administration, including directing state agencies to assist the administration’s immigration enforcement — an action that constitutional law experts said essentially deputized the Texas government into federal service — as well as providing data on voters and redrawing legislative boundaries to net more GOP-friendly seats in the U.S. House.

Abbott’s arguments then and actions now are an example of what Jessica Bulman-Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University, calls partisan federalism, a term describing how state leaders’ fervor for defending their sovereignty increasingly depends on whether their party is in power in Washington. She said Abbott’s support of the guard deployments is particularly alarming because it diminishes the traditional power of governors to manage law enforcement in their states.

Abbott did not respond to interview requests or written questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. But Robert Henneke, general counsel for the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, and James Peinado, chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas, which advocates for limited government, said they saw no contradiction between Abbott’s historic defense of states’ authority and his support of Trump’s actions. Trump is following the law, Henneke said, and “the states don’t have the power to block the lawful exercise of authority of the federal government.”

Abbott’s actions, however, have drawn rebuke from fellow governors, including at least one from his own party.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, told The New York Times that he was surprised Abbott sent Texas guard members to Illinois. “We believe in the federalist system — that’s states’ rights. Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” said Stitt, who did not respond to interview requests.

Ron Beal, a retired law professor at Baylor University, said Abbott’s actions not only violate the historic spirit of cooperation among states, but provide Trump cover to unlawfully interfere in state matters.

“Trump’s reason for sending troops is clearly a total fabrication of reality and I believe a constitutional violation,” Beal said. “It is simply outrageous that Abbott would participate and cooperate with such activity.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker speaks at a Chicago “No Kings” protest against President Donald Trump’s policies on Oct. 18. Jim Vondruska/Reuters

Shifting View of Federal Power

Abbott’s devotion to state sovereignty has long been central to his political identity.

In January 2016, entering his second year as governor, he published a 92-page essay defending states’ rights and decrying what he called the Obama administration’s executive overreach. In a speech that month to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, he accused President Barack Obama of bypassing Congress by enacting climate change and immigration policy through unilateral executive orders. Abbott also lambasted the Supreme Court for upholding the Affordable Care Act, arguing the justices invented a legal basis for it.

“State leaders were supposed to have the power and opportunity to check any attempt by federal officials to overstep their bounds,” Abbott wrote. “Indeed, the entire structure of the Constitution was premised on the idea that the states would be stronger than the national government.”

Abbott proposed the “Texas Plan,” a set of nine constitutional amendments that he said would restore the balance of authority between the federal government and states. Among them was one that would make clear that the president, Congress and judges have no powers beyond those expressly mentioned in the Constitution.

The essay offered a well-reasoned critique of growing federal power, said Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, who has assigned it as required reading for his students.

Levinson said Abbott’s recent actions mark a complete reversal.

“He condemned presidents for overreach, particularly in executive orders, and said we had to do something to rein that in. There’s much to be said for that, but that is certainly not his view in 2025,” Levinson said. “Most of what Trump does is through executive order.”

Trump has sought to use executive orders to force changes to elections and voting. He has also pressured state leaders to make changes on his behalf, and Abbott has obliged.

Over the summer, Abbott became the first governor to comply with Trump’s demand that Republican-led states break from the traditional 10-year cycle of redrawing congressional districts to create more GOP-friendly seats for the 2026 midterm election.

Initially sympathetic to incumbent Republican House members’ worries that the strategy could weaken solid GOP seats by spreading the party’s voters across too many districts, Abbott ultimately called a special session of the Texas Legislature to draft new congressional boundaries.

Texas lawmakers in 2003 similarly conducted a rare mid-decade redistricting, but that was not directed by then-President George W. Bush, said Karl Rove, one of Bush’s senior advisers. “The White House and RNC didn’t provoke or lead the effort,” Rove said in a text message.

A governor allowing a president to influence when a state redistricts cedes the historical power of states to run their own elections, said Mimi Marziani, who teaches election law at the University of Texas.

She said Trump’s request for more GOP-friendly seats “has everything to do with national party interests and nothing to do with state interests.” And she warned that if governors give in, they will be vulnerable to future presidential meddling.

Earlier this month, Trump endorsed Abbott for reelection, citing redistricting as one of the governor’s key accomplishments. A week later, a panel of three federal judges blocked the state’s newly drawn congressional map from taking effect, finding that it discriminated against voters based on race. On Tuesday, Abbott said Texas would “swiftly appeal” to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Abbott’s cooperation has extended to sharing voter registration data with Washington.

Texas joined more than a dozen states in turning over voter roll information to the Justice Department, despite long-standing resistance to federal oversight of state elections.

The Constitution allows states to run elections, subject to oversight by Congress. But Trump sought greater control over the process, issuing an executive order in March that prioritized enforcing the federal laws that bar noncitizens from voting.

Voters cast ballots at the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center in Houston. Michael Stravato for the Texas Tribune

Trump has repeatedly claimed that noncitizens are voting en masse to sway U.S. elections in favor of Democrats, while research has shown this not to be true.

A recent voter roll audit by the Texas secretary of state, using a federal citizenship database, flagged 2,724 voters — or 0.015% — as potential noncitizens. Preliminary investigations by county voter registrars, however, found that some of those voters are citizens.

Acting on Trump’s order, the Justice Department requested from states their entire voter rolls, including dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, according to a letter sent to Texas and obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune under public records laws.

Records show that Texas provided voter roll information to the Justice Department in October.

Texas secretary of state spokesperson Alicia Pierce told ProPublica and the Tribune that the secretary of state provided only the publicly available version of its voter roll, which redacts information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department is suing eight states, six of which had provided or offered publicly available versions of their voter rolls because they did not include all the information the federal government sought. One such state is Pennsylvania.

“This request, and reported efforts to collect broad data on millions of Americans, represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process,” Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, wrote to the Justice Department in August.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment on why the federal government had not included Texas among the states it was suing for failing to share all the information the government sought.

But the same month that Texas quietly handed over the limited voter roll, Secretary of State Jane Nelson, an Abbott appointee, announced her office had finished running the full roll, along with Social Security numbers, through a federal database to check voters’ citizenship status.

The Department of Homeland Security stores voter data uploaded by state officials, DHS records obtained by ProPublica found.

Nelson’s office did not answer questions about whether doing so essentially provided the federal government with even more data on Texas voters than it had initially sought.

Members of the Texas National Guard assemble at the Army Reserve Training Center in Elwood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, on Oct. 7. Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/ZUMA Press/Reuters

In Limbo

Abbott embraced Trump’s deployment of Texas National Guard troops under a novel interpretation of a federal law that authorizes the mobilization of troops to quell a rebellion or threat of rebellion, or if “regular forces” are unable to enforce federal law. No modern president has invoked the law to assist in carrying out immigration policy.

Despite Abbott’s support, the 400 Texas National Guard troops mobilized by Trump are still not on the streets of Illinois or Oregon.

Federal judges temporarily halted the deployments after Oregon and Illinois sued the Trump administration, arguing that its actions violate the 10th Amendment, which gives the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution.

The states’ arguments echo those Abbott made in his 2016 essay, in which he warned that Washington too often ignored that amendment to impose its will on states. He proposed making it easier for states to sue the federal government over alleged abuses of power.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is handling the Illinois case, had a similar take. In an Oct. 16 ruling, the court said the Texas troop mobilization was “an incursion on Illinois’s sovereignty” and likely a violation of the 10th Amendment.

The litigation kept Texas Guard members who were deployed to the Chicago area more than a month ago in limbo, unable to carry out what Trump wanted them to but unable to leave. A U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said the 200 guard members who were training at a base in Illinois returned to Texas last week. The rest, bound for Oregon, remain at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

The U.S. Supreme Court has placed the Illinois case on its emergency docket and is considering the parties’ written arguments. The court’s pending ruling would likely apply to the Oregon case as well.

Despite the uncertainty regarding the deployment’s legality, Trump suggested in an October speech to U.S. military members that he was prepared to send troops, including active-duty units, into more cities.

Abbott’s cooperation thus far will make it harder for other states to resist Trump in future deployments, said James Gardner, a constitutional law professor at the University at Buffalo. The framers of the Constitution intended for states to stand with one another to ensure officials in Washington never accumulated too much power, Gardner said.

He said that while Abbott, who is seeking a record fourth term next year, would likely rediscover his passion for states’ rights if a Democrat were elected president, the governor may struggle to regain power he helped take away from the states.

“By altering the Constitution’s contemplated balance of power, it makes it easier for the central government to crush dissenting states,” Gardner said.

The post Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Long a Defender of States’ Rights, Embraces Trump’s Push to Expand Presidential Power appeared first on ProPublica.

One by one, the prisoners — all immigrants — appeared briefly over video before a special panel of the Louisiana parole board.

The August hearings were unusual in a state that, under Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, has made it increasingly difficult for most prisoners to get early release.

Unlike normal parole hearings, the board didn’t grill the prospective parolees about their crimes — ranging from car theft to vehicular homicide — to gauge their remorse. Nor did it review their disciplinary records to determine if they posed a threat to public safety. And no one was present to represent or speak on behalf of their victims.

In fact, most of the nine men, clad in black-and-white-striped jumpsuits or plain orange ones, did not say a word besides their names and inmate numbers. Only one was even eligible for parole.

But in each case, the three-member panel voted unanimously for release after just a few minutes of consideration.

“Today you’ve been paroled,” panel chair Steve Prator said at the end of every hearing, “to go straight into an ICE facility for deportation from the United States.”

Some thanked the board. Others sat stone-faced or simply nodded.

These days, a 100% grant rate is unheard of for the Louisiana Board of Parole. Where annual parole rates previously stood around 50%, in the two years since Landry became governor, less than a quarter of those eligible have been paroled.

Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, has blasted early release programs as an insult to crime victims, insisting that anyone who is convicted in Louisiana should serve the entirety of their sentence. He pushed Republican lawmakers to eliminate parole entirely for those arrested after Aug. 1, 2024, and to impose strict eligibility requirements for those already in prison.

But this year the same Legislature tossed all of that aside for one category of prisoner: immigrants without legal status. With mass deportations a key policy priority for President Donald Trump, Republican-led state and local governments have taken aggressive steps to deliver. In May, Landry signed an order seeking to “crack down on criminal illegal aliens” by granting the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and other state agencies the authority to conduct certain Immigration and Customs Enforcement duties. In June, Louisiana lawmakers created an expedited “alien removal process” through the special parole panel that passed with little notice during the last legislative session.

“They have the ability to release a lot of people to parole, and they’re choosing to only do it for this specific group because it’s politically popular,” said Bridget Geraghty, senior counsel with the MacArthur Justice Center, a Chicago-based legal nonprofit focused on prison reform.

At least two other Republican-led states have recently put in place similar initiatives to parole and deport prisoners without legal status. South Dakota paroled 10 immigrant prisoners to be deported over the summer. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt announced in February that the state had identified about 525 prisoners subject to deportation.

Since the Aug. 27 hearings in Louisiana, at least two of the nine men paroled have been deported, while two others from Vietnam are being held at a newly designated immigration detention facility on the grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, according to ICE. Neither ICE nor the Landry administration would answer questions about the locations of the five other parolees or whether they are being deported to their home countries of Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua.

On Sept. 21, ICE’s regional office in New Orleans posted a photo of one of the parolees, Samuel Lara Garcia, handcuffed in front of a staircase leading to a plane. The agency identified Garcia as a citizen of Honduras.

“HOMICIDE DEPORTATION,” the X post blared.

Garcia, 36, had pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and obstruction of justice in a 2022 shooting after an argument at a Baton Rouge house party. He was sentenced to 13 years in 2024 but had served less than two years in prison before being paroled.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s regional office in New Orleans posted a photo of Samuel Lara Garcia. He pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 13 years in 2024, but had served less than two years in prison before being paroled. Screenshot by Verite News

A U.S. citizen convicted of the same crime — or any crime — in Louisiana today would not be eligible for release under the new parole laws championed by Landry.

ICE declined an interview request with Madison Sheahan, a former Landry administration official who as deputy ICE director signed the partnership agreement between the agency and the corrections department. The Landry administration did not respond to questions about the new parole panel or the governor’s broader executive order, which was named Operation Geaux.

One member of that task force is Keith Conley, police chief of Kenner, a New Orleans suburb and one of the first Louisiana cities to formally partner with federal immigration authorities during Trump’s second term. He praised the legislation that created the deportation panel in a recent interview. Paroling and deporting prisoners who are illegally in the United States frees up jail space and saves tax dollars, Conley said, “so it just seems like a win, win.”

Under the new law, the deportation panel operates unbound by the restrictions and responsibilities placed on the regular parole process. A parole board is normally tasked with deciding whether prisoners are ready for release based on a number of factors including their behavior behind bars, efforts to rehabilitate, whether they pose a risk to the public and victims’ opinions.

During the August hearings, however, the board was not required to abide by the eligibility restrictions imposed by the Legislature last year, including the requirement that prisoners have clean disciplinary records for at least three years and low-risk scores as determined by an algorithm.

“Parole granted for the purpose of deportation is fundamentally different from discretionary parole granted to individuals who have demonstrated readiness for community supervision,” Francis Abbott, executive director of the parole board, told Verite News and ProPublica. “In these cases, the individuals are present in the United States unlawfully and have been convicted of criminal offenses.”

To be eligible to appear before the new panel, prisoners must have a federal deportation notice and not have been convicted of a sex offense or a violent crime that carries a sentence of more than 10 years. (Louisiana law does not consider negligent homicide to be a violent crime.)

Christopher Walters, deputy executive counsel with the Landry administration, said at a May legislative hearing that the state has identified about 390 prisoners who might be eligible to be paroled and deported. The corrections department would not verify or update that number.

“It’s an ongoing process to determine eligibility for this specific legislation,” Derrick Ellis, the department’s deputy secretary, said in a recent interview.

There are no more hearings scheduled for the remainder of the year, according to the parole board.

Unlike typical parolees, who are required to check in regularly with their parole officers and prohibited from unauthorized travel, those paroled to be deported are not placed under any supervision. Once deported, they are released with one stipulation: Do not return to the United States.

Louisiana law says those who do return will be forced to serve the remainder of their sentences. But that may not be enough of a deterrent. Margaret Hay, first assistant district attorney with the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted one of the deported men, said prosecutors are concerned parolees convicted of violent crimes “may, very quickly, just be right back in this country.”

“There’s no guarantee that our border will remain as secure as I believe that it might be right now,” said Hay, who nevertheless said she supports the initiative.

ProPublica and Verite News contacted the embassies and consulates for Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and Vietnam to learn how those countries manage the repatriation of deportees whose U.S. prison sentences were cut short. None responded to multiple phone calls and emails.

Another issue at play is that Louisiana law requires the parole committee to notify victims about upcoming parole hearings, provided they are registered with the Louisiana Victim Outreach Program, a state initiative that provides support services. Many victims of crime, especially those who are undocumented, fail to register for or are unaware of the state program. The parole board said there were no registered victims in the nine cases that appeared before the deportation panel in August.

Several local prosecutors said they tried reaching the families of the six victims who had been killed by four of the paroled men, three of whom were charged with vehicular homicide, but had trouble making contact. ProPublica and Verite News could not reach any of the victims or family members of deceased victims in the cases involving the nine men.

Landry, a Trump ally, has long been an immigration hard-liner. During his eight years as attorney general, which began a year before Trump’s first term as president, Louisiana’s capacity for detaining immigrants expanded from two facilities in 2016 to eight. That positioned the state to become a key partner in Trump’s mass deportation agenda during his second presidency.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, left, tour a facility to house immigration detainees at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in September. Gerald Herbert/AP

In September, Landry and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem unveiled a ninth immigration detention facility, known as the Louisiana Lockup, located in the former solitary confinement wing of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. That is where Hoang Huy Pham, one of the nine men paroled in August, is being held as he awaits deportation to Vietnam, the country his family said he fled as a child refugee during the Vietnam War.

Pham’s daughter Theresa, who asked to be referred to by only her first name because she works for the federal government and fears retaliation, said her father called her in June to tell her he was going to be paroled at the end of August after spending 20 years in prison for a long history of car theft. He told her he would live in a halfway house before rejoining the family in Baton Rouge, Theresa recalled. She said her elderly grandfather — Pham’s father — was looking forward to him finally getting out of prison to help with his care.

Then in September, Theresa received another call from her father. This time, he told her he had been transferred to Angola to await deportation. That five-minute call was the last time Theresa said she heard from him.

“You finally got out, but you’re going somewhere else where you’re not supposed to be,” Theresa said. “It’s a false hope.”

Hervin Pineda was the only prisoner to tell the parole board in August that he wanted to be deported back home. He wished to return to Nicaragua to be with his ailing, elderly mother in her final days, he told the board through an interpreter.

Pineda, who had previously been deported while on probation, had served less than a year of a seven-year sentence on charges of cocaine possession.

Nevertheless, the board granted his request.

“You’re a serious dope dealer,” Prator, the panel chair, told him. “We don’t want you back.”

ICE took him into federal custody that day and deported him to Nicaragua on Sept. 12.

The post Louisiana Made It Nearly Impossible to Get Parole. Now It’s Releasing Prisoners to Deport Them. appeared first on ProPublica.

Our investigation of a little-known church community in northeastern Minnesota started with something that has become depressingly familiar: child sex abuse.

ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune found that some members of the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church community in Duluth enabled Clint Massie, who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing young girls. Massie is currently in prison in Faribault, Minnesota.

The Old Apostolic Lutheran Church — which has no affiliation with mainstream Lutheran denominations and is known as the OALC — is an insular community with many old-world traditions. There is no official count, but one academic study estimated 31,000 members worldwide as of 2016, with most in the United States.

We examined hundreds of pages of criminal records, conducted more than a dozen interviews with alleged victims across the country, reviewed video and audio of police interviews with Massie, victims and church leaders, and attended a service at the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth.

Read More

Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

Daryl Bruckelmyer, an OALC preacher, declined to comment or answer a detailed list of questions for this story. But in a 2023 interview with a St. Louis County detective, he acknowledged knowing about Massie’s sexual abuse. He said at the time that it was up to victims to report the crimes to police, a clear misreading of the law for mandated reporters — doctors, teachers and others who are required to report crimes against children.

“We don’t protect either one,” Bruckelmyer said of sexual abusers and their victims.

You can read the investigation here, but here are five takeaways from our reporting:

Church leaders knew about the abuse: Leaders of Bruckelmyer’s church didn’t report Massie to police though they knew he’d sexually abused girls for years and Bruckelmyer had been told by police that reporting it was their duty. It was an open secret in the congregation: Mothers warned their children to stay away from Massie, victims said. Church leaders also sent Massie to a therapist who specialized in sex offender treatment. In December 2024, Massie pleaded guilty to four felony counts of sexual conduct with a victim under the age of 13. In March, a judge sentenced him to 7 1/2 years in prison.

Victims were told to forgive and forget: Church leaders held meetings where children were told to forgive the man who sexually abused them and forget the abuse. If they spoke of it, the sin would be theirs. The meetings, described by victims to the police and confirmed through our reporting, ended in one case with a church leader allowing Massie to hug the victim. An internal church document also outlines guidelines for handling abuse and suggests that, when appropriate, both parties be brought together for a discussion.

Missed opportunities to intervene: Prosecutors had at least one opportunity to intervene but hoped educating church leaders about their duties would encourage them to cooperate with authorities. Our reporting found that church leaders did not report what they learned about Massie despite a state law requiring clergy and others to share the information with law enforcement. According to law enforcement notes, Bruckelmyer told investigators that they encourage abuse victims to go to police, but that they believed it was “on [victims] to do that.”

John Hiivala, a spokesperson for the Woodland Park Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth, said that the church “has fully complied with the law in the referenced case, and it’s a matter of legal record.”

Kimberly Lowe, a lawyer and crisis manager for the church, said its preachers are unpaid and therefore might not be legally required to report sexual abuse of children. Asked if she believes the preachers are mandated reporters under Minnesota law, Lowe would only say that the language of the statute is unclear.

A small but rapidly growing church: OALC is a conservative Christian revival movement that came to the U.S. with 19th-century settlers from Norway, Finland and Sweden. It is not affiliated with any mainstream Lutheran denominations. Only men hold leadership positions. The church is rapidly growing, and its emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Washington state and Duluth. Members attempt to live a life as modest and simple as Jesus’. This is why they do not dance, listen to music or watch movies, according to former members. In the OALC, they said, forgiveness is one of the most important acts one can perform.

Victims filed lawsuits: Since Massie’s sentencing, two of his alleged victims have filed lawsuits against him, their church in South Dakota and the OALC. They have retained the same lawyer who represented some of the victims in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

In a letter written from prison that was filed in court, Massie denied the abuse allegations in the lawsuits. He did not respond to interview requests. The OALC, in a motion to dismiss both lawsuits, wrote that “while OALC-America is mindful and sympathetic to Plaintiff for the abuse Plaintiff alleges occurred by Massie, such empathy does not take away from the plain fact that this Court does not have personal jurisdiction over OALC-America.”

The post 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into How Leaders of a Minnesota Church Community Enabled a Child Abuser appeared first on ProPublica.

Two key Senate Democrats have launched an inquiry after a ProPublica investigation revealed this week that a White House official had intervened on behalf of his former legal clients — pro-Trump influencer Andrew Tate and his brother — during a federal investigation.

On Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters sent letters to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security asking for a full accounting of the official’s activities, calling his actions a “brazen interference with a federal investigation.”

ProPublica reported this week that the official, Paul Ingrassia, told senior DHS officials to return electronic devices seized from the Tate brothers when they arrived in the U.S. in February. Ingrassia made clear the request was coming from the White House, according to interviews and records that ProPublica reviewed.

The Tates are facing sex trafficking accusations in three countries. Ingrassia, who has served as White House Liaison to DHS and to the Department of Justice, was part of a legal team that represented the pair before he joined the White House. Ingrassia had been President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Office of Special Counsel, but the administration withdrew his name after Politico reported he had sent a series of racist text messages to other conservative activists. (His lawyer raised doubts about the authenticity of the texts but said “even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor.”) Ingrassia has since been offered a job at the General Services Administration. 

In their letters to the White House and DHS, Blumenthal and Peters wrote that Ingrassia’s “behavior raises grave questions regarding the independence and impartiality of federal law enforcement operations and the White House’s potential meddling in such investigations.” The letters, first reported by Politico, asked whether Ingrassia’s decision to intervene was made at the direction of other White House personnel, who at DHS knew of the intervention and what DHS did in response.

Read More

The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation

The senators gave DHS a Dec. 4 deadline to produce records of all communications between Ingrassia and other officials discussing the Tates. They sent a separate letter to DHS’ inspector general calling on him to open an investigation. Blumenthal, of Connecticut, is the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; Peters, of Michigan, is the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, caused alarm among DHS officials that they could be interfering with a federal investigation if they followed through with the instruction, according to interviews and screenshots of contemporaneous communications between officials.

The incident is the latest in a string of law enforcement matters where the Trump White House has inserted itself to help friends and target foes. Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump.

It’s unclear why law enforcement wanted to examine the Tates’ electronic devices, what their analysis found or whether Ingrassia’s intervention hindered any investigation. The White House and DHS declined to answer questions about the incident.

The Tate brothers’ lawyer, Joseph McBride, told ProPublica he didn’t know what happened to the devices but that his clients have still not had them returned. His clients, he said, are innocent and there were no illicit materials on their electronics.

Ingrassia worked at McBride’s firm before joining the White House and was identified as a member of the firm’s legal team representing the Tates. In a brief interview with ProPublica, he denied trying to help the Tates, before hanging up. “There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” he said. “There was nothing.”

Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message: “Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true.”

When questioned about whether Ingrassia had asked, rather than ordered, authorities to return the devices, Paltzik declined to answer, explaining that “the word ‘ask’ is inappropriate because it is meaningless in this context. He either ordered something or he didn’t. And as I said, he did NOT order anything.”

No criminal charges have been filed against the brothers in the United States. Romanian authorities have accused them of operating a criminal group that trafficked women, including some who alleged the brothers led them to believe they were interested in relationships but instead forced the women into filming online pornographic videos. Prosecutors also said they were investigating allegations that the Tates trafficked minors. Andrew Tate was charged with rape. The Tates have denied the allegations, and the initial charges were sent back to prosecutors by a court because of procedural issues.

The Tates face similar allegations in Britain. Authorities there authorized a raft of charges against the brothers, including rape and human trafficking, based on allegations from three women. In 2024, arrest warrants were issued for the brothers, who have denied wrongdoing.

A woman has also sued the Tates in Florida, accusing them of luring her to Romania to coerce her into sex work. The Tates have denied the allegations, and last month a judge dismissed most of her claims but allowed for her to refile.

The post Senators Launch Inquiry After a White House Official Intervened on Behalf of Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation appeared first on ProPublica.

After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

This is one of the unintended consequences of the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations. For months, ICE has been on a recruiting blitz, offering $50,000 starting bonuses and tuition reimbursement at an agency that has long offered better pay than the federal prison system. For many corrections officers, it’s been an easy sell. 

Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.

“We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE,” one official with the prison workers union told ProPublica. “It’s unbelievable. People are leaving in droves.”

The exodus comes amid shortages of critical supplies, from food to personal hygiene items, and threatens to make the already grim conditions in federal prisons even worse. Fewer corrections officers means more lockdowns, less programming and fewer health care services for inmates, along with more risks to staff and more grueling hours of mandatory overtime. Prison teachers and medical staff are being forced to step in as corrections officers on a regular basis. 

And at some facilities, staff said the agency had even stopped providing basic hygiene items for officers, such as paper towels, soap and toilet paper.

“I have never seen it like this in all my 25 years,” an officer in Texas told ProPublica. “You have to literally go around carrying your own roll of toilet paper. No paper towels, you have to bring your own stuff. No soap. I even ordered little sheets that you put in an envelope and it turns to soap because there wasn’t any soap.”

The prisons bureau did not answer a series of emailed questions. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Director Josh Smith said that the agency was “left in shambles by the previous administration” and would take years to repair. Staffing levels, he said, were “catastrophic,” which, along with crumbling infrastructure and corruption, had made the prisons less safe.

Smith said that he and Director William Marshall III had been empowered by the Trump administration to “confront these challenges head-on.” “Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of our mission to make the BOP great again, and we’re going to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”

ICE, meanwhile, responded to a request for comment by forwarding a press release that failed to answer specific questions but noted that the agency had made more than 18,000 total tentative job offers as of mid-September.

The BOP has long faced challenges, from sex abuse scandals and contraband problems to crumbling infrastructure and poor medical care. It has repeatedly been deemed the worst federal workplace by one analysis of annual employee surveys, and in 2023 union officials said that some 40% of corrections officer jobs sat vacant.

That dearth of officers helped land the prison system on a government list of high-risk agencies with serious vulnerabilities and attracted the eye of oversight officials, who blamed chronic understaffing for contributing to at least 30 prisoner deaths.

The bureau tried tackling the problem with a long-term hiring push that included signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. By the start of the year, that effort seemed to be working.

Kathleen Toomey, then the bureau’s associate deputy director, told members of Congress in February that the agency had just enjoyed its most successful hiring spree in a decade, increasing its ranks by more than 1,200 in 2024. 

“Higher staffing levels make institutions safer,” she told a House appropriations subcommittee. 

But the costly efforts to reel in more staff strained a stagnant budget that was already stretched thin. Toomey told Congress the bureau had not seen a funding increase since 2023, even as it absorbed millions in pay raises and retention incentives. As inflation and personnel costs rose, the bureau was forced to cut its operating budgets by 20%, Toomey said. 

And despite some improvement, the staffing problems persisted. In her February testimony, Toomey acknowledged there were still at least 4,000 vacant positions, leaving the agency with so few officers that prison teachers, nurses and electricians were regularly being ordered to abandon their normal duties and fill in as corrections officers. 

Then ICE rolled out its recruiting drive. 

“At first it seemed like it was going to be no big deal, and then over the last week or so we already lost five, and then we have another 10 to 15 in various stages of waiting for a start date,” an employee at one low-security facility told ProPublica in October. “For us that’s almost 20% of our custody staff.”

He, like most of the prison workers and union officials who spoke to ProPublica, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — a concern that has grown since the agency canceled the union’s contract in September following an executive order. Now union leaders say they’ve been warned that without their union protections, they could be punished for speaking to the media.

After the contract’s cancellation, many of the current staff who had originally spoken on the record asked to have their names withheld. Those who still agreed to be identified asked ProPublica to note that their interviews took place before the agency revoked the union agreement.

Earlier this year, Brandy Moore White, national president of the prison workers union, said it’s not unprecedented to see a string of prison staffers leaving the agency, often in response to changes that significantly impact their working conditions. Prior government shutdowns, changes in leadership and the pandemic all drove away workers — but usually, she said, people leaving the agency en masse tended to be near the end of their careers. Now, that’s not the case.

“This is, from what I can remember, the biggest exodus of younger staff, staff who are not retirement-eligible,” she said. “And that’s super concerning to me.”
ICE’s expansion has even thrown a wrench into BOP’s usual training program for rookies. Normally, new officers have to take a three-week Introduction to Correctional Techniques course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Georgia within their first 60 days on the job, according to the prisons bureau’s website. In August, FLETC announced that it would focus only on “surge-related training,” pausing programs for other law enforcement agencies until at least early 2026, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica. Afterward, FLETC said in a press release that it was “exploring temporary solutions” to “meet the needs of all partner agencies,” though it’s not clear whether any of those solutions have since been implemented. The centers did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

At the same time, the effects of the budget crunch were starting to show. In recent months, more than 40 staff and prisoners at facilities across the country have reported cutbacks even more severe than the usual prison scarcities.

In September, Moore White told ProPublica some prisons had fallen behind on utility and trash bills. At one point, she said, the prison complex in Oakdale, Louisiana, was days away from running out of food for inmates before the union — worried that hungry prisoners would be more apt to riot — intervened, nudging agency higher-ups to address the problem, an account confirmed by two other prison workers. (Officials at the prison complex declined to comment.) Elsewhere, staff and prisoners reported shortages — no eggs in a California facility and no beef in a Texas lockup where staff said they were doling out smaller portions at mealtimes.

Earlier this year, a defense lawyer complained that the Los Angeles detention center ran out of pens for prisoners in solitary confinement, where people without phone or e-messaging privileges rely on snail mail to contact the outside world. One of his clients was “rationing his ink to write letters to his family,” the attorney said. The center didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Personal hygiene supplies have been running low, too. Several prisoners said their facilities had become stingier than usual with toilet paper, and women incarcerated in Carswell in Texas reported a shortage of tampons. “I was told to use my socks,” one said. The facility did not answer questions from ProPublica about conditions there.

Fewer staff has meant in some cases that inmates have lost access to care. At the prison complex in Victorville, California, staff lodged written complaints accusing the warden of skimping on the number of officers assigned to inmate hospital visits in order to cut back on overtime. (The complex did not respond to a request for comment.) In some instances, the complaints alleged, that left so few officers at the hospital that ailing inmates missed the procedures that had landed them there in the first place.

Chyann Bratcher, a prisoner at Carswell, a medical lockup in Texas, said she missed an appointment for rectal surgery — something she’d been waiting on for two years — because there weren’t enough staff to take her there. She was able to have the procedure almost two months later, after another cancellation.

Staffers say several facilities have started scheduling recurring “blackout” days, when officers are banned from working overtime in an effort to save money. Instead, prison officials turn to a practice known as “augmentation,” where they direct teachers, plumbers and medical staff to fill in as corrections officers.

“That’s why I left,” said Tom Kamm, who retired in September from the federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, after 29 years with the bureau. “My job was to try to settle EEO complaints, so if somebody alleged discrimination against the agency it was my job to look into it and try to resolve it.”

When he found out earlier this year that he would soon be required to work two shifts per week as a corrections officer, he decided to retire instead.

“I hadn’t been an officer in a housing unit since like 2001 — it had been like 24 years,” he said. “I had really no clue how to do that anymore.”

Augmentation isn’t new, but staff and prisoners at some facilities say it’s being used more often than it once was. It also means fewer medical staff available to address inmates’ needs. “Today we had a Physical Therapist as a unit officer so all of his PT appointments would have been cancelled,” Brian Casper, an inmate at the federal medical prison in Missouri, wrote in an email earlier this year. “Yesterday one of the other units had the head of Radiology for the unit officer so there would have been one less person doing x-rays and CT scans.” The prison didn’t respond to emailed questions.

When the government shutdown hit in October, it only made the situation worse, exacerbating the shortages and increasing the allure of leaving the bureau. While ICE agents and corrections officers continued bringing home paychecks, thousands of prison teachers, plumbers and nurses did not. 

The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic policy megabill that Trump signed into law on July 4, could offer some financial support for the agency’s staffing woes, as it will route another $5 billion to the prisons bureau over four years — $3 billion of which is specifically earmarked to improve retention, hiring and training. Yet exactly what the effects of that cash infusion will look like remains to be seen: Though the funding bill passed more than four months ago, in November the bureau declined to answer questions about when it will receive the money or how it will be spent.

The post “We’re Broken”: As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving in Droves for ICE appeared first on ProPublica.

A year ago, the federal Indian Health Service posted dozens of flyers on Facebook promoting flu and COVID-19 vaccine clinics across the Navajo Nation, where the pandemic had inflicted a staggering toll just a few years earlier.

The notices, featuring photos of smiling families and elders in traditional clothing, tied immunization to tribal values like community responsibility and made a clear case for getting the shots. “Vaccines are effective at preventing serious illness or hospitalization,” one of them said.

But this year, as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine critic, has put his stamp on federal immunization policy, IHS’ public messaging on vaccines has taken a stark turn.

In internal emails obtained by ProPublica, IHS officials have flagged terms such as “immunizations” and “vaccines” for additional scrutiny, deeming them risky “buzzwords” that require approval from agency public information officers to be used in social media posts, pamphlets and presentations for patients.

Through mid-October, IHS had published far fewer posts on Facebook promoting vaccine clinics this year than last, ProPublica found. And in those posts as well as other notices, it replaced language touting immunization’s benefits with wording that frames both routine childhood vaccinations and annual flu and COVID-19 shots as a personal choice, advising patients to consult health care providers about their “options regarding vaccines.”

Current and former IHS clinicians told ProPublica the changes threaten vaccine uptake in Navajo communities and have left medical practitioners who serve this population feeling censored.

“It seems to me that they’re trying to put up barriers,” said Harry Brown, a physician and epidemiologist who left IHS in 2016 and now works for a tribally operated health facility in North Carolina. In a 26-year career with IHS, he said, he had never encountered an effort to stifle public health campaigns or restrict what medical providers said publicly about vaccines.

Aside from Brown, the health care providers who spoke with ProPublica didn’t want their names used, concerned it could endanger their jobs. One physician said the new IHS restrictions on vaccine-related speech factored into her decision to leave the agency this year.

“I can’t keep people safe,” she said in an interview just before she quit. “I don’t have any of the words anymore to say anything I need to say.”

Two Facebook posts from 2024 by the Indian Health Service in the Navajo area emphasize the importance of vaccination. Navajo Indian Health Service via Facebook A more recent post about COVID-19 vaccine availability by the Indian Health Service in the Navajo area uses more restrained language, no color and no inviting imagery. Navajo Indian Health Service via Facebook

IHS’ shift in vaccine messaging has not been previously reported but aligns with widely publicized changes within the Department of Health and Human Services under Kennedy’s leadership. In the past 10 months, as measles cases have hit their highest levels in decades, Kennedy has been tepid in endorsing the vaccine to prevent the disease while taking several steps critics predict will undermine public confidence in immunization.

He’s launched a federal probe into scientifically debunked links between immunizations and autism and canceled nearly $500 million in contracts and research grants for mRNA vaccines. This technology was central to the speedy development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

In June, he removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy, replacing them with his own appointments, including several vaccine skeptics. Kennedy has also endorsed the founders of Idaho’s medical freedom movement, who helped persuade the state to ban vaccine mandates this year.

At IHS, the only branch of HHS that operates its own network of hospitals and clinics, the altered federal landscape on vaccine policy has had a more direct effect on patient care, clinicians said.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said the redrafting of IHS’ public messaging materials was designed to encourage “shared decision-making” between patients and their health care providers.

“The Indian Health Service continues to provide accurate, evidence-based information on vaccines and infectious-disease prevention,” the statement said. “Our focus remains ensuring Tribal communities have clear, trusted guidance and access to the care they choose.”

The statement didn’t address questions about what prompted the revamped messaging or concerns raised by doctors about its potential effect.

In a separate statement, Matthew Clark, the IHS’ deputy chief medical officer, insisted the agency’s approach to immunizations has remained consistent, even if its messaging about them has changed.

“We continue to advocate that every patient at every encounter be offered every FDA-approved and ACIP-recommended vaccine, when appropriate,” Clark’s statement said.

It’s not clear yet what effect the changes are having. Data hasn’t been released showing this season’s flu and COVID-19 vaccination rates for the Navajo Nation. Through September, the uptake rate for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, known as MMR, for 2-year-olds has held steady at around 95%, the level of herd immunity needed to prevent outbreaks, IHS data shows.

Still, IHS clinicians said, the agency’s lack of public messaging about vaccines was especially notable during the winter and spring, when a measles outbreak emerged in Texas and then neared the reservation’s borders in New Mexico.

The outbreak had spurred alarm. Tribal health facilities, which operate independently from IHS, flooded Facebook with information about MMR shots at the end of February and urged residents to get themselves and their children vaccinated.

Yet two IHS doctors said that at about the same time, the agency installed its new restrictions on vaccine-related speech.

According to a March 13 email that Ryan Goldtooth, a public information officer at one Navajo Nation hospital, sent to colleagues, members of the group had been instructed to take down social media posts or flyers that contained the terms “vaccines (namely Measles)” and “immunizations” from the agency’s Facebook pages. “We cannot forward or post to the public,” the email said.

The email also said that the terms “immunizations” and “vaccines” had been reclassified “from low to medium-risk.” As a result, if clinicians used these words in public presentations and printed materials, they needed to be cleared by a public information officer first, Goldtooth wrote.

The email listed several other topics or types of information that could no longer be freely shared or talked about publicly. Starting from the date President Donald Trump returned to office, any information shared from a state health department, for instance, had to be removed from Facebook, the email said, without providing a reason. Any posts about executive orders also had to come down.

Goldtooth, who still works for IHS, did not respond to requests for comment about the email.

Laura Hammitt, the director of infectious disease programs for the Center for Indigenous Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has worked closely with IHS staffers on vaccination efforts. Limiting what they can say about vaccines could harm their ability to respond to future outbreaks, she said.

“People are really trying to be compliant with changes required by the administration but also have a responsibility to care for their patients,” Hammitt said. “Those two things can seem to be at odds.”

The Navajo Nation, the country’s largest tribal jurisdiction with around 170,000 residents, has long been a focal point and challenge for IHS. The reservation is served by four of the agency’s 22 hospitals, but pockets within its 27,000 square miles of mountains and high desert have no cellphone service, internet access or electricity, creating hurdles for clinicians when it comes to communicating information and delivering care.

These structural issues had a devastating effect at the start of the pandemic, when the reservation’s rates of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths were among the highest in the country. The virus claimed the lives of at least 2,300 Navajo citizens.

In the previous decade, vaccination rates among Navajos, especially for MMR and the flu, had regularly exceeded figures for the nation overall. They also exceeded rates for tribal communities in other regions served by IHS, which typically lagged behind the national average, according to the agency’s data. When the COVID-19 vaccine arrived in 2021, Native Americans’ uptake exceeded 60%, an effort bolstered by IHS public service messages and outreach.

On the Navajo Nation, IHS hospitals posted messages on their Facebook pages and circulated flyers that pushed community members to get the shots. “Protect yourself, protect your family, protect your elders,” the flyers said. Tribal members responded, arriving at clinics in droves, lining up in their vehicles to get vaccinated at hospitals and clinics.

For those who couldn’t travel to larger towns on the reservation that had health care facilities, teams working for IHS, the tribe and Johns Hopkins set up mobile clinics and made home visits to especially remote communities.

After the pandemic, IHS and tribal teams on the Navajo Nation sought to extend the COVID-19 shot success to routine vaccines. MMR immunization rates among 2-year-olds had dropped to 85%, but another coordinated effort restored communities on the reservation to prepandemic levels.

IHS was the engine driving the campaign, said Hammitt, the Johns Hopkins doctor. Agency flyers and Facebook posts retooled appeals used to promote COVID-19 shots to endorse the MMR vaccine, adding a call to protect “future generations.”

In the first few months of this year, however, the messaging began to morph again, with mentions of “measles” and “COVID” disappearing from IHS social media pages.

The weeks leading up to flu season and the new school year typically usher in a robust vaccine campaign in IHS hospitals. But this year, doctors took note of how few notices went out, they said, as New Mexico continued to contend with the measles outbreak that began in Texas and the Navajo Nation encountered a late-summer surge in COVID-19 cases.

One exception came in May, when IHS officials shared a New Mexico Department of Health alert on Facebook saying measles had reached Sandoval County, which overlaps with the eastern flank of the Navajo reservation. Another came that same month, when the IHS hospital in the town of Gallup, New Mexico, announced a clinic for people who wanted to get vaccinated for measles.

The IHS hospital in Shiprock, New Mexico, was the only facility to post a public service announcement about a back-to-school vaccine clinic for children. It included language telling patients to talk to doctors about their options and didn’t specifically mention measles, COVID-19 or any other infectious disease as such announcements had in the past.

Another measles outbreak surfaced in the Southwest in mid-August, this time just to the west of the Navajo Nation along the Arizona-Utah border. In early November, it had grown to at least 200 confirmed cases, according to Arizona and Utah health officials. IHS didn’t issue any advisories or notices on Facebook about this outbreak. The new approval processes for greenlighting public health alerts slowed down local administrators’ and hospitals’ response, the clinicians who spoke to ProPublica noted.

Several clinicians said the restrictions on vaccine-related speech alter the relationship between IHS doctors and patients, even if they apply only to public communications and not to one-on-one consultations.

“This is what we do for a living, and the most important thing we do is explain what’s going on to patients,” one of the doctors said. “If there is an external body interfering with that, as there is now, then that is shaping the fundamental trust between patients and the people trying to provide their care.”

The post The Indian Health Service Is Flagging Vaccine-Related Speech. Doctors Say They’re Being Censored. appeared first on ProPublica.

On Nov. 13, a small team of advocates for people with disabilities stepped through White House security and into the narrow, bustling corridors of the West Wing, unsure what to expect. They’d managed to get a short meeting with James Blair, who is one of President Donald Trump’s deputy chiefs of staff, in the hopes of preventing a planned policy change. In recent weeks, ProPublica and The Washington Post had reported that officials at the Social Security Administration were working on a proposed regulation that could result in at least 830,000 mostly older blue-collar workers being denied disability benefits.

The advocates, led by Jason Turkish, co-founder of the Social Security disability rights group Alliance for America’s Promise, had sent the White House team ProPublica’s Oct. 31 article and other materials. The reporting showed that if the Trump administration enacted this regulation, the harm would disproportionately fall on some of the president’s most loyal supporters: 50- to 60-year-old coal miners, factory workers and other manual laborers, especially in West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama. The administration’s logic for cutting these workers’ eligibility was that even if they have a severe physical disability, they should be able, in the modern economy, to find a more sedentary job at a computer or perhaps driving for Uber or DoorDash. Disability advocates countered that people who’ve worked in grueling fields for decades, some of whom don’t have a high school education — and who grew up before the digital age — would face severe obstacles to such a career change, including age discrimination in the hiring process, the lack of desk jobs in rural areas and the difficulty of mastering unfamiliar skills at this point in their lives.

A few doors down from the Oval Office, Turkish and his colleagues turned a corner into Blair’s office. Sitting across from him was a second person, one the advocates hadn’t expected to encounter: Russell Vought, the powerful White House budget director. He looked displeased.

After several minutes of dialogue about the disability regulation, according to Turkish and another person present, Vought said, “I know that this is being written about.” But, he added, the rule change “isn’t going to be happening.”

It was a startling announcement from an often uncompromising senior official in an administration with little history of changing its mind in response to journalistic scrutiny and pressure from advocates for the vulnerable. But that’s what Turkish and three other sources say has happened: The Trump administration has decided not to pursue the disability cuts that it has been working on all year — and in fact since at least 2019, when officials during Trump’s first term were close to finalizing a similar regulation.

Turkish, who is also president and managing partner of one of the nation’s largest law firms that represents disability claimants and beneficiaries, said in an interview that Vought and Blair seemed to have absorbed the recent reporting on the issue. He said they acknowledged the anxiety that disabled workers were experiencing — people like Christopher Tincher, a former coal miner who lost his leg on the job at a wastewater treatment facility in Arkansas and was featured in ProPublica’s story. Both officials were unambiguous, Turkish and another person present confirmed, that the regulation would not proceed in any form.

Turkish’s takeaway is that in the West Wing, vulnerable Americans with disabilities like Tincher don’t get talked about enough. “To have his story read by senior White House staffers, to remember what this program is, to remember that Social Security disability is not partisan,” was crucial, Turkish said.

Afterward, they walked out together, back through the corridors, and Vought was walking in the same direction. He didn’t say another word the whole way, according to one of the people present.

Spokespeople for the Social Security Administration and the White House Office of Management and Budget did not respond to questions from ProPublica, including whether they would contest the advocates’ assertion that the planned regulation has been nixed. A top Social Security Administration official confirmed in a meeting yesterday that the regulation has indeed been called off, according to a person present. It’s not clear why officials have said this in meetings, including with advocates, but haven’t made any public announcement.

At the White House meeting, according to two participants, Blair told Turkish to go to Frank Bisignano, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and “ask him point blank” if the regulation is in fact no longer being pursued.

On Tuesday, Turkish said, he did just that and met with Bisignano. Also present at this second meeting were the longtime lobbyist Andrew Woods as well as Mark Steffensen, the Social Security Administration’s general counsel. Bisignano, according to both Turkish and Woods, asked them what the White House had said about the disability issue — and he, too, “decisively” confirmed that the regulation would not proceed.

The commissioner, they said, made clear that his focus is on modernizing the Social Security Administration, not cutting disability benefits. “I take him at face value,” Turkish said, adding that Bisignano may not have been actively involved in crafting or discussing the regulation and decided against pursuing it when it “reached his level.”

Turkish and Woods say Bisignano told them to convey to the disability advocacy community that “there is no daylight between this office and the White House with respect to us not moving forward” with the regulation. On Monday, Bisignano should be able to tell them that himself: He’s considering participating in a town hall with advocates and people with disabilities.

Turkish has told other advocates in a group email that his organization will “remain vigilant to ensure these assurances are honored.”

The regulation that the Trump administration had been drafting — which remains listed on a federal bulletin with a scheduled publication date in December — would have made two major changes to the Social Security Administration’s disability system, according to four officials from the agency who had knowledge of the plans. First, it would’ve modernized the job listings that Social Security’s disability adjudicators use to decide if there’s work available in the U.S. economy that a manual laborer could still do despite physical impairments. This proposed change, which would’ve updated severely outdated jobs data, arose from a bipartisan effort that’s been in the works since the Obama administration.

The second provision was the controversial one. It would’ve almost entirely removed age as a criterion in these decisions, making a disabled 50-plus-year-old no more eligible for assistance than a 20-something. This would have had collateral effects: Losing eligibility for disability would block such workers’ access to Medicare, which they’re currently eligible for at an earlier age precisely because they’re disabled. And if workers were to be increasingly denied benefits in their 50s, many would be forced to draw down any savings they have, which could lead them to apply for Social Security’s retirement benefits early, in turn diminishing their and their spouses’ benefits until they die.

New polling by a Trump-aligned firm has suggested that older Trump voters would overwhelmingly oppose such changes to disability eligibility. In the wake of Democrats’ strong showing in recent elections, two people with knowledge of the situation said that the administration may have been particularly sensitive to these views. As one lobbyist put it, it’s all about the “elevation of an issue, and getting it on the right desks.”

The post How the Trump Administration Abandoned Plans for a Major Cut in Disability Benefits for Older Workers appeared first on ProPublica.

The girl pleaded not to go.

She fought with her father on the drive over, screaming and crying in his truck until they arrived at the office building for Bruckelmyer Brothers, a home construction company on the outskirts of Duluth, Minnesota. She was just entering her first years of grade school.

In the office, two men were waiting. One of them was Clint Massie, who the girl had recently told her parents had touched her genitals and groped her under her shirt. The other was Daryl Bruckelmyer, a preacher and leader of the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church down the road, where the girl’s family worshipped. Massie was a respected member of the congregation. Bruckelmyer had asked them all to the meeting, according to the girl’s account to police years later.

In front of the girl, her father and Bruckelmyer, Massie asked her for forgiveness. Looming over her, the three men wept. Then the girl’s dad and preacher allowed the man who had been sexually abusing her since kindergarten to hug her.

“It was one of the worst things ever,” she told police some 15 years later.

In accordance with one of the core tenets of their church, the matter was resolved. It was forgiven. It should now be forgotten. If she spoke of it again, she would be guilty of having an unforgiving heart and the sins would become hers.

But she could never forget. And neither could the other children.

Over the course of about 20 years in two states, Massie had, according to court documents and by his own admission, sexually abused children within the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, or OALC, community. He touched girls under blankets when their parents were present, in the backseat of a car with other passengers — even in the pews at church. His abuse was such an open secret among the tight-knit congregation that mothers warned their daughters to stay away from him.

Some former victims, as adults, confronted preachers, including Bruckelmyer, about what Massie had done to them. Church leaders told Massie to stay away from the congregation’s children, and they sent him to a therapist who specialized in sex offender treatment.

Clint Massie in a March booking photo. Over the course of about 20 years in two states, Massie had, according to court documents and by his own admission, sexually abused children within the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church community. St. Louis County

But they never reported Massie’s crimes to police, as required by the law. Instead, Bruckelmyer and other leaders in the church encouraged the victims to take part in forgiveness sessions — which allowed Massie, now 50, to continue abusing children, according to an investigation by the Minnesota Star Tribune and ProPublica.

Massie did not respond to requests for comment but has denied abuse allegations relating to some individual victims in pending lawsuits. In December 2024, he pleaded guilty to four counts of felony criminal sexual conduct with victims under the age of 13. In March, a judge sentenced him to 7 1/2 years in prison. Church officials, including Bruckelmyer, were not charged in connection with Massie’s crime, but prosecutors said they should have done more to stop him.

“It gives the appearance of a group of people who are not just trying to protect someone — but something,” Mike Ryan, the assistant St. Louis County attorney who prosecuted Massie, said at his sentencing. “And they have enabled something awful here.”

Law enforcement there first became aware of the allegations against Massie in 2017. They said that the church’s lack of cooperation — including pressuring potential witnesses and victims to stay quiet about the abuse and preachers failing to report it to authorities — was a major factor in the delay in bringing charges.

Bruckelmyer declined to comment or to answer a detailed list of questions. But in a 2023 interview with a St. Louis County detective, he acknowledged knowing about Massie’s sexual abuse and didn’t dispute that he took part in forgiveness sessions involving Massie and his victims.

He said it was up to the victims to report the crimes to police, a clear misreading of the law for mandated reporters — doctors, teachers and others who are required to report crimes against children.

“We don’t protect either one,” Bruckelmyer said of sexual abusers and their victims.

Bruckelmyer also told police his actions followed church protocol. An internal church document, obtained by the Star Tribune and ProPublica, suggests that, when appropriate, church leaders and others facilitate “a conversation with both parties together” — an action that experts who work with abuse victims say can add to a victim’s trauma. While the document praises the police and the justice system, it doesn’t mention mandatory reporting laws and gives preachers wide latitude on whether to involve police.

An internal church document outlining guidelines for handling abuse includes bringing both parties together for a discussion. Obtained by the Star Tribune and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.

Kimberly Lowe, a lawyer and crisis manager for the church, said its preachers are unpaid and therefore might not be legally required to report sexual abuse of children. Asked if she believes the preachers are mandated reporters under Minnesota law, Lowe would only say that the language of the statute is unclear. 

Bruckelmyer’s church, Woodland Park, is one of two OALC congregations north of Duluth, in the bluff region above Lake Superior. Some members live nearby, in a rural, forest-lined community. Members are not obviously identifiable by their clothing — they dress modestly but modernly, in muted colors and long skirts. Women do not wear makeup, jewelry or open-toed shoes and they keep their hair up in a bun, giving rise to the nickname “bunners.” According to church literature, members are to live simple, modest lives like Jesus did; television, music and dancing are seen as sinful, according to former members.

On a recent Sunday, the modern, unadorned sanctuary of the Woodland Park church, which seats 1,000, was full of families, parents soothing babbling and crying infants, older children clutching baggies of candy or toy cars.

At the close of the sermon, the preacher asked the entire congregation for forgiveness, which kicked off “movements” — a portion of the service when congregants embraced and begged one another for forgiveness for various sins, frequently in tears.

OALC is a conservative Christian revival movement that came to the U.S. with 19th-century settlers from Norway, Finland and Sweden, and it is not affiliated with any mainstream Lutheran denominations. There is no official count, but one academic study estimated 31,000 members worldwide as of 2016, with most in the United States. The church is rapidly growing, experts say, and the member count today is likely much higher. OALC’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Washington state and Duluth.

There are 33 OALC churches in the U.S. and Canada. Only men hold leadership positions. The less formal nature of OALC structure — a spokesperson said there’s no headquarters in the U.S. — means that, unlike sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church or Southern Baptist Convention, there’s no central authority to hold accountable. Still, news of the criminal case against Massie spread widely in the insular OALC, inspiring more victims to come forward in Minnesota and other states.

St. Louis County investigators say they have been contacted by current and former church members in South Dakota and Washington who allege they were victims of sexual abuse that was never reported to law enforcement. The Star Tribune and ProPublica have interviewed more than a dozen alleged victims of Massie and of other church members in Wyoming, Maryland and Michigan.

By forgiving men like Massie, prosecutors and police said, preachers created a situation where the alleged victims had to worship next to their alleged abusers — and allowed Massie to escape arrest and prosecution for years.

“He was so brazen about it — and there was so little done about it — that he thought it was permission,” Ryan said.

The Old Apostolic Lutheran Church is a conservative Christian revival movement that came to the U.S. with 19th-century settlers from Norway, Finland and Sweden, and it is not affiliated with any mainstream Lutheran denominations. Amanda Anderson/Star Tribune

“Church Knows”

For the girl who said she was pressured to forgive Massie at Bruckelmyer’s office, the silence that followed only compounded her trauma. She reported struggling with debilitating anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder in her teens. She grew tense every time she walked into the church, especially when she saw Massie holding another little girl. 

“I lived in darkness for so many years of my life because I couldn’t talk about it,” the girl said in a recorded interview with police. “Multiple times in my life I wanted to die.”

When she was 16 and in counseling, she told her therapist how Massie had abused her. The therapist reported it to the police, which is how the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office in Duluth first learned about Massie in summer 2017.

Sgt. Jessica LaBore was the investigator assigned to the case. In a recorded interview, the girl reluctantly told LaBore how she used to sit with Massie and his wife, Sarah, at church, just a few rows from the front. Massie would snake his hands up her skirt and touch her thighs and genitals. Another time, at a gathering at the home of her parents’ friends, she said, Massie told her to get a blanket and began touching her underneath it, with her mom and dad nearby.

She told LaBore that she’d reported the abuse to a preacher, Calvin Raisanen, and that her mother had spoken to Bruckelmyer about it, according to police documents and a recording of the interview obtained through a public records request. Raisanen did not respond to requests for comment. In her own conversation with LaBore, the girl’s mother confirmed that Massie had asked forgiveness from her husband and daughter years ago.

Like some victims in the records from Massie’s case, she declined to speak to reporters for this story and is not being identified because the news organizations typically don’t name victims of sex crimes without their consent.

In an email to reporters, she wrote that she is still a member of the church and feels supported by its community: “I truly believe I’m in the right place.”

St. Louis County’s case against Massie cites victims’ descriptions of the church’s “forgive and forget” practice. Obtained by the Star Tribune and ProPublica. Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica.

When LaBore interviewed Massie, he confirmed some important details about the allegations: Bruckelmyer was aware that several girls had accused Massie of sexual abuse. And he remembered asking for forgiveness at his preacher’s business office.

LaBore did not respond to requests for comment, but police reports show that the girl’s family stopped cooperating with the investigation. The mother told her that preachers at the church had spoken to Massie and that he’d “learned his lesson,” though the mother believed that Massie had “continued to sexually assault children after this point,” according to LaBore’s notes.

LaBore referred the case for charges to Deputy St. Louis County Attorney Jon Holets. In a statement to the Star Tribune and ProPublica, Holets said he also spoke to the victim’s mother, who informed him “that there had been therapeutic intervention, that ‘they were good’” and that her daughter did not want anything more to be done. Without the girl’s cooperation, Holets said he decided he could not bring charges against Massie, an outcome he said gives him “heartache” to this day.

5 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into How Leaders of a Minnesota Church Community Enabled a Child Abuser

Three years later, Massie again came to the attention of the sheriff’s office. Two crime-reporting hotlines received anonymous tips saying Massie had sexually assaulted “little girls” over the course of three decades. “Church knows but no action,” reads a police summary of one of the tips.

This time, LaBore went to Bruckelmyer. According to her notes, Bruckelmyer said the church encourages abuse victims to go to police, but he told her he believed it was “on them to do that.”

LaBore explained the state’s mandated reporting law to Bruckelmyer and told him that he and others at the church could be charged criminally if “somebody that they already know about” were to keep abusing children and they failed to report it.

“We are finding out from our investigations that these Mandated Reports are not being made, and instead, these incidents are being dealt with within the church,” she wrote in a departmental memo to update other detectives. “Sometimes the preachers are facilitating in the asking for forgiveness.”

For the second time, Holets decided not to bring charges, though this time it was about church preachers rather than Massie. In a statement to reporters, Holets said law enforcement decided to try to “educate” church leaders about their legal responsibility to report the sexual abuse of children.

“I believed it was more effective to work with existing leadership to influence practices and attitudes regarding child abuse reporting, rather than to pursue criminal enforcement at that stage,” Holets wrote. “That said, criminal charges for failure to report remain a possibility in such cases.”

When LaBore spoke to Bruckelmyer, she read him the entire mandated reporter law over the phone, line by line, then texted it to him.

Haunted by Silence

In 2023, a call to police breathed new life into the case.

A woman told police that she’d been sexually abused repeatedly as a kid. Her abuser was a relative: Clint Massie.

The case landed on the desk of Sgt. Adam Kleffman of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office. He interviewed the victim and listened to the different ways the woman said Massie sexually abused her: the nights when she slept over after helping tend to his horses, the day when she rode a tractor with him, or swam with him and other members of her family at the lake.

Her mom had reported Massie to a preacher when she was a child, she told Kleffman. At the time, the preacher promised to handle it, she said, and told her mother never to speak of it again, not even to her husband. Later, she went through a session with Bruckelmyer, similar to the other girl, where she was pressured to forgive Massie and forget the abuse.

As an adult, she was alarmed to see Massie in church, hugging and kissing children about the same age she was when the abuse began, which is why she’d felt a duty to report it all these years later, she said.

“I went back to the same preacher, which is Daryl [Bruckelmyer], and said, ‘Why is he still able to hold kids and whatever?’” she recalled to Kleffman in a recorded interview. “And he’s like: ‘I don’t know. Like, we’ve told him that he’s not supposed to, but he still does.’”

Kleffman picked up where LaBore left off and contacted the girl who spoke to their office in 2017. She was now in her early 20s, married, a new mom living in Washington state. In a recorded conversation, she told Kleffman that the trauma — and in particular, the mandate that she remain silent about it — still haunted her.

Though the woman had tried to put time and distance between herself and Massie, Massie’s wife, Sarah, had asked for a meeting about a year earlier when the woman returned to Duluth for a visit. At a Starbucks, she said, Sarah Massie told her that the abuse was no big deal and she needed to forget about what happened. The conversation, the woman said, was “horrible.”

Sarah Massie declined to comment for this story.

The woman agreed to be part of the police investigation but told Kleffman that she had little faith it would go anywhere. It did not, after all, go anywhere last time.

“I can tell you,” Kleffman said, “you should have lots of faith in me.”

The investigator now had two victims. They gave him the names of others they suspected had also been abused by Massie. Kleffman tried to contact them, but some were reluctant to cooperate. One woman told Kleffman that Massie had asked for forgiveness. The sin, she said in the recorded call, was “washed away in the blood of reconciliation.”

“It is gone forever,” she told Kleffman.

“So you’re following what the church says to do,” Kleffman replied.

“I am following what God says to do,” the woman told him, before hanging up.

Sgt. Adam Kleffman of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office was the investigator on the Massie case.

“There Could Be Hundreds”

On Feb. 10, 2023, Massie sat opposite Kleffman and Investigator Tony McTavish in a beige, windowless room at the sheriff’s office in Duluth. In a video of the interrogation, Massie downplayed the allegations as a series of accidents and misunderstandings. But as the 90-minute interrogation progressed, his demeanor shifted. He admitted he’d felt a “tinge” of a “sick, perverted thing” when, he claimed, one very young girl had pulled his hand to her vagina before he realized what was happening.

“I’m a lustful man, sure,” he said, but he denied he touched girls on purpose. “Strike me dead right now if I’m lying to you. I was not trying to touch her sexually.”

“I call bullshit on that,” Kleffman said.

Massie told Kleffman and McTavish that Bruckelmyer had spoken to him “at least” three times about inappropriate behavior with children. The investigators asked how many more girls might come forward with stories about him touching or kissing them.

“I mean, there could be hundreds,” Massie said.

Five days later, Bruckelmyer walked into the same interview room with Raisanen, another preacher at the church.

Bruckelmyer, now 68, is described as a kind but domineering force in the church, a father of at least 12 who worked in construction.

Unlike in other branches of Christianity, OALC preachers like Bruckelmyer do not attend traditional seminaries or receive formal training before assuming their leadership roles. Instead, according to a church spokesperson, they are selected by the congregation.

Their advice is seen as coming directly from God, according to several former church members.

In a video recording of the police interview, Bruckelmyer and Raisanen joked quietly with one another before Kleffman and Sgt. Eric Sathers, another investigator, entered the room.

“Do you know what the mandated reporting laws are in the state of Minnesota?” Kleffman asked.

“We have looked at them some, but it’s hard for us to interpret everything,” Bruckelmyer replied.

“Have you ever been told about them?” the officer asked.

“No,” Bruckelmyer said.

Kleffman said he knew that wasn’t true and brought up the 2020 call with LaBore. “I just listened to the audio recording, and it was line-for-line. You said you understood what they were,” Kleffman said.

“We felt, unless it’s changed, that as a part of the church that we keep silent,” Bruckelmyer said.

Investigators with the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office interview Daryl Bruckelmyer and Calvin Raisanen, preachers with the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth. Video provided by St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office

Kleffman and Sathers explained that if someone like Massie confessed to Bruckelmyer one-on-one, that would constitute a protected conversation with clergy. But hearing directly from the victims, from parents of victims or about abuse allegations in a group setting was another matter entirely.

Bruckelmyer and Raisanen claimed ignorance of the legal distinction and thanked the officers for the “clarification.” Bruckelmyer asked what became of the 2017 investigation into Massie. “I mean, it should have been taken care of then, you know?” the preacher said. “It’s like, what happened?”

Kleffman reminded him that a decade before that, the girl’s parents had come forward to Bruckelmyer and was told to forgive Massie.

“Nothing was done by you,” Kleffman said. “So in that meantime, she is not being protected while Clint is still scot-free doing what he’s been doing for 15 years.”

“I see,” Bruckelmyer said quietly.

“You’re just keeping a pedophile in your church,” Kleffman said.

Both Bruckelmyer and Raisanen confirmed they’d known about the girl from the 2017 report, and Bruckelmyer said he knew of two others as well. He expressed his eagerness to cooperate with law enforcement moving forward but denied knowledge of any other victims beyond the three.

Bruckelmyer and Raisanen left the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department office without facing any consequences. John Hiivala, a spokesperson for the Woodland Park Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, said that the church “has fully complied with the law in the referenced case, and it’s a matter of legal record.” Hiivala declined to comment further.

By the time prosecutors brought the case against Massie, the three-year statute of limitations had run out on charging Bruckelmyer with failure to report.

Kyla Chamberlin flew in from North Dakota for Massie’s sentencing. Of the nine alleged victims prosecutors identified from the case, she was the only one to attend the sentencing in person.

Reckoning

On the day of Massie’s sentencing in March 2025, Kleffman walked Kyla Chamberlin to the front row of the high-ceilinged courtroom. The opposite side of the courtroom quickly filled with at least a dozen Massie supporters, including his wife, Sarah.

Chamberlin had flown in from North Dakota alone. Of the nine alleged victims prosecutors identified from the case, she was the only one to attend the sentencing in person. As she waited, she was shaking. She didn’t want to look back, particularly at Sarah Massie, whom she’d adored as a child. She said she could feel the eyes of her former church community on her, people she’d once trusted and loved.

A former EMT and mother of three, Chamberlin had grown up in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1990s. Clint and Sarah Massie lived nearby and opened their home to Chamberlin and her four siblings. Her parents sometimes asked Clint, starting in his late teens, to babysit.

The sexual abuse began around the time Chamberlin was 7 years old, she told police. In interviews with Kleffman, she described a remarkably similar pattern of abuse as the two Duluth victims.

After the Massies moved to Duluth in the early 2000s, Chamberlin’s parents say she went from meek and sweet to being filled with an inexplicable anger. She rebelled, she drank. The close-knit family began to fray. She and one of her older sisters, Kristi Bertolotto, stopped speaking to each other.

“I’ve lost a lot of friendships, a lot of relationships, divorces, anger management — didn’t understand why I was so mad,” Chamberlin said.

“I’ve lost a lot of friendships, a lot of relationships, divorces, anger management — didn’t understand why I was so mad,” Chamberlin said, speaking about the aftermath of her alleged sexual abuse.

She stopped attending church in 2010 and, in response, her parents made it clear that she was no longer welcome at family and holiday functions, a painful and common experience described by several former church members.

“It’s like you don’t even think for yourself,” Janie Williamson, Chamberlin’s mother, said in an interview. “To turn against your own children because of some of those things is — it’s awful.”

After St. Louis County announced charges against Massie, Kleffman began receiving calls from alleged victims all over the country. One of those was from Chamberlin. Months later, Kleffman realized that one of the other victims he interviewed was Chamberlin’s older sister, Bertolotto.

Neither of them knew what had happened to the other. Neither knew the other sister had come forward. Both women agreed to be named in this story.

Court filings listed nine alleged victims, but only three of the cases resulted in charges of felony sexual conduct with a victim under the age of 13. The statute of limitations under South Dakota law had run out for Bertolotto and Chamberlin. And the girl who’d been pressured to forgive Massie in Bruckelmyer’s office hadn’t had her case charged either; under Minnesota law, too much time had passed between her initial report in 2017 and the prosecution.

Nevertheless, six of the alleged victims whose cases didn’t result in charges were still part of the case, and some of the women traveled to Duluth in December 2024 to testify at Massie’s trial. Just after jury selection, Massie agreed to plead guilty to four felony counts. One charge was dropped.

Four months later, at his sentencing, Massie looked pale and paunchy in an orange jumpsuit, his hands and feet shackled. His attorney, citing Massie’s lack of a criminal record, asked that he receive no prison time and be allowed to seek treatment and receive probation that he could serve at home. Massie apologized to his victims and their families.

“I beg for their forgiveness, for the damage and hurt that I’ve caused them over the years,” he said in a quavering voice. “I feel responsible for the horrible acts to these children.”

But Judge Eric Hylden noted that since Massie had pleaded guilty, he’d never tried to enroll in sex-offender treatment or written apology letters to his victims. Hylden also quoted aloud from one of 17 letters of support for Massie, many from OALC members, which he said demonstrated that some in Massie’s community still did not believe he’d done anything wrong: “I wish you find ones that have actually done these things and get them put away rather than putting your energy into lying and seeking evil where there is none to be found.”

The judge sentenced Massie to 7 1/2 years in prison.

Afterward, in the witness room a floor higher in the courthouse, Chamberlin met Ryan, the assistant county attorney, and Kleffman — the two men she credited with putting Massie in prison 30 years after he’d abused her. The three exchanged hugs.

“I feel a sense of justice for the first time in 30 years,” Chamberlin said.

At the same time, none of them felt completely satisfied that the problem began and ended with Massie — that church leaders had not been held accountable.

Ryan said that he’d struggled as he prepared to go to trial with keeping several of the women from succumbing to what he called “a constant effort” by members of the church to “try to get these girls to either tone down their position on it or just to not cooperate.” One alleged victim, he said, had dropped out weeks before trial.

Chamberlin and her sister have retained the same lawyer who represented some of the victims in the Jeffrey Epstein case. He has filed lawsuits on their behalf against Massie, their church in South Dakota and the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church of America.

In a letter written from prison that was filed in court, Massie denied both sisters’ allegations. The OALC, in a motion to dismiss both lawsuits, wrote that “while OALC-America is mindful and sympathetic to Plaintiff for the abuse Plaintiff alleges occurred by Massie, such empathy does not take away from the plain fact that this Court does not have personal jurisdiction over OALC-America.”

Chamberlin and Bertolotto’s family has left the church. They are now navigating a delicate reconciliation, which Chamberlin credits to the abuse finally coming to light.

Chamberlin said she hoped to have a role encouraging other victims to come forward before the secrecy consumes their lives the way it had consumed hers.

“There’s a lot more to be done,” she said. “There’s a lot of Clints out there.”

After Massie’s sentencing, Chamberlin said, “I feel a sense of justice for the first time in 30 years.”

The post Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget. appeared first on ProPublica.

On its face, the rule proposed in July by the country’s pipeline-safety regulator seemed innocuous. The regulator, a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation called the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, was proposing what looked like minor, bureaucratic changes to its process for issuing regulatory waivers. Between the lines, PHMSA watchers saw a much more consequential effort — one that would curtail the power of agency experts to impose conditions aimed at preventing catastrophic pipeline failures.

The rule was signed by Ben Kochman, whom the administration of President Donald Trump appointed as deputy administrator of the agency. In the proposal, Kochman noted that the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, a powerful pipeline industry group, had criticized the policy that the new rule would change. It went unmentioned that Kochman was a director of that same trade group until January.

“You hear of the phrase ‘the fox guarding the henhouse,’” said Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, an advocacy group. “What we’re worrying about in this situation is the fox designing the henhouse.”

The rule is part of a much larger rollback of regulations at the DOT under the second Trump administration. The agency’s new leaders have touted this rollback as cutting red tape and encouraging innovation. But dozens of the regulations they have targeted sought to prevent deaths and injuries in the nation’s transportation and infrastructure systems.

The DOT’s sprawling regulatory domain stretches from air traffic control to highway and train safety to maintenance of oil pipelines and rules governing autonomous vehicles. In recent months, the agency has scrapped possible limits on subway and bus driver hours meant to keep them from falling asleep at the wheel; delayed a requirement that airplanes be equipped with an extra cockpit barrier to prevent 9/11-style takeovers; nixed a planned mandate for safer motorcycle helmets; proposed exempting school bus child-restraint systems from new crash-protection requirements; and postponed a rule that freight trains transporting hazardous materials carry emergency oxygen masks to protect crews.

In total, ProPublica identified 30 regulatory actions taken by the DOT under the new administration that current and former agency officials as well as safety advocates said are at odds with the agency’s mission to protect the public. Some of the regulations targeted by the new administration were required by federal legislation. Five of the targeted regulations could prevent as many as 1,000 deaths and 40,000 injuries each year, according to the agency’s own prior estimates.

“The regulations are written in blood,” said John Putnam, the agency’s general counsel during the administration of former President Joe Biden. “Most of them are driven by a tragedy that resulted in the loss of life.” But industry groups objected to many of the rules as unjustified or burdensome and pushed for, or later commended, the DOT’s recent changes to them.

The DOT’s safety enforcement has dropped dramatically as well. In the first eight months of Trump’s second term, the agency opened 50% fewer investigations into vehicle safety defects, concluded 83% fewer enforcement cases against trucking and bus companies and started 58% fewer pipeline enforcement cases compared with the same period in the Biden administration, agency data shows. The agency has also proposed allowing subjects of DOT enforcement actions to bypass career staff and appeal directly to Trump appointees.

Overseeing these decisions are dozens of political appointees who previously worked for industries regulated by the DOT. The agency’s top posts are now occupied by lobbyists and consultants, former airline and railroad CEOs, alumni of autonomous vehicle technology startups and shipping and infrastructure firms, and ex-lawyers for pipeline and trucking companies. Some of the appointees previously battled against the DOT divisions they now control. Some took industry jobs after prior stints at the agency and have now cycled back into the upper ranks of the DOT.

ProPublica identified 32 political appointees at the DOT with industry ties, including 11 who recently held investments in transportation companies and adjacent industries. Those appointees disclosed between $12 million and $52 million in stock holdings and other financial interests in airlines, railroads, oil and gas corporations, transportation technology firms and other businesses whose work is close enough to the agency’s purview that the appointees pledged to divest or recuse themselves from matters involving those companies. Such investments by DOT leadership may be far greater, but financial disclosures are not publicly available for all of the appointees. The agency has not fulfilled a request by ProPublica for any disclosure filings from other appointees that are subject to release under federal law.

ProPublica’s findings are based on a review of hundreds of rulemaking documents as well as internal agency emails, financial disclosures, legal filings and other records. ProPublica also interviewed safety advocates and researchers as well as 19 current and former DOT officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the administration.

Some degree of industry presence at the DOT is common, even desirable, those officials noted. The agency’s regulatory responsibilities are vast, often involving arcane technical matters for which the input of engineers and operators is essential. Many of the DOT’s recent deregulatory moves are backed by lengthy justifications from the administration or industry groups, and safety advocates do not view all of them as equally consequential.

DOT spokesperson Nate Sizemore said in a statement that “safety comes first” at the agency under its new leadership. “The insinuation that slashing duplicative and outdated regulations contradicts that mission isn’t just wrong — it ignores the fact that doing so enhances focus on enforcing the key rules that actually keep the American people secure.” (He disputed that the pipeline rule signed by Kochman would reduce the agency’s regulatory authority.) Regarding the industry ties of agency leadership, he added: “ProPublica’s gross smears are flat out lies, and these attacks on our exceptionally qualified staff are a shameful attempt to fearmonger.” He did not respond to a question about what the agency viewed as lies or answer other detailed questions.

The breadth and speed of the rollbacks are unprecedented, according to Marc Scribner, a senior transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, who studies the agency’s regulatory activity. “We haven’t seen deregulatory rulemaking volume at USDOT like this before,” Scribner said.

And the number of DOT appointees who hail from industries they now regulate is also raising eyebrows among some agency veterans. “Historically Republicans have been more business focused, Democrats have been more public transportation and public interest and safety focused,” said one former senior DOT official. “What you’re seeing this time around is the industry focus on steroids.”

Safety advocates and former agency officials fear this will lead to deaths and injuries that could be prevented. “The consequence of this, of pulling back on these safety regulations, is that more daughters, mothers, children, bread winners are going to lose their lives,” said Barbara McCann, a former senior DOT safety official who served in Democratic and Republican administrations. “Government is here to safeguard people, protect people, and the new leadership at DOT is not performing that role.”

No division of the DOT better exemplifies the alignment of industry and regulator under the second Trump administration than its pipeline office. Kochman, the appointee who signed the July proposed rule, is one of four political appointees in the division who previously worked for the pipeline industry or in closely related fields. Another is Keith Coyle, the agency’s chief counsel, who, as a lawyer representing industry groups, successfully fought to undo a pipeline safety regulation as recently as 2023. The arrival of these appointees has coincided with an exodus of high-ranking civil servants from the agency.

The new appointees have wasted little time. PHMSA has published 23 notices of proposed rulemaking under the new administration — most of them deregulatory — which is more than the Biden administration published in four years. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this,” Caram said. All 23 proposals were signed by Kochman.

An aerial view of Danville after the 2019 pipeline explosion. “The regulations are written in blood,” a former DOT official said. “Most of them are driven by a tragedy that resulted in the loss of life.” Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal/USA Today Network

The regulatory revisions largely point in the same direction. “The general tone is, ‘We’ve done great on pipeline safety, so it’s time to start looking at how to decrease costs for the industry and improve efficiency,’” Caram said. “There’s really nothing in there about how we can make the rules more effective or more efficient to improve safety, which is the agency’s mission.”

In recent months, Kochman has sought to triple the monetary value of property damage caused by a hazardous liquid pipeline failure before its operators must report the accident to PHMSA. (The agency was forced to withdraw the regulation on procedural grounds.) He proposed allowing companies to transport larger quantities of lithium batteries, which are known to spontaneously explode, and appliances containing flammable gasses. He questioned the agency’s existing drug and alcohol testing requirements for pipeline workers, requesting public feedback on whether those requirements “impose an undue burden on affected stakeholders.” He asked the same about packaging requirements for radioactive materials.

Four of PHMSA’s recent regulatory actions cite INGAA, the trade group for which Kochman used to work. That includes a plan to scale back a requirement that pipeline operators report emergency shutdown events, such as when pipeline systems malfunction and release flammable gases into the air. That proposal quoted regulatory language suggested by INGAA and other trade associations. PHMSA “agrees with the proposed revisions,” the notice reads.

While PHMSA’s rulemaking office has been busy, its enforcement wing has slowed dramatically. From 2002 to the end of the Biden administration, PHMSA typically proposed around $475,000 in penalties for safety violations every 30 days, according to an analysis by the Pipeline Safety Trust. In the first eight months of the new administration, that figure fell to around $8,000 in proposed penalties every 30 days, a 98% drop. (Enforcement picked up in October, Caram said.)

Kochman has become a divisive figure at the agency, according to two former PHMSA employees who left this year and another federal employee familiar with the matter. An ex-congressional staffer in his late 30s with no engineering or legal credentials listed on his LinkedIn profile, Kochman has shouted at colleagues in meetings and demeaned the agency’s prior work, the current and former employees said. He has dismissed carefully considered agency positions as “obviously wrong” and cut out career officials in determining PHMSA policy. His positions typically aligned with those of INGAA and the pipeline industry more broadly, the current and former employees said.

Kochman and Coyle, both of whom also served in PHMSA under prior administrations, did not respond to requests for comment.

Sizemore, the DOT spokesperson, called Kochman and Coyle “dedicated public servants” whose “collective knowledge of pipeline and hazardous materials safety matters have proved invaluable to this Administration’s efforts to modernize the agency.” He said PHMSA has taken steps to advance safety, including updating its inspection and enforcement process, dispatching more personnel in response to safety incidents and protecting “safety critical positions” from layoffs.

An INGAA spokesperson said in a statement that the group’s “members have a goal of operating natural gas pipeline infrastructure with zero incidents, and we will continue to engage with PHMSA to advance rulemakings that prioritize the safety of our members and the communities that they serve.”

Some of PHMSA’s most consequential moves under the new administration occurred with no public notice. In the waning days of the Biden presidency, the agency announced new steps on two major rulemaking initiatives. One would strengthen regulations for carbon dioxide pipelines — an initiative spurred by a pipeline rupture in Mississippi in 2020 that sent 45 people to the hospital. The other would crack down on leaks and was expected to eliminate as much as 500,000 metric tons of methane emissions. But because the Biden administration waited until its final days to propose the rules, they were not officially published before Trump took office. That enabled the new administration to kill the rules silently, without ever having to formally withdraw them.

“For appointed leadership to pull them back without replacing them with anything, and with no intention to replace them with anything, is damaging to pipeline safety,” one of the former PHMSA employees said. “And it’s contrary to what Congress told PHMSA to do.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy frequently says safety is his “top priority.” But that rings hollow to Gary Wilburn. It calls to mind a sunny morning 23 years ago when Wilburn, then a volunteer firefighter, came upon the charred remains of a driver.

Wilburn had responded to a crash on an interstate in western Oklahoma. The deceased man, a subsequent investigation would show, was stopped in traffic on his way home from college when a semitruck traveling an estimated 75 miles per hour smashed into his Chevrolet Camaro from behind, crushing it and causing it to burst into flames. Wilburn was on the scene for 45 minutes before finding the Camaro’s license plate and realizing the victim was Orbie Wilburn, his 19-year-old son. His body had been burned beyond recognition.

The Chevrolet Camaro that 19-year-old Orbie Wilburn was driving in 2002 when it was hit from behind by a semitruck traveling an estimated 75 miles per hour. Courtesy of Linda Wilburn

Since then, Wilburn and his wife, Linda, have spent decades advocating for stronger truck safety regulations through letter-writing campaigns and conversations with members of Congress. One of their primary goals has been to secure a federal requirement for devices in big rigs that prevent them from speeding. By 2016, it seemed their efforts would finally pay off: The U.S. Department of Transportation proposed a rule mandating speed limiters in trucks like the one that killed their son. Studying possible maximum speeds of 60, 65 and 68 miles per hour, the agency estimated the regulation could prevent up to 500 deaths and 10,000 injuries each year.

But many truckers hated the idea. The devices would force them to travel slower than surrounding traffic, which could itself be dangerous, they argued. Less discussed was that many truckers are paid per mile, which means the faster they go, the more money they can make.

The rule stalled for years before seeming to be revived in 2022 when the Biden administration put it back in play. Then Trump appointees returned to the DOT.

“We want D.C. bureaucrats OUT of your trucks so we’re eliminating the absurd speed limiters rule,” Duffy posted on social media in July. The rule was dead.

“It just is heartbreaking,” Linda Wilburn told ProPublica. “It has potential to save lives.”

The agency has drawn less attention to other road and vehicle safety regulations that it has targeted. In September, the DOT quietly signaled that it was delaying two possible rules, one for side underride guards on heavy trucks to prevent cars from getting crushed underneath them, another for additional seat belt warning systems in cars. The rules were estimated to prevent as many as 70 deaths and 600 injuries annually, but industry groups objected to aspects of both. Later that month, the agency said it would push back changes to its vehicle safety ratings for consumers, citing the objection of an automakers trade group. The changes were meant to prod automakers to adopt vehicle designs that would be less lethal to pedestrians.

Tests from 2017 show how crashes can play out differently if a truck has only a fiberglass skirt for fuel efficiency, top, vs. a steel side underride guard, bottom. Courtesy of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

“If you’re going to say safety is our top priority, then you should push for any initiative that is going to save lives and prevent harm,” said David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit that researches vehicle crashes.

Rule delays are common when new administrations take office. But administrations may also slow-walk proposed rules that they’ve inherited but dislike as a way to effectively kill them without formally withdrawing them and facing the criticism that such a step might trigger, former officials said.

Among the moves most concerning to safety advocates are those related to automatic emergency braking, a technology that detects possible collisions and forces vehicles to slow down or stop. The Biden administration proposed or adopted rules that would require the technology in cars and large trucks, estimating they could prevent more than 500 deaths and 33,000 injuries each year, but industry groups criticized the proposals as impractical and dangerous.

That blowback appears to have had an effect. The DOT is planning to significantly narrow the requirement for trucks, according to internal agency emails obtained by ProPublica. Those emails, from May, show that the administration plans to revise the rule to apply only to heavier trucks, not to smaller and midsized trucks as well, as originally proposed. “Drivers and OOIDA oppose,” one official wrote to colleagues, referring to the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, an influential trucker trade group.

“Nobody cares more about highway safety than professional truck drivers, it’s where they make their living,” an OOIDA spokesperson said in a statement. “OOIDA and the small-business truckers we represent appreciate that Secretary Duffy and his team continue to listen to the men and women who keep America’s supply chain moving.”

Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, criticized the reversal. “Nothing is going to do more to prevent loss of life and severity of injury than automatic emergency breaking,” he said. “That is by far the most consequential rule sitting at DOT.”

The automatic emergency braking requirement for cars could also be in jeopardy. An automakers trade group brought the DOT to court over the regulation this year. Instead of defending the proposal, the Trump administration has repeatedly asked the judge to delay the case, legal filings show. “The Department is under new leadership and is reviewing the rule at issue in this litigation, which could lead to its modification,” one filing reads.

Scrapping that requirement would be “catastrophic,” one former agency official said. “Pulling back that rule or slowing it down would just lead to more fatalities with virtually no benefit.”

Also significant, but largely unscrutinized, was the administration’s decision to quietly withdraw two proposals to embed new safety requirements in major federal programs that funnel billions of dollars a year to state and local governments for road projects. That included requiring states to advance the so-called “Safe System Approach” to road safety, which seeks to reduce crashes and make them less severe in part through design features like roundabouts, rumble strips and high-visibility intersections. The Trump administration had little to say about why it withdrew them beyond that they did not align with “agency needs, priorities, and objectives.”

McCann, the former DOT safety official, noted that deaths from car crashes occur in the United States at a vastly higher rate than in other developed countries. She estimated that the proposals, if adopted, eventually could have saved hundreds of lives annually. “The problem with surface transportation is that people die in ones and twos and threes, but it adds up to 40,000 deaths a year,” which is “not enough to spark outrage,” she said. “The only way to solve that is to make broad systematic changes, and that’s what these rules help us do, especially on the roadway side. And without them that carnage is just going to continue.”

The post How Trump’s Transportation Department Is Loosening Safety Rules Meant to Protect the Public appeared first on ProPublica.

After a decade of planning, New York City broke ground in September on a $218 million plan to prevent flooding in the portside neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn, even though experts say it will provide inadequate protection from storms. The project also will provide less protection than other city flood prevention projects, including a new $3.5 billion upscale development on the edge of the neighborhood. 

Over a decade ago, Superstorm Sandy killed 44 people and caused $19 billion in damage across New York City, swamping homes and destroying businesses in Red Hook. The city responded, pumping billions of dollars into neighborhood flood protection projects. Most of the money went to protect lower Manhattan from powerful 100-year storms — defined as storms that have a 1-in-4 chance of occurring at some point during the typical 30-year home mortgage. 

But in Red Hook, where roughly two-thirds of residents are Black and Hispanic and earn below the city’s median income, the city is instead building to protect against a 10-year storm. The planned construction is expected to raise streets and sidewalks and erect barriers and floodwalls to an elevation of up to 10 feet above sea level. 

“It’s at best temporary. At worst, it gives a false sense of security,” said John Shapiro, a Pratt Institute professor whose research focuses on the impact of climate change on urban planning.

Shapiro and other experts say that as the climate warms, floods and storms are striking more frequently and with greater intensity. This leaves coastal communities with a complicated choice: Retreat from the coast, or build protection against the next violent storm.

Port warehouses, brick buildings with black shutters, which now house artists’ studios, with the Manhattan skyline in the background Shuran Huang for ProPublica

Red Hook sits on a peninsula jutting into New York Harbor, which makes it vulnerable to flooding. The neighborhood was a marsh before the city began filling it in by the 1870s. In 1939, the city added the first section of the Red Hook Houses to board dock workers. The 32 buildings of the Red Hook Houses make up one of the city’s largest public housing developments and dominate the neighborhood’s skyline.

The neighborhood has Brooklyn’s last working port, along with an Amazon warehouse and an Ikea store. Artists’ studios are now tucked into old port buildings and trendy stores lining the cobblestone streets. In recent years the area has gentrified. 

Quincy Phillips was living in a third-floor apartment in the Red Hook Houses when Sandy hit. He watched as the water swamped the first floor of the building.

Quincy Phillips and his family had to live without power for two weeks after Hurricane Sandy. Alex Bandoni/ProPublica

“It didn’t reach past the second floor, thank God,” he said. “We had to roll our pants up to even walk past to get outside.

The storm sent a 6-foot wave of water through the neighborhood, destroying homes, ripping metal doors from warehouses, dropping boats onto the streets and carrying cars out into the harbor. 

Phillips’ family, like several thousand others in Red Hook, lived for two weeks without power and had to rely on federal aid until his refrigerator came back on. 

The year after Sandy wiped out the homes of Phillips and his neighbors in Red Hook, the administration of then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg determined Red Hook was at high risk of future flooding. A 2013 city report recommended a flood protection system for the neighborhood, using a combination of infrastructure such as floodwalls and floodgates. 

The city said the project, now known as the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project, would cost $200 million but at the time was able to secure only a $50 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The administration of subsequent Mayor Bill de Blasio tapped the city’s capital budget for another $50 million. As a result, the city told consultants to only consider projects that it could afford on the smaller budget, according to a feasibility study. This would be a less ambitious 10-year storm plan.

Construction on the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project began in September. Shuran Huang for ProPublica

No Accounting for Sea Level Rise 

In order to predict how frequently storms will occur in the future and how high floodwaters are likely to reach, scientists and engineers use historic tidal data.

The models project that in Red Hook, a 100-year storm at current sea level would produce surging waves that would reach an elevation of at least 11 feet — a foot higher than the current plan would protect against. 

That doesn’t account for sea level rise. Climate experts serving on a city climate change panel have projected that by mid-century, in the worst case scenario sea levels will rise several feet. Counting that additional water height, the city’s own study found that Red Hook would need to erect barriers between 15 and 18 feet. Neighborhood storm protection projects in other parts of the city are being built to an elevation of at least 16 feet.

Elevation of City Flood Protection Projects

East Side Coastal Resiliency: 16.5 feet above sea level

Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience: 16.5 feet (plus 1.5 feet with deployable barriers)

South Battery Park City Resiliency: Up to 19.8 feet

North/West Battery Park Resiliency: Up to 20 feet

Red Hook Coastal Resiliency: 10 feet

The federal flood insurance program, which provides subsidized flood insurance to homeowners who live in high-risk flood zones, encourages communities to adopt a 100-year flood plan, said Philip Orton, an engineering professor at Stevens Institute of Technology who researches flood protection. Doing so, he said, lowers the cost of flood insurance for residents. “It’s rare that communities will not do it,” he said. All other coastal storm protection projects in New York City meet a 100-year standard. 

Biden and Obama administration guidelines encouraged federally funded projects to build to an elevation of at least 2 feet over 100-year storm projections. The Trump administration revoked those during each of his terms.

Last year, the city and FEMA increased funding by about $100 million for the Red Hook project. According to the city’s Department of Design and Construction, the agency responsible for the project, the added funds covered a decade of inflation and paid for upgrades to park and green spaces in the area.

New floodwalls at Asser Levy Playground in Manhattan are part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. The walls, seen in the background, are 6.5 feet higher than the planned walls for the Red Hook project. Shuran Huang for ProPublica

The funds also increased the elevation of the project from the original height of 8 feet to 10, taking into account greater changes to sea levels. But it didn’t bring it up to the levels that are being pursued in other parts of the city.

The Department of Design and Construction said a bigger project would disrupt ports, cruises and other waterfront businesses while taking away park space. When asked why Red Hook was receiving a lower level of protection than other communities, a department spokesperson said its low-lying topography and privately owned waterfront made gaining access to build and maintain a protection system difficult. The current project is sufficient, the spokesperson added, because Sandy is the only storm to strike the city since 1927 that would have overtopped the flood barrier.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor at Princeton University who served on the city’s climate change panel that came up with the sea level rise projections, said the city is misusing the historical record to justify its failure to protect against future storms.

“That’s a pretty poor excuse,” he said, adding that storms and floods like those experienced in Sandy will occur more frequently as sea levels rise.

A man tries to ride his bike through Hurricane Sandy floodwaters in Red Hook on Oct. 29, 2012. The heavy flooding destroyed homes and businesses. Craig Warga/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Bernice Rosenzweig, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College who studies urban flooding and serves on the New York City Panel on Climate Change, said the project is inadequate to protect Red Hook from even today’s large storms.

“The walls are not designed for major floods, not even our contemporary major floods, forget about major floods that will happen at the end of the 21st century,” she said. 

Unequal Protection 

Alexa Avilés, the City Council member representing Red Hook, said infrastructure planning is particularly frustrating in Red Hook. Along with community activists and residents, she argues that the system the city and the federal government use to decide how much money to spend on flood protections is biased against poor communities. 

“It never feels like we are prioritized, and we’re constantly fighting with the city again for both a basic level of service and then to get these major projects done and coordinated properly,” she said.

To win federal grants, applicants conduct a cost-benefit analysis that needs to show flood projects save more money in the event of a storm than they cost to build, said Kristin Smith, an economics researcher at Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies flood risk. 

That can be difficult for poor communities, she said. 

“The benefit-cost analysis can be a barrier to qualifying for federal funding when it’s a lower-income neighborhood and the cost of the project is so high that you just don’t have the benefits to justify it,” she said. 

Red Hook residents, advocates and leaders say the flood barrier system proposed for the $3.5 billion housing development in the neighborhood shows how wealthy residents in the city receive greater protection. 

The development, called the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, would build 6,000 mostly market-rate units on the northwest side of Red Hook, according to planning documents. A city task force approved the development in September along with a plan to refurbish and upgrade the port. It promises a flood barrier system that would protect from 100-year storms. 

New Housing Developments Would Have Higher Flood Protection Than the Rest of Red Hook

Note: The proposed housing and 21 feet of protection are part of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal development plan. The 10 feet of protection is part of the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project and includes floodwalls and other forms of protection, like raised streets, sidewalks and floodgates. Sources: NYC Economic Development Corp., NYC Department of Design and Construction Lucas Waldron/ProPublica

The Economic Development Corp., a city-run nonprofit organization, owns the land and plans to pay for the flood protection and other infrastructure with funding from federal grants, the city’s capital budget and the state, plus some from developers. 

The Brooklyn Marine Terminal plan still needs to pass an environmental review and the state’s approval process, but it will bypass the city’s more extensive process. According to the planning documents, it could take until 2038 to finish the project.

The plan would protect the new development site with a 21-foot coastal floodwall, which would start on the northern end of Red Hook and extend about 1 mile north.  

Urban planners who conducted an analysis of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal for the City Club of New York Waterfront Committee, an advocacy group promoting flood protection for waterfronts, say it’s a mistake to protect the new development while the south coast of Red Hook receives a lower level of protection. That will place the new development at risk, as a storm surge can overtop those barriers and flood the area from the landward side of the development. 

The group said the plan serves gentrification and developer interests rather than the larger Red Hook community.

“Most Red Hook residents live in public housing and lack the income necessary for housing mobility in NYC,” the analysis said. In contrast, most of the residents in the new development are expected to be very affluent, based on projected rents, it said. 

A spokesperson for the Economic Development Corp. said the city would study how to integrate the two projects but that there are no plans to further protect the peninsula.

The post New York Moves Forward With a Brooklyn Flood Protection Plan That Falls Short of Other City Projects appeared first on ProPublica.

Tierra Walker had reached her limit. In the weeks since she’d learned she was pregnant, the 37-year-old dental assistant had been wracked by unexplained seizures and mostly confined to a hospital cot. With soaring blood pressure and diabetes, she knew she was at high risk of developing preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that could end her life. 

Her mind was made up on the morning of Oct. 14, 2024: For the sake of her 14-year-old son, JJ, she needed to ask her doctor for an abortion to protect her health. 

“Wouldn’t you think it would be better for me to not have the baby?” she asked a physician at Methodist Hospital Northeast near San Antonio, according to her aunt. Just a few years earlier, Walker had developed a dangerous case of preeclampsia that had led to the stillbirth of her twins.

But the doctor, her family said, told her what many other medical providers would say in the weeks that followed: There was no emergency; nothing was wrong with her pregnancy, only her health. 

Just after Christmas, on his birthday, JJ found his mom draped over her bed, lifeless. An autopsy would later confirm what she had feared: Preeclampsia killed her at 20 weeks pregnant.

Every day, JJ revisits photos and videos of his mom.

Walker’s death is one of multiple cases ProPublica is investigating in which women with underlying health conditions died after they were unable to end their pregnancies.

Walker had known that abortion was illegal in Texas, but she had thought that hospitals could make an exception for patients like her, whose health was at risk. 

The reality: In states that ban abortion, patients with chronic conditions and other high-risk pregnancies often have nowhere to turn. 

They enter pregnancy sick and are expected to get sicker. Yet lawmakers who wrote the bans have refused to create exceptions for health risks. As a result, many hospitals and doctors, facing the threat of criminal charges, no longer offer these patients terminations, ProPublica found in interviews with more than 100 OB-GYNs across the country. Instead, these women are left to gamble with their lives. 

As Walker’s blood pressure swung wildly and a blood clot threatened to kill her, she continued to press doctors at prenatal appointments and emergency room visits, asking if it was safe for her to continue the pregnancy. Although one doctor documented in her medical record that she was at “high risk of clinical deterioration and/or death,” she was told over and over again that she didn’t need to worry, her relatives say. More than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy, according to medical records.   

Walker’s case unfolded during the fall of 2024, when the dangers of abortion bans were a focus of protests, media coverage and electoral campaigns across the country. ProPublica had revealed that five women — three in Texas alone — had died after they were unable to access standard reproductive care under the new bans. 

ProPublica condensed more than 6,500 pages of Walker’s medical records into a summary of her care with the guidance of two high-risk pregnancy specialists. More than a dozen OB-GYNs reviewed the case for ProPublica and said that since Walker had persistently high blood pressure, it would have been standard medical practice to advise her of the serious risks of her pregnancy early on, to revisit the conversation as new complications emerged and to offer termination at any point if she wanted it. Some described her condition as a “ticking time bomb.” Had Walker ended her pregnancy, every expert believed, she would not have died. 

Many said that her case illustrated why they think all patients need the freedom to choose how much risk they are willing to take during pregnancy. Walker expressed that she didn’t want to take that risk, her family says. She had a vibrant life, a husband and son whom she loved. 

Under Texas’ abortion law, though, that didn’t matter.

Walker’s mother, Pamela Walker, holds her daughter’s ashes.

“I Don’t Know How Much More I Can Take”

On a hot September day, Walker was lying down with JJ after a walk with their two small dogs, Milo and Twinkie, when she started shaking uncontrollably. 

Terrified, JJ called 911, asking for an ambulance. 

As the only child of a single mom, JJ had always considered Walker his closest friend, coach and protector wrapped in one. In their mobile home, JJ was greeted each morning by his mom’s wide smile and upturned eyes, as she shot off vocabulary quizzes or grilled him on state capitals. He loved how fearlessly she went after what she wanted; in 2021, she had proposed to her boyfriend, Eric Carson, and the two eloped. She’d just been talking about moving the family to Austin for a promotion she was offered at a dental clinic. 

Eric Carson and Walker married in 2021.

At the hospital, JJ was shocked to see her so pale and helpless, with wires snaking from her head and arms. 

To Walker’s surprise, doctors quickly discovered that she was five weeks pregnant. They also noted hypertension at levels so high that it reduces circulation to major organs and can cause a heart attack or stroke. That, and her weight, age and medical history, put Walker at an increased risk of developing preeclampsia, a pregnancy-related blood pressure disorder, said Dr. Jennifer Lewey, director of the Penn Women’s Cardiovascular Health Program and expert in hypertension.

“If I’m seeing a patient in her first trimester and her blood pressure is this uncontrolled — never mind anything else — what I’m talking about is: Your pregnancy will be so high risk, do we need to think about terminating the pregnancy and getting your health under control?”  

As Walker’s first trimester continued, she kept seizing. Her body convulsed, her eyes rolled back and she was often unable to speak for up to 30 minutes at a time. Some days, the episodes came in rapid waves, with little relief. 

For three weeks, she stayed at Methodist hospitals; doctors were not able to determine what was causing the spasms. Walker couldn’t get out of bed, in case a seizure made her fall, and this left her vulnerable to blood clots. She soon developed one in her leg that posed a new lethal threat: It could travel to her lungs and kill her instantly.

Carson watched over her during the day and her aunt Latanya Walker took the night shift. She was panicked that her tough niece, whose constant mantra was “quit your crying,” now seemed defeated. One evening, during Walker’s third hospitalization, when she was about 9 weeks pregnant, she told Latanya she’d had a vision during a seizure: Her grandmother and aunt, who had died years earlier, were preparing a place for her on the other side.

“You better tell them you’re not ready to go,” Latanya said. 

“I don’t know how much more I can take of this,” Walker whispered. 

Walker’s aunt, Latanya Walker, tried to advocate for her niece during her hospitalizations.

The next morning, Walker called for a doctor and asked about ending her pregnancy for the sake of her health. “When we get you under control, then everything will go smoothly,” the doctor replied, Latanya recalled. The physician on the floor was not an OB-GYN with the expertise to give a high-risk consultation, but the Walkers didn’t realize that this mattered. By the time the doctor left the room, her aunt said, tears streamed down Walker’s cheeks.

Dr. Elizabeth Langen, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Michigan who reviewed Walker’s case, said a physician comfortable with high-risk pregnancies should have counseled her on the dangers of continuing and offered her an abortion. “The safest thing for her was to terminate this pregnancy, that’s for sure.”

During Walker’s many hospital and prenatal visits, 21 OB-GYNs were among the more than 90 physicians involved in her care. None of them counseled her on the option — or the health benefits — of a termination, according to medical records. 

In Texas, the law bars “aiding and abetting” an illegal abortion. As a result, many physicians have avoided even mentioning it, according to interviews with dozens of doctors. 

In her condition, Walker couldn’t fathom leaving the state. When her aunt suggested ordering abortion medication online, Walker was worried she could go to jail. She was spending so much time in the hospital; what if she got caught taking the pills? 

At 12 weeks pregnant, she was admitted to University Hospital. Doctors there noted that even on anticoagulation medication, the clotting in Walker’s leg was so profound that she needed a thrombectomy to remove it. 

“At this point, we’ve gone from ‘complicated, but within the realm of normal’ to ‘we’ve got someone with a major procedure in pregnancy that tells us something isn’t going well,’” said Dr. Will Williams, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in New Orleans, where an abortion ban is also in place. “In my practice, we’d have a frank discussion about whether this is a person we’d offer a termination to at the point of thrombectomy.” 

ProPublica reached out to five physicians who were involved in key moments of Walker’s care: the hospitalist on duty on Oct. 14, 2024, when she asked about ending her pregnancy; three OB-GYNs; and a hospitalist on duty at the time of her thrombectomy. They did not respond. The hospitals Walker visited, including those run by University Health System and Methodist Healthcare, which is co-owned by HCA, did not comment on Walker’s care, despite permission from her family. Although the Walkers have not pursued legal action, they have engaged a lawyer. A University Health System spokesperson said that it is the company’s policy not to comment on potential litigation. 

In her second trimester, Walker’s seizures continued and her hypertension remained out of control. At an appointment on Dec. 27, at around 20 weeks, a doctor noted spiking blood pressure and sent her to University Hospital’s ER. There, doctors recorded a diagnosis of preeclampsia.  

The experts who reviewed Walker’s vital signs for ProPublica said her blood pressure of 174 over 115 was so concerning at that point, she needed to be admitted and monitored. Most questioned her doctor’s choice not to label her condition as severe. The treatment for severe preeclampsia, which points to a problem with the placenta, is delivery — or, at 20 weeks, an abortion. 

Instead, doctors lowered her blood pressure with medication and sent her home. 

Carson in the bedroom he shared with Walker

Three days later, JJ crawled into bed with his mom and fed her soup. “I’m so sorry,” Walker croaked. “It’s your birthday and it shouldn’t be like this.”  

He told his mom it was okay. He hadn’t expected laser tag or a trip to Dave & Buster’s this year. Over the past few months, when his mom was home, he had tried his best to make things easier on her, walking the dogs when she was out of breath, checking in every hour or so with a hug. JJ knew that after missing so many days of work, she had lost her job. She was stressed about getting enough food for the house. He was relieved when he heard her snoring — at least she was resting.

That afternoon, when his stepdad was out grocery shopping and his grandmother was just getting back from dialysis, he cracked open the door to Walker’s room. 

His mom was lying face-down in bed, as if she had fallen over while getting up. JJ ran over and tried to find any sign she was breathing. When he called 911, a dispatcher coached him to slide her to the rug and start CPR.

“I need you,” he shouted as he leaned over his mom, pressing down on her chest. “I need you!”

JJ receives prayers at church in San Antonio.

 “We Have to Allow for More Exceptions”

The anti-abortion activists who helped shape America’s latest wave of abortion bans have long seen health exemptions as a loophole that would get in the way of their goals. They fear such exceptions, if included in the laws, would allow virtually anyone to terminate a pregnancy.

In Idaho, an anti-abortion leader testifying at a state Senate hearing suggested doctors would use health exceptions to give abortions to patients with headaches. 

In South Dakota, a pregnant Republican lawmaker with a high risk of blood clots begged her colleagues to consider creating a health exception that would protect her; her bill never made it to a hearing. 

In Tennessee, an anti-abortion lobbyist with no medical training fought and defeated an amendment to the state law that would allow a health exception to “prevent” an emergency. He testified in the state Capitol that the carve-out was too broad since some pregnancy complications “work themselves out.” 

The refusal to entertain these broader exceptions is particularly consequential given the state of women’s health. Women are entering pregnancy older and sicker than they have in decades. The rate of blood pressure disorders in pregnancy has more than doubled since 1993; they now affect up to 15% of U.S. pregnancies. And they’re most prevalent in states with restrictive abortion policies, according to a 2023 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The burden of disease falls heaviest on Black women, like Walker, for an array of reasons: neighborhood disinvestment, poor access to health care and discrimination in the medical system. Cuts to Medicaid funding and changes to the Affordable Care Act are likely to exacerbate these problems, according to experts.  

Other countries give pregnant women and their doctors far more control over the medical decision to terminate. Across Europe, for example, most laws permit abortion for any reason through the first trimester, when more than 90% of abortions occur. After that gestational limit, their statutes also tend to include broad health exceptions that can be used for chronic conditions, illnesses that develop in pregnancy, fetal anomalies and, in some countries, mental health. 

U.S. abortion bans generally restrict interventions to a far more limited set of health risks, like a “life-threatening medical emergency” or “substantial and irreversible” harm to major organs. A small subset of lawyers and doctors argue that the law can and should be interpreted to cover patients with chronic conditions that are worsening in pregnancy. But the vaguely written bans threaten criminal penalties for performing an illegal abortion — in Texas, up to 99 years behind bars. In practice, few hospitals grant health exceptions, ProPublica’s reporting has found.

Dr. Jessica Tarleton, an OB-GYN who provides abortions in South Carolina, recalled how much changed at her hospital when the state’s ban was put in place: OB-GYNs who want to provide an abortion to a patient with a health risk now need to get a maternal-fetal medicine specialist to explicitly write in the chart that it is necessary, in compliance with the law. Not many doctors are willing to do so. 

“Some people were not because of their personal beliefs, and some because they didn’t want to be involved in any kind of potential legal actions,” Tarleton said. “They didn’t want their opinion to have anything to do with a patient getting an abortion or not.” 

Recently, for example, Cristina Nuñez sued two hospitals in El Paso for their inaction in her care in 2023. She had diabetes, uncontrolled blood pressure and end-stage kidney disease when she learned she was unexpectedly pregnant at 36. Doctors wrote in her medical record that “she needs termination based on threat to maternal life or health,” but Nuñez alleged that one hospital failed to find an anesthesiologist willing to participate. She remained pregnant for weeks, even as blood clots turned her right arm black, until an advocacy organization threatened legal action and she was able to obtain an abortion. The lawsuit is ongoing. 

This year, Texas Republicans passed legislation with minor amendments to their ban after ProPublica reported the deaths of three miscarrying women who did not receive critical abortion care during emergencies. In the updated law, an emergency still needs to be “life-threatening” to qualify for an abortion, but it no longer needs to be “imminent.” Doctors expect that most hospitals still won’t provide abortions to women like Walker who have dangerous chronic conditions but no certain threat to their lives. 

ProPublica asked Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of Texas’ abortion ban, about how the specific complications Walker faced should be treated by doctors under the amended law. When her pregnancy began, would she be eligible for an abortion due to her health? Would she need to wait for a diagnosis of severe preeclampsia? Is there a reason the law doesn’t include an exception for health risks? ProPublica put the same questions to the 20 state senators who co-wrote the bipartisan amendment. 

Only Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Democrat, responded. In her view, the amendment was far too narrow. But, she said, her Republican colleagues defer to the far right of their base and oppose broader exceptions.

“You can’t proclaim to be pro-life, but you’re passing laws that are endangering women and causing death,” she said. “We have to allow for more exceptions.” 

Latanya and Pamela in San Antonio

“So You’d Rather Let Somebody Die?”

After Walker died, her family felt bewildered by her medical care. The doctors had assured them that her baby was healthy and she would be fine. The autopsy found that the fetus was indeed healthy, at just under a pound and measuring 9 inches long. But it showed that Walker had  hypertensive cardiovascular disease with preeclampsia, along with an enlarged heart, dangerously full of fluid, and kidney damage — signs that her condition had declined even more than she knew. 

In Carson’s mind, the many doctors they saw cast the risks as challenges that would be overcome if his wife followed directions. “She was doing what they told her to do,” he said. He couldn’t understand how no one suggested ending the pregnancy to keep Walker safe. “Nobody said nothing.” 

Latanya worried the law played a role. “They didn’t want to offer to end the pregnancy, because the government or someone says you can’t? So you’d rather let somebody die?” she said. “Now we are the ones that have to suffer.” 

Read More

A “Striking” Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage

JJ couldn’t bear to stay in the home where he had found his mom, so he moved in with Latanya. Each day, he scrolls through old videos on the computer so he can hear Walker’s voice. 

Latanya does everything she can to support him, but she knows she can’t erase his pain. 

She recalls watching JJ steady himself at Walker’s funeral, to see her one last time. Until that point, he hadn’t cried.

When he finally faced the open casket where his mom lay holding her fetus, JJ sank to his knees, overcome. His aunt, uncles, cousins and grandmother gathered around him and rocked him in their arms.

The post “Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas. appeared first on ProPublica.

Months after fighting to keep secret the emails exchanged between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s companies, state officials released nearly 1,400 pages to The Texas Newsroom.

The records, however, reveal little about the two men’s relationship or Musk’s influence over state government. In fact, all but about 200 of the pages are entirely blacked out.

Of those that were readable, many were either already public or provided minimal information. They included old incorporation records for Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, a couple of agendas for the governor’s committee on aerospace and aviation, emails regarding a state grant awarded to SpaceX and an application from a then-Musk employee to sit on a state commission.

One is an invitation to happy hour. Another is a reminder of the next SpaceX launch.

The documents were provided in response to a public records request by The Texas Newsroom, which asked Abbott’s office for communications with Musk and the businessman’s employees dating back to last fall. Abbott’s and Musk’s lawyers fought their release, arguing they would reveal trade secrets, potentially “intimate and embarrassing” exchanges or confidential legal and policymaking discussions. 

Abbott’s spokesperson, Andrew Mahaleris, said the governor’s office “rigorously complies with the Texas Public Information Act and releases any responsive information that is determined to not be confidential or excepted from disclosure.” 

Open government experts say the limited disclosure is emblematic of a larger transparency problem in Texas. They pointed to a 2015 state Supreme Court decision that allowed companies to oppose the release of records by arguing that they contain “competitively sensitive” information. The ruling, experts said, made it harder to obtain records documenting interactions between governments and private companies.

Tom Leatherbury, who directs the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, said companies took advantage of the ruling. Among the most prominent examples of the ruling’s effect on transparency was McAllen, Texas’ refusal to disclose how much money was spent to lure pop star Enrique Iglesias to the city for a concert. The city argued that such disclosures would hurt its ability to negotiate with artists for future performances. Eventually, it was revealed that Iglesias was paid nearly half a million dollars.

The problem has been exacerbated, Leatherbury added, by the fact that the Office of the Attorney General, which referees public records disputes, does not have the power to investigate whether the records that companies want to withhold actually contain trade secrets.

“Corporations are willing to assert that information is confidential, commercial information, and more governmental bodies are willing not to second-guess the company’s assertion,” Leatherbury said. (Leatherbury has performed pro bono legal work for The Texas Newsroom.) 

Musk and his companies’ representatives did not respond to questions about the records. 

One of the richest people in the world, Musk has invested heavily in Texas. He’s relocated many of his businesses’ headquarters to the state and hired lobbyists who successfully pushed for several new laws that will benefit his companies.

As part of an effort to track Musk’s clout in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom on April 20 asked Abbott’s office for communications with employees from four of the businessman’s companies: SpaceX, car manufacturer Tesla, the social media site X and Neuralink, which specializes in brain nanotechnology.

The governor’s office said it would cost $244.64 to review the documents, which The Texas Newsroom paid. After the check was cashed, lawyers representing Abbott’s office and SpaceX each sought to keep the records secret.

SpaceX’s lawyer sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dated June 26, saying that publicly releasing the emails would hurt its competitive advantage.

Abbott’s public information coordinator, Matthew Taylor, also asked Paxton’s office for permission to withhold the documents, arguing they included private exchanges with lawyers, details about policymaking decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Taylor said some of the records were protected under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consisted of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public.”

Releasing the Musk emails, he said, would have a “chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

Ultimately, Paxton’s office mostly sided with Abbott and Musk. In a Aug. 11 opinion, Assistant Attorney General Erin Groff wrote that many of the documents could be withheld. Groff, however, ordered the release of some records determined to be “either not highly intimate or embarrassing” or of “legitimate public interest.”

A month later, the governor’s office released 1,374 pages of records, the vast majority of which were completely redacted.

Some records included a note that appeared to explain why. A note on page 401, for example, cited the exemption for competitive bidding records for 974 redacted pages. Names and emails of Musk’s employees were also removed.

“The fact that a governmental body can redact more than 1,000 pages of documents that are directly related to a major business’s activities in Texas is certainly problematic,” said Reid Pillifant, an attorney specializing in public records and media law. (Pillifant has represented a coalition of media outlets, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, in lawsuits seeking the release of public information related to the May 2022 mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school.)

He and other experts said such hurdles are becoming more common as legislation and court decisions have weakened the state’s public records laws.

Four years after the 2015 Supreme Court decision, legislators passed a new law that was meant to ensure the release of basic information about government deals with private businesses. But open government experts said the law did not go far enough to restore transparency, adding that some local governments are still objecting to the release of contract information.

Moreover, lawmakers continue to add carve-outs to what qualifies as public information every legislative session. Just this year, for example, legislators added the following exceptions to public records and open meetings laws: information relating to how government entities detect and deter fraud and discussions during public government meetings about certain military and aerospace issues.

Even with the increasing challenges of accessing public records, Leatherbury and Pillifant were stumped by the governor’s decision to release thousands of pages only to black them out fully. Leatherbury said that the governor’s office may have wanted to show the volume of records responsive to the request.

“They wanted you to see what little you could get in the context of the entire document, even though that’s kind of meaningless,” he said.

The Texas Newsroom has asked the Office of the Attorney General to reconsider its decision and order the release of the Musk emails. There is little other recourse to challenge the outcome.

If a member of the public believes a government agency is violating the law, they can try to sue. But the experts noted that a recent Texas Supreme Court decision made it more difficult to enforce the public records law against the governor and other executive officers. Now, Leatherbury said, it’s not clear how challenging such a records decision would work.

“Every Texas citizen should care about access to these kinds of records because they shed light on how our public officials are making big decisions that affect the land where people live and how their taxpayer dollars are being spent,” Pillifant said.

The post Gov. Greg Abbott Was Ordered to Release Some of His Emails With Elon Musk. Most Are Blacked Out. appeared first on ProPublica.

New advances in environmental science are providing a detailed understanding of the human costs of the Trump administration’s approach to climate change.

Increasing temperatures are already killing enormous numbers of people. A ProPublica and Guardian analysis that draws on sophisticated modeling by independent researchers found that President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda of expanding fossil fuels and decimating efforts to reduce emissions will add substantially to that toll, with the vast majority of deaths occurring outside the United States. 

Most of the people expected to die from soaring temperatures in the coming decades live in poor, hot countries in Africa and South Asia, according to recent research. Many of these countries emitted relatively little of the pollution that causes climate change — and are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat.

ProPublica and the Guardian’s analysis shows that extra greenhouse gases released in the next decade as a result of Trump’s policies are expected to lead to as many as 1.3 million more temperature-related deaths worldwide in the 80 years after 2035. The actual number of people who die from heat will be much higher, but a warming planet will also result in fewer deaths from cold.

Leaders from most of the world’s countries are now gathered at an international conference in Belém, Brazil, to address the escalating effects of climate change. The absence of the United States, which has 4% of the world’s population but has produced 20% of its greenhouse gases, has been pointedly noted by participants. Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino are the only other nations that did not send a delegation to the meeting, according to a provisional list of participants.

Our calculations use modeled estimates of the additional emissions that will be released as a result of Trump’s policies as well as a peer-reviewed metric for what is known as the mortality cost of carbon. That metric, which builds on Nobel Prize-winning science that has informed federal policy for more than a decade, predicts the number of temperature-related deaths from additional emissions. The estimate reflects deaths from heat-related causes, such as heat stroke and the exacerbation of existing illnesses, minus lives saved by reduced exposure to cold. It does not include the massive number of deaths expected from the broader effects of climate change, such as droughts, floods, wars, vector-borne diseases, hurricanes, wildfires and reduced crop yields. 

The numbers, while large, are just a fraction of the estimated 83 million temperature-related deaths that could result from all human-caused emissions over the same period if climate-warming pollution is not curtailed. But they speak to the human cost of prioritizing U.S. corporate interests over the lives of people around the globe. 

“The sheer numbers are horrifying,” said Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the nonprofit U.S. Climate Action Network, which works with groups around the world to combat climate change.

“But for us they’re more than numbers,” she added. “These are people with lives, with families, with hopes and dreams. They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world.”

The Trump administration, sometimes with the help of congressional Republicans, has dramatically set back efforts to limit climate change, cutting tax credits for clean electricity, fuels, vehicles and manufacturing; easing pollution restrictions on coal-fired power plants; and gutting fuel standards on cars, to name just a few of the climate initiatives that were recently reversed.

“Prior to Trump, we had the most ambitious climate policy that the U.S. has ever come up with — our best effort to date by far of addressing this growing problem,” said Marshall Burke, an economist at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. 

“When we roll these things back, it is fundamentally affecting the damages we’re going to see around the world,” said Burke.

Responding to questions about the reversals and their projected consequences, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers attacked what she referred to as the “Green Energy Scam.” “America still doesn’t buy the left’s bogus climate claims,” she wrote, without specifically addressing the forecast of heat-related deaths.

The finding that fossil fuels were causing the world to warm first made it to the White House at least 60 years ago, when advisers to President Lyndon Johnson warned that runaway emissions would lead to precisely the extreme events and rapid warming the planet is undergoing today. Scores of experts have denounced the current administration’s disregard for climate science, noting there is overwhelming evidence that human-driven climate change is already causing damage that will only get worse.

When Heat Becomes Deadly

The people most likely to die from rising temperatures are those already disproportionately vulnerable to extreme heat: laborers toiling outdoors; the very old; the very young, who lose fluids especially quickly; people with disabilities and illnesses; and people who lack air conditioning and stable housing.

A man holds the body of his three 3-year-old son, who died during a 2015 heatwave, outside the cold storage area at a morgue in Karachi, Pakistan. Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images

Extremely high temperatures kill by overwhelming the body’s ability to cool itself. Sweating often ceases. Unconsciousness, organ failure and death follow. Rising temperatures also exacerbate existing health conditions, triggering heart attacks, strokes and respiratory problems that hasten death. 

In recent years, climate change has caused the number of deaths from heat exposure to climb around the world. In the U.S., deaths linked to heat have increased more than 50% since 2000, according to a recent study from the Yale School of Public Health. 

Hundreds of people died in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, when a high pressure system trapped hot air above parts of the area and caused temperatures to soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Many of the elderly victims were found alone in their homes, without air conditioning. One farmworker collapsed in a field, another in a plant nursery. A 65-year-old took her last breath in her parked car and was essentially baked by the sun. A team of climate scientists found that the heat wave would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.

Still, when deaths from both heat and cold are considered together, the total number of temperature-related deaths may not appear catastrophic right away. As the planet warms in the next few decades, the global decline in people dying from cold may almost entirely offset deaths from heat. But in the second half of the century, long after Trump has left office, the number of heat-related deaths is expected to greatly outpace the reduction of deaths from cold. 

While the U.S. has emitted more climate-warming pollution than any other country, when deaths from both heat and cold are considered together, it is expected to suffer only up to 1% of temperature-related deaths worldwide caused by the additional carbon emissions, according to a working paper by R. Daniel Bressler, an assistant economics professor at Bentley University who developed the concept of the mortality cost of carbon. 

Some of the world’s poorest countries will almost certainly struggle to adapt. Niger and Somalia — whose emissions are dwarfed by those of the U.S. — are projected to have the world’s highest per capita death rates from increasing temperatures, Bressler found. India is expected to suffer more temperature-related deaths than any other country. Pakistan, which has just 3% of the world’s population, is expected to have between 6% and 7% of the world’s temperature-related deaths, depending on its ability to adapt to the effects of heat.

Projected Temperature-Related Deaths From Additional Carbon Emissions Compared to Country Population

How disproportionately countries are expected to be impacted relative to their population size.

Note: Some places, like South Sudan and Western Sahara, were excluded from Bressler’s analysis. The number of projected deaths may vary depending on how countries adapt to heat.
Source: Data from R. Daniel Bressler.

“People in my community will die,” said Ayisha Siddiqa, a Los Angeles-based climate activist whose family continues to live in her native Pakistan. 

Siddiqa, who co-founded the environmental group Future Generations Tribunal, recalled the effect of heat on her family in 2022, when temperatures in Pakistan and India soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Like most people in the region, the Siddiqas do not have air conditioning. Her father, she said, lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized during the deadly heat wave.

“It’s unexplainable,” she said of the heat. “It’s kind of like the entire air around you is sticking to your body and you can’t breathe.”

Progress Reversed

At this time last year, the United States was on track to drastically reduce its emissions. 

Under President Joe Biden, the nation made landmark investments to turn away from fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, and harness power from the wind and the sun. Hundreds of billions of dollars were being directed toward reducing emissions through a variety of initiatives, such as putting more electric vehicles on the roads and making office buildings and homes more energy efficient. 

Look Up Countries’ Shares of Projected Temperature-Related Deaths

Note: Only the 100 most populous countries are included in this table. The number of projected deaths may vary depending on how countries adapt to heat. Sources: R. Daniel Bressler, UN’s World Population Prospects 2024

Biden also reversed Trump’s first-term decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international deal struck a decade ago in which countries pledged to work together to limit global warming.

But as soon as he returned to the White House, Trump began to undo it all. On his first day back, in front of a crowd of cheering supporters wearing MAGA hats, he authorized the United States to again pull out of the Paris Agreement, which he previously deemed a “rip-off.” Just 10 days earlier, the World Meteorological Association had declared 2024 the hottest year on record.

Over the next 100 days, Trump instigated more efforts to roll back climate policies than he had in his entire previous term.

In March, his Environmental Protection Agency celebrated the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history” when it announced a slew of actions intended to reverse his predecessor’s efforts to rein in climate change. Among them were regulations that restrict emissions from cars and trucks, limit air pollution from oil and gas operations, and require power plants to capture planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Then came the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump’s nickname for the domestic policy megabill he signed in July. The act cut tax incentives for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles; made it easier and cheaper to drill or mine on federal lands; reversed efforts to cut emissions of methane, another greenhouse gas; and increased government support for coal.

Calculating the Lives Lost

To understand the consequences of these moves, ProPublica and the Guardian used the results of modeling from Rhodium Group, an independent, nonpartisan research firm that analyzed the policy changes from this year. The group came up with a high, low and midrange estimate of the amount of additional emissions expected to be released in the next 10 years as a result of the rollbacks the EPA announced in March and the bill passed this summer. (The modeling also reflects changes due to market forces and other factors.)

For our calculation, our starting point was Rhodium Group’s midrange number: 5.7 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions through 2035. (Using the firm’s other estimates would result in between 571,000 and nearly 2.2 million extra temperature-related deaths due to Trump’s policy changes. The Princeton University-led REPEAT Project conducted a similar analysis and came up with 6.9 billion metric tons, which would result in even more projected deaths.)

To translate those emissions to deaths, ProPublica and the Guardian turned to the field of climate economics, which links human-generated emissions to measurable economic costs. A model that calculates what’s known as the social cost of carbon by Nobel laureate William Nordhaus has been used in federal policy since 2009, guiding everything from requirements mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission to EPA regulations.

While Nordhaus estimated the broad economic cost of climate change, Bressler, the Bentley University professor, used Nordhaus’ model as a starting point but focused on just temperature-related deaths. Drawing also on public health research, Bressler estimated the amount of additional carbon dioxide expected to cause one death over 80 years: 4,434 metric tons. The figure is equivalent to the average lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans or 146.2 Nigerians. Using the same estimate, Bressler also calculated how many deaths are expected over the course of 80 years from each additional metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. He published his findings in Nature Communications in 2021.

In response to questions for this story, the EPA, which recently stopped considering the social cost of carbon at Trump’s direction, rejected Bressler’s scientific analysis. The agency called it “an exercise in moral posturing, not rigorous science” and said that the calculation of deaths per metric ton of carbon is “based on unvalidated extrapolations” and ignores “the dramatic uncertainties that dominate long-term climate projections.”

Climate scientists, however, said that the mortality cost of carbon is a valid metric. Peer reviewers for the 2021 paper that laid out the concept described it as “valuable and intuitive” and relevant for designing policy. After publishing the study, Bressler went on to serve as climate staff economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. 

Others have emphasized that, because Bressler’s model focuses narrowly on the direct effects of temperature, the estimates it generates are vastly lower than the total death toll from climate change. It also does not capture the serious but non-deadly effects of extreme heat, such as reduced productivity and increased misery.

Bressler acknowledges that his work produces estimates and that the true number of additional deaths due to greenhouse gas emissions will depend on several unknowable factors, including how quickly people adapt to changing temperatures and market forces. Critically, future presidents and other countries could also upend predictions by taking new steps to reduce emissions.

Bressler’s 2021 paper previewed multiple possible futures for the planet. Under what he calls the “pessimistic” scenario, global emissions wouldn’t level off until the end of the century. It was under this scenario that Bressler estimated that, by 2100, climate change will have caused 83 million people to die of temperature-related deaths around the world. This is the scenario that would result in 1.3 million deaths by 2115 from the additional emissions released over the next 10 years as a result of Trump’s policies.

If global emissions were to drop to almost zero by 2050, the total projected toll from temperature-related deaths due to climate change would fall to 9 million by 2100. Even then, Trump’s policy changes this year alone would still result in an additional 613,000 deaths.

Experts agree that, while both of the scenarios Bressler lays out are possible, the most likely amount of emissions will fall between these two extremes. Still, Bressler said, the projections underscore what’s at stake.

“If you do things that add emissions, you cause deaths,” he said. “If you do things that reduce emissions, you save lives.”

The post Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths. The Poorest Countries Will Be Impacted Most. appeared first on ProPublica.

Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States.

“The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Tate posted on X before the trip in February — one of many times he has sung the president’s praises to his fans.

But when the Tate brothers arrived by private plane in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they immediately found themselves in the crosshairs of law enforcement once more, as Customs and Border Protection officials seized their electronic devices.

This time, they had a powerful ally come to their aid. Behind the scenes, the White House intervened on their behalf.

Interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.

In his written request, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, Ingrassia chided authorities for taking the action, saying the seizure of the Tates’ devices was not a good use of time or resources. The request to return the electronics to the Tates, he emphasized, was coming from the White House.

The incident is the latest in a string of law enforcement matters where the Trump White House has inserted itself to help friends and target foes. Since entering office for a second term, Trump has urged the Justice Department to go after elected officials who investigated him and his businesses, and he pardoned a string of political allies. Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump. And news of the White House intervention on behalf of the accused sex traffickers comes as Trump is under fire over his ties to notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s recent efforts to stop the public release of the so-called Epstein files.

Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of Tate and his brother, Tristan, caused alarm among DHS officials that they could be interfering with a federal investigation if they followed through with the instruction, according to interviews and screenshots of contemporaneous communications between officials.

One official who was involved and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid facing retribution said they were disgusted by the request’s “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.”

“It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person said. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.”

It’s unclear why law enforcement wanted to examine the devices, what their analysis found or whether Ingrassia’s intervention hindered any investigation. The White House and DHS declined to answer questions about the incident.

But law enforcement experts said it is highly unusual for the White House to get involved in particular border seizures or to demand authorities give up custody of potential evidence in an investigation.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said John F. Tobon, a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations, which typically analyzes the contents of electronic devices after they’re seized by Customs and Border Protection. “For anyone to say this request is from the White House, it feels like an intimidation tactic.”

Tobon said that even if authorities resisted the request from Ingrassia, knowledge that the White House opposed their actions could cause them to be less aggressive than they would normally be: “Anytime somebody feels intimidated or as if they’re not free to follow procedure, that’s going to stay in the back of their mind because of the consequences. In this administration the consequences are different, people are getting fired.”

Samuel Buell, a Duke University law school professor and former federal prosecutor, called the pressure on behalf of the Tates “another data point” in the White House politicizing law enforcement.

“This is not something that would have been viewed as appropriate or acceptable prior to 2025,” Buell said. “There’s a pattern here of severe departure from preexisting norms … that are being tossed aside left and right.”

The Tate brothers’ lawyer, Joseph McBride, said he didn’t know what happened to the devices but that his clients have still not had them returned. He said it’s unclear whether any investigation into their contents is continuing.

His clients, he said, are innocent and there were no illicit materials on their electronics. “There have been multiple investigations against them and nothing has come of it,” McBride said.

Ingrassia worked at McBride’s firm before joining the White House, and McBride acknowledged speaking “to Paul from time to time” but couldn’t recall discussing the seized devices with him. Ingrassia, he said, has never given the Tates special treatment since joining the Trump administration.

The White House declined to answer questions about whether Ingrassia was acting on his own or representing the White House’s wishes.

In a brief interview with ProPublica, Ingrassia denied trying to help the Tates, before hanging up. “There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” he said. “There was nothing.”

Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message: “Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true.”

When questioned about whether Ingrassia had asked authorities to return the devices, even if he did not order them to, Paltzik declined to comment, explaining that “the word ‘ask’ is inappropriate because it is meaningless in this context. He either ordered something or he didn’t. And as I said, he did NOT order anything.”

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the intervention or any impact it might have had on an investigation, only saying in a statement that Customs and Border Protection “performed a 100% baggage examination and detained all electronic media devices when the Tate Brothers entered the country. Electronic media devices were detained and turned over to Homeland Security Investigators for inspectional purposes.”

Ingrassia’s work at McBride’s small New York law firm included helping to represent the Tate brothers. He has praised Andrew Tate’s “physical prowess” on social media along with his “willpower and spirit,” calling him “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence.”

Ethics experts said when government officials take actions to benefit former clients, it undermines public trust.

“The rule of law cannot be carried out if it depends on cronyism,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in the administrations of both parties. “To have a member of the White House interfere when they’ve had a prior client relationship and some sort of personal relationship, that gives rise to questions of impartiality.”

Trump had nominated Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but the 30-year-old lawyer’s chances for Senate confirmation imploded after Politico reported that he had sent a string of racist text messages to fellow Republicans and described himself as having “a Nazi streak.” Paltzik, his lawyer, raised doubts about the authenticity of the texts but said “even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor.”

In a post on X announcing he was withdrawing from his Senate confirmation hearing because not enough Republican lawmakers were supporting him, Ingrassia said he would “continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again.”

Last week, Ingrassia announced he was moving to a new role within the administration, after Trump called him into his office and asked him to serve as deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration.

It’s unclear what prompted authorities to seize the Tates’ property, but the bar for searching electronic devices is significantly lower for those entering the U.S. compared with those already in the country, even if they are citizens.

After the seizure, the contents were examined by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, according to the official involved. A Homeland Security official, who asked for anonymity because they didn’t have permission to speak publicly, confirmed that HSI agents scrutinized the contents.

The Tates left the United States in late March.

No criminal charges have been filed against the brothers in the United States, though a lawyer representing four anonymous defendants sued by them in Florida filed court papers this year suggesting that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were investigating the pair. No other details have become public, and a spokesperson for the prosecutors’ office declined to comment.

In an interview with conservative podcaster Candace Owens soon after landing in Florida, Andrew Tate revealed his devices had been seized, saying they were taken after he refused to give customs officers his passwords.

Tate, who was born in the U.S. but spent much of his childhood in Britain before moving as an adult to Romania, complained that his rights were violated, calling himself “one of the most innocent people on the planet.”

And he said law enforcement officials wouldn’t find anything on his devices: “You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence? You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me.”

In that interview, Tate made no mention of a White House official intervening on his behalf and seemingly misidentified state authorities in Florida as responsible for taking his devices.

Shortly after the Tates landed on Feb. 27, Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that Florida authorities had launched an investigation into the brothers. Uthmeier said his office had “secured and executed subpoenas and warrants” and called the brothers’ behavior “atrocious.”

“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to accept it.”

The status of the Florida investigation is unclear. A spokesperson for the Florida attorney general declined to comment for this article.

Allegations of sexual abuse and violence have swirled around Andrew Tate for almost as long as he’s been in the public eye. In 2016, Tate was booted off the cast of the British version of the “Big Brother” reality series around the time a video emerged of him whipping a woman with a belt. Tate said he and the woman were joking.

Tate’s profile only rose afterward, and he began amassing a following as a self-help guru for young men. He quickly aligned himself with Trump’s then-young MAGA movement.

“The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” he posted on social media after meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2017.

Tate moved to Romania a year after his brief foray in reality TV, in part, he said, because he believed authorities there investigate sex crimes less aggressively.

“I’m not a … rapist but I like the idea of being able to do what I want,” he said.

But in 2023, prosecutors in Romania accused the Tates of operating a criminal group that trafficked women, including some who alleged the brothers led them to believe they were interested in relationships but instead forced them into filming online pornographic videos. Prosecutors also said they were investigating allegations that the Tates trafficked minors. Andrew Tate was charged with rape. The Tates have denied the allegations, and the initial charges against them were sent back to prosecutors by a court because of procedural issues.

The Tates face similar allegations in Britain. Authorities there authorized a raft of charges against the brothers, including rape and human trafficking, based on allegations from three women. In 2024, arrest warrants were issued for the brothers, who have denied wrongdoing, but authorities said they would not be extradited to the United Kingdom until criminal proceedings in Romania were completed.

A woman has also sued the Tates in Florida, accusing them of luring her to Romania to coerce her into sex work. The Tates have denied the allegations, and last month a judge dismissed most of her claims but allowed for her to refile.

This year, Tate derided the allegations against him and compared himself to Trump on X. “Romania? No case UK? No case USA? No case,” he posted on X. “Lawfare? – Im one of the most mistreated men in history beside president Trump himself.”

The intervention on behalf of the Tates was not the first time those around Trump took an interest in legal issues involving the brothers.

In February, Romania’s foreign minister said that presidential envoy Richard Grenell told him at an international security conference in Germany that he remained interested in the fate of the Tates. “I did not perceive this statement as pressure,” the foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, said, “just a repeat of a known stance.” Grenell told the Financial Times that he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu but supported “the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”

The post The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation appeared first on ProPublica.